The Start Of Another Day: Chapter VI-Part 1-

CHAPTER VI: Development

    Stoicism has been such a big part in my life that it would be unreasonable for me not to mention it anywhere in this book, if you did not notice already, all of the views that are present in these chapters are heavily influenced by Stoicism, which is a Greek school of philosophy that was founded by Zeno of Cyprus at around 300 B.C. Stoicism consists of a group of virtues and beliefs that are all centered around the idea that everything is connected through cause and effect, and the inevitable  ignorance of what is ultimately “good” or ” bad” for us as humans, in other words, a big part of stoicism is believing that even in the darkest hours of our lives we must not fail to acknowledge  that this darkness in itself might bring a light brighter than any light we’ve ever seen before( take the explanation I set for understanding The Chaos Theory as an example) . Stoics also tend to prefer viewing life how they see it and not how they want it to be, or in simpler terms, they are realists before anything else. Another part of stoicism (which is more so a result of being stoic and not an integral part of it in and of itself) is being able to control your emotions and avoid throwing emotional fits even under pressure, always prioritizing logical thinking over unleashing your emotions without any given thoughts. As I declared above, being a stoic implies being a realist (without mentioning that what is considered “realistic” depends on a person’s perspective on life), from a philosophical standpoint however, I and many other stoics believe that the end does not always justify the means, even if we only care about the definite results in a certain situation, going through a set of undesirable or questionable acts in order to realize them will generally engender other negative consequences you did not intend to cause in the first place. That aside, Stoicism made me experience numerous epiphanies and changed my views significantly, it is a truly great philosophy in my opinion, however, it is not a flawless one; one of the major flaws of Stoicism (or at least what appears to be a flaw for me) is the fact that stoicism is a somewhat difficult philosophy to adhere to properly, and that is because it requires a significant amount of self-repression and self-control; whether we like it or not, emotions are an integral part of our lives, and are in fact necessary for us to have in order to be emotionally stable, oftentimes the problem with stoicism is that people might feel overwhelmed and cornered by the fact that they have to ignore their emotions, which would only lead to negative consequences if they force themselves into Stoicism, for example, if someone had a loved one pass away recently, and genuinely feels sad and hurt because of that, he should not repress his emotions , in the contrary, he should be honest to himself and admit that he is sad and unhappy but that he will get over it eventually nonetheless, once given enough time and space that is. This is different than being pessimistic and willingly “embracing the sadness” mind you; this method is much more beneficial to a mourning person since repressing your emotions will sometimes lead to an involuntary feeling of overwhelming sadness long-term, in addition to having many harmful effects on your psyche. On that point, I would like to refer to another issue which is being overly pessimistic about life,  If you ever feel unhappy when thinking about the world, or have an overly grim view of your surroundings, always remember that you are in fact human, so you should most certainly refrain from dwelling too much on ideas that bring you unhappiness and that are out of your control (whether be it thinking about your past or future), moreover, there’s no shame in feeling anger or sadness, it is something everyone goes through at some point in their lives.

      After being introduced to stoicism, I’ve come to realize something very important to me, which is the importance of experiences and their significant role in shaping your personality: it is necessary to experience certain things in order to form a certain point of view in regards of a certain matter, which is why I believe that it is unnecessary to try and convince people that had different experiences compared to you as well as having their own unique opinions; even right now as you are reading my book, I do not expect you to be fully convinced by everything I say  nor do I want to push my ideals on you (even though not pushing my ideals in itself is an ideal that I am pushing unto people, but I digress, exposing philosophical dilemmas such as that one are not the purpose of this book) I advise you to seek out new experiences and to form your own opinions, while disregarding other people’s opinions when it  comes to judging a certain matter, that being said, I do believe that you should make use of other people’s experiences and try to learn from them since that might change your own perspective, this is especially true when we talk about learning something new. That brings me to my next point, which has a bigger relation with stoicism than my last one, and that is the unfortunate revelation that you will never know what experiences will be the most beneficial for you, and even if you did, chances are, if an experience seems unpleasant and “bad” for you, it would be extremely difficult to convince yourself otherwise, or at least that’s what has been the case for me generally speaking.

