Carry the carrot, leave the stick behind

Ok, here we go, a third post in a row that touches on the conception of sub- or super- humanism except that this time I feel I should backtrack a bit and just stick with humanism as it is. Terms like sub-humanism and super-humanism in the end seem a bit too loaded and end up making me write those little disclaimers in order not to be misunderstood as condoning the treatment of people as less or more human.

I am partly driven to this point by Taco Nat’s response to my last two entries and partly by a bit of thinking I did afterwards. I thought about myself and how exactly qualified can I really be to call other people ignorant and conforming or sometimes even further imply them as shallow or dumb, when I have desires or emotional triggers of my own, which can on occasions potentially make me at least temporarily ignorant/conforming/dumb/childish/asshole/lazy/please-tell-me-more.

Even though I tend to do this (like, shut off or shut the hell up) in my “free time”, I have to recognize the fact that not all people have the kind of main occupation that allows them so much freedom to pursue philosophical topics as I am. I essentially turned doing that into part of my “job”, but a lot of people have something much less liberating as their job or are just much more sharply focused on doing a particular thing they like that they don’t constantly surf around exploring anything around everything they are possibly interested in, like I tend to do.

That said, I still believe that culture of ignorance and conformism are quite prevalent and that they contribute hugely to the difficulty of changing our societies to the better. I also believe that Idiocracy exists, at least in some pockets of our society. However, the farthest I should go is to acknowledge that these cultures exist, what makes them be what they are and why I think they are harmful to society. Putting any particular sub-culture or group of people under those categories would probably be going too far just as well as saying that their aspirations are towards sub-humanism or super-humanism. They might just be human within the circumstances they are in and the mind set they developed.

In other words, I should practice the kind of approach where I keep talking about these problems and encouraging people to be as superb humans as they can be without saying or implying that they would be worth less if they don’t, for I can’t exactly go around playing a role of a religious leader or a God to someone who can tell people “This is the way you should be and if you are not, you are a veeery baaaad person!”, right?

In other words yet again, let’s just try to help. Carry the carrot and leave the stick behind. Kind words never hurt and unkind responses wont kill me. I should be more mature than that anyway.

That said, I still fully stand behind all that I’ve said in my last entry except for anything that might sound like a “stick” kind of approach and the “sub- super- humanism” suboptimal terminology. If I may say so, I believe there are some good ideas presented there. I think we should all be leaders.

So I stick to humanism, and DoublePlusHuman.com is going to be essentially about promoting humanism mixed with libertarianism. I didn’t yet decide on the exact form and content for it, but it will come in due time. It is not the only project that is coming up.

Cheers

Tags: Philosophy