A Bear – Poles Apart

Fate is an outcome of human affairs that is not caused by humans. Fate exists, fate doesn’t exist, or Fate sometimes exists, all depending on how you choose to look at it.

We can’t control what happens to us. Everything is subject to chance; we can try to influence the sequence of events, but we don’t have full control of anything. Therefore, everything that happens is due to Fate.

BUT the forces that interfere with our plans are human. Other people bump into us and alter our course. We can blame them or thank them, for we know where they are coming from. They have a recognizable will, just like us, and there’s nothing mystical about it. None of it is due to Fate.

BUT when many human wills get entangled in a web of interaction, what comes out is no one’s will. The outcome is sometimes quite predictable, but often unpredictable. It depends on how many intermediate steps there are between a single decision and the result. If an outcome is far removed from anyone’s explicit will, we might as well call it Fate.

There is comfort in the idea of Fate. No one has the responsibility anymore and no one is guilty. What happened just happened.

The rich are rich, and the poor are poor. There is war; the market collapses, and then there is the virus. But whose fault is that? No one’s. Let’s call it fate then.

Do we want to mess with Fate? If we try to intervene, the burden of failure will be on our shoulders; the disaster that we have, may still feel safer.

Fate is what we have, the earth as it revolves around its axis, the shifting seasons and the government by the grace of God.

Do we dare to challenge Fate?

People hurt people for their own benefit, however that is perceived. It’s hard to imagine someone ever hurting anyone if there’s absolutely nothing in it for them, and I doubt that it is even possible.

The sadist (to take the most extreme case first) enjoys seeing people suffer, and this enjoyment is his benefit. This is probably the closest we can come to pure evil, although it also has a very small redeeming element in the pleasure that is gotten from it. If someone were to harm for no reason other than a wish for suffering, it would be the purest evil.

The desire to punish without any practical benefit for oneself is a far more common cause of harm that has a considerable amount of evil and malice in it. Still, there is an emotional benefit in that the evildoer somehow imagines that justice is being done. In a fit of anger, we want to strike back at the person who’s bothering us believing, at least at that short instant, that revenge is required.

A lot of malice in the world comes from a misconceived perception of justice. It is often disguised as selfless desire for universal justice, and the agent frequently believes in it himself or is able to convince himself of his impartial behavior. He doesn’t think he is all that bad, and in fact you will rarely, if ever, find anyone who openly admits that he is nothing but a crook.

Seen from outside it is rather obvious that the alleged principle of justice is molded so as to fit into the perspective of the avenger. Nevertheless, we all have this tendency of self-righteousness in us and therein our inclination towards malice is also found. Our instinctive attitude that our own right to justice has precedence over everyone else’s makes us do harm to our fellow humans.

Philosophy is searching for questions. The world is such a strange place, that can be felt intuitively, but only when a question is formulated, do we become explicitly aware of the strangeness. We must find the “why?” before we can attempt to answer it.

We have learned the difference between right and wrong; at least we think we have, but until we have asked why it is so, we risk being mistaken even before we have made the mistake. Isn’t is a shame to be in error from the very start and take things for granted that may be utter illusions. We pity mental patients who are delusional about reality, but if we don’t ask questions, we may be in such a state ourselves.

We may not find an answer to why things are the way they are, and we can never find one that we can be a hundred percent certain about, but when asking questions we may start approaching the truth and that is clearly better than having no truth at all. Imagining something to be true without having any reason for it, is the worst kind of ignorance even if it happens to be true.

That being said, the Socratic philosopher is never content with merely asking questions. Philosophy is the search for truth and even when knowing full well that complete certainty cannot be reached, the quest for an answer doesn’t stop.

The Socratic method of asking questions is directed towards the truth. Philosophy is not a sport engaged in amusing questioning scoring points for absurd notions. A question that no one attempts to answer has no value.

Still, a question necessarily precedes an answer and in that sense the question is of superior interest. We must ask why before we can ever hope to know why.

Who are you? What is your identity?

The identity of a thing is that which distinguishes it from everything else. My left hand has a different identity from my right hand. If two things are identical, they are strictly speaking the same thing, but if there are really two of them, at least they occupy different positions in space, so they are not identical. Identity is uniqueness.

What then makes you unique? What is your identity?

You see, now you can’t mention your nationality since you share it with millions of people. Gender or sexual orientation are hardly distinguishing factors either. What then? Profession? Well, then it starts to narrow down, but obviously a lot more has to be added to make up the unique combination that constitutes you. I’m not asking you to list them all since that would merely serve to provide the coordinates for your position in the world, and that’s probably also not what the question implies. What would be worth considering is this: Which property is the most important part of our identity? What is the one thing that more than anything makes you the person you are?

Who are you? What makes you you?

We would have to look for what is most crucial to your personality. A factor like nationality, the country where you grew up, undoubtedly had an influence in forming you, but it’s hardly the most significant one. There would be many foreigners in this world who are more similar to you than many of your countrymen.

It would therefore be more meaningful to tie the question of identity to your psychological personality type, and that’s what I would want to know when I ask about your identity.

However, that’s probably not the kind of answer that’s normally expected, so who am I to demand a different answer. By all means, tie your identity to your nationality or gender or whatever you choose, I’m just saying, it doesn’t make sense.

So, who are you? You don’t have to answer.

