I thought the thought first and then I found it in a book.
That’s how I came upon philosophical constructs like existentialism and absurdism. That’s how I expanded my understanding of neutrality and duality.
I didn’t just take on other people’s ideas. I invented them within myself and then I manipulated them based on the struggles I watched some of the greatest thinkers of our time have with their own ideas.
I reinvented their ideas by adding spiritual constructs, removing the ego, and breaking the human rules around morality, right and wrong, and fairness. If I break enough of the made-up human ideas, the philosophies work. Not only do they work, they make room for spiritual truth.
At first, these ideas were terrifying to me, horrifying honestly. They were so far away from what I’d been taught, what I’d grown up believing, and what I had been telling myself was the right thing to do for most of my adult life.
Is it really okay to challenge morality?
But what if something truly horrific happens?
My mind kept asking the question—What if this and what if that?
I kept coming back to the same place. In order for spirituality and philosophy to work, everything had to be okay, no matter how awful it seemed. It was our human judgment of things and events that was the problem, not the principles I was beginning to explore.
Can it be that human judgment is broken?
So many of the philosophers I read run into the same wall and find themselves going around in the same loop. They want to abide by human rules that ultimately break their philosophies.
Sartre believed in radical freedom, but he couldn’t make that work and protect people from harm at the same time. He, like many others, ended up creating dozens of rules as a means of keeping people in line. It’s not radical freedom when the foundation is a set of rules for how to live.
Radical freedom requires us to let go of the idea of keeping people in line. To be truly free, we have to do away with the rules. Sartre couldn’t make that leap, so I did it for him.
What would make radical freedom safe?
What I created to allow for radical freedom to exist without total chaos was a society that didn’t require people to fight for survival. Imagine a world where food, clothing, shelter, education, and healthcare were completely free and provided to all regardless of income level. In a world where people can thrive and not just survive, radical freedom becomes possible.
As a student teacher, we learned about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Kids, in order to learn, need to have their basic needs met. When those needs are met, kids can then focus on learning. If it’s true for children, it’s probably true for adults too. If we meet the needs of adults, not just children, wouldn’t adults behave better naturally?
I don’t believe that people are born bad. I believe people are inherently good. Given a society that actually takes care of them properly, there would be fewer reasons to act out.
I did what Sartre couldn’t do—I reimagined society instead of trying to control the people in the society. I found the actual problem. I didn’t just look for something to blame. It’s easy to blame “bad people” for the things that go on in our world. But what if that blame is misplaced? What if, instead of being the people’s fault, it’s actually the structure of our society that is at fault?
Re-thinking isn’t just about tearing something apart and putting the pieces back together in a different order. It’s about recognizing when there are pieces missing, while also seeing what needs to be removed. Fighting for survival is something that needs to be removed. Thriving is the piece that needs to be added in. How do we make it safe for people to be radically free? Just like with children, make sure their adult needs are met so they have no reason to act out.
The inability to question the foundations of society. The inability to question why radical freedom doesn’t work, without simply blaming bad people for the problem. The inability to see people as inherently good and simply struggling to survive means that we reach for rules and systems of punishment to fix the problem instead of seeing where the real problem is. The child isn’t misbehaving because the child is bad. The child is misbehaving because the child is hungry—no, we shouldn’t be making the child learn to deal with it because that’s life. We don’t have a food shortage. There is no reason for anybody to be hungry. When we stop questioning the behavior of people and start questioning why we make people try to survive in a broken system, then we can fix the problem. Then radical freedom of the people becomes not only possible—it becomes realistic, obvious, and the logical next step.
What are the underlying reasons why people do things we typically judge as bad or wrong?
Pain. Survival. Fear. Stress. Worry. Doubt. Insecurity. Illness. Lack. Hunger. Suppression. Self-defense.
How many of those things can we fix by changing the foundation of society to one of abundance instead of lack?
We don’t have a shortage. We have a distribution problem. Distribution can be fixed.
We should not be in the business of trying to fix people because they aren’t broken. We should be in the business of fixing systems and the foundation of society because those things are broken and they can be fixed.
What good is fixing the walls when the foundation is crumbling?
I don’t often read others’ interpretations of original thinkers like Sartre, Kant, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Camus, Jung, Paine, and others. The reason is very simple—I want to form my own opinion. I want to rethink their thoughts for myself. I want to fit their philosophy into a world that supports it.
Continually trying to rearrange our existing society or put enough rules in place to make radical freedom feel safe doesn’t work. These philosophers have all proven that in their own ways in the time periods in which they were alive.
Kant wrote about freedom (the moral imperative) following WWII. His philosophy and idea of society was a hard sell in a time when people were truly just trying to survive at the most basic of levels. For as much as he tried by involving himself in politics and writing articles for newspapers and magazines, he simply couldn’t convince them that there was a better way to do things.
To be fair, the majority of people are scared of change. My suggestion of a radical overhaul of society is a hard sell too. What’s ironic is that the world is, proverbially speaking, on fire. We’re literally blowing ourselves up from the inside, but people are still scared of change. They would rather defend the pain of the current system than find a way to create meaningful change to avoid the inevitable upcoming implosion.
Is fear of change the reason why these philosophers couldn’t make their philosophies work?
Is the need to defend broken systems so deeply ingrained in people—not just in the time period I write this, but also for many hundreds of years before me? Are we really that stuck on broken ideas?
Why is rethinking so hard to do?
It must be fear. There is no other logical explanation. It’s a fear of change, but it may also be a fear of deeper questioning. The risk of questioning beyond the surface level of what is visible is the fear of what we will find.
What do we find when we look beyond the surface of the society we see around us? What do we find when we question why people act the way they do beyond just being “bad people”?
Is fear the reason we defend the problem (societal structure) so vehemently?
There’s a conundrum present in the logic. We are afraid of being trapped in systems of dictatorship and authoritarian rule, but we are equally afraid of changing the capitalist democracy we have currently to avoid the dictatorship and authoritarian rule we are at risk of ending up in.
We can’t get there from here.
I remember when Google Maps first came out. I live in North America, and if I told Google Maps I wanted to go to China, it would find me a route. Do you know what that route required? A jet ski to get across the ocean.
Can I get from here to China? Yes, with an airplane or a boat, I can get to China quite easily.
Google Maps didn’t recognize that I couldn’t get there from here using the methods it had offered me. It didn’t see the problem with suggesting that I should hop on a jet ski and make my way across the ocean.
While nobody is afraid to see the fault in the logic of Google Maps in its early phases, we are afraid of seeing the fault in our logic today.
It is no longer easier to fix what we have than it is to start again. A controlled implosion is definitely the better option. Google Maps didn’t have to start over to fix its jet ski problem. We, on the other hand, are going to have to start over, because I’m afraid that trying to get across the ocean on a jet ski will seem realistic after the chaos we’re about to put ourselves through.
Don’t be afraid to question your thinking. Don’t be afraid to rethink ideas that are already out there. There aren’t very many completely original thoughts these days. Most new ideas come from thoughts reinvented and reimagined.
We’re not reinventing the wheel, we’re building a new one.
We need to stop being afraid of that process, otherwise the broken wheel is going to be the least of our worries.
Love to all.
Della