Epistulae morales

I have been thinking lately. About conventions. About rules. About interhuman norms and precepts. And about the place where they might be coming from. And about why I do believe in them in general but why I don't care about them in particular.

I understand their origins, and I also do understand those who apply them throughout each and every incident they find themselves in. And I would love to say that I work the same way. Unfortunately, however, this is not so. I don't claim that I am unorthodox, I don't and won't ever even try to argue that I fall for the bohème or might even be one of them. I am not. Unorthodoxies are just as much laced in a corset of rules as the acts of the conventionalists. Regularly breaking the rules is unimpulsive and predictable and as such accompanied by the same tedium and conformity that any house of regulations is built upon.

In an era where we are forced to invent new definitions for any movement that mankind ever brought up since we are in the habit of exaggeration and excess, in an era that needs to wed the term conservatism with a prefix titled social or an object named value, it doesn't make much sense to call yourself something, does it?

Values are misused in every layer of society and they always have been to attract the weak and the lost and ultimately to control the latter. Yet values are far away from being a grand intellectual invention at least according to my (utterly stubborn) moral idea. Values are self-explanatory, obvious and innate. Values are instinctive.

I don't deny the great human talent to subvert it's instincts - the ones that dwell in ourselves and the ones that we face in our counterparts to turn them into unremorseful stooges.

We don't have to talk about that, and I certainly shouldn't as I lack the ability to entirely grasp the wider context.

But I do have a certain understanding of the interhuman laws and rules that I am surrounded by and the desperate attempt of the people around me to press their actions and non-actions into the laws and rules they read into their counterparts' ideals because they think that they are expected to do so.

And this is exactly the point where I lose my sympathy, my empathy and my understanding. I believe that we could lead a far more unencumbered and unladen coexistence if we would stop to think that we are supposed to live up to what we think our vis a vis expects. We entirely underestimate the ability of our fellow being's to decide for themselves what they can cope with and what they can't. Lies are the most obnoxious and irreverent attack on the power to judge of the ones we lie to. Just imagine we would lack the gene of falsehood and the amazing side-effect this condition would entail. We could be entirely confident that the people around us were there because they wish to. We could be entirely assured that our actions and non-actions were accepted which of course wouldn't equal approved but this isn't something that a grown-up and genuine human being should strive for anyhow.

When I observe people who spin a sweet yarn instead of being silent or truthful just because they underestimate people and their permissiveness and because they believe that their actions would be disapproved, I get sick.

And I wonder if the ability to lie is really genetically manifested as the result of a spontaneous mutation at some point of human evolution or if it is purely and simply a nasty little human weakness.

"I really will go straight to school tomorrow and I'll be good." ~ Pinocchio