Our Morals; Our ideas on what is best for our survival!

Life is a wonderful changing kaleidoscope of understanding of the world! When we enter life we all have 1 key goal, to survive. Depending on the circumstances that we get brought into, that goal is somewhere on the spectrum of extremely difficult to extremely easy. This clearly brings with it, as a consequence, a different set of heuristics or guidelines for the people who live in the different areas of the spectrum.

As a person becomes more conscious, their desire to move from simple survival to becoming self-governing (sovereign) increases and beyond that to respect the sovereignty of others independent of where the others are on that spectrum.

Now it is easy, or relatively easier, to respect the sovereignty of those with similar or more power than you, as they have the ability to prevent or at least resist attempts of subordination. It is actually harder, or we could say that we would need to be more conscious of our actions and their impacts to respect the sovereignty of those with either less power or those who make different choices in how they act due to a lack of empathy for their choices.

Our awareness of both our ‘power’ and our ‘consciousness’ of ourselves and others is key to expanding our own peaceful sovereignty. And as either or both our power or consciousness change, we adapt (or we could adapt) our heuristics or guidelines to how we live by treating ourselves and others with an increased level of respect for our and their sovereignty.

There are so many areas where this evolving appreciation can be noticed, let’s take these areas as examples that are discussed with frequency.

• The Freedom to Think
• The Freedom to Express Emotionally & Physically
• The Freedom of All Groups including Weaker Ones

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• The Freedom to Think

Our consciousness has brought along with it, the development of the ability to think, and the goal of our thinking is to survive and beyond that to prosper. As we are pack animals and live in groups, there is an additional level of rules that is to be considered. Each individual has their rules to survive which are due to the different circumstances of their environment. Different groups have different rules. But to get along as a pack or group, finding common ground rather differences becomes another element of survival as our instincts trigger our fight or flight reactions. Now the question is, how do the pack rules become established? Is it by power or by some other method? Power is by far the easiest method. This power is wielded by individuals or groups whether their style is by strength or benevolence. Then comes the person or persons who begins to leading through Monarchies, Religions, Political Groups that establish their own moral code which often were or are more static that the growth of a people and definitely slower than an individuals. Freedom becomes restricted for the common understanding of what iss thought to be good for the group whether it is the most effective approach for everyone or not. The groups guidelines are often the same rule for everyone even though everyone does not think in the same way. And the same rules are simply not applicable in a practical sense to all people. An ethereal way, swim may call utopian, would be to accept that ways of thinking would be accepted by all as long as they did not impinge on the sovereignty of an individual, pure philosophy.

More tangible examples of these differing philosophies can be viewed through the acceptance different opinions and the respect for living creatures with less might.

The 2 parts are about smaller groups and groups that have less power.

• The Freedom to Express Emotionally & Physically

The world is full of people with different preferences and that is what gives colour to life in all its expressions. Like very ‘Bell Curve’ there are the normal elements and the fringe elements. Acceptance of normal is usual and acceptance of fringe behaviours if often refuted and resisted by larger and more powerful groups. At least in my mind, if the ‘different’ behaviour is done willingly, and does not impinge on the sovereignty of others, it is wonderful. That is the expression of life! Having grown up in Ireland, people’s expressions that were different, i.e. from a sexual preference perspective, were actually considered illegal just like Brunei has declared this week with its new law on stoning. The de-humanization of people because ‘we’ are not confident enough in ourselves to accept others having different desires is a sad state of affairs.

• The Freedom of All Groups including Weaker Ones

The world has over 7 billion people in a wide spectrum of socio-economic circumstances. Places where due to environmental conditions have a low survival rate at birth and others who has all the conditions to give longevity and quality of life. And that is just talking about the humans on the planet. There are animals that live in their natural habitat and those who are breed and farmed for slaughter as food even though it is not necessary. Now if a human needs to do something to survive I understand the actions that might be taken even if the consequences are violent etc But if there is a choice to live abundantly and peacefully without those acts of violence, it is what I would call a no-brainer decision. therefore when I watch the Australian Prime Minister wanting to bring all “the power” of the law down on a few people (referred to as Green Collared Workers) who blocked traffic to protest peacefully about animal cruelty. It is easy to see that both habit and invested interests can be inhibitors to change, and particularly to evolving to a more sovereign environment even for the groups with less power i.e. animals.

#thoughts