Reflections From a Murky Pond

Governmental aid policies, both foreign and domestic, are as much designed to foster gratitude as to alleviate any woes or sufferings. The problem is that, just as they consistently fail to end the woes and sufferings of the recipients, these aid program fail to generate any gratitude in those recipient as well.

This is to be expected. Charity rarely, if ever, breeds gratitude; it breeds resentment instead.

It’s not as if this wasn’t understood for a long time – well over a century, in point of existential fact.

Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.

— Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 93

Say what you want against Nietzsche – and there’s a lot to say against him – but he had a good and solid understanding of the baser instincts, reactions, beliefs, and behaviors of Man.

At a purely unconscious and visceral level – bermenschen they’re not – even the Liberals understand this basic truth. That’s why they couch their program in terms of “entitlements” and “rights.” They seek to deflect the anger of those their supporting unto their enemies by projecting the indebtedness onto those they seek to force to fund such largess.

Charity perforce spawns indebtedness and this will almost always result in the gnawing worm of resentment in the receiver which, like all infections, will fester and grow. One can, like the Liberals and Progressives, deflect it for one’s own gain but one cannot change the underlying sad truth of it.

Until this is fully realized, the government will continue, both foreign and domestically, through good money after bad to no beneficial effect beyond possibly keeping their own jobs for another term.

I have posted before about the ethics of reciprocity – the “Golden Rule” – as have others that I know online, which is not surprising since this Golden Rule seems fundamental to almost all ethical thought, philosophies, and religions.

The question arises though of whether we’ve all failed to fully grasp and internalize both sides of this ethical equation.

Have we focused too much upon the primary action and not enough upon the reciprocal reaction? Have we also failed to recognize that it functions much as an engine, a natural law that we’ve placed too many “higher order” considerations upon?

Any of the variations of, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” may serve well as admonishment or exhortation to right behavior by people, but we seem to fail to connect it with, “As you sow, so shall you reap,” which common sense tell us must be the reciprocating side of this ethical equation.

The greatest problem this schism causes is the cognitive dissonance it causes is in those cases where the primary action was a negative or harmful one.  This causes both internal conflict and hampers effective mitigation of the negative or harmful effects of the primary actor’s actions.

If the theory of Reciprocal Ethics is true than it must be true in all its parts or be claimed false. Therefor, natural law would require that negative actions lead to similarly negative responses as a normal course of events and to break this cycle requires conscious decision to engage in an unnatural course of response which might very well, due to its unnaturalness, be misunderstood as weakness, vulnerability or surrender of the point in contention by the original actor.

Some few in the course of history have understood this, though with mixed results.

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.

— Mahatma Gandhi (Disputed)

Gandhi, through his cult of personality and abetted by the nature and proclivities of the two cultures involved and the greater scope of world events, succeeded in breaking the natural laws of reciprocity and doing so in a manner that achieved his victory, India’s Independence from Britain.

Somewhere somebody must have some sense. Men must see that force begets force, hate begets hate, toughness begets toughness. And it is all a descending spiral, ultimately ending in destruction for all and everybody. Somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe. And you do that by love.

— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

MLK seemed to understand the basic equation of reciprocity but did not seem to understand that sense was not what was called for, since sense would lead people to follow the natural order of action and reciprocation. As can be seen by the largely unalleviated and unabated levels of racial angst and hatred among the Black population in America, despite the legal and pragmatic success of the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. King was largely unsuccessful in his prescription.

One has to accept the basic nature of the reciprocal engine that is the foundation of Reciprocal Ethics and fully understand the difficulties involved in convincing people to behave otherwise.

This post is solely due to the emotions that my friend – you don’t really know me so you don’t understand the weight of that word upon my soul –  ichabod dredged up out of my memory by including a simple image in one of his articles.

I refer you, my valued reader, simply to this video – a rare glimpse of Canada’s Bluenose as she lived and loved upon the Widowmaker,

The Bluenose vs. Gertrude L. Thebaud

Years and years ago I stood the deck of the Bluenose II, which was a true replica of the original great lady of the Grand Banks. Standing there I wept. I wept with both the joy of her lines and life and with grief over Man’s casting her and her sisters aside along with the love of them in favor of the practicalities of modern maritime shipping.

I wept as I read and commented on ichabod’s article and I wept still as wrote this one.

I f you can’t understand why I weep without shame over the loss of these grand queens of the seas then the languages of our souls have too little in common with each others’ to ever truly understand each other.

I say that without reproach for I know that I’m a living, or plausible facsimile of living, atavism in this modern and needfully oh-so-practical world.

For those very few who will care, the Bluenose died in January of 1946 when she was gutted on a Haitian reef. With her died an era and large part, – in my estimation – of Man’s soul.

One should always strive to be honest in one’s arguments. Most importantly, one should be honest with their self about the nature of their arguments on any topic.

This does not, in this case, mean that one should not deceive those that they argue with. It means that one should not lie to themselves about what their underlying position on an issue in contention is.

When engage in an argument over any issue of substance one should always strive to be cognizant of what one’s aims truly are, irrespective of what tools of debate one uses upon others. This is especially true when one has a measurable chance of winning the argument and enacting or preventing change to a subject or system.

The above is not just mere philosophy or some exercise in moral rectitude; it is a matter of pragmatic necessity. If one is not honest with one’s self about what is desired, it is possible, probable even in a more complex, real world scenario, to completely win the argument and not come close to achieving the goals one actually desires.

It is a long recurring theme, the call to have no regrets and/or to live one’s life without regret. Both the young and the middle-aged seeking to find their lost youth herald this idea as a measure of courage and personal growth.

It is one of the more laughable ideas that I’ve heard issue from the mouths of fools and people trying to sell me something. It also would be dangerous if generally achievable.

Let’s leave aside for the moment the fact that only the severely mentally deficient and/or damaged, the most shallow of narcissists, and total sociopaths could ever hope to achieve a life with no regrets. Let’s concentrate instead upon those deluded fools who might attempt this largely in vain.

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