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I spend a lot of time at work in the midst of the hustle and bustle thinking about things to write here, while never actually having the chance to get them down since I'm usually too tired to articulate them when I get home. I do enjoy building this website and it's beginning to integrate well into my life.
I'm usually pretty open to change and much like the weather I find myself changing at a gradual rate over time with surprise temporary drastic storms from time to time. It gives me pause to reflect on my various mistakes in life and learn how to avoid them in the future.
I find myself putting forth my best efforts with regard to acting well, yet over the years I've mucked it up pretty seriously. Although I'm not going to go into that sort of thing now, my life is more or less an open book. Hopefully I've at least set the example on what not to do. It is likely a bad job to have, but someone inevitably fulfills the position.
Yet it's not my mistakes that bother me so much as the attitude of others that ought to be beyond making these sorts of mistakes. Just when you think you've found the type of folks that have their stuff together, you come to find that they're typically as lost, if not more so, than yourself. So my hope here is to just make a few brief statements that come to mind that may be helpful in ascertaining that transcendence of error that we seek to achieve.
As one comes to find herself alienated from immediate society, questioning how she got there in the first place, she may find herself searching for answers as to whether anyone at all shares the sentiments that expedited her disconnect. Perhaps with those folks can she find sanctuary. Yet even if she does find that crowd, it is still likely that she will be faced with an established political order. One that on the surface is very different from that of which she came, yet as she involves herself more deeply into the mechanisms she discovers that the folks operating the levers still share much of the same flaws as those in the social environments from which she has been expelled. It is not surprising to find these new crowds sharing, in essence, entirely new flaws of their own that compound the confusion and frustration.
It is in one sense surprising to find these anti-establishment communities sharing in the habits of the old order. These groups have a natural tendency to form cliques within themselves and even "good ol' boy networks", which in light of our post-modern era now include girls, of course. And while there may be a semantic shift from "good ol' boy" to (perhaps) "good ol' person", the core of the problems faced by our troubled individual seem to still be alive and well, generating ever more setbacks to accomplishing the ideal of anti-establishment doctrine.
I don't intend for this to be a defense of eudaimonia, I'm not qualified to give an adequate academic defense of it. However I do carry a conviction for eudaimean virtue ethics, so my comments about it are built upon it as a valid premise.
As eudaimonia is the ultimate end of all human action, it seems that to curtail its attainment in any fashion is unethical. One may be acting in a fashion that runs contrary to becoming eudaimon while attempting to attain it. Now there is nothing inherently wrong per se with helping this individual to realize his mistake in a way that promotes ascertaining eudaimonia. Yet if that other comes along, curtails any potential achievement and exacerbates the problem even in the context of trying to help him, such action runs contrary to its attainment and thereby is also unethical.
I'm guilty of making this mistake on multiple counts. Yet I know others who are just as guilty, if not more so. I'm fortunate insofar as I've come to the aforementioned conclusion. For those who have helped me discover it in a eudaimean fashion, I extend my endless gratitude to you. For those who have set me back, while I still come to grips with conquering the bloodlust that you've engendered, I hope that one day you discover your own mistakes. Please don't cower at and avoid what you find in the face of self-discovery. |