Avoid It

 

 

One of the best ways to live well and prosper is to avoid getting into trouble in the first place. This requires not doing what is corrosive and corrupting, and then doing what promotes healing and hope.

 

Whether it is an individual, or an entire nation, one of the worst things a person can do is invert one’s sensible belief system or creed into an ideology, a set of beliefs distilled down to a term, a fetishized abstraction, a radicalized holy causes whose backers are willing to die for or fight for to the death.

 

When thousands or millions of followers goose-step with one one-voice, one mindset, uniformly chanting the empty slogans that epitomize their revered holy cause, they are now devil worshipers spreading violence, destruction, tyranny, war and totalitarian across the world, inflicted upon weary humanity.

 

Humans must have meaning in their lives to stay sane, be moral and be happy. They require a story or narrative that weaves together the body of concepts that they have adopted to explain the world and their place in it.

 

If this body of concepts is built upon good values like rational egoism, individual-living, self-realizing, reasonable altruist volunteering, citizen volunteering, self-sacrifice, and promoting a cooperative and civil society wrapped around constitutional republicanism and a free market economy, and a personal faith in some benevolent deity, these good values will serve to underpin and frame the set of beliefs as the operating philosophy of the people holding these beliefs.

 

Even this body of concepts, grounded in great values, can deteriorate into an ideology, a perversion of wise ideals and good values, by deconstructing them into an ism to worship fanatically, and peddled by mob thugs who use terror and aggression to force unwilling outsiders to join this holy cause.

 

If people are emotional, group-oriented joiners, run in packs and are splitters, seeing themselves as noble, superior and always correct while dismissing and gaslighting their foes as stupid, wicked enemies to be crushed, they will have converted their bad set of altruist-collectivist values into a belief system or ideology that is now a mass movementized holy cause, a cruel, hostile, nihilistic narrative whose true believers move to gain power across the world.

 

How to live: we need good values and with them, we weave a human narrative or story, and this reasonable body of values is what we base our lives on, find meaning, and our identity is practicing this narrative in action in many ways that renders such actions as a prayer extended to heaven to please the benevolent deities that we serve and adore.

 

When a personal set of beliefs is healthy and sensible, it is built upon such axiom as respected freedom of choice, intellectual independence, freedom of belief, independent speech, tolerance, coexistence, voluntary acceptance, or rejection of said set of beliefs without any negative repercussions felt whatsoever.

 

This privately held doctrine should never be able to be transferred into a dangerous ideology.