Two of the most restrictive myths about humanity is that we must extract our standards and moral codes from either religious or political modes of thinking — the assumption being that without a government, god, or master of some other description, society will descend into amorality and there will be blood running in the streets.
This means that a great majority of our philosophies, moral frameworks and socioeconomic ideologies have that self-preserving silent assumption built into their cores, as do many of our theories of human behaviour. And while these assumptions might seem functional in terms of our interactions with the institutions of the man-made world around us, the cost of certain oversights due to this assumption is intense and ours to bear.
Not only does this assumption serve the basic function of keeping us reliant on political, economic, and religious control, but it inherently restricts and in some cases blocks our interest and discussions into new and alternative concepts.
Once all new curiosities and interests are filtered out through the “self-evident” societal truths that come with our silent assumptions, we are inevitably left supporting current systems and value-sets, and go on to do the necessary work to uphold them in ourselves regardless of whether or not they are obsolete.
When discussing new, alternative or otherwise disruptive concepts with others, the conversations call for us to cross into the territories of human behaviour, morality and values, science, psychology, and society itself, specifically when it comes to the influences that “The System” has on behaviour; conversations that require time, insight, and mutual understanding.
These conversations force the subject wide open, but this triggers a protection mechanism within the great majority of people who unknowingly make these silent assumptions, instantly capping the conversation and forcing it to be based on outdated cultural memes about how people are a certain way because of “Human Nature”, or that a certain aspect of society can be explained away by relying on phrases such as “that’s just the way it is,” which is followed by “that’s the way it should be.”
It’s important to note that these are active, functioning premises that inform our moral codes, our values, and how we think, but when they are stripped down to their core, they can be recognised as nothing but roadblocks, serving only to shut down conversation and awareness in favour of preserving current conditions and discouraging the uncomfortable and laborious exploration of alternatives.
Interestingly, despite how different these assumptions may be on the surface across cultures, each of them ultimately provides an explanation of the way things are that does not threaten the way things are. The most rebellious of political activists, for example, may threaten the career or life of a leader or the preservation of power by an entire group, but will scarcely threaten the presumed relevance of the political establishment itself. In fact, the only socially-acceptable desire is to feed in to this institution – just to be in charge of it.
This can also be recognised among the world’s economic systems and its religions as well, particularly those that make demands or place restrictions on people.
To bring it back to politics, the political concept of Anarchism can serve as a great example of these silent assumptions kicking into action. The word Anarchy is popularly used to be synonymous with chaos, civil unrest, blood running in the streets, buildings burning down, etc. In fact, this definition of the word is so prevalent that it is even the default for people who are aware of the broader conceptual definition of Anarchism.
In plain, simple fact, Anarchism was originally a concept that rejected the idea that The Government has a legitimate claim to authority over its citizens, and that educated, self-governing communities could be formed that outgrew the need for national authoritarian control and would enable people to live both peacefully and on their own terms.
What is happening here is a linguistic/semantic trick. Whether or not you agree with Anarchism as a concept, it is still an attempt at drawing up the blueprints for a peaceful society; nothing to do with destruction, but the definition and image that people default to in their minds when they hear or say the word “Anarchy” is often the direct opposite of what was originally intended, based on the self-preserving, silent, thought-stopping assumption that, without government, chaos will reign.
In most cases when people use the word Anarchy, they’d be better off using the lesser-known word Anomie, which is usually defined along the lines of “social instability caused by the erosion of standards and values,” and has its etymological roots in the Greek ‘a-‘ (meaning without) and ‘nomos’ (meaning law).
Lawlessness – exactly what the majority of people intend to refer to when they use the word “Anarchy.” The mismatch between the original meaning of the conceptual word ‘Anarchism’ and its modern definition is so common as to go unnoticed.
The philosophy of Stoicism, to take another example, can at times be difficult to talk about because a great many people have been led to consider the word ‘Stoic’ to mean cold, uncaring and sometimes non-responsive, and have likely met people who have called themselves Stoic while pretending to be indifferent to reality.
In fact, the original pioneers of Stoic philosophy were interested in peace and freedom through strength, and realised that the only way to be ready for these things as individuals was to embrace and to work with the suffering in life in order to face it and overcome it.
