Keeping Our Brains Honest

THE LADY at the senior center who got caught stealing and got fired spooked me a bit. Not that I'm naive, or anything like that. I certainly shouldn't be, at seventy one years of age. My thinking is: if someone like her, a deeply religious Pentecostal, is doing something like this, then precisely what in hell or on Earth might the rest of of us be doing? I recall reading a stark stat. Your average American and probably average human in general will commit at least one felony during his or her lifetime, many of them unknowingly. Part of that is of course the sheer number of felonies on the books; tens of thousands, available for committing, in our litigious, legalistic American culture. Part of it is human nature. Cheating seems to be a somewhat basic human behavior, intended to provide the cheater a competitive advantage. To keep ourselves honest, we must rely on ourselves, and our received moral standards. One way or another, the criminals are going to get inside our fortress homes, despite all our locks, alarms, and guns. We lock our doors to keep the rest of us, each other, the honest people, honest. In smaller groups mutual monitoring helps keep all members honest. Both honesty and deceit are necessary, it seems, for human survival. And it seems that all of us, in one way or another, are mentally ill, just as arguably nobody experiences perfect physical health all the time. I suffer from paranoia, I think. But of course, we must be careful precisely waht we describe a "ill". Under Stalin, it was considered a mental illness to fail to embrace communism. We must avoid the trap of diagnosing so many types of behaviors as "mentally ill" that we all start taking pills at the slightest provocation which turn us into uniformly mentally stagnant zombies. The first time you look at a Picasso or Dali painting or hear Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring", you might be tempted to ascribe to some sort of mental or "artistic illness", as many originally did, rather than, more properly, to artistic creativity and genius. One might wonder how great Beethoven would have been had he not been sick and depressed much of the time, or deaf, with the attendant isolation, depression, and anger. Not worth a plugged nickel, perhaps. The mind must be free to be creative. Sure, let's study technique, let's ahve our do's and don'ts. But above all, let's allow our shining, unique personalities emerge from wthin ourselves, radiate outward, and wash over each other in our unique individual vibrations of joy. I think it was Carl Sagan who said that considering the sheer number of brain cells we all have within our skulls, we should probably never be surprised by anything anyone ever says or does. We also do well to remember that all actons, large and small, engender responses. There isn't the slightest piece of real evidence that there exists anything which might remotely be called "free will". There is a great amount of evidence that every particle of matter and enerty in the universe obeys the laws of nature. Instead of thinking in terms of reward and punishment, praise and blame, it might help to think in terms of cause and effect. If every human being in the world embarked on a project to make better choices and decisions, perhaps the cumulative effect of billions of better decisions, better choices, better thinking, would transform the world, from its current largely undesirable state of affairs, to one much more closely reembling a utopian vision the sort of which most people imagine and desire. As Carl Sagan pointd out, humanity is not afflicted with a shortage of intelligence, but himan intelligence is a tool which can be used either destructively, or productively. We can destroy, but, thank heavens, we can create.