The Mentoring Program

Last month, I applied for a mentoring program in my county, and got in immediately. I was given the information by my career counselor, and I acted upon it not expecting anything to happen. The next morning, I got a call from one of the program directors informing me that training would start the next day.

Over the course of the training, I found myself doing things I never would have thought I would do: Skipping karate the month before my brown belt test, and driving to a nearby town to get fingerprinted. At the end of the program, however, I had to do a collage. I am not an artistic person. Yes, I can write, but I failed arts and crafts in kindergarten; I couldn't cut a straight line if someone handed me $10 million. Luckily, I had my mom and sister to help. Despite my panicked disposition, the collage turned out extremely well. I hope I get to see it again, and I wish I could show it to my friends.

Unfortunately, I also had to present said collage in front of the rest of the group. I didn't prepare--I don't prepare for anything like that--but I managed to do two things: 1) not screw up, and 2) not scare everyone away.

This week, I am meeting with one of the program directors to finally be matched, and I am very excited.

After my correspondence with one of my classmates from training, I am thinking about why I am doing this, why I am so adamant about participating in this program. I know why--I said it to them: Because I was bullied, and I wanted to help another kid who was going through that avoid a path to self-destruction.

In my last email to my training classmate, I explained that children become bullies because they have no capacity for empathy, which is a result of no one ever conferring value upon them. But if that were true, then why is it that I have so much of what they lack? Why should I be so compelled to benefit the society under which at this time I feel so oppressed?

The answer lies in my own experience. In a way, my life has become a circle, and it is the enormous drive to stop it from happening to someone else. No one should ever have to go through what I did. It is a way to close this chapter of my life, to become a whole being.

Seven years of severe bullying, and another five and a half years of major depression has had a profoundly negative effect on how I relate (or, rather, not) to other people even long after the original oppression has ended. I have an overwhelmingly negative perception of myself in the eyes of others; I don't expect people to care about me, and therefore I do not do anything to compel them; I am very unsure of others' trustworthiness, and it is remarkably rare for me to ask anyone to do anything for me. This, in part, is what has made the job search so difficult, because I don't expect people I don't know to treat me like another human being, and it is far too easy for me to become cynical when others don't do what they say they will (such as call me back when they say they will). Overall, I often feel alienated, and my relation even to others I do know is often in question, sometimes without cause.

Some of these issues are what I will be dealing with in others--in my mentee--but how can I ever overcome them myself? Am I impenetrable? Has anyone ever tried? How much do those I know really know about me? Will I ever know?

There is so much worldly experience I have never had--things that normal people have what seems like easy access to, and I wonder just what I did to be so excluded.

I have just finished The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, and I have to wonder if I am doing what I do--reading, philosophizing--because I have limited access to the real world? Do I sit there reading Being & Nothingness simply because I am looking for a way to fill empty time? What am I hoping to do with all of this knowledge--knowledge that others seem to do perfectly well without?

Or, has it prepared me for this? Do I feel ready to enter into this uncharted territory because of what I learned about myself and others?

Joining the mentoring program is the one thing I have done that I do not doubt; I know it must be done, for myself and for my relation with the world. It is the only way this is ever going to end.

Excerpt From My Project

"Let us assume that this program was adopted, and produced a single, brilliant generation of over 5 million children, who went on to college, and majored in science, math, gender studies, English, art, and music. After college, when they finally look for work, they will come across people who are still tied to their own petty interests. This generation will lose all sense of right and wrong as their own ideals are dissolved into an endless bureaucracy that only cares about its own existence, and the nebulous entity will punish any of these gifted people for acting in an unorthodox manner, even if their ideas would improve it.

The nature of institutions is such that it cannot afford to care about anything except for itself, and the immense weight of this overprotection and paranoia bears down upon those who operate beneath it to the degree that the only manner by which one is to survive is to embrace Sartre’s Bad Faith: In our context, it is to pretend to oneself that s/he is having a real impact upon the world in his or her everyday life, even—especially--if the opposite is objectively true. It is here, then, that our goal in this project is totally and irredeemably lost, and it is against this crushing reality that I pound away at my keyboard."

An Ambitious Project

You may have noticed that in my essays, I have frequently come up against a virtually intractable problem. I have noted on numerous occasions that the generation that suffered through Vietnam was the same generation that eventually sent us to Iraq and Afghanistan (I'm looking at you, John Kerry); humanity continually makes the same mistakes over and over again.

