The righteousness parable
26 Nov 2011 1 Comment
in OBSERVATIONS Tags: all, blog, ctwfrank, economics, education, financial crisis, Life, News, personal, psychology
Recently, I applied the final touches to my latest book and decided that there was nothing more that I could change, improve, fix or be paranoid about, which meant that it was good enough. It’s called “The Sixty-seven Rules: A promise kept.” I gave it that title because I was keeping a promise (to you; cool beans!). This post is not about my book however, it is best example of rule #2 that exists, and rule #2 is very, very important right now. Just to recap; rule #2 says: “Never confuse shit with shinola.”
For as long as anyone can remember, people have confused, substituted or treated as synonyms; the words Truthfulness and Righteousness. It is not very difficult to understand how this occurred, given our track record for using heaping portions of convenience and hypocrisy in the building of our social structures and languages. The fact that the origins of the phenomenon are easily understandable does not make it any less unacceptable.
A simple application of the basic scientific process yields some very enlightening answers. We have a fascinating love/hate relationship with truth, we always have, ever since whenever it was that we understood what it was; because we all understand what truth is. For the sake of clarity, truth is an intransigent absolute in the universe, which means that it just is. It can’t be changed, modified, corralled, manipulated or swayed, in fact as far as we humans are concerned, when it comes to truth; there are only two ways that we can interact with it: we can accept it or ignore it, but that’s about it. That is what has always fascinated us about truth: its unquestioned validity. A truth simply is, above all else and in spite of anything else. That particular quality is irresistibly desirable to us: to be unquestionable, indisputable and publicly acknowledged as right above all else. The mere thought of a person possessing the intransigent qualities of truth is so powerful that it overpowers and overshadows all human emotions, even lust. We simply had to incorporate it into the human condition, so we came up with truthfulness; a human trait also referred to as honesty. In reality, both terms are misnomers; what is claimed by the use of the words truthfulness and honesty is far from what we actually do when we’re being truthful and honest because we lie, continuously. We can’t help but lie, it’s so easy to get away with. The only problem is rule #1: “Do not lie.” This rule is not “optional”, it is not something that one can casually decide to acquire or to partake of, it is a requirement for happiness. Hold on… wasn’t I writing about truth just a moment ago? How did I end up here? Do you see how easily we confuse things? Regardless of this, neither word has anything to do with truth, they are just one way that we have attempted to “humanize” one of the absolute qualities of the universe.
It turns out that truthfulness and honesty simply did not provide the same amount of pleasure to the ego as truth. They were good qualities, but while they leaned towards aspects of actual truth, they became synonymous with humility and as anyone can tell you, humility is a WEAKNESS. It’s what a person should claim to be, when in fact they desire to be and are expected to be ruthless and imposing and above all else: right. Yes, that is what makes human flesh tremble with desire and makes the knees weak: to be right – and for everyone else to know that I’m right. Oh yes! That’s good, that’s very good! All it needed was a little math to establish the parallel and all of a sudden; there it was: To be right one had to possess truth, otherwise they were wrong. Being right became the membership ID card that was shown when we wanted to be treated by others with the same unyielding and unquestionable validity as truth, and it worked! All one had to be was right and BAM! – the same endorphins and pheromones that are set off when we imagine what it must be like for a person to be as omnipotent as truth itself coursed through the body. We humans have always been so resourceful.
In this manner, we created righteousness and immediately upon doing so, we did something to ourselves that will haunt us to until we reconcile the truth; we created and set loose a construct capable of giving the human ego an orgasm, as it were.
[Note: Keep in mind that a human ego having an orgasm is probably the most horrific thing that can be imagined. Without our egos, we’re not human, but when you take into account that the ego is such a ferocious and inconsiderate beast that the only way that a person can remain human is to keep their ego on a very short leash and feed it a very low calorie diet to keep it weak, lest it consume everything in its path, the thought of that same thing having an orgasm is overwhelmingly addictive.]
Following is the definition that we assigned to the word; righteous, and just in case it pops into your mind: it’s no joke:
right·eous
[rahy-chuhs]
adjective
- Characterized by uprightness or morality: a righteous observance of the law.
- morally right or justifiable: righteous indignation.
- acting in an upright, moral way; virtuous: a righteous and godly person.
- Slang . absolutely genuine or wonderful: some righteous playing by a jazz great.
- noun
- the righteous, ( used with a plural verb ) righteous persons collectively.
World English Dictionary
righteous (ˈraɪtʃəs)
-adj
- characterized by, proceeding from, or in accordance with accepted standards of morality, justice, or uprightness;
- virtuous: a righteous man(as collective noun ; preceded by the):
- the righteous morally justifiable or right, especially from one’s own point of view: righteous indignation
And so it is that right there, in the last definition of righteous, in the same line item where the concept of righteous indignation is established that the math unravels completely. We started out with truth; a universal constant that contains, among other things, the attribute of indisputable and absolute validity and veracity and attempted to define a human version which we called truthfulness or honesty, but they resulted in humility which we interpret as “weak”. We then embellished truthfulness by adding the premise of being right based on a “solid moral foundation” and gave birth to righteousness, which takes the entire concept straight down the toilet, where we reach righteous indignation, or “I’m right, you’re wrong, therefore I own the truth.”
So then, what have we accomplished? We are a world of 7 billion people who each believe that they are right. We attempted to emulate truth and came up with righteousness, which allows for everyone to be right and for everyone to also be wrong, depending on the desire for convenience. This is then further extrapolated into “I’m right, therefore I’m telling the truth and you are lying because you’re wrong.” Other than the clear errors in this psychotic math, it’s not even possible! Everyone can’t be right and wrong at the same time! That would be…impossible and paradoxical, right? Reality would shatter and all life on earth would immediately come to an end. I can clearly hear a voice, it sounds like the voice of an older woman, saying: “Well, I’m very sorry. I guess the world will just have to end then, because I’m RIGHT.” None of us are right or wrong, just human. Isn’t that right? Come on now, tell the truth!
”Being right serves no purpose, whatsoever.”
ctwfrank
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