Failure. The very thought of it can send some folks spiraling into a whirlpool of despair. Western society places impossible value into the calloused hands of avoiding failure at all costs. From our first memories we are taught that success, achievement, one-upmanship, conquest, power, control, wealth, victory, dominance, these are the dark stars that light our path towards a life considered well-lived. To fail, to not reach your goal, take second place, be victimized, forced, controlled, be poor, lose, submit, these qualities are seen as signs that you are weak and that you have wasted your life. And this life, for so many, is believed to be a gift from a benevolent being— an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent being, who loves you unconditionally, who will literally save your soul, unless, that is, they don’t, in which case, fuck you, because you’re on your own. To the faithful, to sully this gift by breaching the sacred code of duality is outright sacrilege. Of course, the truth, as always, is another story.
The thrust of this mindset lies in a number: the number 2.
2 represents duality. Black & white, good & evil, up & down, man & woman, right & wrong, these are the tenets of a binary worldview. You’re either this thing or that thing. Never the two shall meet, and any sense that there are other ways to see things just means you’re in the evil category, because you are trying to breach the binary.
As a concept employed to assist in thought, or to play, or to overlay structure onto something to assist in your understanding, duality is benign, helpful, even. Things fall off the rails when one starts to believe that everything that matters deep down, everything that gives life intrinsic value, must somehow cling to dualism. No person is all good or all evil. That’s because for this to be so, we would have to accept that these ideas are absolutes, primary concepts which can not be broken down any further. When we are talking about human behavior, the idea that a certain act, when performed by one of us, under suddenly quite specific circumstances (while sane, in adulthood, willfully, with malice), is always wrong, sounds pretty cool in theory.
Killing people is wrong.
That’s an easy one. It seems hard to have issues with that, right? What normal person would disagree with this?
The problem is, the what-abouts.
What about war? Capital punishment? Self defense? Why are those suddenly okay? And if those are okay, why is abortion bad? How about birth control?
Do you see the problem? The binary that feeds this mindset, it doesn’t work. The harder these people try to toe that line, the deeper they fall into a garbled pit of fantasy.
If all killing is bad, don’t kill for any reason. Period. I mean, right? It just doesn’t work, and that’s by their own rules. And it doesn’t work because it’s based on a false premise. It’s based on the idea that there everything that matters is broken in 2.
Here’s the thing. There is nothing more than the 1.
Christians love to attack the concept of moral relativism by claiming that if morality is relative, then anything could be seen as moral. Well guess what, it already is. And not just from lunatics or criminals, but them too. Fuck, especially them. They think that socially sanctioned murder is not murder, but it is killing, no? If thou shalt not kill, then don’t. Ever.
Oh, and does that go for all living things, or just people? What about other animals? Killing for food? Hunting for sport? Culling herds? Putting animals down? That’s generally considered okay, but why? And if we don’t kill animals for food, let’s say, and only eat a plant-based diet, well, plants are living things, aren’t they? Their end-around for this one is that God intended for us to eat animals and plants, literally put them there for us.
I mean, come on, that’s a bit loopy. That’s up there with the dinosaurs were put here to trick us into thinking they’re ancient when what really happened was they were kicking it along with us just a few thousand years ago. I mean, it must have been before Christ because there’s no fucking Jurassic Park in the Bible last I checked.
Not that long ago I wrote in part about how I don’t begrudge people their faith, and I don’t. But I would like to add that I also said that whenever a person, or people, of faith decide that they have some sort of spiritual mandate to impose their faith on me or anyone else, I absolutely begrudge them for that, because fuck that. That’s not cool. If you don’t have enough respect for someone else, or a bunch of someone elses, to allow them the room to think as they please without interference and bullying from you, then you are not only going about it all wrong, you are also an asshole.
Moral relativism isn’t about permission, it’s about reality. We put pets down to limit their suffering, not because we are “playing God.” It’s not cruel, it’s mercy, compassion. Both of which are in short supply in this world. Both of which are regarded as weak in the false binary that rules our lives, our culture, and our politics.
The future is 1.
God, faith, the soul, consciousness, the spirit, death/life, being/nothingness, all that juicy shit, it’s all 1. Not 1 being, as in a monotheistic sense. Just 1.
1
There is nothing else.
Good people do bad things. Bad people do good things. The things they do have no inherent value until we give them one. as in 1.
1
I, me, you, us, them, person, people, all 1.
Cut it into as many pieces as you like, if it helps you to understand things, but know that all you are doing is tearing yourself away from all that matters, which is now. And now is already then. because 1.
Wow, John’s gone goofy.
Nah, I’m just being honest. Besides, I was always goofy.
Never in my life, not even for a second, have I ever believed anything other than this. Not even for a moment did I genuinely believe in the binary. I never feared God, for instance. Never. Not even for a fraction of a second. There is nothing to fear. So fear that if you must.
If none of this makes sense to you, that’s okay. If any of it angers you, ask yourself why.
If god is infinite, no beginning, no end, what hope is there that we could even begin to imagine what the even means? We can’t, because it is literally encoded in our existence as incomprehensible. That’s because we are looking at it all wrong. There is no difference between a moment and forever. They are literally the exact same thing. The framing we use to understand, to gain knowledge, to approach meaning, are illusions. How does everything know itself? How does the self-aware ocean planet in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris identify itself prior to its encounter with humans? It can’t, because until we showed up, Solaris was eternal, Solaris was a God. That’s not the interesting part of that story. The interesting part is that Solaris only start to approach knowledge when it has something to compare itself to. The trick is that this isn’t a binary, it’s a reflection of 1.
The imposition of your will against someone else’s is the worst thing any of us can do, and yet we do it all the time. It’s the backbone of the mess we currently find ourselves in today.
I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind about anything here, I’m sharing mine. The older I get, the less I care about persuasion. I care about creating, connecting, expression, freedom from and freedom of and freedom to be. Because in the immortal words of the great A Tribe Called Quest, “the rest are doo-doo.”