These misperceptions and subtle yet popular redefining of the words has the convenient consequence of making these concepts and others like them instantly dismissible to large numbers of people.
If someone were to genuinely explore Anarchist ideas with sincerity, they run the risk of finding themselves questioning the legitimacy of government as a whole, regardless of its ideology. If many people start doing that, it is not unforeseeable that this becomes a real problem for governments and a challenge to their power and, hence, their very existence.
Rather than dealing with this problem if and when it occurs, it’s practical for them to uphold the conditioning of these silent, seemingly self-evident assumptions, deliberately attributing the word Anarchy to chaos wherever possible, in a subconscious attempt to prevent people getting too far along with their exploration of such concepts.
A similar case can be made for Stoic philosophy, which empowers individuals to face their struggles and suffering head-on without outsourcing their strengths and decision-making abilities to any institution. This is subtly discouraged within a great majority of the world’s religions, as their interests in social control and the preservation of their own relevance means that the more people that are dependent on them for ‘guidance,’ the better.
The manipulation of the definitions of words can also serve a second purpose; the creation of the façade that people can still think freely, but, under the new definitions, the self-preservation of the institutions is guaranteed as all thinking that filters through them feeds back in to current conditions rather than challenging or threatening them.
George Orwell sought to communicate varying levels of this danger in his most famous book, “1984.” In this work, the rulers of the fictional state of Oceania have imposed a new, hyper-controlled language on the population. The language is called Newspeak, and it’s not only the language they use to communicate with each other but is also the language they think in.
Newspeak was designed to restrict the reasoning and limit the imaginations of the citizens of Oceania, rendering them incapable of exploring certain concepts and ensuring their self-preserving support for The State.
It’s crucial to note that their inability to consider these certain concepts is not due only to lacking names for them. It’s also that the underlying movements of logic beneath the thoughts they are capable of set up many restrictive silent assumptions and the redefining of words which discourages and otherwise blocks them from reaching these forbidden concepts as a natural consequence of any critical thinking.
How many other natural aspects of human behaviour and thought, or concepts that we can spend time considering, have been restricted, suppressed, brainwashed out of possibility, purely for the fact that it may threaten the institutions that were allegedly developed and maintained to serve humanity?
As for the assumption that without god or government, the world would be a bloody chaotic mess; we have that anyway, and the tyranny that these institutions impose on people “for their own good” along with the restrictive oppression that people impose on themselves and each other through belief systems does nothing to liberate people from the chaos, but only ever seems to stoke the flames.
Due to the infinite variation in our ability to think, there is no species more malleable and adaptable than the human being. When we realise this, it becomes clear that we can extract and develop standards and moral codes from many places, and even none at all. This adaptability is a double-edged sword, capable of seeing us through our personal and social struggles but also capable of having us adapt so deeply into the prisons of our own thinking that we are no longer able to see the bars.
First and foremost, we suffer with this as individuals, in our minds and in our behaviour.
Historically, the belief-oriented, ideological and power-based systems that direct the course of our world have sought to restrict this adaptability of ours to serve their own purposes. This, arguably, has produced a shallowness of human thought and has resulted in a great deal of confusion and conflict between the limited states of mind required of us in order to go along to get along, and our natural yearning to seek greater awareness, expression, forms of communication, and so on.
Now, with the rise of the internet, advanced communications technology and previously unexplored ways of thinking, many of the old states of mind, the claims of the past and hence the power and relevance of the institutions that push for them, are being challenged with such strong levels of resistance that it’s leading them to new levels of desperate, tyrannical means of maintaining their dominance over human thinking. As a consequence, they are churning out some of the most extreme, senseless belief systems and ideologies in order to squash these challenges, to set us against ourselves and, ultimately, to bring us back into a state where we are dependent on them.
This leaves us with states of mind where our beliefs and moral structures leave us not only divided against one another, but also divided within ourselves as individuals; capable of understanding and creating our way out of natural human problems, but unable due to being disarmed and divided under the rules of our social systems and the languages of thinking that support them.
Divide and conquer.
The BADN claim is that, if we broaden our worldviews to become historical, philosophical, scientific, technological, and also allow these factors and their insights and principles to inform our languages of thinking, rather than being shaped merely by political and religious ideological belief, then new concepts and frameworks for moral and intellectual structures will emerge and come to the foreground.
