- MBTI
- INFJ
The OP is a bit confusing - my grasp of it is that you're interested why people seek idealized peace when it does not make clear sense? Acts of violence are natural and in line with survival instinct.
To that I agree. Yet I would like to expand: humans have some unique abilities that can override survivalism: namely morality and willpower. So they operate under different conditions then rocks, flowers or animals do.
Having morals means we constantly assign some value on the scale "bad" to "good" and by willpower we can stick to our decision and ignore all resistance.
The aforementioned tells that killing people is bad, so not killing is good. It means that peace is good. And woila - we suddenly have hordes of peace activists outside.
Nietzsche argued that there's no universal good and evil - and he was right. So morality is relative. Yet he did not offer a solution that can actually replace it. The only alternative is degradation to survival instincts.
When you speak that we should see the universe as it is - then we have to admit that it's meaningless. There is no difference whether a galaxy lives on or is destroyed. There's no meaning to our survival, no meaning to the work we do.
BUT... we can choose to assign the meaning - that's our free will working. So we choose to create morality, we choose to believe that every human is valuable by existence, we choose that peace is good and we ourselves become our choice. It's called the positive philosophical choice. And by it world peace is possible !
There's also an alternative approach to this problem. Humans are wired in a certain way that allows them to feel emotions of another person - it's called empathy. So killing another person becomes difficult because we can feel their fright and desperation. And that's not a pleasant feeling to experience. So it's no wonder that actions that generate unpleasant feelings are labeled "bad" on morality scale. The golden rule is a perfect example of this: "That which you hate to be done to you, do not do to another".
UPDATE: since I mentioned a need to fill morality vacuum in oneself there can be other philosophical choices. A negative choice would mean that all humans are evil by nature and a plight to a planet. A middle choice (those people like to call themselves realists) is that some people are good and some are bad. For example little children are good but pedophiles are bad. It also suggests that people can change their alignment (since pedophiles once have been children too).
To that I agree. Yet I would like to expand: humans have some unique abilities that can override survivalism: namely morality and willpower. So they operate under different conditions then rocks, flowers or animals do.
Having morals means we constantly assign some value on the scale "bad" to "good" and by willpower we can stick to our decision and ignore all resistance.
The aforementioned tells that killing people is bad, so not killing is good. It means that peace is good. And woila - we suddenly have hordes of peace activists outside.
Nietzsche argued that there's no universal good and evil - and he was right. So morality is relative. Yet he did not offer a solution that can actually replace it. The only alternative is degradation to survival instincts.
When you speak that we should see the universe as it is - then we have to admit that it's meaningless. There is no difference whether a galaxy lives on or is destroyed. There's no meaning to our survival, no meaning to the work we do.
BUT... we can choose to assign the meaning - that's our free will working. So we choose to create morality, we choose to believe that every human is valuable by existence, we choose that peace is good and we ourselves become our choice. It's called the positive philosophical choice. And by it world peace is possible !
There's also an alternative approach to this problem. Humans are wired in a certain way that allows them to feel emotions of another person - it's called empathy. So killing another person becomes difficult because we can feel their fright and desperation. And that's not a pleasant feeling to experience. So it's no wonder that actions that generate unpleasant feelings are labeled "bad" on morality scale. The golden rule is a perfect example of this: "That which you hate to be done to you, do not do to another".
UPDATE: since I mentioned a need to fill morality vacuum in oneself there can be other philosophical choices. A negative choice would mean that all humans are evil by nature and a plight to a planet. A middle choice (those people like to call themselves realists) is that some people are good and some are bad. For example little children are good but pedophiles are bad. It also suggests that people can change their alignment (since pedophiles once have been children too).
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