On Morality, Sin and Behaviorism
To live without burning passion is to die half-formed and unresolved. At the juxtaposition of devotion and self-sustenance lies the heart of desirability, a potent incantation of fulfillment that satiates the interconnection between morality and mortality. The gap between living-obligation and driven-purpose is narrowed through the act of creative outpour, a fantastical derivation of experiential lessons and sensational tribulations. I aspire to be a breathing reflection of that which infatuates me. To uncover one’s most profound adorations is the greatest gift attainable, for only in the light of enthusiasm can one’s shadow be cast as an imprint on humanity. Life in alignment with soul is a sacred journey, marked with agonizing disappointment and remarkable joyousness, all fastened to an undulating liaison with personal zeal.
If my sincere objectives extend only to the limits of self, am I not fraudulent? By infusing both altruism and actualization into earthly travel, one may exist as a meaningful, compassionate denizen. Society, having ripened to the point of decomposition, is in need of assistance. Its average constituents have emulsified, forming an amalgamation of righteousness and self-obsession. Oracular forces dominate with quiet precision, creating an “eat or be eaten” atmosphere that proliferates disparity and thrives on chaos. Individuality has convolved with deception, transforming malaise into normalcy. By chance or divine edification, I am exposed and susceptible to the dark underbelly of civilized personality.
All sentient organisms are compelled by their impending finality. No one wants to reach their existential demise and realize they have wasted all potential for greatness, in essence rupturing the flowing spring of expansiveness that is latent in every single person. I conjecture that unscrupulous conduct could implicitly arise from the divergence of authenticity and vocation—under the inhabitation of soul, the human vessel is designed for sovereignty. Socio-cultural influences can sever the lifeline of vitality which ideally implores one to discover their uniquely embodied capacities for externalization. An enigmatic layer of dysfunctional misdirection coats the air we breath, a cunning subterfuge that has left a mass population convinced of having actual autonomy. For most, choice is illusory, and this disconcerting facet of aliveness exerts extreme pressure, compressing the urban landscape into an alternating state of hopelessness and rage.
Indiscriminately, stress leads to sickness. The absurdity of nihilistic dogma seeps into the micro-porosity of ordinary consciousness and thus is bred psychopathic, sociopathic, Machiavellian-type lunatics who truly believe that the universe orbits on their gravity. I have witnessed abhorrence, ill-fit jokers who enact travesty onto innocence, and every time I do a fraction of my engrained faith towards humanity at large withers and dies. Typically, I believe that empathy is the quintessential solution to all problems in a systemically sick world; however, it is easy to become wrapped in judgement and pity, which does nothing but perpetuate separateness. There must be an intermediary somewhere between ostracism and magnanimity that fosters rehabilitation in even the most extreme cases of malfeasance.
I understand too well the innate desire for justice—I have been wronged, I have been wounded at the hands of my kin, I have watched in subdued horror as everything I knew was incinerated, leaving me naked, twisted, engulfed in flames. Simultaneously, I am no saint—I have played causation in the unfolding of traumatic manifestation; however, when cognizant of implicated choices, I have always worked to decide upon the moral high-ground, many times thinking long and hard on what that entailed. Some, it seems, have lost connection to their compass of goodness, perhaps so confused by contemporary nonsense that they have discarded any sense of granted ethical conviction.
There is a counter-argument to this sentiment—people are intrinsically complex and the architecture of morality is not drawn in permanent ink, rendering a house-of-cards that is malleable and subject to dissection. The underlying premise of an arbitrary situation is not always as it readily appears, just as idiomatic actions are not necessarily a reflection of one’s internal longings. This speaks to the duality of all things human, the polarity of natural order which characterizes the dominion of widespread organicity. Why exactly are certain behaviors deemed to be evil? What governing law suggests that which is right and just in an era of hyper-variability? With over 8 billion living residents within our earthly confines, it is reasonable to expect that a vast majority of possible behavioral permutations are actively underway in any given instant.
The church gave us deadly sins—gluttony, pride, envy, sloth, lust, wrath and greed—comprising a historical backbone of guiding principles that has conceivably held steadfast since their inception, owing to the sheer power and reach of non-secularism. All of these traits are commonplace in society—some have even normalized, such as lust and gluttony, while greed is incentivized by a capitalistic regime. These classifications pose a non-linear dilemma—to insinuate that unhinged sexuality or compulsive eating are immoral, for example, we effectively assume that such actions are voluntary, which may not be accurate considering the highly-addictive nature and resultant alterations in brain chemistry corresponding to any type of addiction, not just to drugs and alcohol.
Consider also the realm of legality—a semi-rigid armature that dictates allowable human activity, one that carries with it the potential for drastic life-distortions under circumscribed indictment. The law clearly caters to those privileged—people with money, status, connections—and stomps on those vulnerable and trapped in its overbearing web. Formulated on many years of calculated trial and error, the culmination of small-scale decisions sets precedent for future cases, opening the system to threat due to compounding fundamental errors. Such an entity is quantified by an incredible amount of mass and momentum, devouring everything in its trajectory as it shifts and slides with temporo-spatial monumentality.
