There’s an important issue related to the previous article, where I talked about separating your inputs from your outputs, so that you don’t become a reactionary automaton. It’s the issue of “turning the other cheek”, as Jesus would put it. If we look into it more deeply, we find two underlying issues: self-defense and justice.
The issue of self-defense is essentially the issue of standing your ground, both spiritually and materially. Spiritually, it means defending what you believe in and what you stand for. Materially, it means protecting your life and property, as well as persons and things entrusted to you.
The problem with standing your ground is that everybody and their dog assume they are on the “right side of the Force”. Everybody assumes they are worth defending. But are you, really? Is defense of your person really the defense of God in this world? Is it the defense of what is true, righteous and good? Or are you merely a dog barking at the people on the street just because you’re on the “right” side of the fence, and you’re simply defending your territory like any other animal? Those are important questions, because if you ask people, they will all tell you they are trying to do the right thing, and they are trying to do good. The result of all that is the sum of all evils in the world. All evil people think they are perfectly justified in all their actions. If you find a person who is full of self-doubt and thinks of himself as inherently evil, you’re probably dealing with a saint. Evil not only assumes the right to defend itself, it assumes the right to assert itself. So, although the issue of self-defense initially seemed straightforward and clear, it is everything but. When someone slaps you in the face, the instinctive reaction is to assume you’re right, to assume the right to defend yourself. But what if you are in the wrong? What if that other person has the right to slap you in the face? What if the right and proper response is to feel shame and remorse, to accept rebuke and to repent? So, the solution would be to be situationally aware. You need to know your place in the wider world. You need to know where it is proper to stand your ground and defend your position, and when to re-examine your stance, retreat, perhaps even change sides. One possible lesson of “turn the other cheek”, therefore, might be that you should not assume your righteousness with full certainty. Maybe you got slapped because you’re an asshole. To turn the other cheek might be to accept blame and rebuke, and to offer apology. If so, that is a valid lesson.
Implicit in this is the judgment of right and wrong. If you are wrong, retreat, accept punishment and offer apology. Attempt to redress the wrongs. Repent. However, if you are right, and you are attacked, what then? Turn the other cheek no matter what? This is the place where people instinctively disagree with Jesus, they rebel against his teaching, and I’m not really sure it’s justified, because as we could see above, there are other legitimate interpretations of his statement – don’t assume you’re right and automatically reflect the input. We don’t know if he had a moderate or an extremist attitude towards this. I, however, can tell you what I think. I think you need to defend what you know to be true, and what you know to be just. You need to stand your ground. You don’t necessarily retaliate in kind, but you make your position known, you declare yourself and you work toward the greatest good. Sometime this means to attenuate a volatile situation. Sometimes you will remove yourself from the situation. Sometimes, however, you will respond with deadly force. There are legitimate situations where I would do so, and I wouldn’t bat an eyelash about it. If you had an active shooter scenario where some Muslim yelled “Allahu Akbar” while shooting people, and I was armed, I would shoot him twice in the chest and once in the head to make sure he’s dead. I think the response with deadly force would be so automatic I wouldn’t have time to even think about it, it’s like catching a glass you dropped, a reflex. So yeah, I wouldn’t turn the other cheek, I wouldn’t try to talk, or dismantle the situation. Every second of fucking around can mean another innocent person dead. You need to act, and you need to apply violence. You need to do it quickly, and effectively. Yes, those who live by the sword can die by the sword, but the trick is, you don’t even have to know what a sword is, to die by it. But that’s not the only possible scenario. It’s not always “allow someone to bitch slap you” or “shoot to kill”. Sometimes, you negotiate the exchange of five hostages for yourself, knowing you’ll be killed. You make the assessment, and if you see it’s worth it, you save their lives by offering yours. That, too, is a way to stand your ground – “if you need to kill someone, kill me”. So, as you can see, it’s a complicated matter, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s all an application of Augustine’s principle of just war, or, in a generalized case, just application of violence. Today people think violence is evil and there can be no excuse or no tolerance for it, but that’s a wrong approach. The right approach is, how can we minimize violence? How can we fight evil, how can we act in order to reduce evil? If you have a situation where 50 people die if you do nothing, and 1 person dies if you shoot the armed terrorist, how is refusing to kill a terrorist a good thing? And how is killing him bad, even though it is violence? You need to have your priorities straight. The Hindus have an excellent system for this; they have a list of priorities. First priority is moksa, liberation. Second priority is dharma, righteousness. Third priority is artha, usefulness. Fourth priority is kama, sensual pleasure. Basically, you see if something is conducive to liberation or not. Of things that are conducive to liberation, favor those that are righteous and just. Of things that are righteous and just, prefer to do those that are useful to you and others. Of things that are useful to you and others, choose to do those that are pleasurable.
