Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Goodness

What is being good?
  Human beings pretend to like honor honesty kindness and sharing.
 We as groups seem to rarely celebrate these qualities, instead seeming to prefer "winning" Wealth success in sports and fame are much more interesting?

2 comments:

  1. A great example of this question is the book The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin. In it we have a protagonist, George Orr, who is essentially a good person in his drive not to cause harm to other people and therefore is trying to have as little impact as possible. The antagonist, Dr. Haber, is well intentioned, and truly believes that he wants to help the world but also believes that he must run roughshod over the world to remake it into his vision of good.

    Both of those guys have an end goal of doing good for the world. The main conflict of our time is between those who want good for everyone and those who want good for themselves, and to heck with everyone else. The BS meritocracy preached by the Ayn Rand-ites of these times basically says to take as much as possible for yourself and blame the people who don't have anything for not having the gumption to behave in the same selfish manner. I cannot see how there is any way to spin that worship of personal gain as a greater good--I can only see that people who practice it are rationalizing and denying the need for a greater good--as long as they get their own.

    Sorry, I'll step off my soapbox now.

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