Good vs. Tradition:
For about 40 years now, people have been abandoning tradition to do what they feel in their souls to be right. These people are, on the whole, good people, and the things they do are, on the whole, good things. Since these people are acting on their feelings, they don’t require great intellects to make their decisions. Still, there has to be a reason these people are doing what they are doing, even if the people don’t consciously know what it is.
All kinds of academics have noticed this trend and intellectualized it up and down, but given that these intellectuals all received their doctorates from universities that have been accredited by the very establishment that the good, non-intellectual people have to rebel against in order to do what they feel to be right, studying this mysterious force of good from the outside can only lead people to understand it from the outside. All the intellectualizing in the world will never mean anything to the non-intellectual people who are actually making it happen.
Obviously, in order to truly understand what these people were doing and why they were doing it, I had to become one of these people. That wasn’t difficult, because I was raised as one of them. All that left for me to do was to drop out of college. It wasn’t even a conscious decision at the time I made it; I was just doing what felt right to me.
I have all the intellectual brains I could’ve ever needed to get a doctorate in anything I felt like, but obviously, there is no doctoral program for the only thing that could hold my interest, this unexplained force of good that people could feel but couldn’t define. Over the course of history, people have been drawn to study scientifically mysterious forces of all forms: gravity, electricity, chemistry, and atomic physics, just to name a few. I’ve done exactly the same thing, and I’ve done it in the only way it could be done directly. Interestingly enough, over the course of my adventures I’ve accumulated enough education learning about different things to try to figure out why the world works the way it does that I should be a doctor of something by now: half a bachelor’s degree, a couple associate’s degrees, a commercial helicopter pilot’s license, and flight instructor certification. But if nothing else, it’s been a hell of a lot more interesting than studying the same thing for eight years!
If I could find a scientific definition for the force of “good”, I could improve upon the force of good and make it even better. If I could harness the force of good and industrialize it, I could mass-produce it. If you harness the forces of electricity or atomic energy, you can build a power plant. Does that mean it’s possible to build a goodness reactor?
Most importantly, perhaps, the people who choose to serve the forces of good instead of the forces of tradition are always at an intellectual disadvantage, because the forces of establishment and tradition have, by far, the most Glorious Money on their side. Does that mean I should side with the forces of tradition that killed 180,000,000 people in the last century so that I too could earn as much Glorious Money as possible? Should I let the rebels stand alone?
F*ck that…
As I once heard a young friend of mine explain so aptly to his parents when they asked him why he had to be such a rebel, “Luke Skywalker was a rebel.” Of course, his parents inevitably tried to explain to him that Luke Skywalker was just a character in a movie. They completely missed the point, but I understood it perfectly, because I could’ve told it to him if he hadn’t already figured it out on his own. Luke Skywalker isn’t remotely “just” a character in a movie; he’s a legendary figure of the modern world who embodies admirable qualities. He could’ve sided with the establishment of his fictional world, but instead (in his story) he did what he felt to be right, in spite of all the dangers and hardships he faced and in spite of his opponents’ best attempts to convert his loyalty to their side. And he’s recognized as a mythical hero all over our real-life world now.
As people have discovered throughout history in numerous ways, the force of good is the most powerful force known to humankind. For 50 years of the Cold War, two superpowers stood poised to annihilate each other with the push of a button, but it never happened. This potential nuclear force existed in the world, but it never succeeded in changing anything. Scientifically speaking, there must have been some other force at work to oppose it. According to Newtonian physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Even though this force of nuclear annihilation came into being, its effects were never felt by the world. According to the Newtonian explanation, there must’ve been some other force that already existed in the world that must’ve been more powerful than nuclear annihilation, because nuclear annihilation never came about. Good triumphed in the end, because the people who controlled all that nuclear energy never used it to blow each other to hell. I’d say that’s good, wouldn’t you?
It’s obvious that if I could come up with a scientific definition of good and thereby level the field between the forces of good and the forces of tradition, good will have to triumph over tradition, and that will be good by definition. Considering that tradition and all its Glorious Money has killed 180,000,000 people since 1900, I’d say that’s a good enough reason to side with whoever is trying to improve upon tradition, all by itself.
But this raises the question: Where did tradition come from in the first place? Did everybody get together and say, “Hey, this sounds like a terrible idea—let’s do it!”? Or are traditions all a conspiracy devised by evil people to serve their own self-interest by brainwashing the masses? I think it’s safe to say that both of those are laughable ideas. Take, for instance, the American Revolution. In the American Revolution the original government of the United States rebelled against the British Empire and won. About two hundred years later, American citizens started rebelling against the U.S. government. The Founding Fathers of the United States thought that what they were creating was good, so why did people eventually have to rebel against it? Were the Founding Fathers deluded and only created something that was “less bad” than what they were rebelling against? Or was the government they created good at the time but then it went wrong somewhere? Or both?
If I want to harness the force of good so I can build this hypothetical goodness reactor in the world, I have to answer all these questions.
See this gigantic book in your hands?
Heh, heh, heh…