So, it’s not always a choice between righteousness and a painful death. It sometimes is, if it can’t be avoided, but sometimes it’s a subtle choice, between polite silence and polite expression of your attitude. Sometimes to testify for God means to have an orgasm with the right person. Sometimes to testify for God is to offer your life in exchange for another person’s. Sometimes it’s to kill someone, quickly and efficiently, so that he wouldn’t kill the innocent. It’s a subtle thing, and it annoys me when people oversimplify things to the point of making nonviolence or kindness an absolute. Yes, kindness is good, but only if it’s helpful and useful. Sometimes kicking someone’s ass is better than kindness, and produces a greater good. It is wrong to justify evil actions with this, but nevertheless, it is my opinion that violence solved more problems than any other approach. The Nazis in the second world war weren’t defeated by lovingkindness, they were defeated by brutal violence. Sometimes you need to blow someone’s brains out in order to do good, and there’s no other way around it. If you’re facing an army of murderers, the right thing to do is take up arms and oppose them with deadly force. Sometimes, the only truly consistent choice for the greater good is to reject the concept of absolute nonviolence, and instead treat evil as a problem, and moderate violence as a possible solution. But it functions like this: if one uses words to do evil, you oppose him with words to spread truth and reason, and do good. If one uses a gun to kill good people, you take a gun and put a bullet in his brain. It’s that simple. Respond moderately, adopt a moderate, almost passive approach, but be ready for decisive and very violent action if it’s the right thing to do. Oppose evil by doing good, oppose lies by spreading the truth, but oppose an armed terrorist with a 9mm, two in the chest and one in the head if he still moves. Then turn the other cheek to check how the victims are doing and how you can help them.
Self- rightness, as a concept, certainly isn’t new to our modern society, but perhaps contemporary self-obsession has taken it to the next level. It creates a contradiction to ‘turn the other cheek’ phrase, because if it is all about us, why should we tolerate anything else? Obviously, everyone believing they are entitled to everything (that is the religion of the day, isn’t it?) is going to lead towards certain (probably disastrous) behaviour patterns and consequently, on a larger scale, to social movements and actions (possibly anarchy, war, bloody revolutions etc). Combine that with a modern simultaneous duality that exists in a form of hysterical fear/ phobia of and fetish desire/addiction for sex and violence and we’re in for a treat.
Instead of studying the ‘turn the other cheek’ phrase for what it might imply people today prefer make their assumptions on basic emotional responses. Yes, today people like extremes. They try to simplify things because that gives them a feeling of security. Because it is, I suppose, a pleasant alternative to admitting that most of us are intellectually, emotionally and spiritually challenged (we must use the politically accepted term, mustn’t we?).
What I find most troubling is that today people are not able to comprehend a simple text, just a basic article about some topic. It is not about skimming (that is becoming second nature to many of us), it is that people genuinely read something that has a bit of complexity in it and they fail to understand it. Adults. People with education, people with an average IQ and even people with the above the average IQ. They brain automatically catches ‘strong’ words and make an assumption. They are starting to abandon the thinking process. They are forgetting what it means to think. They are assuming they know everything. It is like newspeak from 1984 by George Orwell has come to life. War means peace, porn means feminism, vulgarisation means art. That scares me. People smarter than me and in many cases people who are my moral superiors are making crucial decisions based on something as trivial as an emotional response (which is in most cases an accumulation of past experiences and what we are taught to believe).
I’m not talking about the fact that people aren’t intellectually equal, that is and should be obvious. I’m no Albeit Einstein either, for that matter. What frightens me is that those people who are supposed to be intellectual giants, those with PhDs and academic careers are pushed aside when it comes to participating in public dialogue (and if everybody is equal why should they have a saying in anything?), pushed aside either by themselves (because “it’s none of my business” attitude) or by society. The same goes for people who have had some spiritual experiences and who have basis to take a moral standing. It may be a symptom of equalisation of everything by society, but it also may have to so with self-obsession. If it is all about me, why should I care? Or let the state take care of it, I have enough on my plate. There is no doubt that intellectuals are becoming more and more specialized. Like that joke about doctor who stepped over a woman who fainted because he was a paediatrician? No, wait that’s actually not a joke, someone told me that one. Or about a doctor who pretended to faint while he was giving a lecture on a medical seminar and counted how long will it take the other doctors to reach him? If I remember well what the guy himself told me, it took them a considerable amount of time to get to him.
