Thinking about asking some questions.
Thinking about my website and cross referencing, linking items like Diderot’s encyclopedia.
Questions:
What is the difference between thinking and knowing?
What is the difference between knowing and thinking?
What is the difference between thinking and believing?
If your favorite cat got its head stuck in an expensive and rare Egyptian artifact worth perhaps $100,000 dollars and the choice was to let the cat suffocate or to destroy the artifact and lose $100,000; what would be your choice?
What if your choice was losing your wealth and saving your best friend?
How much would you let yourself lose before your friend died?
What is the equation between losing your wealth and good sense?
Tell the truth and lose your job? Your life? Your reputation? Your well being?
There is a kind of standing ethic about giving 10% of your income to charity?
Should you give a higher percentage back into the system in which you obtained it in direct proportion to your wealth on an exponential scale?
What is the ‘ethic’ of most significance in the overall context of which is most important in the where, what, when and how much we are required to sacrifice of what our self values and our self interest desires?
Isn’t it all about what ‘Life’ requires for everyone’s survival in sufficiency vs wealth’s desire beyond rational need?
I want sufficiency of wealth for the rest of my future. “I” want an unending increase of more wealth than I can ever use. I want to pass my wealth onto my offspring when I die. Cease to live.
The criteria of “wealth”, the control, value of possession and power vs the survival of another or other living beings is volatile, distorted and life threatening in withholding essential resources and education.
I don’t see this as anything simple, but I do think that it is a question of rational understanding of balance of what is required by the total commercial functions in a system requiring a significant portion of its distribution directed to sustaining the totality of the organic system.
We humans, and other animals, can and do turn off concern when it comes down to what the unaware and uninformed ego determines is important; when it comes to their convictions of personal possession.
It can start early on, as feeding i.e. the driving force of life seeking its primal needs. There is nothing ‘wrong’ with this kind of self serving force. It is a biological imperative.
What could be ‘wrong’ would be for me to withhold from you what you need when I have more than enough to provide for my family and community. The core of this is reflected in what we all know when we watch one chick survive and the other die of neglect. A paradox for sure. Is not everything and everyone entitled to live, or entitled to try?
What human’s don’t acknowledge is that we too are ‘organic’. We are caught up in a modified version of ‘survival of the fittest’ when we do things like ‘favoring’ one child over another, the eldest son thing, or preference of males over females to fortify the survival and the fighting strength of the tribe. We can’t forget the 200,000 years of evolution preceding our own.
Then there exists our personal ‘distance’ from our neighbor’s child, the other children of the community, and then the distance from the children of the more extensive community we aren’t generally exposed to and don’t know. Then in the global community of foreign places, languages and irrational cultures i.e. strangers, the ‘other’.
All this points to how confusing values of possession and privilege can be in the totality of the social order in both close and distant proximities, micro and macro.
Then comes the measure of life of others over the treasure of our own possessions. This measure of “our” treasure over the living of life of others is not ‘wrong’ when referenced from what is embedded in the biological forces of survival. But, what also occurs in the dialogue of sharing is co-dependence.
Group living is inherently a stronger life support system than is individuality in its singularity. But, it is in the paradox of what belongs to the “Us” in relationship to what “belongs” to the “me” and/or “them” essentially, because there exists no individuality without an “Us” to create and support it.
The strength of group living requires the sharing of all talent, knowledge and resources of provision in order to integrate individuality into its task of serving the collective’s well being and survival.
The question is, “How effective are we, can we become, in controlling the limits of possession and power of individual wealth that is needed in the provision of a healthy circumstance for the well being of the collective organism?”
And we come back to the dilemma and paradox of life force directed towards the wellbeing of the strongest and most competitive or the all and everything belonging to the whole species and its well being and survival.
Me and Us, Mine and Yours, and especially “Us and Them”, provokes a different challenge in our time if for no other reason than the paradigm shift of population numbers. Our population has not so long ago exceeded tribal boundaries, territories and behavior in a completely new collective organism composed of 7.6 billion individuals in what is perhaps in excess of what the Earth environmental processes can withstand. There is the terribly difficult and contentious interactive circumstance of not only provision and use of resources, but also the values and control of their distribution in an equation of daunting numbers. The provision of quality, what it takes to harmonize in purpose and behavior, to balance breeding, distribution of knowledge and resources into a sustainable process of expectation of the survival of the species, which is now the fulcrum of every ethical question about “ownership”.
Or, we can, are and will, face the reality of organic imbalance and follow its natural course of disease, starvation, violent competition and confrontation of a species composed of individual strangers, unable to function collectively in their own interests.