Human Values Versus The Values Of Institutions

Our institutions have failed us. Our government does not represent us, our media lie to us, our corporations care only about their short term profits.

That is to be expected.

Institutions in time become their own entity. They begin to look out for the institution’s interests rather than the interests of the people they were created to help. It happens inevitably. And then the institution begins to tell those who are part of it that they should behave in ways different than a human would, that common sense and morality no longer apply within the confines of the institution. The commandment “Thou Shall Not Kill” does not apply to those in the military. The ethic of not evicting a widow from her home does not apply if you work in the banking industry, the idea of setting a good example for children is not in the interest of the entertainment industry, nor is justice a primary concern of the politician or the lawyer. Institutions have their own requirements and seek to bend humans to their will.

We humans have created human values over the millennia and when practiced they work quite well. They are the laws and values handed down by the great religions, by moral and spiritual leaders. But religions have warped such teachings in ways that promote their own well-being. They place the individual at their disposal rather than seeing their main function as being to serve the individuals. They place themselves between God and man, interpret the words of the prophets and set them down into rigid codes and laws rather than allowing humans to interact directly with them and have a direct communication with them.

Our political parties too place themselves in between individuals and the government they are supposed to control. We are no longer in control of choosing our fate but are instead played upon by one party or the other that insists on blaming the other for all that is bad in the nation. They both realize our instinctual fear of the big institutions, the conservatives playing upon our fear of big government, the liberals playing on our fear of big business. And each is right to a degree, but neither is interested in revealing the bigger picture. Few are the politicians from either party willing to admit that it is the parties and their donors whose interests are being served rather than the interests of the citizens.

Institutions create secrets. They hide away all the truths they do not wish you to see. Few of us are shown the factory farms and processing plants that treat animals the way no society would if they were more fully aware. If the greater populace were to see what life in prison was like we would transform them into places that helped cure prisoners rather than creating new diseases for them to suffer. The harm our system of doing business is doing to our environment is seldom shown on television, we see only what is done in our little part of the world, and then only when we step outside and away from our televisions.

If we give them the opportunity, our institutions will crush us individually. Individuals matter little to institutions, they are so much larger than us. But institutions cannot crush humanity, not if we commit to human values rather than conforming to the values of institutions. We don’t need religions to explain to us what “Thou shall not kill” means, nor “Love your neighbor as yourself”. We don’t need our government to tell us what country is our enemy, nor do we need corporations telling us what we need to have in order to be happy. We, human beings, must be masters of the machines we create, not their slaves. We must decide upon a morality that works independent of the needs of our institutions, that like to distort our most basic truths.

And the most basic human value is that we are all brothers and sisters, all members of the same family. Institutions are always seeking to make us forget that, to emphasize our differences rather than our shared beliefs and needs. Institutions create the lie of the “other”, the “not us”, the “them”.

Institutions create fear and doubt, and when we fear and doubt, we seek protection and safety. Institutions, after evoking our fears to begin with, offer us protection from what they have caused us to fear. They offer us a unity that we as humans are always striving for, but it is not the natural unity but a selective one. It is a partial unity at the expense of the greater unity, a promise that something is better than nothing. It is the kind of unity that requires an enemy, the kind that promises peace and security but only gives us war and a perpetual sense of fear and distrust.

Do not allow yourself to belong to any institution at the expense of your humanity. Do not put your country above the needs of the planet. Do not put the company you work for above your need to do what you feel is right. Do not place your religion above God, nor your political party above the nation it is supposed to represent. Institutions are useful and often necessary tools, but we must never let them become more than that. Instead, be a human. Trust yourself, be yourself. Trust your human qualities. Trust what you know and feel and believe in as well as the examples of those who have sacrificed to put humanity above the interests of institutions that would belittle both the individual and the entirety of humanity of which each of us are a part.

You are a human being and that is a beautiful thing. You are a part of humanity, and that is even more beautiful still.

