I’ve been reading a couple of Gary Lachman’s books, and there are a few points that have come to mind as I do that I wish to cover.
Firstly, the books are:
· “The Caretakers of the Cosmos” (Pub. Floris Books, 2013, ISBN 978-178250-022-3; Amazon);
· “Politics and the Occult: The Left, the Right, and the Radically Unseen” (Pub. Quest Books, Wheaton USA, 2008, ISBN 978-0-8356-2032-1; Amazon).
Clearly, I don’t agree withy everything Mr Lachman writes. My post on the heteronormativity test disagreed with the presented version of polarity, for instance.
Equally clearly, there are points I agree with, or aspects of the books that I find informative – for instance, in “Politics and the Occult: The Left, the Right, and the Radically Unseen” I was appalled to discover how backward, unspiritual, and downright bigoted some past groups and individuals were (and current ones still are - too many, but that gets into my personal experience rather than what I’ve read).
The following quotation from “Politics and the Occult: The Left, the Right, and the Radically Unseen” is striking (emphasis added by me), although I consider some of the angst makes sense if we accept that Reality manifests from higher levels down to the physical:
“Often those who reject meaning and purpose accuse those who look for it of wanting the world to be that way – who wouldn’t, they concede – but of not being strong (or honest, or hard, or brave, etc.) enough to face the truth. But it strikes me that the opposite can be just as true, although it rarely gets a mention: that those who embrace meaninglessness and chance want to be seen as tougher (or more intelligent, honest, brave, etc.) then those who ‘need’ meaning and purpose. Frequently the search for or expectation of meaning is seen as a weakness. Yet again, the opposite can be just as true. The embrace of meaninglessness can be an expression of a hunger for superiority, the need to feel more intelligent and strong than the rest of us fools, just as it can be seen as a form of misanthropy, of a dislike of human beings.”
This is actually a good lead in to what I want to cover in this post, but I’m going to start with a few more quotes.
“By declaring the world of values and meaning unreal – that is, not susceptible to quantification or measurement – science, or a particularly aggressive form of reductionist scientism, opened the door on the ‘anything goes’ school of values. Beauty, and everything else, was now in the eye of the beholder, not in any kind of objective stratum of real meaning or value. Like many other thinkers of the time, Scheler recognised that this was a dangerous development, which led, as mentioned earlier, to utility being the sole gauge of any good.”
“One of Scheler’s bêtes noires was precisely the invasion of the cultural world by the utilitarian sensibility, which promoted the cultivation of the arts and literature, provided they served some purpose, that they helped business in some way, much as meditation and other spiritual practices are today promoted as a means of increasing productivity.”
“Positive vital values build a strong sense of community and social responsibility, while negative ones undermine our social and communal bonds. One of Scheler’s concerns was that with the rise of utilitarian notions of value, which he believed were on the increase in the modern age, ideas of nobility, heroism, and self-sacrifice would lose their significance, and an ethos of self-seeking, in which everyone was out for themselves, would dominate. As altruism today is increasingly explained in terms of the ‘cunning’ of ‘selfish genes’, we can see that Scheler’s concern was warranted.”
Similarly to the problem of seeing values as only of value if they are utilitarian, which denies the Soul / Higher Self (a particular problem of the version of Communism adopted in the USSR), I find many human rights advocates make the wrong assumption that all opinions can be expressed.
This is often qualified by statements along the “don’t cry fire in a crowded theatre”, but that assumes physical harm matters, and psychological harm doesn’t – which is a load of utter rot.
Words kill – directly, in the case of misgendering, and indirectly, in the case of “hate speech”[see Note 1] – and 1930s Germany is a particular example of that, as are the rantings and actions of former POTUS45.
There’s also the issue of words judged to have caused harm to public reputation.
Morally, not all opinions have the right to be expressed.
In addition, there is the problem of “both side-ism” (see, for instance, this), where, even though one side of an argument is endemic and predominates public debate, some human rights advocates think they still have to acknowledge that predominant side.
But where I particularly want to focus on in this article is flawed parenting.
Now, I quite specifically mentioned 1930s Germany, because that is an example of pernicious state interference in child-rearing that hasn’t been matched until China’s brainwashing of the “Cultural Revolution” in the 1960s and the more recent social credit system.
Because of the past and the current examples, I do NOT favour legal or compulsory intervention in such matters (beyond addressing what is legally accepted to be child abuse).
However, when parents say they want to do the “mini-me” style of parental abuse, we need public figures to advocate, instead, for parenting based on helping child to achieve their full potential, including when that potential differs from that of parents, and avoiding utilitarianism by aiming to instil values based on the UDHR.
[Note 1]
· https://www.un.org/en/hate-speech/understanding-hate-speech/what-is-hate-speech;
· https://legaldictionary.net/hate-speech/;
· https://racismnoway.com.au/about-racism/hate-speech/;
· https://www.byarcadia.org/post/hate-speech-effects-on-society;
· https://www.rightsforpeace.org/hate-speech;
· https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hate_speech&oldid=1101302181.