Who are you? Ask different people, and you’ll get different questions. Not only different answers, that’s obvious, but different questions. The meaning of what was asked is open to interpretation, and normally when that happens the person asking needs to clarify. In this case, however, any interpretation seems to be appropriate to the question since presumably only you can know who you are. Whatever you choose to reply with, whether it’s your name, nationality, sexual orientation or favorite dish, is equally acceptable. It’s up to you to form your own identity, they say. Or is it?

Any question must have a specific meaning, or else it is nothing, and the question of identity is no exception. Who are you? A policeman and a psychologist probably have different intentions when asking; they are looking for particular kinds of answers limited to a certain range, and if you don’t know what is intended, you must request a specification.

Who are you? What makes you the person you are? That’s what I want to know, and you are still not free to answer just anything. There is an objective answer to it; none of us knows it, although you are obviously much more likely to know yourself than I am to know you, but I’m still not going to accept anything for an answer.

Something necessarily has a deeper significance than other things for what is uniquely you. You share your nationality with millions of people, so that can’t be it. You have your gender in common with half of humankind, so that’s even less likely to be a candidate of significance. Still, those two items often figure on the top of the identity list when any answer is accepted. “I’m an American woman,” someone says. “I am a Frenchman, and that is me.” No, I think you are a lot more than that, so I can’t accept your answer. Therefore, I ask you again: Who are you?

Whenever you find yourself in general agreement with your immediate environment, you should be skeptical. If there is less agreement as you look away from your own epicenter and complete disagreement in the remote parts, you have all the more reason to doubt yourself. How could you be so lucky that you were born exactly on that spot on earth where people have reached the most sensible outlook on things? Well, of course you could, but what was the probability? And how funny it is that people in erroneous regions seem to think the same about their place of birth.

You are right and everyone around you is basically right. Those people over there are wrong, but their attitude is a mirror image of yours: They also think they were born right.

Knowing our innate bias, it would be good if we could force ourselves to turn around and assume that we are wrong from the very beginning. The Cartesian method of skepticism is not enough. You can try to discard everything you think you know and start afresh, but chances are that once you start assembling the pieces again, you will pick the ones that are already familiar to you.

Instead of trying to rid yourself of all bias, it might be more fruitful to do the opposite: Adopt a new bias. Choose one over on the other side. Assume that the Muslims are right or that the Nazis were the good guys. Where will that take you?

Of course, it’s not quite a realistic approach; we can’t turn off our beliefs on command. But it would be an exercise of healthy skepticism and an attempt to understand the others and realize that they are like us. You can’t change your place of birth, but you can try to neutralize its effect on you.

Free speech and democracy seem to go well together, but they are not two sides of the same coin. It’s plausible that one could exist without the other. The idea of enlightened absolutism in the 18th century envisioned free speech amid total political control, and Athenian democracy of 5th century BC combined with harsh punishment of speech. It’s true that in our time free speech has had better conditions in democracies and that’s not a mere coincidence of course, but it’s also not a strict necessity.

Democracy is the rule of the majority, and if this majority decided to restrict free speech, society wouldn’t be any less democratic for that reason. In fact, the guarantees of free speech that exist in most democracies today, are actually measures that contradict total democracy since they put limits on what a majority can do. Implicitly that constitutes an answer to a question that is rarely explicitly heard: “What is more important, democracy or free speech?” The latter is clearly deemed more important.

Normally the contradiction is denied, and an increase of free speech is considered to be an increase of democracy. One just doesn’t like the idea that two good things may work against each other and both of them sound like sacred concepts that we can’t get enough of. Therefore, let’s have our cake and eat it.

Free speech is indeed more important than democracy because it speaks against the tyranny of the majority which is an enemy of truth. Absolute democracy favors arrogance and lies and works against a good and just society.

The majority don’t want to listen to reason because it’s stressful and inconvenient and ruins the tranquil state of self-satisfaction. They would shut up dissenting voices if they could. Democracy must be kept in moderation. Only free speech can be let loose.

Do some people like sleeping under bridges?

The most convenient solution to any problem is plain denial. If it’s not a problem after all, there’s nothing to worry about and we can concern ourselves with problems closer to home; our own home that is.

The most radical distortion of the idea of individual freedom is to think that whatever people do, it’s their own choice, and trying to help them might rob them of their liberty. Some people seem to think that the homeless people seen roaming the streets of big cities eating from garbage cans or lying lifeless on the sidewalk, do it because it’s their preferred lifestyle. Such views sound too absurd to be taken seriously and maybe no one would express it quite that crudely, but it’s a fact that some conservatives dismiss the problem of homelessness with reference to freedom.

Absurd as it is, at least they draw the ultimate conclusion of their basic ideas and thereby they illustrate the fallacy more clearly than their opponents would have been able to do.

“Whatever people do, expresses their freedom of choice.” It may be more difficult to disprove that in less extreme cases. After all, it looks as if you and I do what we want, and it’s hard to imagine that someone else would have done a better job choosing for us. But that’s not to say that we wouldn’t benefit from advice and assistance and in a few cases even compulsion. It does occur that we do things we don’t really want to do.

If it’s true for us, it’s obvious for the homeless. Living in a shopping cart is no one’s childhood dream, and we can be quite confident that they wouldn’t have become homeless if they had had a choice. You need a home to go home.