All men are created equal

No civilization or culture has ever been able to eliminate human wretchedness and melancholy; no political system can liberate us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our cravings for the superlatives.

After watching Masaki Kobayashi’s film – The Human Condition, one can comprehend that it is the human condition that gives direction to the social condition, not the other way round.

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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed - Thomas Jefferson (1776).

While it may be the truth that all men were born equal but what separates them is politics, ideologies, religion, caste, creed, race and finance.

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Bow down to Ignorance

There are many myths and mysteries of the universe that still cannot be elucidated adequately by science. We are still ignorant of our surroundings, but ignorance does not mean we continue to bask in the glory of our ignorance.

It took us centuries to be where we are today. Someday we will triumph over that ignorance.

In the interim and till such time, we will continue to be immature, (covering our ignorance with mystical words like ‘faith’, ‘belief’, ‘devotion’, ‘fear’, and ‘intuition’) while surrendering our lives to ignorance and giving it a name called god.

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Civilization will keep on progressing. Today the progression of Technology can be seen to be synonymous with the progression of Civilization.

And with progression, your privacy will keep diminishing.

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I don’t understand people. I don’t understand myself. I took a closer look and I understood that we are no different from each other.

I also understood that there is nothing worthwhile in man to understand.

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Do you believe in The Bermuda Triangle? Do you believe in E.S.P.? Do you believe in Astrology? Do you believe in flying saucers? Do you believe in ancient astronauts? Do you believe in Life after Death?

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Provoke Thought.

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The ‘fascist power-hungry political leader’

If you have a point, you cannot dispute or debate with a person who is ignorant, ill-bred or narrow-minded. You just cannot shake them. It is futile to even endeavor a discussion with them. Just leave them alone.

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau said in 1762 "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains."

When one looks around in today’s world one sees man influenced by authorities, majorities, customs, religions and opinions.

Nothing seemed to have changed!

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Instead of predicting that the world would end or the world would blow itself up to pieces and humanity and mankind would be wiped off from the face of the earth; why not get involved with and in the world and try to see that it does not end or blow itself to pieces?

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In the Past if someone wanted to seize political power, he simply had to control the army and the police. Today the ‘fascist power-hungry political leader’ refrains from using tanks to usurp power; he hides his naked urge by garbing himself with the fabrics of democracy and exploits it as a form of government to grab authority.

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”Financial worries and insecurities”

People with power, weight, influence and clout tell us to spend, since expenditure is imperative, critical and fundamental to economic growth and for creation of jobs.

Does this means that savings, which unmistakably is the reverse of consumption, bad for growth?

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“Man is a rational animal” - so said the great Aristotle. I am nobody to contest that. I don’t know what rational is when it come to man. (These days I don’t even know what man is!). But I feel that Man indeed is a corrupted animal – corrupted to the core. I thought what would distinguish man from animal - Rationality? Then one day, I understood! The only thing that distinguishes man from animals is the”financial worries and insecurities”.

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I have often being asked what Philosophy is all about. I don’t think it is possible to explain in advance what philosophy is. The best way to know about philosophy is to read the works of great philosophers : Plato’ work, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Locke, Hume, Russell, Wittgenstein, Rousseau, Kant, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Confucius, Tagore, Radhakrishnan and others greats that might interest you………………….(Darwin, Shakespeare, Freud,)

I don’t know, after reading all these, whether philosophy would provide us the knowledge that we seek, but I think it does help to understand a wee bit of what went around us, what goes on around us and what you might expect to go around.



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Protection of Women from Psychos.

I am not acquainted with how many thousands of schools exist in the US. But the low ratio of some psychotic shooting at students, to the number of schools is quite evident. Schools are believed to be the safest place for children. If the Government after usurping all the taxes from the citizen cannot give security to the students then let the school authorities be authorized to have arms. Let the teachers and administrators carry guns for the protection of the children.

One can instantaneously hear the objection: What if a teacher is psychotic and chooses to shoot all the students? I get bewildered when I hear the same kind of squabbles being used against allowing airlines to arm their pilots and to have their right to protect their own private property. It a pilot has some cerebral problem; can he not fly you into the ground and kill you if he already wants to? Why think and wait for an imminent death as he nosedives into the earth, rather than putting you out of your wretchedness with a gunshot to the head. Same thing goes with a teacher who if is psychologically wobbly, cannot be prevented from bringing a gun to the school and commit his spineless, wretched act.?

How about putting a sign in front of the school or in some residential area: “This school or this residential complex is a gun free zone”? The so called law abiding citizens will be thrilled and contented by such a sign. So would the criminals be, who would take this as an invitation!

The same rationale can be applied to protect women in India. Why not arm our woman to shield themselves from these rapists and psychotics? Why not liberate our woman from these parochial animals?

Women don’t need to be preached and provided with therapy – they need protection.

Maybe we will hear about our women being saved because they carried guns.

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Gun Control

We Indians seemed to have inculcated the characteristics of the average Americans, trying to poke our nose in affairs that does not concern us. While most Americans in the guise of respecting privacy does not bother their neighbours or does not seem to be concerned what goes on around them, they sure are meddlesome and intrusive when it comes to world affairs.

These days we seemed to be taking a lot of interest regarding the recent gun control laws or the lack of it in the US.

To purchase a gun, one must make a statement and identify oneself. The application is sent to the police who after taking their own sweet time would decide depending on their whims and fancy, whether the applicant may own a gun on the basis of him being a law abiding person, (in other words whether or not he obeys every law of the Power Elite).

In US, gun ownership is denied to criminals, thieves, offenders, murderers, illegal aliens, users of drugs, dishonourably discharged veterans, anyone under 21, et al. They are seen as prospective or latent elements showing antipathy towards the ‘Establishment’. The ownership of automatic, large caliber, silencer and other varieties of firearms is also absolutely forbidden to one and all except the State.

