Saturday, July 23, 2011

Of Merit and Purpose

MERIT AND PURPOSE: Who should be selected to decide or guide how civilization should develop? When it comes to allocating goods, what are "merit" or "enlightenment," once pills and manipulations of genes and Substance can be quickly accessed, to rewire anyone for intelligence, energy, empathy, strength, agility, courage, and/or drive? What becomes of desire for recognition for achievements? Are not some lower classes needed to remain as lower classes, to aspire to serve and succeed to higher class purposes? Who shall do what, or be permitted to do what, once all could otherwise do anything? What can or should be done to manage, instill, or reduce competition among powerful beings? Is there a meta aspect to character or consciousness, to which one should be receptive, to accept and be guided in one's present choice of empathies along one's unfolding path? How may meta empathies guide how best to sustain decent civilization?

Ultimately, it seems that merit is not to be found in relative wealth, pretensions of fashion, or displays of power.  More reasonably, merit may be intuited to be related to how one interfunctions as a conduit that is receptive to unfolding apprehensions of God.  The desired civilization is the civilization that accords with that approach.  Indeed, if merit were solely derivative of measurable interrelations and displays of Substance, and if such displays came to have no relation to any higher value, but could be accorded merely on whims of pill or interventions of genetic operation, then merit, so measured, would come not only to be devoid of qualitative merit, but also devoid of quantitative merit.

@Thus spake Dlanorrenrag.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Re: "I completely fail to understand how taxing a corporation, which may in fact be merely an individual, is anything other than an attempt to micromanage.


I agree. It's only when corporations move resources out of America that they should be taxed. I worry less about crony capitalism within America than I worry about international crony capitalism, that abuses entire peoples and governments.



Re: "As to secular particles and spiritual math"



At bottom, the people who want to wall away the political expression of (spiritual) concerns (such as concerns about freedom and dignity) about immeasurable qualities of life are the people who think the only ideas worth discussing are those that can be quantified, for which they depend on the notion that everything is ultimately explicable in terms of inanimate particles rather than in terms of mind. These are the blinders that keep the "establishment of religion" folk engaging in the same tedious debates with the "free exercise" folk. I am suggesting that any worthwhile resolution must accept that it is beyond government or science to force a perfect reconciliation of the quantitative with the qualitative. Simply put, it is not just wrongheaded to ban spiritual concerns from the public square --- it is impossible. We need to stop bouncing off those walls and think beyond the box.


Beyond the box: We need to stop bouncing between being governed by crony capitalists versus micromanaging bureaucrats. To get crony capitalism under decent control, we need to think outside the box we are bouncing around in. We need to fundamentally redefine what is allowed to be done in the corporate form, because that is the agency that is being used to reduce America to the lowest common denominator. We are submitting to a new aristocracy of internationial corporatists, who are using international law and the UN as camouflage. Until we do redefine the business corporation, we are just alternating to beat our heads against opposing walls.