Goodness and Stupidity

Are they legitimate topics at all? ~what can we say about them?

Where’s the reality. Where’s the goodness? If we should ask about goodness in life, there is an old tradition (e.g. in Judaism) that, yes, there is goodness. But something is happening today. I don’t know what. My question is about that “what?” What is going on? No, this is not a Marvin Gaye album but one may ask: Is life still something good? What is happening now? I figure that because of these new things just now coming to the fore, or coming down the line, I am able to see that something may be going wrong in certain areas. But what areas do I follow?

I follow TRANS ideology and COVID problems. I am concerned about the manner in which this disease outbreak was handled by the authorities and vaccines. I study vaccine resistance. There is a well-documented vaccine failure that establishment forces won’t admit. This is a matter of concern, as the authorities are incompetent and they are failing to protect us. And these two areas are place where we suddenly see such an astonishing ignorance. There is the new element of people’s refusal to think. Ignorance is manifesting in a new way, as total mass compliance by the more conventional members of society. Here there is complete, willful ignorance.

Does this say anything about the goodness of life? How do humans need to live? We need to know how to do it, how to live, but there are requirements as well. So, do not just say you can be free, and so forth, because, for example, one needs to have a job, to work. We cannot expect things to come automatically, or by “the market,” which is just an excuse for “freedom.” We have to hold ourselves to a high standard. That is how persons should behave. At some times in history (an earlier era), this was called “virtue” or “goodness.” In general we should not criticize others. For example, such a teaching exists in Buddhism. There is this teaching.

They teach that everything is ultimately impermanent. And from there one might say that what is the point of criticizing others if everything will be over soon? Most of us (including Pope Pius, as we will see) criticize much too easily. Humans being are not perfect and it is better to treat them kindly. There is also in that Eastern system I mentioned a specific injunction that you do not “point out faults” in others. [my search: /Buddhism, "pointing out faults"/ - I used DuckDuckGo; that gets a few Buddhist results plus other results.]

I recently discovered a new writer. The British historian Peter Watson has written a good number of books: recently, a long “history of ideas.” Does a historian talk about the good ideas or the bad ones? He talks about the good ideas! Even if there are only a few persons with good ideas, they are the ones we talk about. Not others, really.

So, there we read of “The dilemma that faced the Vatican at the end of the nineteenth century…”, which was a dilemma of having less followers, since many had already left. If the church reaction was severe repression of dissent, those lost would not be coming back. Well, this is Watson’s point. The harsh rules came anyway. They were put there by the successor to Leo, Piux X, who reasserted church dogma listing 65 features of “specific propositions of modernism” that I guess, Um — you oughter be steerin’ yo ass clear of. His document, the Lamentabili, was a “decree,” says Watson, the historian of idea. Piux X tried to save us through religion even as persons were turning away from the calm of church life. The Pope thought peace could only be maintained by the church. So, Pius X he done declared: “Faith is an act of intellect made under sway of the will.” Or much the same thing in the beautiful, sacred Latin language. If persons had simply “gotten back their used to be” things would have not gone so badly, said Pius.

If Pius X had studied Buddhism he would have known that one doesn’t go around criticizing others so easily. There must have been some need for all those new ideas of 1907. (I quote Prof. Watson again) When “discoveries in the sciences were coming quick and fast.” I wonder: is the current modernist dilemma where it all ends up?

But I really don’t think we should fall into wrong thoughts or wrong patterns, including criticizing others. We may become part of a general decline in virtue. From posting too much to Substack we could get up into some junk like some kind of habitual rut, just wanting to hear ourselves talk, again and again, about the modern dilemma like chicken little with the sky falling, you know. But -oh yes -this time it is not so certain that the sky really is not falling.

Or badly heating up anyways.