Even those who qualify to own a gun goes through total scrutiny of their records with the police and Federal agencies snooping around the buyers. In some states, constant harassment by the police on anyone possessing a firearm is never ruled out.

In Miami, the situation can be translated from a chapter from 1984, a dystopian novel, written by George Orwell - where society is oppressed, intimidated and tyrannized by the Party, Big Brother and its totalitarian philosophy.

To apply for owning a gun, the applicant must submit extensive personal information to the police. Maybe very soon we will have a the then Rhodesia {now Zimbabwe} like US, where blacks were sentenced to death for the ‘crime’ of possessing firearms, where anyone carrying a weapon without police approval gets a 6 month prison term or a USD 1000 fine or both and where people were encouraged to squeal on their neighbours for a USD 100 bounty for ‘firearms violation’.


So what is the goal of the power structure? Is it the total abolition of private {read as non ruling class} gun ownership? Is it that the minimum they will settle for is the absolute police control of all firearms as is the case of Soviet Russia?

The mass is made to believe that such laws diminish crime. Does it? Does gun ownership by the general population cause crimes? Isn’t it that if one wants to kill another, the absence of a gun will not deter him to do so? Is anyone safe if there is a dearth of guns in the hands of a private owner? In Japan where civilian guns are banned, is the murder rate with guns lower than that in the US?

Let’s look at the other side. Owning a gun by the vast majority of the public serves to thwart crime. Peaceful individuals who may be armed may give second thoughts to the criminals, who may plan to slaughter or plunder. Would the criminals hesitate when they are sure that their victims are vulnerable and devoid of arms?

In any case, some criminals will always have guns (criminals don’t register their guns, and besides there are always the so called ‘country pistols’ and ‘pipe guns’), thus necessitating potential victims to arm themselves to avert crime. In other words, private guns will ward off crime.

Is the goal of State’s gun control artificial? What could be the real reason for the power elite to leave the people defenseless and at the mercy of the criminals? Are guns not necessary for peaceful individuals to defend or protect themselves from criminals? Does it work on the same principal for a State when they declare that to achieve peace, one must prepare for war? The US government has the largest arsenal in the world. When it comes to the government, they trust themselves to store everything from napalm to H-Bombs, but will not trust their private, peaceful citizens with hand guns. Why does not this trust exist?

The people {non ruling class} want to be free. Is a laissez faire gun ownership feared for the same reason that Hitler was afraid of a gun owning Jewish population or Stalin of a bunch of pistol packing Ukrainians? Or is it that the State is familiar with Mao’s aphorism: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”. The Rulers recognize that the only way to retain their control over the people is to monopolize firearms. The rulers realize that people can never exercise their RIGHT TO BE FREE if they have NO MIGHT TO BE FREE! This is how Big Brother achieves his domination over people. Soon there would be no guns in the hands of the mass, leaving the people vulnerable and at the mercy of the criminals.

Mass Civil Disobedience may turn out to be the only way to prevent Big Brother from entirely disarming his slaves.

On hindsight, one should wonder whether that appalling, grotesque, monstrous, atrocious, gruesome, heinous and horrendous crime against that 23 year old woman in a Delhi bus would have occurred, had that lady possessed a small gun in her vanity bag.

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So what if two or more roads diverged in a yellow wood?

During your juvenile years, you probably had the same set of questions in your mind:
If god was so powerful, influential, prevailing, authoritative, potent, then why didn’t he confront real problems? Why didn’t he stop wars? Why didn’t he eradicate hunger in Ethiopia? Why didn’t he cure cancer?

These and a set of whole bagful of questions popped out.

Shredding those infantile years and as one went ahead in life, one couldn’t just buy their reasoning. They had their sets of answers in their bags – which ranged from anything to “God’s Will”.

Let me explain what I meant when I said 'they/their'.

Recently I discovered a new word.

How do you describe a person exhibiting retention of juvenile characteristics even though he is an adult?

He is said to be ‘neotenous’. While this may relate to the physical aspect, I might be tempted to use this against cerebral characteristic. Let us say psychologically neotenous traits in humans could be: inquisitiveness, mischievousness, friendliness, sociality and an intrinsic desire to cooperate.

It I stretch this a little further – I would dare to say that most humans haven’t been able to shred their psychologically neotenous traits.

Otherwise how am I to explain the inability of man to shred their ‘neotenous’ years and go ahead in life, not buying those reasoning about a supernatural?

Anyways - then one day you realize:

It does not matter if two, three or even four roads diverge in a yellow or green wood. It does not matter if you are able to trek all the routes. It does not matter if you take the one less travelled.

“IT DOES NOT MATTER WHICH ROAD YOU TAKE OR HOW YOU TAKE IT”

Because nothing is going to make a difference

No matter what you say or do – all roads lead to the same end.

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Delusion - Insanity - Religion

First let as recall the meaning of delusion.

- A false belief or opinion.

- A false belief strongly held in spite of invalidating evidence, especially as a symptom of mental illness, as in schizophrenia.

- Something that is falsely or delusively believed or propagated.

- A persistent false psychotic belief regarding the self or persons or objects outside the self that is maintained despite indisputable evidence to the contrary; also : the abnormal state marked by such beliefs.

Synonyms:
chimera, conceit, daydream, fantasy, dream,fancy, figment, hallucination, illusion, nonentity, phantasm, pipe dream, unreality, vision

Antonyms:
truth, verity

Other Psychology Terms:
fetish, hypochondria, intelligence, mania, narcissism,neurosis, pathological, psychosis, schadenfreude, subliminal

Now the Question :

Can one be sympathetic to the American writer and philosopher, Robert Pirsig's statement in Lila: "when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity, when many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion?

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