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October 7, 2019 / Congau

Don’t Do Your Duty!

A dutiful person is a machine. Duty first, he says, thinking later.

A soldier is a proud machine killing on command and always doing what is right. His enemy, another soldier, is also right, and they kill each other. They both die because they both do their duty, and the world is a better place. How wonderful it would be if everyone did their duty!

We were born into a place and put in a position that we didn’t choose. From there we are expected to act in a certain way. Had we been born somewhere else, other expectations would have been put on us, and we might have been doing the opposite of what we are now doing. What is right depends on place of birth. Does that make sense?

We fight out of empty principles. We fight people who are just like us. We fight ourselves.

Since people do their duty, the world is stuck in a senseless game of obligatory destruction. There is no way out when everyone is following the rules; the ruinous system is permanent.

Is there a difference between right and wrong? Well, if we didn’t think so we wouldn’t struggle for anything. But if you know that your right is another’s wrong and that you yourself could have been that other person, why do you persist on being right? Because you do your duty.

Duty doesn’t ask for reason. Duty is averse to thinking.

Why did you do it? one is asked. Because it was my duty, came the answer. No, it wasn’t. Unless you can explain why it was the right thing to do regardless of any arbitrary obligation that had unwittingly fallen down on you, it was not your duty.

Something may be a duty because it’s right; it is not right because it is a duty.

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October 6, 2019 / Congau

A Potential Child

Nothing is valuable in itself. (Well, except happiness). That means that the things we appreciate are cherished not for what they are at the moment, but for whatever potential they may have, or in other words, what they may become in the future. If our very lives have value, it is because we expect to be alive tomorrow.

The present is a fleeting instant, immediately gone, passing into what will be. It hardly is, if at all, and that makes the act of becoming all the more important. Don’t throw away what is not yet. It will be.

In a becoming mother’s womb there is nothing, not yet. If there is a human being there, it is not human as we think of it. It is not a thinking, rational, self-conscious thing. It is nothing, but it will be.

Everything is just potential. Does it matter much if a person got killed who only had hours left to live? Probably not.

Does it matter if something gets destroyed that soon would have been valuable?

Value is only in the future. Imagine you possessed a currency that had not yet come into circulation, freshly printed dollar bills that would only be valid nine months from now. Would you throw them away? Of course not. If other people also new that they soon would be valid, you could probably start using them already. People would accept the bills since the knowledge of future value is identical to present value.

If the fetus were known as the child it would have become, it would not have been aborted. But one can imagine. A mother-to-be may imagine the thing inside her as the child it will be, and then it would break her heart if it died. Or she avoids imagining and its disappearance is nothing to her.

Value is in our imagination. It is real.

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October 5, 2019 / Congau

Fake Taste

Taste cannot be discussed. We are frequently reminded of that. Whenever we dare to question someone’s strictly private preferences, it gets hurled back at us. Don’t discuss taste! Well, it’s true of course. Pure taste simply is. It’s there as inexplicably as any other of our innate features. There can’t be a debate, so shut up!

Yes, if the taste is genuine. If it comes from oneself and oneself only. The preference for different kinds of food is usually quite authentic; no one can convince us that we like what we don’t like. Even that is not entirely inborn, though. We have been trained to accept some flavors and who knows what we could have found acceptable with a different upbringing. Still, food serves as the best example of genuine taste.

But if even such neutral values as our gastronomic inclinations can be somewhat challenged, very few of our preferences can in principle go unquestioned. Please don’t get angry now. I’m not going to scrutinize all your cherished likes and dislikes. I’m just politely suggesting that you don’t consider all of them as indelibly engraved in your soul.

Nothing in life needs to remain unexamined. Your choice of music and art is not just there, having arrived out of nothing to form your genuine and unique self. Sorry, sir, we are all products of our environment, and that includes you. Even me, I admit.

Everyone wants to be an individual, why are we then so alike? One is infatuated with a piece of clothing and thinks it exactly expresses his personality, and it just happens to be what everyone else is wearing. Music, the most self-assuring sounds of identity, is delivered to the masses and incessantly copied. Is that really the unique you?

Well, maybe it is. Maybe you are a person who possesses a genuinely rare taste. But even then, it is worth looking into yourself to check if what you see is really you. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” someone said.

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October 4, 2019 / Congau

The Death of a Teenager

She was only seventeen years old and I just met her once. I will never meet her again.

She had had a difficult life, she told me. There were monsters following her, real and imaginary. She was full of fear and anxiety and at times she had been suicidal. But now things were better. She had been helped and those beasts were fading. Life was getting bright and she had woken up to it. She had her hopes and dreams.

“I don’t want to be a victim for the rest of my life,” she said. The rest of her life was two weeks.

It was a car accident. A drunk driver snapped her life away. Hers and her brother’s. Her parents survived.

