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About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
We have become morally confused as a people, and possess neither the human sympathy nor the corporate will to put our inner convictions into practice. We are split personalities.
'Tut, tut, child!' said the Duchess. 'Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.'
"Never let your sense of morals keep you from doing what's right."
~~Isaac Asimov~
The moral and the political are twisted together in all this like a torqued Moebius-strip: we define our political duties toward others or our rights of expectation from them in terms of the highest moral values and obligations and principles conceivable to us. But these highest moral values etc. are themselves ideologically stunted things, a bonsai-ethos that has been deformed by the contraceptive culture of the democratist Many. Do human beings have a positive and universally recognizable right to be left alone as ingrown idiotes, as self-gratifying swinish consumers, as pathetic sacks of illusions and delusions? Are ultimate rights something that the least cultured and least reflective are fit to define for themselves, much less for everyone in general? Can any civilization afford to leave its most vital principles to be framed and legislated by the least philosophically aware? When a society organizes the entire thrust of its energies and institutions to mass-produce such obtuse types, and when malleable human nature makes this organized stupefaction all too easy and efficient, how can any mere exceptional individuals do anything about such a Malthusian dynamic?
All the particular moral judgments we intuitively make are likely to derive from discarded religious systems, from warped views of sex and bodily functions, or from customs necessary for the survival of the group in social and economic circumstances that now lie in the distant past.
In those early days there was a general opinion that a business man could not be honest and make money or be successful. “Business is business,” was the slogan, with the connotation that no matter how sharp your practice it was all right if you did it legally.
“That is the jungle philosophy of every man for himself,” commented Mr. Russell. “It can no longer be practiced in the business world for it works against natural law. The future of great business lies in man’s comprehension of the principle of Balance in Natural Law and his determination to work WITH it instead of against it.
“The underlying principle of Balance in Nature’s One Law is equality of interchange between the pairs of opposites in any transaction in Nature. That principle must eventually be observed by big business, and the go-getter salesman who selfishly thinks that the sale he makes is the only thing that counts is not giving equally for what he takes. Therefore, I say, that equal interchange of goods and service between buyer and seller is the keynote of tomorrow’s business world when the vision of the modern business man awakens him to the wisdom of writing that policy into his code of ethics.”
(During the Civil War, on hearing complaints that Gen. Ulysses S. Grant drank alcohol to excess)
Find out what Grant drinks and send a barrel of it to each of my other generals!
The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.
The government has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.
The moment my methods crystalize, is the moment I will have lost my senses, for no moral or value can ever be solidifed in an ever changing universe.
Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.
The downside, of course, is that over time religions become encrusted with precepts and ideas that are the antithesis of soul, as each faith tries to protect its doctrines and institution instead of nurturing the evolution of consciousness. If one is not careful to distinguish the genuine insights of a religion from its irrelevant accretions, one can go through life following an inappropriate moral compass.
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