Sunday, October 14, 2018
Alienation, Meaning, and False Dogma
I have submitted the following comment to the fabius maximus site, in response to an article on alienation:
Large-scale, or mass, alienation is due to a general incompetence on the part of the "experts", particularly in science and religion. Or to make a long story short, too long nurturing of false dogmas in the underlying assumptions of a civilization or society. The primary false dogma of modern times is the establishment of Darwinian, or undirected "evolution" as the paradigm for all scientific observation and explanation of all that we observe, without thought for the essential meaninglessness behind that assumption.
This works on the individual level too, because the individual's mind is the very unit of intelligence, which absolutely requires meaning, or more fundamentally, meaningfulness of all that is in our lives, all of the physical universe particularly (which feeds our senses).
In my book, "The End of the Mystery", I identified what I have learned through my research and lifetime of experience as the natural philosophy of Man: "I think, therefore God exists." "God", in turn, is identifiable as the meaningfulness behind all things. Our own, slightest rational thought presupposes such overarching meaningfulness; without it, our thoughts must fall apart -- hence, alienation, from ourselves and from the meaningful world.
Alienation is the individual's natural response to an assumed meaninglessness, to which the meaningfulness of our own thoughts give the lie, always and ever. The answer is, and has always been, to realize once and for all that the world and everything in it is meaningful, both in itself and in its connections to all else. Which is not to pretend that any human being knows all of those meanings, or the overarching meaning of it all. Just that logic itself tells us, or should if we are intellectually competent or wise, that the meaningfulness of all is real, and independent of our limited understanding.
I have probably said, "protested", too much...but such is life; I have said it, I take responsibility for it, I proclaim it to the world. Go forth, and multiply the understanding
As if that weren't already a lot to think about, I added separately:
The growing trouble with multiculturalism should also be mentioned. You can see how that is going, with the Western embrace of Islam and the bringing together of cultures that don't WANT to come together, but to cling each to their own culture as superior, despite evidence to the contrary. Our societies are not judging the long-held dogmas of each culture competently -- it's kind of like introducing a new predator into one's biosystem, without regard for its predatory nature. Really stupid, and the scientists have been guilty of that themselves, in their trying to improve on the established systems of the natural world while not understanding those systems well at all.
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