New Ideas: Ideals and Reality, Part Three

When I think of a world such as this, I grow despondent. We are primarily selfish beings because selfishness commonly benefits the individual on a physical level. We create economies and philosophies that thrive off of this behavior, and then call on an aggregate force to reign in on the terror some would create for others. The ideal is to use money taken from others and use it to alter the world we live in, often combating the very selfishness we ourselves perpetuate.

The ideals of government are grand, yes, just as the ideals of freedom are. But in a world with imperfect people with selfish desires, we find ourselves with poor uses of both government and freedom. So we develop a mindset that favors one over the other, mainly to create a scapegoat for our poor state of existence, using the opposite force to combat what we detest. All of us urge the government to reduce freedoms we dislike, and all of us reduce the power of the government in order to create certain opportunities we do like. It is a tug of war between the selfish interests of society.

There is a reoccurring theme of order versus chaos. People see society as if it existed on such a scale, but that scale is simply a great oversimplification of the combined action of all present individuals. Self-governance never exists in these polarizing scenarios, simply because you cannot have both order and freedom when a large majority of a particular society acts on selfish impulses. One need not be evil to be part of the problem, but ignorant, and ignorance abounds in the human race. So does mediocrity, as well as complacency and laziness.

Humanity does not currently exist as a race that focuses on the ideal state. Few can even agree what such a state would be, let alone act on such beliefs. So we do not know what to believe, what to fight for, and when we do take that leap into action, it is often against others who faced different challenges and arrived at a different solution. So then, by focusing on our problems, we focus on those who reject our solutions, and suddenly humans become expendable. In our desire to make the world a better place, we destroy each other, and that is because selfishness has always ruled our very nature.