"Pass through a gate,
then climb as high as you can."
The first one passed
through a gate and saw a stair leading up to heaven.
The more he rose, the more he saw enormous heights still above
him.
Humiliated and discouraged, he started crying.
The second one passed
through a gate and saw a stage followed by a stair down to the
abyss.
In one step he went up the stage, proudly contemplated the abyss
below him and shouted victory.
The third one, after hearing their cries, rushed towards the second gate.
The first gate is the discovery, or the path to the discovery, of how there are so many things we could do well or better.
The second gate is:
It is also generally the act of building standards to be followed by simple obedience and passivity, and to fix these standards as conform to what you can conform the majority to. Then, beware if you dare being not normal !
It is a practice particularly exacerbated in Christianity, but also present everywhere.
It is a pathological perfectionism that does not tolerate the possibility of dissatisfaction: only considering faults, is the only way to achieve a feeling of perfection that resists.
That is why it is tempting to slip from an acute sense of morality to a mere accumulation of prohibitions, a spirit of inhuman bureaucracy which avoids asking any questions.
So I once explicitly heard an evangelical preacher teach this: that we are condemned for our sins, that our good deeds can not redeem. So these Christians believe any faulty act of the slightest importance, to be far more serious than the omission of good deeds no matter how wonderful they might be. Then of course they introduce the sacrifice of Jesus that erases all faults. Thus they focus their moral concerns on an idea of fault which is deleted. So on the empty set. So easy to reach the top of a route ambiguously described as either only going down, or without any extension (crashed to one point).
That is why we come to only get interested in bad news in order to get the best possible conscience, and yet only the bad news that are not the strictly necessary consequence of passivity, cowardice or the practice of a well-established morality rule.
(For example, what happened to me : that a young genius recognized as such by various professors, knowing general relativity since teenage and mortally bored in school classes, failed to be admitted to the highest educational institutions that he was obliged to target by social pressure, and is deadly traumatized by the prospect of having to repeat a year of shit in which he will never have the right to breathe, is not considered as bad news worthy of media attention. The fact that the most serious, nice, fragile and timid secondary school students are are regularly persecuted by violent ones, neither).
This is the cult of the violent social paralysis.
The cult of the violent social paralysis sees any action as potentially a form of violence, and defines itself in opposition to violence. But it needs violence to exist: it feeds itself by its opposite and is inseparable from it.
Violence and paralysis are the obsessive dipole which swallows the universe and paints it all in black and white, so as to better feel oriented there.
There is no paralysis possible without violence.
Staying paralyzed in the face of violence, or forcing paralysis by the means of violence, are both forms (themselves antipodal to each other) of the contradictory unity between paralysis and violence.
Faced with any two opposing interests, one is tempted to take sides, to satisfy his perfectionism: to automatically label as acts of violence the acts of one side, and to remain deaf to their complaints, but let go without any question the acts of the other side, so as to not be disturbed and so keep one's innocence. The choice of the side does not need to be fair, the main aim being to easily remain deaf to the complaints of the enemy, in order to maintain one's innocence. No compromise could satisfy you, whatever the side where you look.
This cult of paralysis would be tantamount to timidity, but a timidity that is ruthless against the timid. Indeed, in the conflict between the violent and the timid, the cult of paralysis takes party for the violent because it could not ignore their claims. But it has no problem to leave and crush the shy, because the shy are not able to force others to hear their complaints. Thus, the world remains undisturbed and everything is fine.
For instance, on the question of whether all students should be mixed in the same schools, a conflict of interest rises between the violent and timid.
The violent students (or their parents) would not tolerate being separated from their victims: they would shout complaints for discrimination and segregation. So the timid must suffer bullying silently.
This is the cult of egalitarianism and standardisation: we are afraid of freedom, of what different people might do. As concerns education, all students might not be educated in the same way, and this would lead away from any semblance of perfection. Better is to declare that the instruction of all must be identical. Even if not all can stand it, the appearances of perfection will have been saved. It will be the fault of the different if they are different and can not bear the common mold.
