Everybody assumes that forgiveness is good, whether the person is sorry or not, and regardless of what the person has done. “Turn the other cheek,” they preach. What they fail to consider is that once you forgive away something bad, you’re communicating that it’s not really all that bad. You have no business expecting NOT to see the bad behavior again. Why should the person stop? He knows, deep down, that he’ll be forgiven anyway.
Everybody assumes that selfishness and self-interest are bad. What they fail to consider is how worthless a person becomes when he or she lacks a self. To tell someone to not care about his own needs means to turn him into a slave to the whims and desires of others. How valuable a person is a slave? How admirable and how competent can a slave actually be, to himself OR others? When a person is stripped of self-initiative, self-esteem, sense of pride from accomplishment, you are clearly doing that person no favors. You are denigrating him and making him less than he actually is, or could be. You’re even destroying him. How does it help anybody to make everyone selfless?
Everybody assumes that we are all our brother’s keepers. This is the moral code we’re all expected to believe, follow and never question. All religions spout this moral code and the agnostic or atheistic liberals/socialists on the left believe in the exact same code. Think about it. The measure of a moral code is how well it would work if everyone followed it. What would happen if everybody became everybody else’s keeper? Everyone would, in effect, be a social worker. There would be no people to start businesses, take risks, build or create things. These would all be careers which are too selfish according to the prevailing moral code. We need people who care, not people who produce for financial and/or personal profit, according to the prevailing moral code. What kind of world would that be? We’d all be poor and miserable. Most of us would perish. Granted, everyone would be equally poor and miserable. Where’s the morality in that? We should be thankful that most people don’t really act on this moral code of being our brothers’ keepers. It’s the only thing that keeps the world going.
Everybody assumes that man is an instinctual being. Man has no choice but to tame and curb his instincts by submitting to authority, according to this undisputed belief. Some say the authority should be a supernatural being. Others say the authority should be the officials who speak for that supernatural being on earth, i.e. church and religion. Others say the authority should be a political strongman or dictator, or maybe a body elected by democratic vote. Everyone seems to agree that man’s instincts must be curbed by something outside himself. It’s presumed that those who will do the curbing are reasonable. To religious believers, God is the all-reasonable one. To socialists and the like, government authorities are the all-reasonable ones. Yet if reason is the way to curb one’s irrational or self-defeating impulses, then why is the individual not considered capable of using his reason? Reason is a capacity available to all human beings. Why transfer this capacity and responsibility to others, when one is free to exercise it oneself? And pay the price if refusing to do so?
Everybody assumes that in life we must find “something greater than ourselves” or something “outside of ourselves.” How can any value exist without a self — a person — to do the valuing? It’s fine to have an ambitious purpose of some kind. In fact, it can even be great. But the very concept “ambition” or “purpose” implies a consciousness, or a person, to feel the desire or purpose in the first place. There is no achievement of any kind — regardless of how you define achievement — outside the existence of the person doing the achieving. And behind every achievement, there is a person who yearned to do the achieving, at least in large part, for his or her own sake. How in the world could it be otherwise? And why should we pretend otherwise?
Everybody assumes a lot of things which are downright wrong, and which make no sense. People wonder why there are psychological problems. How could there not be? When human beings adopt ideas which are at war with their very natures, with the facts of reality, then how can they not develop problems such as depression, anxiety, and psychotic breaks? These problems are symptoms of something deeper. To find out what your problems are, what caused them and how to resolve them, you have to look deeper.