Home • Essays • Lost Articles • Loose Ends • Collections • Computing • Projects • Widdershins • Quotations • Links • Us

 

Resolutions

We always start off our New Year’s resolutions with this one: "We will never abide by our New Year’s Resolutions." That certainly describes our particular attitude toward life. If we obey this 1st resolution, then we must certainly disobey it!

We humans seem adept at saddling ourselves with damned-if-we-do or damned-if-we-don’t scenarios. For ages, men have been looking for a key buried somewhere deep inside that paradox that will let us transcend the psychical bog of cause-and-effect relationships that keeps us down. It’s clear enough that there are no causes, no effects that’ll save us from our self-conflicting nature. Some would say that there is faint hope for any kind of spiritual redemption to be found in our raveled life-tapestries, whose patterns always seem twisted and incomplete.

I’m not sure I fully believe in the notion of human free will. But if it exists, certainly its most powerful corollary is the freedom to deny its existence – the inherent, guaranteed freedom to elect not to acknowledge the many unsolicited demands made upon us to select one bad option over even worse ones. That’s one of the reasons I don’t choose to participate in that dreadful artifice we call American Democracy.

To be sure, semantically speaking, the decision not to take an action is itself a choice. Somehow we have to rise above that logical conundrum.

If a fellow is windmilling at the edge of a deadly precipice, you would surely choose to yank him back onto solid ground – he may not be quite ready to collect his ultimate Karma, and may have stumbled into that dire position by sheer accident. It wasn’t his conscious will that caused him to end up in his predicament, and your willful decision to save him should be easy to make. But suppose I add some small history to the scenario by saying that just a moment before, that fellow had tried to kill you? In that case, your decision to act takes on a different aura. You might decide to give him a little outward nudge, rather than pulling him back to safety. Or you might choose to do nothing, and let his fate be governed by the mindless Newtonian forces operating on him. Or you might choose to save him, regardless of the scene’s history.

There are always other options too, that wouldn’t ordinarily come to mind. You might choose to link your fates together by leaping against him, carrying both of you over the edge. Or by engineering some sort of sacrificial acrobatic maneuver to save him while going over the edge yourself. Or by slicing him in two, thereby saving one half of him -- whichever half enjoys the most advantageous center of gravity.

That’s an extreme scenario. More often in our lives, the scenes play out in slow motion, often taking years to unfold. If a fellow doggedly persists in marching towards some awful personal perdition, most of us will not get in his way.  On the other hand, neither will we help him further his self-defeating cause. So long as individual wills aren’t too closely intertwined, each can retain its own indisputable, inherent sanction. (This is notwithstanding the fact that in some places, suicide is considered illegal -- a truly wonderful example of jurisprudential imbecility.)

Problem is, like quarks in a proton, the concept of individual will can’t be separated from the concept of universal rights. Free will and universal rights are always seen playing together -- not always nicely -- on the teeter-totter. Have you ever jumped off the board when your play partner was stuck helplessly up in the air? The uniquely American take on this interplay explains our love of personal weapons and lawsuits. It also explains why we struggle so much with defining exactly where we want our government to stand in all of this.

Having spent the first half my life in the North and the latter half in the South, it’s interesting to me to contrast the regional differences of opinion in what freedom and rights mean. Where I live now in the South, the concept of freedom focuses on the individual, rather than the community or society at large. "Individual right" here often seems like it’s defined as the right of the individual to take on personal risk. That right overrides the impact on society, when the individual’s risk falls buttered-side down. Thus it’s extremely difficult to pass any laws here that abridge, say, the right of motorcyclists to ride without helmets, or for drivers to drive without seatbelts. Statistics show that fully 40% of drivers in my county don’t carry mandatory auto insurance. Consequentially, as the insurance rates rise for people who do carry insurance, less and less people choose to buy it. It would be extraordinarily easy to link the insurance databases with those of the state agency that issues annual vehicle license tag stickers. But that isn’t done -- and, in fact, it wouldn’t be tolerated.

Another difference is the notion of personal property taxes, contrasted with licensing taxes. It’s all in a name. Folks here will accept the idea of paying taxes on their personal automobiles as "property", but wouldn’t stand for the alternate idea of paying the same amount of taxes for the privilege of driving them. That is something God-given; it's not something that is subject to regulation by government. Yet another facet of individual rights in this region is the freedom to conduct business in an anonymous fashion, especially when transacting the sale of firearms. That’s got a lot of logic to it; it does at least put you on even footing with the raving crackheads and armed criminals running amok here.

But I fear I’m digressing from my theme – to the extent that there is one. My life philosophy tends to follow the conclusion of Moliere’s Candide: We must cultivate our own garden. In the final analysis, the simpler we can make our lives, the less conflict and mental turmoil we'll experience. Decisions and choices will become clearer and easier. Effects become less risky and less potentially devastating to ourselves and to others. If we conduct the business that’s close to home in a prudent, honest and straightforward way, the same pattern will extend to larger transactions we make in the world at large. Act consistently. Things don’t have to be complicated. Take care of putting local issues in order, and global ones will fall into place nicely.

To be sure, this won’t preclude hardships from occurring. You can’t control all the vagaries of life. But if you focus on making your own bed, you’ll make your own luck at the same time.

  Back to Essays...  

 

 

First-time visitors -- including you!

Free Web Counter

Free Hit Counter The Foggiest Notion The Foggiest Notion The Foggiest Notion The Foggiest Notion The Foggiest Notion

 

Luck Favors the Prepared Mind...

Essays • Lost Articles • Loose Ends • Collections • Computing • Projects • Widdershins • Quotations • Links • Us

Site contents Copyright 2004-2008 by Gary Cuba       Email: webmeister at thefoggiestnotion dot com