I am currently working on an incredible project: I want to stop this vicious cycle, at least in the United States. I am devising an educational program to do just that, and it will be my longest essay to date (currently it is six pages long, single-spaced; I estimate it will be 15-20 pages long). Children are the future. I know that is a cliche, but it is true by the sad fact that adults are mountains of prejudices, and are unable to reconsider the world around them, having had their youthful idealism sucked right out of them as soon as they left college for the "Real World." It is this impotent complacency that makes the world what it is and perpetuates its harsh condition.

I may or may not be updating this blog as I work on this project. It was to actually be a blog post until I discovered just what I was doing. I currently do not know whether or not I will post the project here when it is finished.

This project is ambitious, and it may turn out to be impossible: No one has ever undertaken this before and had it actually work. The society devised in Plato's The Laws was never implemented, but I do not have the burden of creating a society from scratch. In fact, I want to perpetuate this society, but fix the most egregious problems. Can I do it? Do I know enough about how things work? We will soon find out.

Some Decaying Old Man Claims That the World Will End on May 21st. He Should Know--Just Look at Him!

For about 2 months now, a certain percentage of the population of the United States has been following a shambling corpse of a televangelist who claims that the world will end next Saturday, May 21st, 2011. It is worth noting that this particular decaying corpse has previously claimed that the world would end in 1994, but has admitted he was wrong simply because he "hadn't read Jeremiah."

Basically, the premise is that next Saturday is the 7,000th anniversary of the Flood in Genesis (not the one from Halo, but that would be much more awesome/terrifying, as it involves mutated space zombies instead of just a ton of water).

There are five basic theological problems with the idea of the world ending on Saturday: 1) God never indicated that he eventually wanted to annihilate us all a second time (in fact, he tells Noah that he won't ever do that again), and, by extension, God learns from his mistakes; 2) We really don't know how many generations have passed in the Biblical timeline even if some of us believe it to be literally true, and this is important because the Old Testament measures time by generations, not years; 3) The number 7 has significance for Numerologists, but few others; 4) (also the most important) The Biblical Old Testament is completely rearranged, it differs significantly from the order of the Jewish Tanakh, therefore, such predictions are impossible; and 5) Jesus' apostles believed that he would return within their lifetimes but he never showed up.

The rationalist arguments as to why Harold Camping should be placed in an insulated nursing facility are that 1) He was wrong in 1994, 2) He frequently says bizarre and irresponsible things (by my standard, anyway), and 3) people have been predicting the end of the world since it began, and all of them have been flatly wrong.

The only argument one could make in favor of Harold Camping's prediction is because of his physical disposition: He appears emaciated and more or less dead already, so his proximity to his death may give him privileged information. But old and sickly people are often delusional, and he may be clasping to what little he has left of his mind, and he has no proof that what he believes is actually correct beyond his own bizarre interpretation of the Bible.

This leads to an interesting point: Just why are people so eager to see their world end? This is the only home we have, why would we want Jesus to burn it? Jack Miles writes on page 268 of God: A Biography,

"An Apocalypse is a cryptic revelation of imminent destruction to be followed by a definitive divine intervention at the end of time. Historically, apocalypticism is a kind of weed sprung up in Judea from the charred earth of failed prophecy. Its predictions are coded and otherwise elaborately mysterious in part to mislead the Judeans' and later the Jews' foreign oppressors, in part to renew the nation's own belief in God's power and its national uniqueness when all evidence seems to point the other way"1.

So why now? Over the past decade we have seen a nearly unceasing series of destruction, from 9/11, the tsunami in Indonesia. the Haiti earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, the earthquake off the coast of Japan and the imminent collapse of the Fukushima reactors, and I am sure that there are more than a few other events that I have omitted here. Also, do not forget that the May 21st prediction is not the only apocalyptic conspiracy theory in circulation: December 21st, 2012 is also apparently a date for annihilation.

It has always been fun to speculate that civilization as we know it would collapse. I know that I enjoy zombie movies, dystopian novels, and exploring an annihilated United States in the Fallout series of computer games. But it is an entirely different matter when people begin to believe that these ideas are factually true.