Suppose that an overarching legal concept is undeniably archaic, ill-informed and detrimental, yet so intricately woven into the encapsulating fabric that it pervades every aspect of modern day sentencing. Within the current working model, such a thread is near-impossible to untangle, as the inertial tendencies of massive, dynamic objects are to resist any and all feeble efforts made to contain them. Analogous to a black hole, the legal framework is an unfathomably vast network of conclusionary judgements built on antiquated revelations. Rather than aiding culture as a future-oriented tool for genuine betterment, its stands as an oversaturated, under-simplified, and frankly daunting labyrinth of hierarchal fixations.
Morality is a felt sense of intuition—what would cause pain to me should not be done to you—a logical strand of humanity that amplifies the apparent utilitarianism of neighborly love. A hypothesis stating that polarity—right and wrong, good and evil—may not exist in higher-spiritual dimensions is intriguing, posing a divisive question—is God, the spirit of the universe, able and willing to orchestrate terrible tragedy for the sole purpose of evolving its intensely-feeling components? If so, is God evil? If the divine looking-glass of predictable optimization claims that an individual will emerge ten-fold more resilient and equipped some X years beyond the loss of their relatively young parent, is it equitable on a globalized scale to induce their death? Or, is God opportunistic, acutely aware of pending fatalities and seeking to capitalize on them to enhance the livelihood of the greater system?
This particular idea emerged in contemplation of my own father and his inevitable demise, which happened over 5 years ago. Had he not died when and how he did, my life would look significantly different than it presently does—I would plausibly have the same friendships that withered away in the shadow of my then unmanageable grief, I would be living in the same city I then had no intention to leave, and I would have avoided interjoining with certain strangers whos positioning in my life produced pivotal transitions. Serious loss and trauma bring about cascading, often-spiraling effects; in fact, my history is definitively sectioned by various devastating events that have shaped me for better or worse, many of them connectively stemming from the loss of my father.
There is little benefit in dwelling on the rippling consequences of past hardship; however, in deconstructing the nature of morality, doing so offers valuable insight. If another person had killed my dad, rather than deterministically-trending fate, that individual would have been jailed and this would be celebrated. Assuming God or some higher, non-physical power did have an actionable stake in his death, divine law supersedes the governing mechanisms of human conscientiousness. In this case, God effortlessly maneuvers the limits of operable ethics, as we know them, and this is indisputable, were it true, and untouchable. Divinity thus resides in the upper echelon of power distribution, as would be expected.
Is Man truly expected to adhere with culturally-situated guidelines if his very creator acts in total defiance of them? In the jungle, the lion is not placed before his peers to be judged and committed after mauling its prey, for it acts in accordance with its own nature. Humanity is a predatorial plexus; however, we are tastefully suppressed by unruly dictation and utterly convinced to be above our animalistic roots. Some choose to remain at the edge of moral clarity, waiting in anticipatory angst to pounce should the need come to save their own skin, pitted against their peers as pseudo-gladiators in greyscale cubicles. Others live as willful victims, not entirely ignorant of their misfortune yet too fragile to rise against the system, paralyzed by its sheer volume. Few retain an articulate awareness of their comedic placements. There are those too who have garnered a methodical armament of manipulative tactics and wearable castings, chameleonic impersonators who have been burned one too many times, yet never again.
Futility is to attempt a comprehensive differentiation of human behaviorism—the scale and range of variability is far too vast and the multilayered dimensionality of complex sociopathic-types is far too dense. However, the foundational relationality of powers that drive moral codability is worthy of study, as is the integrable simplification of categorical motivation. There exists what is, whatever that may entail, and there exists what can be described, and the dissociation between these snapshots will continue to engage rampant egoism for as long as there stands a shred of segregation between them.
Sometimes, we fall prey to blatant surrealism, diving so deeply into the oceanic pit of abstract-mindedness that we are engulfed by darkness, our basic sensory engagements throttled as we submerge ourselves in dualistic presumption. To be enlightened is to accept the singularity of humanism—that there is but one answer to all things divisive, to all matters horrendous and horrible, which is the interwoven blending and convergence of all ideologies into an ultra-viscous, steady-state streamline, one that prevails over wickedness and consumes virtue. This parcel of subtle fluidity is functional bliss, a statement of certitude that tells the tale of survived depravity and welcomed conquest as if they were one—that all is the same and nothing is dissimilar, that all that is and was and may ever be is wrapped up into a point-source of quantum energy both infinitesimally small and infinitely large, the paradoxical perfection of logical-irrationality and sinister-benevolence. It is the summation of nothing, the permeation of everything, the senseless, wise, black-or-white interchangeability of gravitational emptiness. It, ultimately, just is.
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