The SUPEREGO

 
Human beings act in the world. Why? Basically our needs are simple but necessary to maintaining the biological being. How one acts are conventionally same as how others act, yet I think I do things my way. There is an expectation that one sovereign being is aware of what that means for oneself and for others. There are ethical conventions which in the collective being exudes unquestionable authority in governing the human soul. This authority is not guarded by the gun but in the very way people behave and act. No one likes to be told what to do with the niggly details of socialising. Beyond the ten commandments, a truly minimal set of condensed ethical behaviour, we all prefer to interpret each relational problem on its merit and measure it against the general truth of collective being. There is a political system that keeps the structure of society together and functioning but it should not involve telling individuals how to be. Keeping all the essential services running in itself is quite a task, so when someone asks me to produce a garden, despite the difficulties, I try my best to get the various big and small tasks performed with equal diligence.

Are axioms truths? Well, they are not exactly lies but if you believe that all men are born equal and therefore ought to have the same income and that no one should own property then you better think through what the legalisation and enforcement of such social theories might mean before you become convinced that it is a good idea. Everybody disavows the communist tyrannies as if they truly understand what happens at the psychological level of state power; and sure, workers ought to earn more but that is a matter of negotiation and agreement at the commerical level, not of ideological conflict. The freedom to own things is the predicated on the sanctity of individual sovereignty.

Social contracts ought to bind you at the interpersonal level rather than the abstraction that is the State.

If your architect is proposing to impose his ugly design before us on your behalf, since visions project out beyond your boundary, we have a dispute that we must try to resolve amicably. If it is all the same as the post-modern theory goes, how can the fact of finding a building ugly lack any kind of explanation?

If traditional belief systems have not been determinant in forming human character right up to now, there might be an excuse for chucking it all out and starting all over again. Mao admired his own little red book. It was not a book that left much space for a critique. Nietzsche's 'Übermensch' is not a call for self-improvement. Rather it is a symbol of failure. The body is an outline of limits. A political theory cannot be built on that the assumption that out of this body will emerge a superior being all by itself. Such an idea was predated by Mary Shelley Wollstonecraft's novel Frankenstein. There is deep dissatisfaction. It is a bright sunny day and angry fists are shaking against the sky. And these are people like you and me co-opted into one consciousness or another breathing in the same deep space.

Personalised moral guidance aside, the wolves are out there. A friend got mugged the other day because one guy tipped off another guy about the fat wallet. In the beginning there was the Word. "Thou shalt not steal." How many stories are there where theft as the central momentum of the drama that unfolds and where a heroic act gets the money back so that the moral equilibrium is restored? Yes, the wolves are out there and wolves move in packs. Adam saw a wolf and called it thus.

Even in the bliss of freedom, it becomes quickly apparent that decisions must be made. Try and get past those ten rules and you will only find the book with twelve. It is called the antidote to chaos and I am not sure what there is to find if you get past this one.