Intelligent people…. They either refrain from social commentary or they are forgetting to think. In the West nowadays, lots of people have BA and MA. However, how many of them spend a substantial amount of time thinking about something? How many just assume it is not of their business? How many are on subconscious level completely paralysed by mermaid’s liberal song of equality? True, the world is growing increasingly complex. And we? We are growing increasingly frightened and paralyzed mentally. It is like wanting to speak a language, claiming you’re fluent in it, but failing to even understand it, not having the passive let alone active knowledge of it. It is like claiming that by learning a few key vocabulary items we can be fluent (there are people who actually believe it, published authors, they only aren’t sure should we focus on nouns or verbs).
Today there are about 100 second language acquisition theories (if not more) developed by people who aren’t even bilingual. Nobody will believe you if you tell them that in those ‘dark’ medieval ages there were plenty of polyglots. Every educated person could speak Latin, if nothing else, and they learned it the old fashion way, by studying grammar. Today when you say you want to teach grammar to kids, they watch you like you’re crazy, like you’re about to commit some atrocity. No, grammar, that horrible updated thing, you mustn’t mention it, you’ll traumatize their sensitive young minds. No, let’s download an app and let them play games all day. Something is bound to sink it. While we are at it, let’s stop teaching them math. Some kids might not like math and we don’t want anything unpleasant. We know that kids can’t develop abstract thinking on their own, but while they grow up somebody is bound to develop an app for it. We must not take away from them their right of having fun all the time. Let’s all play Pokémon together. It will help us forget about the terrorist threats. Oh, wait we shouldn’t call the terrorist that, lest they be offended. I know, let’s make it a law that Pokémon should be remodelled to have Arabic facial features. That way everyone can be happy!
Good comment. My “favorite” thing is the way that modern readers respond on forums and even on Disqus on long comments such as yours. They simply type TL; DR, which you probably know is the short for “too long, didn’t read”, for displaying they don’t care about comment at all and they must show how they not care by typing four letters. In their minds, “too long, didn’t read” is too long to write as a respond. Pathetic…
Yes, we live in a tl;dr word, where anti-intellectualism is “cool” and taking anything seriously is a social faux pas. Not really a mentality conducive to survival and prosperity of the species. When I want to warn my kids against it, I warn them that they will have to compete for a job with the Chinese, Koreans and other Asians who take things very seriously, who excelled at maths and science, who are polite, disciplined and hard working. So better learn how to take things seriously because there aren’t enough dumpsters around to feed all who were too cool to read.
I actually didn’t know that one. It is amazing how everyone has time to spend a lot of time saying how they don’t have time.
What strikes me as interesting is that we live in a civilization that produced the greatest number of people with degrees in known history, and yet the number of competent thinkers seems to be more less constant in any generation throughout history. In the era of enlightenment, somewhere around the invention of the printing press, it was thought that mass education and literacy will exponentially increase the number of competent intellectuals in the population, but apparently all it did was increase the number of idiots who routinely jumped through the hoops of testing short-term memory in order to get a degree, and they neither understand what they were taught, nor do they care. They see it merely as a necessary prerequisite of social status and getting a job in some administrative position which requires a degree.
It makes you think: what if all those illiterate, anintellectual people throughout history weren’t really limited by the lack of opportunity, but by lack of inherent spiritual potential?
I think most people just don’t care…and even if they cared at some point, they simply forgot about it. I remember buying something advertized as a book about art ( with essays from some University art historian) and all of them were about how and why we should vote for the lefties. it is quite possible that the state supported the publishing of that book. A book about conflicts of minor political figures from the nineties that nobody even remembers now. People nowadays want gossip and dirt just as much as they did before, but they can’t admit it and they can’t stand it being called what it is. Everyone with an internet connection has access to education, but how many people use the internet that way? People don’t want to think, they want someone else to do the thinking for them. Perhaps that is how it had always been and education really doesn’t have anything to do with it. You can’t make someone own up to having a personal responsibility, you can’t make someone not want to be a part of social collective where one doesn’t need to use one’s head if that is what one wants. University degrees aren’t any different from branded expenssive bags, they’re only there for the show and I suppose they take about the same amount of effort and time (if one actually works to buy a Chanel bag) to get hold of.
Well, if they don’t care then neither do I. I just object to tax money being used to feed them. I think people who are too cool to give a fuck should be allowed to fail and die.
I agree. Tax money should be used on something much more useful than making everyone feel a bit better about themselves, which sadly seems to have become the purpuse of education.
A slightly tongue-in-cheek concept of selecting proper actions would be a SQL statement:
select * from actions order by moksa, dharma, artha, kama desc limit 1;
🙂