Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

They say people who rely on violence and physical power are stupid or barbarians... but are they just responding to a fundamental truth? Violence, and Physical power. . . it's the power that transcends all others. Each other type of power relies on the human mind for the very system in which it exists. Looks are in the eye of the beholder.... money is just paper without minds to value it. Rank, Reputation. . .

But physical forces exist even if there is no mind to perceive them. Futhermore, they can destroy the body, which destroys the mind. The richest, most handsome, most beloved man ever can still be put down with a single bullet. The pen is not mightier than the sword, the pen just rallies the swords to battle.

Perhaps it the transcendental nature of violence that makes it so scary and taboo, yet so often relied upon. People who have mastered power in one of the other areas would naturally feel compelled to promote anti-violence morals as a way of protecting themselves from the number one threat they face. Since normal people face the threat of violence too, they readily accept these efforts, and violence stays taboo. And yet, somewhere deep inside, I think every person knows that the fundamental truth is.... the people with the most firepower makes the rules.

If I died today... noone outside my immediate family would even notice or care. No matter how tragic an event... no matter how many died or how much people suffer, life goes on. To those who don't experience it firsthand, sympathy is optional. In such a large world, people's sympathy is all burned out, and they only display it when others are watching, or when they have a personal stake in the crisis. . .

Does the truth have any real meaning? People will listen to a nonsense idea from a high regarded member of society before they will a brilliant idea from a bum. Yet, ideas have a truth independant of their source.

And even still, can the source ever truely be credible? How many people take the time to confirm stastical claims? Can you know if the methods used to generate the stastistics are real? Even if proven false, what of the chance that the whistle blower will be assumed a conspiracy theorist or biased?

Truth itself has nothing to do with belief.

Morals are a social instinct. In primitive societies, if an act, such as theft, is not caught, it is not wrong in the mind of the perpetrator. This is because morality has no purely objective basis. Rather, just as hungry is an instinct to make us eat, and lust an instinct to make us reproduce, morality is an instinct to identify our place within a society.

Whenever a large group of people get together, some really bizarre forms of morality become possible. . .