The resulting behaviours and social frameworks will likely be much more desirable than those we have today, no longer born out of divisive, self-serving, belief-oriented languages of thinking.
It is the claim here that instead of allowing our adaptability to be hijacked and focused onto the self-restricting, self-isolating characteristics of belief, it is entirely possible and practical to take a self-empowered, self-directed, more socially-aware approach, regardless of whether or not our traditional institutions approve of it.
This can be useful for people whether or not they subscribe to the ‘Believe and Disbelieve Nothing’ approach.
When it comes to morality, it has to be stated outright that it is not the goal to impose on people and lecture them, nor even to try to pull people out of some perceived slumber and raise them to some hypothetical ideal moral standard – each person is technically free to explore morality and amorality, to make as many mistakes and create as many bad memories as they like.
On the other hand, raising the standards and scope of our moral frameworks from an early age, reclaiming them from institutionalised languages of thinking and realigning them with our greater human awareness, will cast a wider net, creating a natural psychological refuge for larger numbers of people without having to subject them to the biases of religion, politics, or any in-group/out-group dynamics.
This can also be done without imposing on people’s technical freedom to ‘do what they want,’ but with a certain level of awareness built in to our language of thinking that not everybody wants to just be left to do what they want, especially since what people want can be manipulated, misperceived, maliciously conditioned over time, and so on.
This is especially true in the modern world, where people routinely have their true selves pushed aside and are hollowed out through various means of conditioning in order to sell products, to bring them into some belief-oriented or ideological group dynamic, to have them compromise themselves to seek social points and vain popularity – the list goes on.
With the internet offering people a window to the outside world, being able to critique others has become a popular pastime. This, without sufficient focus on self-awareness, as opposed to mere self-acceptance and self-worship, will assure that society is made of large numbers of people trained from a young age to keep their perspective turned outwards at others, rather than raising populations capable of real self-reflection.
This has led to growing numbers of people who are generally blindly accepting of their own patterns of thinking and behaviour, and, when beginning to delve into morality, become highly critical of those around them who do not validate their every tendency and impulse.
The growing trends of using moral virtue as a weaponised debate tactic, a means of social control, or as a way of breaking people down for ego-gratification or to score ideological points, quite frankly, need to be brought to an end. Not only do people who do this risk turning people away from genuinely admirable causes due to their self-righteous approach, but, on a personal level, they make it incredibly exhausting to be in their company.
Given that we’re still living in a belief-based world, with almost no focus on this language of thinking at all, we’re essentially doomed to consider these new concerns through old lenses. People and establishments just beginning to find their way through morality will come to conclusions that they consider worthy of others hearing, and they may well be, but they then go on to enforce these conclusions through authoritarian means, such as trying to enforce their morality through language-policing, and arrogant mockery of those they deem unaware or uninformed, not as enlightened or as psychologically advanced as they, etc.
These tendencies aren’t indicative of a psychologically advanced, intellectually superior or spiritually enlightened person; they’re indicative of someone who is using morality as a kind of weapon for their own self-righteous image and need for ego-validation.
This is to be expected, but it shouldn’t be taken as a sign that everything they’re talking about is wrong – just that their approaches are typically restricted to the old ways of doing things due to being conditioned in to these traditionalised languages of thinking.
Whether it’s compassion, empathy, understanding, recognition of our intrinsic ‘oneness’ – whatever the case may be – it has to be understood that these qualities must be reached as the result of genuine insight. They can’t be mandated by government as an attitude that people must assume, because this will always generate underlying resentment and resistance. Alongside that, if belief systems are still the primary language of thinking for humanity, all the tribalistic divisiveness that results because of them will still threaten this newly mandated moral structure.
The fact is, if there are ways of thinking that can disrupt the development of natural empathy, compassion, or mutual understanding among the species, they are belief, opinion, ideology – the languages of bias and division.
Nobody wants to see a world where people walk around acting like a bunch of intellectually moralising snobs. In fact, once again, to some degree, we already have that. A dangerous inadvertent consequence of this is pushing people so far away from the perceived snobbery of morality that they reject it outright and become lost without any direction at all, in turn leaving them wide open to life-defining levels of impulsive manipulation.
