No Ganging Up
On my chart of good and evil values, ganging up is among the more evil-tending activities. Here it is with its neighbors:
The hitch is that the very same impulses that give rise to ganging up can power good values. Like supporting the community or helping in emergencies.
The difference lies in
self-respect
and
critical thinking.
Self respect is seeing oneself as special enough to be worth taking seriously. Self-respect sees oneself as a person whose actions can make a positive difference.
Critical thinking sees a reality called conscience which alerts the mind to what harms. It enables us to avoid harm and shoose what prevents harm.
Armed with these weapons, a person can be cautious in choosing his or her associates.
A person can decide, as I did at a very young age, that he or she will not be drawn into cliques.
If truth be told, it was not a hard choice. I was not drawn to cliques!
Slant toward independence.
Embrace freedom from as well as freedom for.
Don’t try to fitting in to a bullying crowd.
There are situations of letting loose that are completely harmless. There are environments where the excitation level will encourage a few to step over the edge and harm thelselves, others, or both. It is not hard to see how a gathering that is supposedly peaceful can translate into a gathering that can become a mob that murders and injures with impunity.
We are fallible, weak and susceptible, all of us.
We need to improve our grasp of what really harms and what really helps.
We need to see through the wiles of those who claim virtue while choosing the values that lead to the worst harms.
We are combating ganging up. The only way is to create more persons whose default posture is self-respect and critical thinking.
We must take in this entire chart and understand it.
This is the immanent frame where we play out the actual drama of our lives., What we do makes a difference. Each of us is important to history. We can be influencers for positive values in actions and messages.
This century we can build toward a world beyond ganging up and exclusion.
In an ideal world we will live in communities where the values on the chart above will guide ethical education. We will see a universal surge toward betterment.
We will create art no less complex than we have. But it need not be violent. It need not assume that crime must be rampant. It must see a drama in saving lives, not ending them.
We have a job to do.
Triadic Philosophy is about moving toward nonviolence.
Which means less ganging up. Communities where ganging up is not the culture. A world without gangs.