Why should we have to suffer through the Christian fundamentalist nonsense again? In response to the dumbassery of the Bush administration, Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District, assault on women's rights, Terri Schaivo, and the enormous campaign in favor of gay rights, because the liberals began fighting back, because they dialed it up to 7, the Christians have to dial themselves up to 12, when they started at 9. When Americans start supporting gay rights and fighting back against Creationism in public schools, they want to feel vindicated in their own way: "How could we lose America? Surely God will annihilate it now that they're all hedonists!" Even though most of the country is still religious. As Michael Shermer wrote in The Science of Good & Evil in 2004, "If America is going to Hell in an immoral handbasket, it is happening at a time when church membership is at an all-time high and a greater percentage of people than ever before proclaim belief in God"2

The irony is that it is these people who took us in the wrong direction in the first place, and continue to try to steer us further to the right, and only seem to get angrier when the voices of reason fight back.

This entire escapade is motivated by bitter and resentment over staggering political losses, evident of a slash and burn attitude toward America: It isn't going their way anymore, so they want to see it destroyed. So what looks to us as some fun little game--riding Winnebagoes across the country telling people the Rapture is going to be a lot of fun is really a subtle code for "We're losing elections and if you keep supporting gays, we'll tell God on you!" But God hasn't been seen for more than 2000 years.

1) Miles, Jack. God: A Biography Vintage Press. (C) 1995. NY, NY

2) Shermer, Michael. The Science of Good & Evil. Henry Holt. (C) 2004. NY, NY

Osama bin Laden: The Reigning Hide & Seek Champion

On Monday night at around 10:30-11:00 EST, I learned that we have killed Osama bin Laden. Unlike everyone else, though, I was a bit ambivalent about his death.

There is no question in my mind that the SEAL team that stormed his compound did the right thing by ending it there and then, but to me this victory rings hollow in that Osama bin Laden accomplished more than simply the deaths of 3,000 innocent people.

Politicians profited immensely from the attack, and were able to pass legislation that would have normally been unpopular. President George W Bush passed the PATRIOT Act soon after the World Trade Center attack, which made us subject to sweeping and nearly Orwellian security measures. In 2001, we invaded Afghanistan, and in 2003, George W Bush and his administration, with the GOP institution following, made the erroneous case that Saddam Hussein was connected to al-Queda. We, despite objections from the United Nations, preemptively invaded Iraq.

During the previous decade, despite cheerleading for the troops overseas, Americans consumed even more gas with bigger cars, and our domestic car manufacturers failed to create more efficient vehicles. With the focus on global climate change and the fabricated 'controversy' associated with it, few people saw petroleum consumption as a national security issue.

Socially, Americans became increasingly paranoid and suspicious of others (especially Muslims). Ten years later, a proposed Islamic Cultural Center in NYC has come under enormous fire, despite the fact that there are already a significant number of mosques in the area, as well as a large Muslim population. This backlash was motivated primarily by paranoia and suspicion. Many Americans claim that Osama bin Laden had taught them everything they need to know about Islam, and I already stated how unfair this is previously, when I asked whether or not it was fair to say that Jerry Falwell and the larger GOP taught me everything that I need to know about Christianity.

In response to Osama bin Laden America under George W Bush had a knee-jerk reaction that went far beyond trying to find him and began to erode its very democracy. In Guantanamo Bay, the United States held--and continues to hold--terror suspects outside the bounds of the Constitution. There, detainees are tortured psychologically and held indefinitely without charge. Unfortunately, Obama has thus far failed to close Guantanamo, but that is mostly in part because Americans are uneasy about holding terrorist suspects on American soil. Are we afraid that our Constitution is insufficient to protect us? Would it not be good for our image to hold Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a Dostoevskyan trial in a demonstration of the superiority of our values in the face of religious nihilism?

That we will not, that we are afraid of a fair trial for the most evil people currently walking on this Earth, points to the stark possibility that Osama bin Laden has already won. We have tried one of the most evil ideologies human civilization had ever seen in the Nuremberg trials, and won. Why can we not do that again? Furthermore, that we are celebrating his death is evidence of the possibility that we have become the very monsters we are fighting. I completely understand that it was necessary and convenient to kill him at his compound, but that is nothing more than a necessary evil. It is not *good* that we killed this man--it is never *good* to kill any man, even if it may be necessary. But our celebration of his death--our jubilation--is unequivocally vile. This is America, home of the free, land of the brave. We are supposed to be decent, if docile, people. But our behavior is not indicative of our values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But then again, maybe it never was.

