And some more serious thinking to get your morning started, but only if you’ve had plenty of coffee!
Originally shared by David Amerland
The Superior Man
When I was fifteen I discovered the writings of Confucius. The sexily titled “Doctrine of the Mean” (http://goo.gl/q1ch) offered to a teen mind struggling to find meaning in the world a series of quotes offered as postulates that in their Koan-like nature hinted at the impossibility of perfection and the need to constantly strive for it.
It appealed. There was something about the suggestion that we are inherently fallible and will fall that appeared to the young, arrogant, angry me, to be a challenge. I have never been without a copy of it in some form in my life and though the meaning of each postulate has changes as I filter it through my ever accumulating store of knowledge and the inevitable building up of personal failures, it has never stopped being of help when, late at night; when the world sleeps, its words acquire a special, private meaning.
Favorite amongst sayings that it is hard to pull favorites from is this one: The Master said “Men all say, ‘We are wise’; but being driven forward and taken in a net, a trap, or a pitfall, they know not how to escape. Men all say, ‘We are wise’; but happening to choose the course of the Mean, they are not able to keep it for a round month.”
Like most things in Confucianism it can mean almost anything you want it to mean at a personal level, within reason. It is at the boundaries that things actually begin to become apparent. Living in a world of knowledge we are preoccupied with wisdom. There is a real fear that while we can learn everything about everything that there is to know we will fail to understand it. Our mental wealth, seemingly limitless, will be revealed for the fool’s gold it actually is.
To safeguard against this we put in place rules, guidelines, regulations, statements, labels, ideologies, groups … and we defend them. It’s our ”We are wise.” moment. And it proves to be our downfall for in externalizing what should be internalized we lose something in the translation.
Zeke Cao brought to my attention an instance where liberal beliefs (a label in itself if there ever was any) http://goo.gl/w95EUw are used in an incident (http://goo.gl/3jRu5w) to brand as a ‘heretic’ of sorts an outsider who wrote a satirical piece about left-handedness in a right-handed world (http://goo.gl/dlmUlJ). The post Zeke shared has several links which are really worth pursuing. The reason it resonates is not in the seeming injustice of what has happened nor in the subconsciously felt fact that political correctness, which addresses language and behavior towards others so that we can “all get along” without judgment and oppression, may actually be becoming a judgmental, oppressive movement in itself.
No, it resonates because we all sense that somehow the world we see is deeply flawed, we are deeply flawed and every fix we try works only so far before it blows up in our face. It can get depressing. It is dispiriting. It makes us want to stop trying. For some it may already be a signal that it’s time we went back to the “good ‘ol days” where “a spade was a bloody shovel”.
In truth our ‘enhanced’ vision of the world works both ways. We see the world not improving much as the very word “terrorist” is used as a blanket term to permit a multitude of sins to take place (http://goo.gl/NQ8wun) without question. We struggle to fashion a meaningful response when those we elect to protect us ask for wider powers (http://goo.gl/GyXeDq) in order to do their job. On the one hand we know there are risks. We have seen, very recently, horrible things take place. On the other we feel that each incident feeds into something that is globally bigger as ‘authority’ becomes more Authoritarian and as security seems to be paid for with the loss of personal freedoms.
We also see the world become more human: http://goo.gl/qMtlRU People reaching out to people. Acting in very human ways that would have been inconceivable in the 20th century.
We find that even in the worst of cases we can sometimes act with a grace of spirit that is driven by reason as much as by emotion, applying forgiveness because it is the right thing to do: http://goo.gl/uwFLhn.
And as our gaze deepens and the throngs flinging themselves against our modern barricades become crystallized into people with faces and hopes and dreams and we listen to their stories: http://goo.gl/BLIQ4G we realize that ultimately they are the same us. They want the same things we want. Exactly.
Labels, ideologies, theories, parties, sects, belief systems, ultimately are techniques we employ, signposts we use to tell ourselves we are on the right path. We have joined the mainstream. We are safe. It’s maybe an instinctive response that ultimately leads us into becoming the very thing we are trying to avoid and there is no real cure for it.
The moment we believe we have attained ‘wisdom’ we are, indeed, at our least wise. The solution is, funnily enough, offered within The Doctrine of the Mean (http://goo.gl/fqbVFY) a work written for a people living in a time where uncertainty was the norm, when there was no concept of law to independently safeguard anything and when allegiances and personal choices were the only advisable path to safety, it highlights the struggle entailed in constant self-improvement.
It is a struggle. It is hard. It may be the only way forward. And now perhaps we can take it in the understanding that we are not truly alone. Weak, fallible, uncertain, we are still a global collective marked by the same desires and responding to fear in similar ways. As Russell Brand (incredibly enough) shows in a brilliant riposte to a Big Brother (http://goo.gl/4zUxv) moment, ‘all’ it takes is empathy: http://goo.gl/55ioem. Just a little of it. Enough to help overcome our sense of fear and that may indeed help change everything.
So, Sunday. Coffee. Donuts. Cookies, Croissants. Cake. (You know the drill). All the things needed to help us read long and think deep. Change inside ourselves will soon begin to be reflected outside. I hope you have an awesome Sunday, wherever you are.
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