“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book
rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building
has been renamed, every date has been altered.
And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in
which the Party is always right.” --George
Orwell, 1984
All human beings share a common desire for meaning. Did you choose to be born? Neither did anyone else! Jean-Paul Sartre reasoned that once born we
are “condemned to be free”. But with
freedom comes responsibility. And even
when restrained, we always have the freedom regarding how we respond to
circumstances. Pragmatism teaches that we
all have the capacity to strive to make things better in life, even though we
will never achieve perfection. We may be
terribly restrained in life, but we have the freedom to act well. Compassion for a child, animal or forest
comes from being aware that we’re all interconnected.
No single role such as our jobs, our relationship status,
our political views, our philosophical views, etc. can ever define a person
since we are always changing. Our elders
teach us that you can never cross the same river twice because by the time you
cross again, both you and the river have changed. Aristotle encouraged his students to strive
for success but acknowledge that external forces can inhibit that
progress. Hedonic calculus predicts
whether something will be pleasurable in the long run or not, e.g., drinking
beer all evening (short term pleasure or long-term pain) or studying at a
university (short term pain for long term gain). Actually, I was able to validate both
examples on my way to achieving both of my degrees!
St. Augustine reminds us that the presence of evil gives us
a perspective on those things that are good, e.g., a long harsh winter gives us
a much greater appreciation for the warming spring. A visiting tourist at the preserved Nazi
concentration camp at Auschwitz asked a guide why the locals hadn’t simply
burned such a terrible place to the ground after the prisoners had been
freed. He replied that it had been discussed
but after thoughtful consideration they wanted to preserve this place of horror
as a reminder to the world that the events which created it would never be
repeated. Hate has created many
problems in our history but has never solved any yet.
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