Truly, is our reaction to Osama's death any different from our previous behavior? Was there ever a time when we treated the enemy--the Other--with at least some decency as a society? No, there was not. We came to the New World and profited from the subjugation of the native population. When that population was almost completely destroyed, we joined the Dutch in the Slave Trade, and in spite of our stated values and intentions, there was left a gaping chasm between what we said and what we did. When the Puritans came over from England because of oppression, they immediately began imposing their views upon everyone else, repeating the exact same tactics they suffered under in their homeland. Even among white people, each new demographic that arrived in this country was reviled: The Irish Catholics, the Germans, the Jews, etc. But each in turn eventually joined with the majority, if only to turn around and join in the oppression of the new Other. In fact, what do we see today? African-Americans, who have had fought the greatest uphill battle for civil rights in the history of the country, have turned around and joined their white counterparts in the oppression of homosexuals. In fact, these were the same kinds of people who sixty years prior wanted to deny them basic civil rights. Globally, no other kind of oppression brings more different people together than the oppression of homosexuals. All three monotheistic religions condemn homosexuality, so it is the only issue upon which nearly every group--no matter their religious or political differences--can come to a tragic consensus.

It is actually quite logical then that after World War II, we have had medium- to full-scale conflicts in 4 countries, financed rebel fighters that would eventually turn around and attack us, and all the while used buzzwords like "Freedom" and "Democracy" when the truth is that the only freedom we want to preserve is our own freedom to continue to enjoy lower gas prices.

Should we give up, though? Should we simply accept it, muttering to ourselves "c'est la vie", doing nothing to change who we are? No. The truth is that we have made some progress: We recognize that what we've done in the past was wrong and we have become much more tolerant than we were previously. The problem is that we currently do not possess the mechanism by which we can understand what we will do in the future we may be wrong. For all of our tolerance, however, it appears that someone has to be oppressed, much like capitalism generally, where the low prices we enjoy at Wal*Mart must come from someone's $0.50/day wage. It is very unfortunate, however, because tolerance doesn't have to work like that. In fact, then it really isn't tolerance at all when it is banking on intolerance toward someone else. There is no 'currency' of tolerance, it doesn't have to be compensated for.

How do we solve this problem; a problem as large and complex as human nature? How can we ensure that we do not simply repeat the behaviors and attitudes of our predecessors? What, exactly, is the root of understanding? Would it be possible to instill an unwavering respect towards others regardless of who or what they are in our children? And most important, how do we ensure that they do not fall into the traps their parents and grandparents fell into before them? For it is a great tragedy that the generation that suffered in Vietnam would send their children into Iraq and Afghanistan. Are we damned to repeat their mistakes, too?

Business Ethics: Further Problems Between Society and Business

Abstract: I write about hubris and ethical problems in business, and I attempt to figure out why CEOs escaped unharmed as the companies they led sunk into ruin. I map roughly what causes most institutional problems, and I attempt to dissect the ethics of major corporations and lower management. I also attempt to explain how my generation may avoid making such mistakes.

Wal*Mart is being sued by 1.6 million current and former employees for sex discrimination; Apple is storing unencrypted long-term exact location data on iOS 4; BP is applying for a license to resume drilling in the Gulf of Mexico; Food giant Monsanto is going to be allowed to police itself1; the Consumer Financial Protection Agency is about to lose a massive fight because the debate over consumer financial regulation has left the mainstream2; and Sony has failed to inform that their customers' financial data is in the hands of cyber thieves3 & 4.

Combined with what I have said previously about corporate America--especially with the financial collapse and tobacco companies--it would appear that the jobs we all have are, while providing us with a decent living--are contributing to harsher costs elsewhere.

I've begun reading one of my father's old university economics textbooks (from 1979), and the author (APA citation at the end of the essay5), George C Sawyer wrote the textbook as a project in part because there is--as he said--very little literature providing a framework in which businesses can act ethically. Thirty-two years later, it seems, this same thing could be written again.

After 9/11, George W Bush diverted FBI personnel from white-collar crime investigations to counter-terrorism, at a time when white-collar crime was rampant6.

