A Bear – Poles Apart

There is no justice in a court of justice. The legal institution is there to punish; to make sure that whoever deserves what is bad, gets what is bad. Sometimes, it is true, compensations are given for damage, but never does it bestow a reward.

When we ask for justice, when we lament how life neglects to give us our fair share, it’s all the good things we are missing. We don’t complain when we escape punishment. Justice is goodness for ourselves and badness for the undeserving others.

Life is not just. We know we don’t get what we deserve for hard work and good intentions. If we use our imagination, we realize that other people live in the same predicament, but our cry to the heaven concerns only ourselves.

Earthly authorities are evoked when providence has failed to give to others the misery so generously bestowed onto us. Our neighbors hurt us, and justice demands revenge, we think.

The court of justice keeps taking away and reducing the goods of the community and we think it fair. If someone has too much, it must be removed, not to be given to someone else, but to be eliminated. We can’t tolerate that a criminal lives in freedom; the freedom must be taken away and destroyed. We put him in jail, and no one enjoys the freedom he lost; no one has gained, and we call it justice.

Put a danger in jail, and the danger is gone; maybe it is a solution, but it is not justice.

Justice is the right distribution; if something is taken away it should be given to someone else. Less is never more.

Call it a warning or call it revenge, but don’t call it justice. If we don’t deserve what is bad, no one does.

Don’t demand that everything be useful. The best things in life are useless.

What we need is just prosaic stuff to sustain plain life: Food and drink and maybe shelter, and for that we must work and toil.

Eat to live and live to eat; only food is useful and anything that doesn’t partake in the production of food is useless. But what is the meaning of a life that has no other purpose than staying alive?

That’s why we play; that’s why we want to have fun: To give life meaning.

The more useless, the farther removed from dreary food production, the more fun and the more meaningful.

But the fun should still keep a connection to life or else it forms a separate world and the so-called real life remains as dull as before.

Sports is playing games with the body, so it’s both fun and real. – Art is a game of imitating life and searching for its essence: it’s pleasing and real. – Literature entertains while describing life: it’s amusing and real.

But when fun is not real, it is empty. Hallucinatory drugs are no doubt enjoyable, but then there is nothing more. When waking up from the trance nothing is gained or learned that connects to reality. It is a separate world that is no world at all.

Games, useless as they are, are still meaningful when they connect to the world, but meaningless when the connection fails. When everything is acted out on a board, on eight times eight squares in a square, and no inside logic is relevant outside, no thought reaches beyond that box and all imagination is futile.

Life is not a game of chess. In reality everything connects and the mind knows no boundaries. But lock yourself up behind narrow rules, then: Checkmate!

There are things we should do and things we should not do. It is often easier to list the latter. Thou shalt not kill, not steal, not lie; those are presumably commandments that are always valid (although one can make the argument that there are exceptions in certain circumstances). It’s more difficult to specify what we should do; the positive commandments are more circumstantial. We should help others, give to charity, be nice, do our best, but it’s hard to tell what exactly that means. Who should you help, when and where and how much? What could reasonably be expected of you? When have you done enough?

Strictly speaking, it’s never enough. You could spend all your waking hours doing charitable work, but even then you could work harder and more efficiently. You could exhaust yourself until you drop, but what good would that do? You could go to Africa and save one starving child or focus your efforts closer to home. What should you do? It’s impossible to say.

But sometimes your duty comes to you clearly and unambiguously and you just have to act. Suppose you walked past a child lying face down in a pool and all you had to do was to turn it around to save it from drowning. Wouldn’t it be absolutely terrible if you omitted to do this simple act for fear of getting your shoes wet or just because you didn’t feel like it? Nowhere does it say: Thou shalt rescue children from pools, but in this case the moral requirement is as clear as if it had been spelled out in those words by the highest authority.

Sometimes we are as responsible for a damage done when we omit to act as when we are the direct cause of it. We can’t hide behind oversimplified rules and laws that appear to acquit us. By living in this world, we make a difference and that makes us responsible.