From: KPJ (kpj@sics.se)
Date: Sun Jan 10 1999 - 09:45:57 MST
It appears as if Terry Donaghe <tdonaghe@yahoo.com> wrote:
|Samael, please explain how you can, in good faith, follow a philosophy
|which can be construed to justify anything. Your subjectivist
|philosophy implies that it may, under certain circumstances, be
|morally okey dokey to nuke a newborn in a microwave. Hey, there's no
|wrong or right! We can do anything!
Of course we can do anything.
Only our meme systems stops us from doing these things.
Your meme system defines some acts correct and some incorrect.
The correct behaviour according to your meme system it labels "right".
The incorrect behaviour according to your meme system it labels "wrong".
Other humans may have other meme systems that define some behaviours
"wrong" which your meme system defines "right" and vice versa.
A clash of meme systems occurs. Wars have been fought to decide memes
(Jahve vs Allah, Catholics vs Protestants, Free Market vs State Capitalism,
etc. ad nauseam).
|I'm not a philosopher and I have no grand justification of objectivism
|other than the fact that your subjectivism can justify all of what
|most of us consider evil in the world - genocide, murder, rape, child
|abuse, etc etc.
Cultures which value humans who work as concubines highly have no problem
with prostitution.
Cultures which consider consentual sexual activities the correct behaviour
between adults and children have a lesser "child abuse" problem (defining
it as violence).
By giving the same act different names (such as "murder", "execution" ,
"slaughter" and "war") our meme systems makes us do things others find
abhorrent. As an example you might wish to read the memoirs of Rudolf
Höss, "Commendant in Auschwitz", in which he describes how he and his
collegues self-sacrificingly fought to remove the undesirables. His meme
system differs considerably from yours and you will probably find his acts
abhorrent, but seen through his meme system it was the logical thing to
do.
The Christian crusades seen through the Muslim eyes were a genocide.
The list goes on and on.
I suggest rational thought to dynamically decide which meme systems have
the best merits in a specific situation as well as in a longer perspective.
The postulates for such a thought system should be specified explicitly
and why they have been selected.
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