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The Gaffer's Philosophy;
Part 14: Personal Ethic:
June 17, 2002:
In this essay, I want to take up our responsibility to and for
ourselves. This concerns our personal integrity and philosophy.
It is about being true to ourselves. None of these other things
I address will matter without that. Eventually, even our claim
to our personal rights will not matter. We will not be able to
secure them. If we are not solidly grounded in our own personal
ethic, we can have no positive impact on anything else.
Let's look at what an individual ethic is. What am I talking about? I'm really talking about personal morality, nothing else. We all know what that is. It is about our behavior toward the community at large. An ethical person does not lie, does not cheat, does not steal, and he does not hurt other people. We do not do these things and then rationalize our dishonesty. That is what I mean and that is all I mean. It is about the golden rule. It is about having enough personal integrity to behave morally.
I learned this as a kid. So did most other people, though many will deny it. You can pretend you don't know this, but that is simply another example of my point. It is a lie. We all did learn it somewhere. I learned it from my mother. Her position was very firm. Tricks with words and rationalizations did not wash. Technicalities were not accepted. Lying is lying. You know it and I know it. Stealing is stealing. You know it and I know it. That was her position and it is also mine. It was, I believe, also the position of most of our earliest citizens.
Now, we Americans seem to have abandon that strict moral philosophy. It seems that almost everyone lies, cheats, and steals. This is not all about other people. It is also about me. It is about my own personal ethic. It is about my responsibility to and for myself. It is a personal morality and integrity upon which my feelings about myself are based. It is a personal code. To be sure, sometimes I violate that code. When I do, I feel crappy. We should not wonder why we feel crappy. We feel crappy because we behave crappy and we know it. At the center of ourselves, we know.
We can take many examples of crappy behavior from our current politicians and business people. For example, it is immoral to knowingly sell software that does not work, yet it is a regular business practice. It is immoral to misrepresent a product just to get ahead of a competitor, yet it is a regular business practice. It is immoral to use gambling as a source of government revenue, yet our governments do just that. It is immoral to pander to human emotional pathology, yet our governments and businesses do it regularly. In total, there has been a general moral degeneration of our entire culture.
The reason for this loss of morality is that we, as individuals and as a community, are spiritually bankrupt. We have lost our grounding in ethics, because we have lost our grounding in spirituality. We have written off spirituality and without that there can be no ethic. It think this moral degeneration is the very real source of all of the insanities which we are currently witnessing. Our political system and culture is degenerating because we are not anchored in a sound ethical and spiritual philosophy.
Political systems cannot flourish without personal ethics. The communists tried it. It just doesn't work. Further, ethics cannot exist without a spiritual grounding. Ethics, in fact, come out of a spiritual grounding. Political systems come out of ethics. Community comes out of ethics. Government comes out of community. Power is not top down. It is from the citizen up. Power comes from the citizen. This is what we have lost. Our loss of ethics has allowed government to usurp our power.
I am not going to invest pages of argument to reiterate the case made by the English and French philosophers of the Glorious revolution and the Enlightenment. I will simply summarize it here. In the beginning was man, spiritually connected, grounded in his spiritual self. Out of that spiritual grounding came man's ethics. Our of man's ethics came community. Out of community came the commonwealth and the body politic.
The political body exists for the citizen. The citizen does not exist for the political body. Yet the political body depends on the enlightened participation of the citizen. That participation must be a function of the citizen's and community's political philosophy. We cannot have a political philosophy without an ethical grounding. It would have no foundation. Our founders knew this. At that time, most of the people knew it. They had a very strong ethic based in a shared spiritual philosophy.
With hindsight, we may say that the spiritual philosophy was incomplete or even incorrect. That is not a reason to discard our ethic or our spiritual philosophy. It is a reason to nurture and expand our spiritual philosophy to encompass our expanded awareness. We simply base it in the individual's spiritual nature. Everything else flows from that.
Let us get clear on what I mean by a spiritual grounding. I am not talking a bout fundamentalist bible thumpers or about organized religion at all. I am talking about man's connection to his own spiritual inner self and the connection of that self to the infinite divine entity. In that, I see that there are two other discussions to eventually come out of this. One is about the responsibilities and functions of organized religion. The other is an expansion of the concepts of personal spirituality. Those will both come later.
For now, looking at our culture, we must conclude that we are on a road to disaster. I will not belabor the obvious. We need only watch the daily news to know that. In total we are behaving badly and self destructively. That everyone is doing it does not make it right. It's not about a majority excuse. It's about what we know in our soul. We know the difference. The knowledge is born in us. It never changes.
It is just the same as the urge to freedom which is born in us. These primordial things are all there all of the time. Justice, freedom, and compassion are undeniable basic human qualities or drives which we can deny, but cannot eliminate. These are things that we know and are where a philosophy must begin. When we examine them, we find that they are simply the things which make us feel right. When we go against these things and contradict them we do not feel right. This means that we can discuss the difference between right and wrong on the basis of how we feel in our soul when we do it. When we hurt another human, we feel wrong inside.
Currently, unfairness and dishonesty dominate our culture. Part of my goal is to work toward interrupting that. Everyone has been wrong including me. That is no reason to continue being wrong. It is certainly no reason to evade talking about what is right. It is not a reason to shun setting new goals and standards of behavior. That we sold out does not mean that we are forever doomed. Nothing need be forever. We can recover our integrity. We can recover our souls. At this point, integrity and soul are identical. They come together in our spiritual grounding and our ethic. This is not just about how it is. It is about how a human should be.
In my next essay, I want to continue the theme of personal
responsibility. I will take up our responsibility for creative
achievement and self fulfillment.
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