I only met her once, but her image is haunting me. I don’t want to think about her, but she keeps intruding on my thoughts. “For the rest of your life,” she says.

Why did I meet her? I didn’t know she existed until that day, and two weeks later she didn’t. If my arrival in this foreign town had been delayed just a little, I would never have met her; never ever.

I roam the world; go there, come here. I bump into things, I bumped into her. Time and place encounter each other and produce chance and accident. It’s not supposed to be. Sometimes it is good, often it is bad. Why did I meet her?

She shouldn’t have been in that car. The drunk driver shouldn’t have driven. A moment in history that shouldn’t have happened. A bullet hit a bullet. It had just begun and it was over. It happened.

It happened that I met her. It was a flash of inspiration that I didn’t understand. I still don’t understand.

I’m glad I met her.

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October 3, 2019 / Congau

Hate Speech

Hate speech is speech, and speech is free.

But speech doesn’t quite mean speech. Speaking loudly in a quiet library, crying “fire” in a crowded theater, revealing a neighbor’s secrets; that’s all speaking, but it’s not quite what it refers to.

“Freedom of speech” is a misnomer. What is meant is “freedom of opinion”. Anyone should be allowed to express their opinion publicly, that’s the idea behind this law that presumably forms the basis of free Western society.

Whether or not that’s a good idea in the first place, is not the issue here. We assume that it is, and if it is, it is essential and must always be taken seriously.

If someone expresses an opinion it must be allowed, however despicable that opinion may be, or else we endanger this essential principle and “free society” appears as a blunt lie.

“Hate speech” expresses an opinion. Recently in Germany someone was convicted for saying online that “Homosexuals belong in the gas chamber”. That’s an utterly disgusting opinion, of course, but it is an opinion. It surely would be very bad if that kind of attitude spread, but I actually think it’s unfortunate that any opinion that I don’t agree with is spreading, so this is no different in principle. Any time I disagree with someone on a social issue, it is because I find their view unhealthy for society. Hatred is an unhealthy opinion, but unless I want to ban any opinion that doesn’t agree with my vision of an ideal society, I have to accept it.

But, some might argue, the ban on “hate speech” doesn’t prohibit any opinions but only the attitude behind them. Well, that’s something new: people are entitled to bad opinions but not bad attitudes? How can you prove someone’s attitude? You would have to prove the person’s inner thoughts beyond the words that were in fact uttered. If the law against “hate speech” is not a ban on opinion, it’s something worse: A ban on thought.

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October 2, 2019 / Congau

Unhealthy Moderation

Who are the extremists? Those who are farthest from the middle. Where is the middle? Where most people are. The extremists are those who are farthest from most people. Is that bad?

The golden mean is a virtue. There shouldn’t be too much and not too little and what is just right is in the middle. Do most people get it right?

The political moderates praise themselves for being moderate; it sounds as if they are in harmony with reason and common sense. But the middle ground that they pride themselves of having occupied, is rarely an absolute middle; it all depends on where you place the extremes.

The mainstream is not always the same. It will be different at different times and places. The moderates in America would be right wing in Europe and in times of turmoil the more moderating elements are actually quite radical.

If we were to search for an absolute political middle ground, it’s hard to say where that would be. Perhaps somewhere between total state intervention and no state at all, between no private property and only private property, between all military and no military, between war and peace. Now where could you find a convincing balancing point between these arbitrary extremes?

The extremes that are used to qualify the moderates in an actual political environment are even more arbitrary. Between the extreme left and right in the American congress, for example, there is relatively speaking not so much space, and especially to the left there is ample unoccupied room. Being a moderate in this environment does not imply much virtue. It is rather likely to indicate a lack of courage or imagination; a wish to feel safe by not straying too far from other people and finding it difficult to envision the world being any different than it is.

True moderation means avoiding unhealthy excess. Political moderation may be no moderation at all.

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October 1, 2019 / Congau

Intolerable Tolerance

It’s easy to be tolerant when you are indifferent. When you don’t care anyway, you won’t condemn those who do. You will shrug your shoulders and let anyone bother about anything they like, and then you’ll return to your dinner and your tv show.

Sure, tolerance is a virtue. We should accept people for who they are. Their silly little quirks and innocent habits shouldn’t upset us. What is not important should not be important.

But some things are very important and should be. If something is so essential to you that it governs your whole life and your fundamental values, how can you be expected just to shrug off someone who has a diametrically opposite perspective on things? It wouldn’t be possible, and it wouldn’t be desirable.

For better and for worse, the secular West is probably more tolerant than any other society in history. There are so many belief systems and isms floating around that we just can’t afford getting upset every time we encounter something different. But for many this abundance of worldviews must have a rather benumbing effect. Since there’s so much to pick from and since it seems one can get away with anything, anything is as good as anything else, which means that nothing is really preferable. Then you have reached the pinnacle of tolerance; that is, utter indifference.