As the recession devoured people's lives and livelihoods, the entire business structure underwent immense changes: take-overs, shut-downs, and massive layoffs. While this is normal in business and is not generally frowned-upon, the constant adrenaline rush at the workplace and the subsequent focus on simply the bottom line eradicated any kind of ethical framework in the workplace. If you were a part of an organization that valued a relationship with its clients or the society in which it operated, and were taken over by someone else and everyone who enforced and adhered to that ethical standard were upended, ethics are not going to appear to be immediately important.

What I am trying to get across is that in business, long-term ethical ideals are not immediately valued unless they are proven to be profitable. However, there is a problem with this idea, because as history as far back as we can tell, has proven to us consistently that to cover up a destructive act and to ignore it creates a much bigger problem than to admit it and do something about it when it happens. The lie is usually worse than the crime. People will find out, and will no longer trust you. This is the ultimate answer Socrates gave to Thrasymachus in The Republic when he supposed that to be unjust is more profitable than to be just.

What is amazing about businesspeople then, is that for the sheer number of occurrences of this same thing happening over and over again, they keep making the same mistakes. But I also don't want to categorically say that there aren't businesspeople who do see the errors of their neighbors, but these are usually smaller business people, if only because they think that they cannot afford it.

On Easter, I was talking with my aunt's boyfriend and his brother about business ethics, and we were trying to figure out why these CEOs are making an exorbitant amount of money when their companies were in ruins. "Aren't they beholden to an executive board of directors who ultimately have to decide how much the CEOs are paid, and whose primary interest is the existence of the company?" There is a very interesting dynamic between them, and while we do not immediately know why this would happen, my own hypotheses would be this: (1) The Board of Directors could be operating under groupthink, in that the CEO wants to tell them that the company is doing just fine and therefore he should get a raise. The reality may be that corporate offices or outlets may be closing across the country, but the CEO and the Board of Directors are willfully complicit in supplanting factual reality with delusions of prosperity; any admission of possible failure is deemed heresy. This is what happened to the Bush Administration. (2) The CEO takes full command of the company and buys off the Board of Directors (this is an example my dad suggested). Any kind of collective entity could break down because of threats or coercion. Bush's cabinet denied problems in Iraq or Afghanistan out of nothing more than blind faith and ambition. The Catholic Church vociferously denied allegations of sexual misconduct with children, even after the presentation of overwhelming evidence. This same instance can appear anywhere and has nothing to do with economics; it has to do with psychology and the dynamics of hierarchical power and the blind belief in the invulnerability of the existence of the institution. Remember "Too Big to Fail"?

Most institutions--especially corporate institutions--are not democratic. Whatever equality we enjoy as citizens is lost for the bulk of our lives. This means that we are beholden to people who may not understand ethics generally, or not really have an interest in the success of an organization or its employees beyond his or her own petty satisfaction. S/He may even decide he hates you. You certainly say "Cest la vie", but I think that would be a mistake. There are hundreds of books on how to deal with a [an ethically] corrupt manager or supervisor, but I see very few books about how to be an effective and ethical manager. This, too, is not economics, but psychology and philosophy. Because of the power dynamic reminiscent of the Master/Slave dichotomy humanity has always been cursed with by its own avarice, most business leaders with whom one deals with in everyday life--the supervisor at a grocery store, the owner of a restaurant--do not have the kind of ethical or educational upbringing that would lift them out of it. Even a little power corrupts absolutely. Good managers are very difficult to come by, but most of them are so hard-hearted because the system itself demands a certain output. This output, however, under a corrupt manager, is often thrust upon a few individuals, a fraction of the total workforce. This is called favoritism, or bullying.

Let's say you have 100 people working for you, and you need something done over the weekend every weekend. Out of your 100 employees, there are 10 people who are capable of doing this project. The ideal would be to fairly rotate the weekly workload. So far so good. But what would you do? Let's say that there is one person out of that 10 you really hate, and one you simply don't know that well--maybe because you never see them at your religious service--and 2 people you really like. So what do you do? You organize the workload so that the people on the bottom do a disproportionately higher percentage of the work than the people at the top. In fact, you game the system so that the top two people--maybe they're really sexy brunettes who wear low-cut jackets, push-up bras, and high skirts--never do any extra work (you'd also be committing sex discrimination, but you wouldn't care about that, and quite frankly neither would they).

Let's say you REALLY hate one person. He just annoys the crap out of you; he's constantly contradicting every idea you have, and his arguments are generally very compelling, but you can't get rid of him because your supervisors value his input. So to show your dissatisfaction, you make him come in over the weekend every two weeks, and you insult him at every turn.

