To Carry Fire

I spent my childhood learning about God. What he wanted from us humans, and how we could give it to him. What we were saddled with from birth: sin. Like with other religious sects, I grew up believing in my inherent imperfection. I grew up with the belief that  life was suffering, and we had to make meaning from it. We would fail, constantly, and never live up to the standards God set for us, so we had to hope for the future. Through God's power alone could the world be set aright. Only through God's grace could we ever be forgiven. Jesus is the epitome of this viewpoint: His one time death was the only thing needed to release all men from sin and death. (Now, being Protestant, my birth religion  did  also focus on "works" not just "faith", but that's a separate concern.) Jesus needed to suffer for the world to be saved. And we, his spiritual descendants, had to suffer for the world to be saved.  My belief growing up, then, was that suffer...

Of the many concepts that are ethically important, one is incredibly valuable in this age of inflated self-importance and unhealthy narcissism: genuine self-respect. What is "genuine" self-respect? It is, more correctly, just "self-respect", but needs to have the qualifier to distinguish it from fraudulent self-respect: that which is proposed by the self-help circles and certain religious traditions. These forms of fraudulent self-respect are called "self-respect", "self-esteem" "unconditional positive self-regard", etc, but amount to an unhealthy psychological concept called narcissism. Narcissism vs. self-respect is a debate which seems too muddy to consider, but can be distilled into key similarities and differences. Similarities include the focus of both concepts on what the self is, what the self does, and why the self does what it does. Differences arise from the different answers to these questions. So, while a narcis...

I could take this time to write a brief post on the "Green New Deal", of recent acclaim and criticism... But I want to devote the time instead to examining what seems to be the goal of the GND: prosperity. I mean this in the sense that the proponents of the deal mean it: economic prosperity, as measured by equality between citizens and the abolition of classes. Now, we can quibble (correctly) that prosperity is not, in this sense, the real word for it. A better word may be "degradation" or "impoverishment". That is the actual aim, not the named goal. The only way to make everyone equal is not to provide maximum opportunity, but instead, maximum control. Take away the rights of an individual to make their own way in life and they will only be of value to a grand scheme - and to the schemer. Ultimately, this is why socialism is immoral: it shows a shocking, horrifying lack of regard for the individual. The goal of socialism (and specifically,...