A free exchange of ideas necessitates that people have ideas and that they believe in them. If people are so extremely tolerant that they don’t even fully believe in their own opinions, there will not be much to tolerate anyway. A certain amount of intolerance is necessary to take yourself seriously and thereby enable you to be tolerant. If you like everything, you like nothing, and if you tolerate everything, you tolerate nothing. Too much tolerance is intolerable.

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September 30, 2019 / Congau

Division = Choice

We don’t like deviation. One swerve off to the right and another to the left. Why can’t they all stay in the middle? Bipartisanship be praised!

Politicians argue incessantly while the honorable citizen simply wants some peace and quiet. If only they could agree, stop the bickering, reach a happy consensus and let honest people do their work.

Right, wouldn’t that be great. If they were all of one opinion, the voter wouldn’t have to worry about who to choose. Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and socialists, it would all be the same harmonious middle ground and common sense would reign. It would be nice, but it would not be democracy.

We are told it’s important to have a choice, and we believe it is. We feel empowered when we get to pick for ourselves, whether it’s between two different brands of detergent or between candidates. But what is it worth if the content is the same or nearly the same? We are curiously satisfied when just given the illusion of a choice.

And now people are complaining that even the meager choice they have is too much. They lament the great division that they see tearing society apart.

This dramatic view is probably vastly exaggerated, but even if it wasn’t it shouldn’t worry those who see democracy as a goal unto itself. The greater division, the more real alternatives, the more choice the more democracy.

It’s a paradox that when democracies reach a ripe age and consolidate themselves there will be a higher degree of consensus, less division, less choice, and thereby less democracy.

If it’s true that divisions are increasing again in Western societies, that may be reaction to this process. The traditional democratic models have become overripe from stagnant consensus, and certain groups are crying for a renewal of the alternatives. If that’s unfortunate, it’s because we don’t really want too much democracy. After all we don’t like deviation.

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September 29, 2019 / Congau

The Thieves Among Us

“Property is theft,” it’s been said. Well, owning something does mean excluding someone else from having it, and that’s essentially what stealing is, isn’t it? It’s may not be quite specified who is losing something and if it is, that person was not necessarily very attached to the “stolen” item, but the fact remains that whatever you possess it would have belonged to someone else if it wasn’t for you.

What ultimate right do you have to your property? Sure, the law gives you the right, no doubt about that, but the law stipulates a lot of rules that are just meant to regulate society as efficiently as possible; most laws make no claim to being ultimately correct. If you are required to pay say twenty percent of your income in taxes, that’s an arbitrary amount. It could have been more or it could have been less, and no amount would be absolutely right.

Simply the fact that the government sees it fit to tax your property, indicates that property is not seen as something absolute and inalienable. If a twenty percent tax is suitable, why not a hundred percent? It’s just a matter of degree.

 If you stole your property in the first place, it would seem quite just if the government chose to confiscate at least some of it? Well, did you? You deny that, don’t you? You say you’ve worked hard for every penny and every Porsche.

I’m sure you have worked, but what you got out of it was dependent of what share you possessed in the first place; your original position in society and your society’s position in the world. That you didn’t own; it was given to you and you took it.

We continue to steal as we conserve our goods and accumulate. No one has ever appropriated anything entirely on his own. We are all thieves.

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September 28, 2019 / Congau

Illusion of Freedom

Complete freedom is an awful thing. It means being allowed to do anything, absolutely anything you want, without restrictions. No urge can be checked. If you want to kill and rape, that’s what you are to do.

The freedom of others is a limitation of your freedom, for their freedom would be used to limit yours. Two free persons cannot exist side by side; a free society is impossible.

Then what is this thing called a free society? A compromise? The best possible conditions compared to what is essentially impossible? A poor substitute that would be!

Freedom is doing what you want, but even in a so-called free society there is police to stop people from doing what they want. Is that a contradiction? Yes, it is, unless we assume that what some people want isn’t really what they want. Maybe the killer and the rapist don’t really want to kill and rape and the police help them to stay within their true wish.

There’s a lot to be said for that supposition. The only problem is that once you start assuming that people don’t really want what they explicitly indicate that they want, you deny a basic premise of western democracy: All choices must be respected and we are not supposed to question people’s preferences.

What the people vote for is their real opinion and the profession they choose is their real calling. The consumers are autonomous and even unhealthy habits must be accepted. We are not allowed to ask if people’s tastes and inclinations are genuine and it’s offensive to suggest that they may be deceiving themselves.

We must therefore also assume that the killer really wishes to kill, and since obviously we cannot allow him to do that, the only alternative is to stop him, that is, to take away his freedom.

Western society could only be called free if we insisted that criminals didn’t really want to commit crimes, but since we are barred from making that claim, we must concede that our society is not free.

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