Monday, September 1, 2008

The best morals are no morals.

If we had free will then it would mean we have some kind of moral responsibilities in life to act upon each day, because if we control our actions then it's up to us to do the right things. Since I claim we have no free will and things exist due to causalities, we have no moral obligations in life. The question would then arise that if we have no moral obligations how do we create stability, control, and security? My answer is that morality is already innate and therefore will create itself just by us acting out the things that our genetic and societal structures cause us to do. We don't choose what our values, beliefs, and motives are for doing things, because don't choose to care. Caring is an emotional state that precedes all those things. The same as we don't choose what people we do and don't want to care about, we also don't choose values, beliefs, and motives. We just care about something and it suddenly becomes a value, belief, or motive. The things we're taught to care about come from our environments. Anything that hasn't existed in our environment can't be cared about.

Since we're driven to act on the things we care about we should only do what feels good to us. As creatures of desire by nature and by that same nature are taught what to value socially by people we care about, we should all do what makes us feel good no matter what. The reasoning behind this is if what we do makes other people feel bad even if it makes us feel good it's only a matter of time before it makes them feel good to punch us, which makes us feel bad and then we stop doing that thing learning it doesn't feel good in the long term. It's only through experience that we learn what is right and wrong in our environments and that's where morals come from. We're hardwired to perform certain actions based on what our ancestors did for millions of years of experience before us. On a social level we're taught to act certain ways within a structure that we are rewarded and punished for in that environment that alters our behaviors starting at a young age. Every institution has its own sets of norms, values, beliefs, and motives. The things that manage to overlap most institutions are societal norms. The reason each institution has a different story is due to encoding and decoding of language. When one institution tells another what it expects as normal it's encoding information to us. From the institution we stand in we decode based on the angle we see what they're saying things from and hear it the way we want to. This is why we all have different desires. Stories mutate when they travel from group to group. Even two similar institutions like the two families can be the same and act completely different due to the other institutions the families involve themselves in. What we desire that isn't hardwired is taught to us socially, and when we care about people we tend to care about what they do too.

It's because we each decode information from a different perspective that two people can be in a situation with each other from different places and expect different outcomes. This is where new norms have to develop by creating a new story together about what we share and intend our outcomes to be. If the mutual story never happens we're both still telling different stories to ourselves about the desired outcomes. The only way a bond can happen between two people is if they both happen to care about enough of the same things to eventually care about each other. The only people who naturally love us are our parents. Everyone else who meets us in life won't care about us and only seek what we can do for their lives. In many cases people don't even do this on purpose. We like to tell ourselves lies in order to get something quickly from people most of the time that are only acquaintances or strangers and believe we're being good or even altruistic. When we do things that seem giving it's really to get something in return. The purpose of speech and action is to acquire potential desire. We only speak and act if we think we'll get something for doing so.

Since we like to lie to ourselves it's only through our experiences that we can learn what feels good and bad by doing the things that feel bad enough times that we have to stop lying to ourselves. An example is I care about you as my girlfriend. You tell me you care about me as only a friend. I then agree to be just friends and continue to hang around and shower you with phone calls and kind gestures. What I've done is lied to myself that I can be a friend, but the real reason I'm hanging around is to win you over. This gesture will in fact do the opposite in most cases, because the girl gets free attention at no expense and I get nothing, but they will lie to themselves too and never tell me to stop, because they like my attention even though they don't intend to date me. That's because I'm validating how wonderful they are and what will happen eventually is she will date someone else and all my work will be for nothing. This is an example of running into something that hurts and continuing it thinking it will turn out in my favor. All my friends could tell me that what I'm doing isn't going to work, but I continue telling myself the story I'm emotionally attached to. It's only till I act out this story enough times and hurt myself that I realize it doesn't work in my favor. That's because this person isn't my friend. They're an acquaintance who is doing what makes them feel good and I'm lying and telling myself that what I'm doing feels good too when it hurts, because I'm not getting the effect I want through speech and action. We can't speak sense into someone who is going through a problem, because it's only through their own action and speech they'll learn to change in time. Any advice they ask for is really to unload their problems and continue doing the thing that hurts. That's why we need to realize nobody really loves us in this world except our friends who have been around for the long haul.

If we can't change whom we care about we have to eliminate the person from our environment. When we care about things that aren't working in our favor we can continue to work on them till we get them right or quit and try something else. Through experience we learn what we are and aren't capable of. People on the other hand who haven't proven friendship by being around regularly for the long haul shouldn't be worked on. It's only by removing ourselves from their presence we can start working on things that feel good again and heal. Once somebody proves they aren't stable in our lives the way we'd like and they haven't reached the stage of true friend, they should automatically be discarded. The reason for this is because they won't change till they try the same thing on enough other people that they realize this thing never works in their favor. If they never learn it's not our problem anymore. If we hang around they'll continue to think we're the only people who have problems with the way they do things and they won't earn respect for us. At the same time we hurt ourselves in the process. If someone does something that hurts just leave whenever they appear, because they only intend to use you for what they want till you're dried out emotionally. It's not till several years pass we can try interacting with these people again, because our emotions have changed for new things that aren't them anymore.
Emotions are like billiard balls and if we throw an emotional billiard ball at someone and they don't react at all it's because they don't care about the thing we care about, so we're just throwing it at a brick wall in a sense and it bounces back at us. If we throw it and they react in a way we don't like, it's because they care about the thing we do but not the same way we do, and not really us or they'd react kindly. It's not till our emotions cause other's emotions to act in a way we approve of and they approve of that we both benefit and that's when we know it's safe to continue throwing these kind of billiard balls of emotion more often. When this happens long enough we develop the same morals and form friendships around them. When we both benefit we're stronger than all the people that never learned how to throw good emotions at anyone.

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