But if we do want to see a world where people are at least capable of change, growth, self-awareness, and reaching new ways of thinking and more practical frameworks of morality, no longer restricted by the self-preserving customs of the past, then this should at least be presented as an option to people.
In our current world, the emphasis is generally placed on ways of thinking that prepare people for work, that uphold the current established institutions, and that perpetuate the explanations of the way things are that do not threaten the way things are.
The claim here is that if we foster the psychological conditions for people to develop and embrace a practical morality guided by a new philosophical discipline and a new language of thinking, then we will adapt to those conditions with relative ease.
And so long as people at least expect the internal resistance and cognitive dissonance that will likely occur when trying to allow new ways of thinking to emerge while having to deal with the loud echoes of the old ways of thinking, then it stands less of a chance of preventing them developing and reaching these new standards of self-empowerment.
One socially unexpected source of morality is the ever-insightful scientific method. Although it can be argued that the scientific method doesn’t directly inform moral structures, it does empower the expansion of awareness necessary to align us with our interconnection with each other and with nature, and which encourages our natural human qualities instead of shelving them in favour of preserving the establishment and the closed-mindedness demanded of us by small groups of powerful people in order to carry out their will.
This method, combined with a coupling of overlooked, forgotten ancient philosophical wisdom and verifiable technical knowledge of today, can provide a solid, completely human foundation for a new kind of moral code, one that is confident in its positions and aware of its relationships and symbiotic connections, but also one that is critical and humble enough to change in an instant in light of new or conflicting information.
Not a top-down, micro-managed, superimposed, politically- and religiously-correct nightmare that can do nothing but feed in to current conditions and institutions, but a grassroots shift that starts with the individual and, if cultivated, will be able to support unified future societies who are able to relate a lot more effectively with everything and everyone around them.
Whatever our future world may look like, and the moral and intellectual structures that may take us there, there are certain things that we’d objectively benefit from taking conscious action in outgrowing and ensuring they are left to the history books where they belong. With all the insights and information we have today, we have more than enough to form new philosophical disciplines that can achieve exactly that, and produce far better states of mind, behavioural tendencies and social institutions than what is currently on offer to us.
Most importantly, it’s highly probable that these new disciplines will directly challenge a great deal of our misconceptions about how life and the world should be, and empower us to overcome a lot of the more oppressive silent assumptions about human behaviour that we have been raised to think are natural, permanent, and “just the way it is.”
Just as we have outgrown the more obviously obsolete superstitions of the past, we now have to deal with the subtleties of the present.
In the context of BADN, this means no more self-reinforcing reliance on tribalistic ideologies; no further fragmentation of humanity for profit and power; no anxieties or ego issues that people aren’t willing to face head-on; no vested interests in keeping things as they are or gatekeeping insight and awareness, and, potentially, no more assumptions of eternal dependence on a small number of political, religious, and financial powers.
These are just a few examples of what could be achieved with sufficient application of wisdom to our daily lives and to early education, and these advances will never be achieved by the current dominant ideological institutions as it simply goes against their self-defining, self-preserving, divisive natures.
“We live in a world where our social system is old, our language is old, the way we acquire goods and services is outdated, our cities are detrimental to our health, chaotic, and a tremendous waste of resources, and, most of all, our politics and values no longer serve us.”
Jacque Fresco
It’s time for a conscious upgrade.
These goals and guiding principles, infinitely better than the absolute claims, myths and mantras of the past, are intended to lead to the development of moral and intellectual structures that people arrive at with states of mind ready to be developed and refined according to our greater human awareness.
Finally, for the first time in known human history, this can be done and it is practical to strive for, and it has the realistic ability to free people from languages of thinking that have been pushed through doctrine, policy and fear, meaning that the ways that people think and live their lives will no longer rely on outdated, restrictive, manipulative social conditioning.
The ultimate goal is to realise a more self-aware, free-flowing yet practical framework for individuals and whole societies to build on, and one that is likely to produce the improvements in the integrity of our thinking, our standards of living, and the freedom, unity and prosperity that our traditional institutions have hijacked in order to preserve their power.
This can be done now, so long as we are willing and encouraged to shed the psychological obsolescence of our old states of being and the old ways of thinking — from belief, ideology and opinion, to awareness, insight, understanding, and wisdom.
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