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Balance
or balderdash?
It’s
often said the world has to be the way it is: there must be
good and bad so there can be balance.
Bullocks, that! The things required to make balance are not
good and bad, but light and dark —which, contrary to
what so many mistakenly think, is not the same as good and
bad.
Still, even if, let’s say, that it was good and bad needed
to make balance, we must see there is no balance. Good and
bad would have to be balanced for there to be balance, and
there is no balance between good and bad.
Suffering outweighs joy.
No one who is suffering under bad things talks of the need
for bad in the world; only those who want to do bad to others.
Take the Marquis de Sade, whom many a twit without an original
thought in their temple likes to call a father of free-thinking
and free-living, because he was a libertine and worse besides.
Sure the Marquis espoused doing exactly as one feels and being
rid of inhibitions, blah, blah, blah. But he meant that only
for the rich, the elite, the high-born, the bourgeoisie. He
meant they could do anything they wanted to the wretched poor,
not the other way around.
See one way would work for him and his class mates. The other
would have worked against them.
So people in general don’t mind bad things happening,
bad things being done... just as long as it’s to somebody
else.
Most of us do not seek to suffer unless we’re on a fundamentalist
path. Most of us see those who seek out suffering as odd,
deviant, a bit off their rockers.
The majority of us, given full selection between the two,
would choose joy over suffering any day; at least for ourselves.
For others we may choose something else.
And that right there, folks, explains the “mystery”
of “Why is there so much suffering in the world?”
The reason is man’s inhumanity to man.
This remains particularly perplexing, however, when we consider
evidence to the opposite: the amazing acts of kindness and
selflessness human beings display to loved ones and total
strangers on a daily basis.
It means we can do good. So why do we do bad? And since we
do bad, why do we ever bother to do good?
Perhaps we just all want to be in the press.
Consider all the asinine so-called reality TV shows, and call-in
radio programmes, in which people will do or have the most
absurd, degrading things done to or said to them merely to
get seen by a bunch of people.
Maybe mass media has so suffused the senses—term used
loosely—of the masses they’ve been brainwashed into
wanting to do anything to become a story.
So they kill. They rape. They beat and bash and bawl. They
set fire to whole buildings or little kittens they’ve
stolen off old ladies.
They blow up factories, cars, school buses. They bomb entire
cities full of people. They kill homos, abortionists, coloured
people, their sisters and wives, in God’s name I might
add. They steal from the rich and give to the...wait, no,
that’s not what they do; they steal from the poor and
give to the rich.
There are people who love and give and help and care. But
their stories seldom make the news.
And while the public boohoos at the media for its “bad
news” bent, the public itself tends not to buy periodicals
that take the positive approach.
Hypocrisy, as ever, is the order of the day.
Or, perhaps, it’s just confusion.
We often get confused over the question of good and bad, even
right and wrong (or could be we just convinced ourselves we
were confused and we actually knew which one to choose all
along.)
Perhaps if we allow our actions towards others to be motivated
by the desire to spread of joy rather than suffering, we’d
fare better at the “do no harm” thing.
“Are
you sure?” we could ask ourselves. “Are you sure
you will not bring woe in the long-run by committing this
act?”
I think that will help us to better come good.
Be BREWing again Sunday!
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