THE EVOLUTIONARY GOOD
Does good triumph over evil? Is life absurd? How do we deal with this absurdity? With hope or despair?
Some philosophers taught about the absurd nature of existence, of its joys and failures, but they did not fall into trap of despair and meaninglessness. The duality of the world and its very diversity brings to us the positive and the negative. And while they both occupy our lives, we cannot let the negative dominate. And more we cannot even afford to let the negative stand equal to the positive, for that gives it equal say in our destinies, and this will end in its own kind of misery and nihilism. A clear mind teaches a bias, a prejudice or primacy in the dualities of the world – a supremacy of one thing over the other through the effort of life itself.
Paradox or contradiction or duality are part of life and the cosmos. They are the dynamic and drivers of existence. In the Diverse, duality is a special kind of diverse category. Many cultures and thinkers have misunderstood duality and because of this they have not understood good and evil, truth and fallacy, beauty and ugliness. Further, many have not grasped the many kinds of duality that arrange our world.
It helps to believe in an evolutionary good, a good that triumphs in stages and steps, generation to generation through the real history of the contradictory boundary age we live in today. No immediate leaps to an age of exsuffering are possible, but not a single step is possible without the ideal and its flag.
Thousands of years of behavior are manifested in concrete institutions and methods. It will take time to replace them, time to build the next age.
There is no absolute utopia, utopia is in motion, and we work to each new stage of history, and then work again to make things better in an endless evolution of good, generation to generation. Utopia is thus incomplete and restless; we may call it an agitated utopia, an “agi-topia”, if you like. Agi-topia has no end and thus we have no end to our dreams and our work.
You may look at each stage as a sort of compromise of good and evil, as an achievable limit, or see that conditions only allow the progress of the good to a certain point, or you may say that new evolutionary conditions create new problems. In any case, each generation has its tasks and burden, some more than others, this present generation has the task of founding a new kind movement, that of beginning the cycle of a new civilization.
We can change so much, so we will change that much. We can find the essential leap that we can and must make. We can set the next achievable standard in human behavior.
Some people say that good and evil are eternal, that they are a great circle, that things never get better, that you must accept this and disengage from the world and its struggles. But a wise person would say this is a cynical idea. Each struggle of good and evil drives humanity to a higher level of development, that there is progress, and that society and personal behavior do get better. Just look at our evolution over the last five thousand years. Evil changes in degree and form as we progress, the battle, yes, is eternal but the duality transcends from higher level to higher level. Things do get better. Old behaviors become out of fashion, repulsive or even forbidden. New proscriptions are written.
This raises a philosophic issue about dualities. The duality of good and evil or right and wrong or true and false or beauty and ugliness are “value dualities”. These are always "directional", they are "axial". That is, they proceed along an axis; we are always seeking more good, more right, more truth and more beauty and so on. We are highly biased in these dualities; we do not want more fallacy, more ugliness, more evil, more wrong!
These dualities are value dualities, they are about our core values. These dialectics or Tao drive us in a progressive evolution, they make us struggle and strive for something better, they are the drivers of meliorism.
Other dualities are not directional, they are "practical", they are not “idealistic”. They have no predetermined bias. The side of the opposite that is primary merely depends on concrete conditions and changes. For example, in some situation you may have to make a choice between whether study or action is primary, rest or work and so on. These are opposites but there is no primacy as to which is your bias. We make judgments as to which is primary based on specific situations. And as conditions change, we shift the bias. These practical dualities are very basic categories we use to analyze and organize our lives.
In the value duality the side of the opposite that is primary is always primary, it is directional, the value dualities guide, leading our lives; the pragmatic dualities are for managing and administrating our lives. Human beings are axial animals in the main, the pragmatic dualities give us our footing, the value dualities force us to stride forward, and they lead to evolution
Many people have confused the two different dualities. Some think that good and evil have equal weight, to them this is a practical duality. This is a kind of relativist ethics that is based on a complete misunderstanding of polar relations within values. It is true that we are not free of the bad, the incorrect and so on, that is why we strive to supersede our old selves. In a sense you can say that each of us is a duality of the desired and the undesired, but in our comprehension of the value duality we must work constantly against the undesired for a higher level. We do not accept the lower state. This attitude drives History and Your personal evolution. Yes, we work and then we rest, but rest is not acceptance, it is simply a necessary pause. And this timeline is endless, each generation sets its goals, then the next sets its own goals in an endless process.
Certainly, only a few mentally ill people actually seek evil as their value, so we can disregard them. A few opportunists do not care about good or evil, they seek only self gain. Relativists will advocate doing some evil to achieve good. But the vast majority of Humans want to do true good.
Cage Innoye
Axxiad News