On the World

The world is what it is, there ought to be no denying that. A grand chemical reaction, a giant mixer of intentions and powers acting upon each other trying to minimize risk while increasing their powers as much as possible. It’s a grand tapestry of blood, flesh and steel, longing for softness and grace but forced by its own nature into bondage and endless toil.

There are some of us who have cheated the system, used its own counterbalances in our favor and have avoided, for the most part, having to spend all of our time working endlessly for nothing but a roof over our heads and what food we can spare. Some of us have done it through self-destruction and self-sacrifice, others have done this through predatory consumption of others’ resources. Regardless of the method, liberation is sought after and most people will do anything to anyone to get it.

And yet in this absurd world there is softness, because it is the intention of all things to achieve free movement and secure rest. To know the peace of mind of not having to fear harm, the sublime security of knowing everyone is kind and caring. But how do we make everyone kind and caring? The manipulation of our minds begins at the very desire for peace, and so it becomes impossible, for no one wants to be manipulated either. No one wants to suffer the same that they desire to do unto others, so we try to only do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

This world is a cruel indifferent engine of the human condition running up against its own contradictions. We want the miracles of our own hands but we need to make others work to get what we need to make our own way. We want to be free of the threat of others but women bred men to spill blood and make weapons. We are a species of conflict that used our capacity to create to forage philosophies of peace that were contrary to the very foundations of our capacities as human beings. We are, ultimately, a designer limited in our own capacity to design ourselves.

And yet, despite this, self-design is not the optimum route, for self-design requires the same incentivized endless toil to make the technologies to manipulate our own biology. The solution must come from what we already can craft about ourselves: the malleability of the human mind.

We cannot abandon the need to organize each other, but must minimize the amount of force we put upon others’ minds. We cannot end the human capacity to make and employ weapons, but can disincentivize these behaviors by forming and controlling a monopoly of force. In all things that are crafted by the human condition, we must seek temperance and grace, but in all things psychological we must learn to accurately form a realistic understanding of the human condition and the duties needed to maximize our freedoms and our security, our movement and rest, and learn to be at peace with it.

The mental philosophy must accept the nature of being a human being, but must accept that harmless diversification is a part of that, and that there is no harm in becoming pliable in the face of the world, as long as our core self remains intact and we remember our virtues of grace and temperance, keep our strengths and be prudent in our decision making.

And so the Stoa naturally emerges from the Gnosis of any tradition, even my own monotheism though we have different words for such things, the logic of God, the divine emanation of authority. But the world is what it is, the authority is shaped by its absurdity, and the blood, flesh and steel that shapes it is dangerously close to no longer needing blood or flesh to keep working. We must be prudent in our designs, but furiously alive in our duties. This is the only right: to be human and have a philosophy that brings us and others to peace with or without the technology of empires. If you can be at peace in bondage, you can bring the world to liberation.