This week I had a number of conversations with folks about our society and racism and homophobia and free speech. Michael Sam is the first openly gay player to be drafted by the NFL and he went to the St. Louis Rams. When he was picked he kissed his partner and some people found that offensive. One of them was an NFL player who tweeted OMG and horrible. The player was suspended.
My only point was that both players had a right to freely express their feelings. Others thought that anyone expressing homophobic or racist comments needs to be silenced. Nobody is advocating that government interfere with free speech, and so this is not a first amendment issue. But many people feel employers have every right to discipline employees that say things that are offensive.
The NBA case against Donald Sterling continues, with the rest of the owners pressing to remove him as an owner for racist comments that were recorded while he was at home.
I would like to take a moment and step back from the specific details and take a broader look at these issues. Sometimes in the heat of the moment we forget about larger ideas.
I have written before about natural law and natural rights. The idea is that there are certain universal truths that exist, certain “natural” laws of man as part of creation. Some of these have been enumerated by philosophers through the ages, and some have been enshrined in our founding documents.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
All men are created equal. To me that does seem self-evident, as does the right to life and liberty and to pursue happiness. Some are bothered by the term self-evident, and so folks like Ayn Rand have taken great pains to describe an epistemology from scratch that describes the origin of these rights based on rational concepts and reasoned logic.
Of course it must be pointed out that Jefferson’s words were written while people still owned slaves and it was not until Lincoln that those great words could be defended in our society. And even then it would be many years before blacks and women would get the right to vote and the 1960’s before we would pass meaningful civil rights legislation.
And yet, we got the words right at the start. “All men are created equal”. Sometimes I think our slow painful discovery of the natural laws governing men resembles our sometimes slow and painful discovery of the laws of sciences such as physics and chemistry. It is an imperfect process, but the truth does reveal itself, in bits and pieces. In a frustratingly slow manner we are revealing the truth about science and natural laws.
Even more frustrating is to look at the rest of the world where they do not yet see the reality that we do. Young girls are kidnapped from school and threatened with being sold as sex slaves and a pregnant mother is sentenced to death for refusing to renounce her faith.
There are still debates in this country about evolution and whether the earth is more than 6000 years old. We debate climate change and abortion and the death penalty and the rights of homosexuals.
I have my personal views, of course. I think that hundreds of years from now when we have a better understanding of both science and natural laws regarding society there will be certain truths that will be self-evident to future generations. We should never kill humans, from conception to natural death, unless they pose an immediate threat to us. So I think abortion and the death penalty and drone strikes that kill innocent people are wrong. And I think war is to be avoided unless it is a last resort to defend lives from imminent attack.
I think we will find that when we say all men are created equal it means all people, throughout the world, regardless of the circumstances of their birth, have equal standing in society. That would include people of all nationalities and colors and genders and religions and sexual orientations and ideologies.
And I think the free expressions of any point of view, no matter how offensive or stupid or brilliant or uncomfortable will be tolerated. I also think that this will diminish the number of stupid and offensive points of view. We will find that the free expression of ideas and open debate is the antidote for stupidity and backwards thinking, and that silencing viewpoints perpetuates those things.
I also think we will come to the realization that we are all sovereign individuals, responsible for ourselves and free to pursue that which makes us happy. We are not members of groups or special interests, but free and independent men working for our own self-interest which in turn furthers the common good. We will find that it is possible for all men to earn what they need without needing to take from others that which they did not earn.
I could be wrong, but that is my vision. It is one of freedom and independence and self- reliance and equality. It is one of free and open communication of ideas. It is a vision of a world where people are only born as a conscious and deliberate act by loving parents and where killing is exceedingly rare and stealing from others a distant memory of times past.
Years ago I read a book by Dr. Maxwell Maltz titled Psycho Cybernetics that had a profound influence on my life. Dr. Maltz was a physician who proposed the idea that our brains function as goal-seeking cybernetic devices. Space does not allow me to fully present his theory but if one imagines the act of picking up a pencil using only fully conscious commands you soon realize what an amazing “device” our brains are. If we had to consciously think, “contract left bicep”, “ extend index finger”, move thumb toward index finger”, etc., life would be incredibly difficult. Instead, we simply supply the goal – pick up the pencil – and the wonderful cybernetic device that is our brain does the rest.
There is the “you” which we call our being or soul, and there is the goal seeking mechanism that we use, called our brain. This is a very powerful tool that if used incorrectly will yield the wrong results. Our brain takes note of what we imagine and seeks to make it reality. If you keep saying, “nobody will ever love me”, or “I am not going to get a job”, then your brain will strive against you to make those things reality. Likewise, positive mental images will unleash the power of our brains to achieve positive goals.
I am told this is the basic idea behind other books such as “The Secret”, but I have not read that book. It is the idea behind Norman Vincent Peale’s “The Power of Positive Thinking” as well. But Dr. Maltz in my opinion does a much better job of explaining the “why” behind his theory.
Which brings me back to society. I will not suggest that there is some societal brain or collective consciousness, but I do think that as a collection of individuals we exert a collective force on society based on our vision of society and what we picture. As we picture society in our brains there is a goal seeking tendency in the individual to bring it to reality and if enough of us share a vision it exerts a powerful collective force in one direction or another.
We need to pay attention to those dreams, those visions of society that we feed our brains. I know that racism still exists, but if enough of us keep repeating that “racism is a huge problem” then it will have a negative effect. If we say “skin color does not matter”, then it does not mean there are not people who are racist, it just means that we have a vision of society where skin color is irrelevant.
If, in our attempt to make sure nobody expresses any negative opinions about people who are gay we focus on every negative comment, then the negative comments become our focus and instead of celebrating diversity we perpetuate disagreement.
We cherish people like Jefferson and Gandhi and Lincoln and Kennedy for having a vision of positive possibilities. We admire Dr. Martin Luther King for having a Dream of a better world. Our great leaders always see things the way they can be and then work to bring those visions to reality.
There is evil in the world, and I am as guilty as anyone of pointing out the negative. I understand the need to recognize those things that are wrong so that we can correct them, both in myself and in society. Having a positive vision does not mean we ignore reality. It just means we need to be careful what vision we fill our heads with.
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