      As I have previously mentioned in the second chapter of this book, I do not believe that humans do not have absolute free will, which implies that there can be no “good” nor “bad” people fundamentally, one thing that I did not mention however was that “free will” as we know it through its philosophical definition is nothing but a label for another human concept that has no concrete or objective definition, especially when you take into consideration the Chaos Theory that I mentioned in the first chapters: if our opinions are formed through experiences where we rarely have any control over their outcomes, then no one is a neutral entity that has ideas of his own that cannot be influenced by other factors, this means that the concept itself doesn’t really exist, in other words, maybe we are capable of thinking freely, just in a different form of freedom than what we usually perceive it as, or in even simpler terms, we do have free will, but that free will is nothing more than us being  constantly influenced by other factors, and thus making us change perspectives, while appropriating those perspectives as our own. The reason why I am bringing this up is to explain another idea of mine which has been quite the discovery for me, that idea is that we generally fail to take into account that we are a part of the universe and an important part of the ecosystem as well; we are constantly interacting and making irreversible changes to our surroundings, whether be it in the favor of our planet or against it. Many people claim that humans are constantly destroying the environment around them for their own benefit, how I see it however, humans are as much of a balance mechanism to the planet as killers are a balance mechanism to society and to the overall population, with the exception being that in this case, humans do actions that seem to go in  both directions, for example,  if we were to drive a species of animals to extinction, animal welfare associations would incite governments to enact laws in order to prevent anything similar from happening again, or if phenomena such as climate change appear, we will look into the causes behind their appearance and we will start viewing  the causing acts as harmful acts,  in addition to trying our best to avoid them, as well as doing actions that would counteract them. It doesn’t just end at canceling the harmful changes that we make however, humanity also deals with abnormalities that happen naturally, such as dealing with the over-breeding of certain species in certain biomes by relocating them in a more habitable area with more food supplies, or even creating  natural reserves for example. This all goes to show that  humans do have their place in the ecosystem and that we cannot say with certainty that the world would be better off without them, we think that it will be when we see how much harm we’ve done to the planet, but we have not seen what the planet would be without us, nor can we predict all the circumstances that will change because of our absence, and as I mentioned before, even the most seemingly minor factors can play a huge role in the development of a situation. Something similar can be said about morality and ethics, that is because humanity constantly picks out and glorifies the attributes and opinions that work in its favor, or in other words, the attributes that fortify our social structure as a species and increase our chances to survive and evolve, the reason why people have urges of righteousness  and a sense of justice in the first place, is because it serves humanity in general, not just a single group of people (that does not imply that having a sense of justice is “good” or “bad” of course , it is just something that some people will always have because of its importance to us humans); this is also why people are constantly “fighting” for what they believe is right by creating waves or movements to freely spread their opinions(it also happens because people‘s opinions of what is considered ”good” differ quite a bit, even though the general consensus of what is “good” seems fixed). A  movement’s life in my opinion can be summarized as the following: at first, it starts slowly gaining popularity and supporters even if the movement is shunned by conservatives in its first moments, and then, after gaining much relevance, one of two things can happen, either the ethics spread by the movement become mainstream and considered “good” in society, or the movement slowly becomes less and less relevant because of society’s  rejection of it (note that when I use or refer to society I am really referring to the majority of the population of a certain region and not that region as a whole of course), resulting in that movement slowly shutting itself to outsiders. in the first scenario, there would almost always be a counter-movement that opposes the ethics of the first movement, and if the first movement starts showing signs of extremism (which generally does happen ,although what is considered extremist is up for debate) the counter-movement would take this opportunity to gain more followers and discredit the other party, which would result in  society embracing its set of ethics instead, until this cycle repeats itself again at least, with the only difference being that the counter-movements -as time goes on- start disagreeing less and less with their previous counter-parts; it is almost as if these whole waves can be represented as sine waves that are slowly decreasing in amplitude with each cycle as the whole graph gets closer and closer to unify with the horizontal axis when the curves become flatter and flatter, although be it without the graph ever becoming identical to the horizontal axis. One notable example of these movements is feminism, what I said above directly applies to this movement in my opinion, at first, the movement wasn’t exactly appreciated by people who were obviously at a loss if the feminists’ demands were met, but it still gained followers nonetheless and reached its peak around the 90s, nowadays however, a large portion of the western population seems to think that  the movement has strayed away from what it was supposed to do and are accusing some of its members of extremism (which, again, is up for debate), there are three important  things to consider here, the first one being that by no means are these people discrediting feminism as a whole, they are mostly disagreeing with some of the recent demands that the feminists announced. That aside, you also need to know that these counter-movement do not have to be  organized movements, what I mean by this is that it can simply be a large group of people that share an opinion that opposes the other group’s opinion, which is the case for the example above about feminism. The third and final thing to consider is that extremists do not only start showing when a movement has been popular for long enough, sometimes signs of extremism start showing up as soon as the movement gains a bit of popularity, or at its start even, though as I said before, it all depends on what you view as being extremist. Now of course, this analysis is subjective and is nothing more than a curious observation of mine, but it is an interesting observation nonetheless, if you start focusing more on it, you will most likely start noticing the same pattern in most movements; as for fourth wave feminism, I only meant to use it as an example, this is by no means a way to implicitly put it to shame, nor debate its ideals.

     This all goes to show that humans are stuck in an infinite loop of trying to determine the “right thing to do“, but ultimately serving humanity nonetheless and propelling it forward, all the while being unaware that going through the loop itself, is what’s  pushing us forward, not reaching the end goal of our ideals; this also confirms the reoccurring trend that I have mentioned in the understanding chapter, which is that everything tends to seek balance, the reason why I think so is because I interpreted the previous analysis as nature trying to find its balance point (or if you want a more scientific  term , its true vacuum) through humanity’s evolution. Another peculiar observation relating to this topic is the correlation between overpopulated areas and natural disasters; researcher and biologist Paul R. Ehrlich has written an article on the Stanford university website about this matter, and in it, he mentions that the large number of Homo sapiens is in fact heating up the planet which then in return causes typhoons in the overpopulated areas, he also goes on to mention that food supplies are a major factor in limiting the population of certain impoverished regions that have a significantly high density of people, which further reinforces this thesis. If we look into this even further, we can see that most earthquake faults and volcanoes are present near regions with an extremely dense demographic (you can look up the ring of fire for reference); this would be quite the coincidence if you perceive it as such, I choose not to however. This reaffirms the idea that nature is constantly enforcing balance in everything, while disregarding anything else such as our emotions or desires, all the while making us a partner in crime without us even realizing it.