A snippet of a conversation I thought to be of interest in relation to a previous post.
The repression of instincts is necessary if we wish to benefit from all the advantages gained from living in a society. As a man many of my natural aggressive instincts if given free reign would result in an early death for me and probably those I fought with. If every man and woman gave into their natural urges without thought of consequence civilizations that have taken thousands of years to build would be destroyed very quickly. We as a race will only survive and prosper through reason and restraint. As for heroism, the world is full of heroes, but they speak softly, act without thought of gain and are often gone before anyone knows they were there.
The repression of instincts is necessary if we wish to benefit from all the advantages gained from living in a society. As a man many of my natural aggressive instincts if given free reign would result in an early death for me and probably those I fought with. If every man and woman gave into their natural urges without thought of consequence civilizations that have taken thousands of years to build would be destroyed very quickly. We as a race will only survive and prosper through reason and restraint. As for heroism, the world is full of heroes, but they speak softly, act without thought of gain and are often gone before anyone knows they were there.
qucker than I expected, and I agree with
what you have said but you've left a lot unsaid. You're focusing on the
repression of our violent instincts or other negatives as we've deemed
them, yet make no mention of the evils we do not repress or even openly
express in a controlled manner. Nor do you mention why we suppress our
positive instincts that would benefit others and ourselves. Some people
restrain themselves from helping others or even go out of their way to
hinder them. Others like various war mongers and dictators slaughter by
the millions with no self control and we sit idly by and do nothing but
watch. What are your thoughts on that? (+1 for you btw very well worded)
Well when discussing evil, things get a bit complicated. What is considered evil by one culture can be considered by another to be perfectly normal practice. I think what constitutes evil is a question for another day. (Four in the morning where I am so have to go to bed.) What will always be a part of human nature though is the desire to compete and this is not necessarily a bad thing. While it is this desire that is responsible for some of the things you talk about, like going out of our way to hinder others or failing to offer assistance when it is needed. It is the desire to compete that has driven most of our technological advances. For every instinct there is a negative and a positive. Anger for instance while often thought of as solely negative will help a man to fight to defend his family when in danger. Anger is right at this moment helping citizens around the world to topple corrupt governments. Love is often see as the ultimate expression of selflessness and is the embodiment of all that is good, but terrible things have been done because of love and the kind of fanatical devotion it can create, not just between individuals but love of all manner of things. Emotions should inspire and guide us, but reason above all else is mankind’s most valuable gift.
I won't comment further on it right now, just putting it out there as is for your consideration.
Well when discussing evil, things get a bit complicated. What is considered evil by one culture can be considered by another to be perfectly normal practice. I think what constitutes evil is a question for another day. (Four in the morning where I am so have to go to bed.) What will always be a part of human nature though is the desire to compete and this is not necessarily a bad thing. While it is this desire that is responsible for some of the things you talk about, like going out of our way to hinder others or failing to offer assistance when it is needed. It is the desire to compete that has driven most of our technological advances. For every instinct there is a negative and a positive. Anger for instance while often thought of as solely negative will help a man to fight to defend his family when in danger. Anger is right at this moment helping citizens around the world to topple corrupt governments. Love is often see as the ultimate expression of selflessness and is the embodiment of all that is good, but terrible things have been done because of love and the kind of fanatical devotion it can create, not just between individuals but love of all manner of things. Emotions should inspire and guide us, but reason above all else is mankind’s most valuable gift.
I won't comment further on it right now, just putting it out there as is for your consideration.
I thought that you were talking to someone else in the first two paragraphs, turns out you were just pasting what someone else said. You should have made it more apparent man, got confused the whole way until the brackets clued me in.
ReplyDeleteIn general, your blog posts are a little hard to take in so I go over them again. But yes like you said before, the whole point of your blog was for thinking.
Mate, because your blog is such a pleasure to read I'm nominating you for the Liebster Blog Award.
http://thewordoferl.blogspot.com.au/p/blog-awards.html <--- go here to know more!
first paragraph is him responding to a paragraph I didn't post in this because I kinda touched on the subject in a previous post
Deletethe second is me
the third is him
and we continued our conversation another day but it got too far off track to post here
and thank you for the nomination, much appreciated