In fact (I consider that) education should basically be about learning action and innovation, that are essential to economic productivity. What a scandalous concept: the society, unable to manage this by the mere rule of obedience and inaction, smashed the affair of education and professional training into a regime of normalcy. So the Norm has officially declared that to officially educate yourself, as doing nothing would not suffice, it will suffice to do nothing else but to obey. And no matter if some people trained to the standard are unemployed, it will be the fault of those bad employers that do not comply to the norm by employing them.
Then, since sub-gifted clearly can not raise up to the standard by inaction, and since it is not their fault, society is willing to spend millions to enable them to comply, or to lower the standard to comply it with the level of the fruits of their passivity.
The world sees no problem to actively destroy the life of the gifted by forcing them into the common standards, while their example might demonstrate the imperfection of the standard. No help nor home (right to own their own mind) is given to them: they are allegedly gifted enough to have nothing difficult for them to do to fit into the system, so that any problem is denied. No matter all what is lost from the possible works of the gifted whose life is destroyed by standardization.
Similarly, tax is a form of violence disguised as a standard to make it unquestionable. Thus those pursuing useless university studies just because it's free, lost the consciousness of the violence they are exercizing on taxpayers, under the excuse that it would be standard. Thus, public debt and the redistributive pension system, violence against future generations, are justified by their disguise into standards. It seems good to throw out of the window the assets of future generations and no one protests: no wave and everything is fine. This will be the fault of future generations when they take the outrageous decision to break the norm, to land into the real and not send the bill again to the next generation. Similarly, no matter all the absurdity and destructiveness of the curriculum of high school and college classes for preparing to a career in science some students that cannot fit with the common educational methods: the totalitarily compulsory character of this curriculum as the only possible way to a scientific carreer, is the best and sufficient way to justify everyone and everything vis-à-vis this disaster, and thus to get everything perfect.
So we are only concerned with the misfortunes that are linked to a specific event, and even preferably if we can find a culprit who has been convicted of an action that breaks the norm.
So we are shocked that somebody wrongs or leaves his partner, but nothing is said of the misery of those who remained alone because there has never been a happy meting event. Even if this is as unfortunate as a hostage's situation, we will consider a hostage when he was captured at a certain date and there are kidnappers that we can satisfactorily accuse of all these ills, but we pay no attention to the complaints from millions of singles, whose happiness is hostage of unfavorable circumstances and of the passivity of the whole world in this matter, provided that "nothing happened". As love meetings are positive events that depends on so many circumstances and specific acts, they could be helped by others or by society. But people are afraid of any idea of a positive act, so that love encounters are disguised into non-events, or at least non-actions: a stroke of fate. No matter Whether the fate makes things good or bad (it is anyway seen as good by definition, as the exclusive source of never expected love encounters), the main point is to take it as sovereign and to reject any question to it, to paralyze any complaint and regret. The evil is seen as coming from man, and the good as coming from destiny, people worship destiny and ensure to let it sovereign whatever happens. Only of course in the case of natural disasters, the crimes of destiny are recognized for what they are, by their manifest violence and the obvious innocence of their victims.
Above all, people don't try to think further: they do not seek
collective organizational solution to the dating problem, based on
the assumption that it is not the responsibility of society but
only of the individual, because it is assumed that society can not
do anything anyway. They consider that society can not do anything
because they have no idea what could be done. It is the vicious
circle of mental paralysis. Yet in reality, by working to think a
little about it, it is widely possible to find solutions, as I
explained here for
dating and there for
other problems of the world.
Related texts:
The moral comparison
of science and religion, section "The spiritual ego, in
practice"
Morality as a
scientific field ("Now, is it possible ... tolerated
either.")
Spiritual
contradictions (last 2 sections)
Moral
philosophy ("Improvability of the world...")
Divine promises
Singles Union (series of
pamphlets)