From: John Beasley
Rick,
You said,
"I couldn't even begin to list the bewildering number of historical horrors
perpetrated by those who believed their intentions were good and aim true
(some examples: the Crusades, the Spanish Inquistion, the Holocaust ---
those behind all of these attrocities believed themselves to be doing good,
and that's not even the top of the tip of iceberg). And this to say nothing
of the countless everyday examples of "good intentions" gone awry."
Spot on.
John B
Sorry for the awkward quoting and sorry for all the lurkers who keep getting
zinged by my read tickets, I'm working to turn those
off.
This seems to be the old Plato debate where Plato says if a man (now a
person) knew what the right thing to do was, he (or she) would do it. And
then any old person can knock it down by saying people know that robbing
banks is wrong, but they do it anyway.
I'll take the Spanish Inquisition just because I lived in Sevilla for so
long, but the Holocaust and Crusades can be thought of in a similar manner.
The Catholic Church had many, many challenges to its religious authority,
not limited to Manichaesm and "neo-Platonism". To think of it as an
unchallenged entity from 313ad to 1600's when Martin Luther nailed his paper
on the door is pure falsity. Part of the Spanish Inquisition was to them a
legitimate effort to root out falsities and corruptions inside their own
doctrine. Secondly, the Spanish Inquisition was a continuation of an
Italian Inquisition and also a French one as well. That's the "good
intention" part.
The other part is that it was the social giant at work: the property of the
heretic AS WELL AS that of his family was confiscated by the church upon
conviction. That is to say, Baron von Yokel over here has been giving the
church trouble, find him a heretic and now all of his lands are the church's
to sell or divide or give away. The Inquisition in Spain financed the
church, which as we all know was a political body in the extreme. Despite
EAPoe and other Protestant writers, you will find the majority of the
Catholics (as opposed to Roma and Jews who incidentally could not be found
to be heretics) were people with property.
Sound familiar to you yet? It's the same thing that happens in these United
States. Only the "Inquisition" is on some plants and other chemical
compounds collectively known as "illegal drugs". If you have enough illegal
drugs in your car it is considered an automatic (legal!) assumption that you
are going to sell them, therefore your car is now an (illegal) business
enterprise, therefore your car can and will be seized by the police and sold
for the benefit of the local government. Same for your house and property.
The only difference between the "War on Drugs" and the "Spanish Inquisition
to Root Out Heresy" is no physical torture is used in these remaining days
of 2001 (of course torture is used in Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia where
they do confiscate property as well).
This is thinking in a bottle to say the SI or the WoD are the results of
"good intentions". They are social actions, designed to increase the
political and financial power of social entities. Torquemada didn't inherit
the lands and your local sheriff won't be living in your house either.
Social entities seek to increase power by _any means available_ and if one
method is shut down it will find another, no differently than an animal will
eat in a territory but if the food runs out it will move to another
territory.
The "intention" drives the Quality event belief springs from an individual
level, which is a totally different "level" than that of a "society". I
myself find it fallacious logic to say that societies are beholden to
individual intentions. I am sure it is not my hair cell's intention to be
rooted out and killed if I wax my legs, yet I do it anyway. The individual
cell (or my DNA's marching orders for the cell) was to be born and exist and
grow and take some of the body's nutrition to live, and here I go, the
"society as a whole of my cells" and remove it.
It is my firm belief that what we call "Western culture" is a collection of
societies that do not have morality in the MoQ sense. They are not built
upon a "right or wrong" but upon a "can or can't". If a society can do it,
it will. The exception to these societies would be the ones which are
largely destroyed, but can be labeled as "indigenous cultures". The Hopi
tribe (just to take an example) was a social unit that had a very moral code
built into it; the proof of which can be found in the fact that there were
no judicial branches and/or written laws. The "laws" of conduct for a Hopi
were built-in from birth and were known and subsumed into every member. A
"Hopi" man could offend the tribe and be excommunicated, but he was Hopi
even in that and was part of the tribe even when being excluded from it. In
other words, his very nature was "Hopi" and not even abandonment in the
desert could remove that. The rules of what was "right" or "wrong" for a
Hopi tribesperson was "self-evident" and whenever there would be a question
of what to do, the elders (the people who have been Hopi the longest) would
meet and try to discover what was the most "self-evident" course of action.
The cultures we live in now are not in any way based on "self-evident", they
are based on an SOM analysis that is continually in flux and is usually
thought of as "superior" to those other cultures because the other cultures
use "superstition" and we use "rationality". And yet at the same time I've
seen on this list (as well as a lot of other places too) how we, this
culture which is now 99% of the human race, is a "cancer" or a "virus" on
the planet. It doesn't receive much argument to say the world's population
of human beings is growing at an enormous rate that is consuming every
resource on the planet to sustain. The culture we live in is an a-moral
culture. A Hopi culture was never a culture of environmental saints but
they never went over the hills to massacre another tribe because Hopi
culture is a moral culture. There is no book sitting in Arizona which says
"don't massacre the Navajo" and yet they never did (and never tried) and yet
many thousands of my neighbors have a book which they follow that says "do
not kill" and of course we know we do.
The short summary of this email:
People as individuals can follow and execute a MoQ morality. The societies
WE live in however are not predicated upon an MoQ morality therefore they
violate MoQ whenever possible. The societies we live in are based on the
maxim "if it can be done, do it" and then if it is successful a theory of
why it was the right thing to do is developed. In the USA we see every day
on the TV how righteous and moral we were in destroying the evil and immoral
Nazis, yet anyone who can read history knows the USA was bitterly anti-war
and anti-Lend-Lease and anti-convoying and anti-Cash-n'-Carry until December
7th.
Intention DOES create the quality event, but in our lives as they exist now,
it is only performed on an individual level, not the societal level.
--Soj
Sorry for the long post but thank god almighty that's what Delete is for can
I get an amen? *grin*
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