Understanding My Novels

Thoughts I had at work today regarding the series of novels that include The Amazing Morse Series and Seven Stones, as well as novels yet to be finished:

I am constructing the paradigm through which humanity needs to look if it wishes to survive.

How’s that for a bold statement? Give a few moments before you judge. I think my books best make the case but I’ll try to summarize for you. It's not so much of a perfect summary as thoughts upon the matter.

The Amazing Morse was a story of an individual overcoming the restraints one is capable of placing upon himself. Your worldview can act as a straightjacket upon you, restricting your ability to move in the directions you wish to go.

Perchance To Dream, my second novel, involves the individual overcoming the restraints society places upon him. In the end, it shows that the disbelief of a single individual in a shared vision, can save the whole.

The Association deals with the inevitable rise and fall of societies due to their imperfect conception of reality. In it, it is stated that in the fall of a dominant paradigm, people and groups of people constrict, and fear and defensiveness take the place of trust and interdependence. The tragic result is always violence, war. Man can no longer survive war.

War. It is the symbol of all that is wrong with the human race as well as the one great human evil that we must evolve from if we wish to survive an age of atom bombs and ICBMs. I go back in time 100 years to do an earlier series which will tie into my Amazing Morse series, beginning with Seven Stones. I decided that seeing the foibles of the present age might prove too difficult for some, and so I went to another era in order to critique it. That we do not see the foolishness of our own era and find it so easy  to mock whatever is different about another era is a theme that runs through The Amazing Morse Series.

The year is 1913, shortly before the start of WWI. I wanted to show the senselessness of war and this one truly looks pointless in retrospect. At the beginning of the 20^st Century, Mankind had emerged from primitive means of production, had at hand the tools necessary to build whatever society he wished to build, and yet morally and emotionally had not been able to elevate from the fear of others and the desire to protect himself through violence. The very science he believed could free him from his past had built new and unimaginably cruel weapons to kill him. The seven stones in question are representative of the seven continents. Divided, each stone is a strength but one that does not work with the others. Individually, power is destructive. It is only the unity of the seven stones that can achieve the understanding mankind requires.

The era immediately preceding World War 1 was also a beginning of new perspectives. In art, different perspectives were being represented in a single painting. Albert Einstein was postulating ideas that were tearing down our conception of the universe. Constants were being shown to be relative. The very world we lived in, or at least our understanding of it, was beginning to break down. We needed to find new ways of thinking about the world, not just simply more answers to plug into our existing paradigms.

The Seven Stones trilogy will end with an understanding of what has gone before and a laying of a basis for understanding that will spread throughout the 3 Amazing Morse books as well as the not yet written The Beyond Show  trilogy. It is the shattering of humanity’s mindset and the rise of a new, more comprehensive one. It is the realization of our interconnectedness and the rejection of violence as a means of change.

The Amazing Morse: To liberate oneself before being able to liberate the world, or at least one is able to liberate the world only so much as one is self-liberated.

Perchance to Dream: The doubt of an individual can save the whole. It only takes one person to put a crack in a paradigm held by the group, allow cracks to show in it.

The Association: The idea of a society coming to grips with the collapse of an imperfect understanding is not resolved in the action of the novel, but the roots of what will happen in novels to come are revealed.

Magic is my description for the ability to see unimpeded by the intellect (i.e. whatever paradigms we have acquired), to see through the eyes of a child. Because life is truly magical when we are young, although occasionally very frightening. This is not to say our vision should not be assisted by the intellect, the paradigms we have imagined, merely that we should not mistake the finger that points at the moon for the moon itself. We should never mistake the model for the real.

Perception versus reality, that is the source of all struggle. The more we mistake the finger for the moon the intellectual construct for what it represents, the more religion and philosophy divides rather unites us. Two differing vantage points are not reasons to quarrel but opportunity for us to gain a deeper understanding.

In denying another person’s perception of God we are limiting our own understanding of God, and in a very real sense denying God.