Edited ideas on good and evil

[haustusstevemcclure]

Re: "I think it's partly because I think of good as normal and evil as abnormal."

Wow!

My immediate, almost instinctual reaction when I read your sentence above was to say, to myself, that I think the exact opposite.

Then I immediately began backtracking, modifying, contextualizing [i read a lot of history, politics, philosophy, quantum science and, of all things, anthropology] and compartmentalizing, all in my own mind.

And then, again to myself, I began fearing that, in all this hedging of my reaction, I was just hamstringing the truth of my original instinctive reaction.

In the end, I guess I think my immediate instinctual reaction that evil is normal and good the achievement is basically more correct than your stance.

Of course, then, after that difference is seen, what we have to wonder about is all about the nature of good and evil.

I think, or maybe just hope, that I tend to think of 'evil' as disconnectedness, as processes acting on their own or tending to do so without care or concern for the processing of others, thereby usually interfering with others' processing.

Whereas 'good' is processes 'recognizing' and thereby 'joining with' other processes in a larger whole.

And that this "recognizing" and "coming to join" is, at bottom, 'after the fact' of the original state.

'Mutually supportive feedback loops' is, for me, the essence of 'good,' and this is, to me, not the primordial given and initial state of affairs. but rather the 'eventually achieved' state.  In other words, reality begins in chaos and cross-purposes and achieves [through evolution and sometimes through revolution] greater community.

Looking back, I find that the thinking of my, and maybe of our, youth had 'good,' and being,' and 'reality' and 'meaning' and 'value' and the ethical dimension as basically atomized, particularized, in separated being(s), each with their own nature, acting themselves and their separate natures out.

So, now, I go an opposed way to the thinking of my.youth and to your statement above quoted.

Here's another meandering association from memory.

Where our tradition begins with what was called  "prime matter" as ultimately valueless, meaningless, purposeless [just think about how this concept.worked in our neoscholastic days], so that all that is real finds its ground in "form " which is there, from the beginning, piece by piece....

......Whereas I find "form" and meaning and value to be an achievement, over time, within history, arising out of what was there before, at least ontologically "before."

I begin with the roiling,  formless, fluctuating, energy-filled "chaos" as itself struggling to 'come to be,' to 'enter into' something other than what it is, i.e., into mutually supportive feedback loop processing] -- with that which we call "evil " being the primordial chaos, yearning to become what it did not begin as, namely that which we call evil, fighting to become good.

Now obviously I don't have the slightest 'feel' for how all this about my vision of reality relates to, or makes sense of, our differences about Putin or about Winston Churchill, or about really anything, for Pete's sake.....

.....But maybe it does, eventually, somehow.

Sent from my T-Mobile 5G Device

[haustusstevemcclure]

After correcting the typos and adding or editing a phrase here or there, I re-read this.

What strikes me is how 'time focused' my thinking tries to be.

Time and history are at the core of reality.  Process is the core of reality.

So everything is 'coming to be.'

Then again, maybe the three immediately previous sentences are mostly too filled with the stain of pomposity.

Sent from my T-Mobile 5G Device

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[Jim Doran]

Was this previously titled 'More all Things British'?

Thanks.

jd

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