Instincts and emotions are baked-in when you are born.
Vern Bender
It’s a massive irony that in this land of plenty, there is so much poverty. Everything is frozen now, and a thaw is nowhere to be found. Buzzards keep circling you, and no oasis is located nearby.
Love is something that used to be. The complaining voices from the frozen trees with no leaves are bombasted into your head. The frozen seashore is calling your name. Your daytime nightmares are growing stronger by the day.
Philosophy has been in a death spiral for so long it can no longer tell right from wrong. Philosophy has created its meaningless bubble of babble that shuts all else out. Change yourself before you attempt to change others. Two thousand five hundred years ago or so, a handful of Greeks exhibited a modicum of common sense. Later, in the East, Buddha, Confucius, and Lao Tzu told you how to live while navigating equality vs competition. You had to choose which way to go.
Not to be left out, the West jumped into the game with Hobbs, Bacon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and later, Bertie Russell. Enlightenment was all the rage. They declared that human reasoning could discover truths about the world, religion, and politics. This would be used to improve the lives of humankind. Getting people to pay attention was the tricky part. The Enlightenment produced numerous books, essays, inventions, scientific discoveries, laws, wars, and revolutions. Enlightenment ideals directly inspired the American and French Revolutions.
The Enlightenment ultimately gave way to 19th-century Romanticism. Romanticism was an artistic movement that emphasized emotion and imagination. Knowledge can’t buy you happiness or love. Reality is only what you perceive it to be, instinctually or not. Thought, with or without emotion, follows perception if need be.
ALL THINGS ARE TRIUNE, WITH BINARY INTERACTIVES.
First, your instincts kick in when you attempt to perceive a transaction.
Second, your emotions decide whether to react or not.
Third, rational reason assigns a value to a thought or not.
You finally decide. You’re either in, or you’re out. Your mind is made up unless it isn’t.
That is how the game is played. This time, a check and raise is allowed, sometimes.
Note: Instincts and emotions are baked in when you are born. Rationalism is acquired as you go along.
Philosophy organizes reason in a rag-tag way. Self-awareness grows out of reasoned sense, or so they say.
The trinity of ideas that concern philosophers the most are:
1st, What is the origin of life?
2nd, How does the Universe work?
3rd, What the hell is the mind?
Philosophy is currently in a state of confusion. The academics have divided it up into dozens of branches. Everybody is talking, and nobody is listening. The bedrock of philosophy has turned into bits and pieces of clay. Doing the right thing has nothing to do with getting the grant following—physics split from philosophy about two hundred years ago. Today, philosophy is lost in a self-generated fog. It has been unfocused for quite some time, and few care. Metaphysics is the study of ideas, and most people could care less. Topics like Rationalism vs Empiricism and Elitism vs. Egalitarianism are distinctions without much difference. We categorize our experiences.
The tools of knowledge are used and misused daily. Our point of view is quite limited. Thoughts and ideas wouldn’t exist without brain cells. Consciousness is a separate function. Reason and logic use the same operating system. Reason begets rationality. Experience begets knowing. Pragmatism begets practicality. We categorize and store the knowledge we have obtained in our knowledge superstructure. We can only know what we know.
We can only see the reality that we perceive. The rest of existence is outside our ken. The quality of our equality is dependent upon who is the determining judge. Ethics deal with morality and the law. Ethics change over time.
Elitism is a hierarchical thing that comes out of the nature of life. The talented and rich think they are superior and more equal than the rest. They have essence, and you do not. Individualism, freedom, and material domination put them above the rest of the maddening crowd. The robust get control of the weak. Identity political policies keep you where they want you to be. Identity politics is all the rage today.