The work still gets done, but at what cost? You have paid a price you didn't really need to pay: The work was done, but you've alienated many of your employees. You have also made yourself vulnerable if they know that the two sexy ladies who should be in the pool are not, and decide to report the problem to your boss. If these 10 people communicate, and one of them records the frequency and distribution of the work in a given time frame, it would be incontestable evidence that you are corrupt. I think most people are in this category of managers who succumb to these base notions and take unnecessary personal and social risk.

It is this same risk that is committed on a much grander scale. Sony perhaps believed that it could get away with not sharing critical information with its customers; maybe Apple never thought two tech geeks would find their long-term location data on an iPhone and be able to map it; Nobody thought the housing market bubble would burst; and few people understand that gold is historically a volatile commodity. Tobacco companies probably never figured people would be able to trace their products to a smorgasbord of medical complications. Wal*Mart never figured that 1.6 million employees would be suing them for sex discrimination; BP never thought that the consequences of being cheap on critical parts for their Deepwater Horizon rig would manifest themselves in a massive fireball killing 11 workers and dumping millions of barrels of oil into the ocean. And yet we see this all the time.

This is a complicated problem, and it has to do with more than simply ethics. It is easy to charge that these executives were complacent and morally dubious, but the truth might be something less overtly malevolent. It might be that instead of (or, in Wal*Mart's case, aside from) being callous bastards, they might not have correctly calculated the probabilities of failure. The person or team in charge of calculating disaster risk at BP may have--either of his own volition or coercion by management--artificially reduced the calculated risk they were taking by using faulty equipment in order to save money in the short term. But I see now that this is a solipsism in that in the example I entertained the possibility that upper management may have pressured our person in charge of risk management at BP into presenting fabricated data in order to at least present the illusion of security. But it would be equally wrong to pin everything upon an ethical bankruptcy. It may also be a hubris in that an institution may falsely believe that it is above the law, its customers, its clients, or its employees.

Most corporations, when faced with an accusation of wrongdoing, or evidence of negative social impact, immediately deny or cover up said allegations. This is the start of collapse, and embodies Jean-Paul Sartre's Bad Faith: What happened to the Catholic Church in the child molestation crisis is that they categorically denied everything beyond the point at which the evidence against them was irrefutable: A letter signed by Cardinal Ratzinger--now Pope Benedict XVI--urged the institution to protect those priests who have been accused from the law. It became a game: The only people they were even trying to convince were themselves. They blamed everyone else for their problems, but no one believed them.

How do we fix these problems? They seem insurmountable because changing the nature of institutions and how they work as a class from the outside is impossible. If we truly want our institutions to change, we must educate people in such a way that they both understand and internalize the values they would need to succeed: Social good and responsibility, respect for those around them, etc, and give them the freedom within the institutions they join to do what is right. This last condition may be the most difficult to meet because of the attitudes ingrained within CEOs and Boards of Directors may be contrary to factual reality, especially if they operate like the Bush Administration. But an even greater problem exists: How do we guarantee that those who manage to do all of this do not fall into the same traps as their predecessors? This is the most incredible and seeming insurmountable problem in human history generally. The generation that protested Vietnam brought us into Iraq and Afghanistan. It is up to my generation to solve it.

1) http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_23097.cfm

2) http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-april-26-2011/elizabeth-warren

3) http://gamrfeed.vgchartz.com/story/85812/sony-your-psn-personal-info-was-stolen-nine-days-ago/

4) http://www.techi.com/2011/04/playstation-hacked-credit-card-data/

5) Sawyer, George C. Business and Society Houghton Miffin Company. (C) 1979. New York, NY

6) Moore, Michael, Capitalism: A Love Story Documentary. 2009. Overture Films. United States.

The Point of Jesus From a Philosophical Perspective

I don't write a lot about Jesus. He has never really fascinated me as a philosopher or as a person. But his death--and Socrates' death--says volumes not necessarily about him, but our collective reaction to him.

The deaths of Socrates and Jesus are tragic in such a profound way that few would ever dare consider, because the manner in which they were killed speaks to the very worst in all of us.

I don't consider Jesus to be even a very important philosopher on paper (fitting, because he didn't write anything down; for that matter, neither did Socrates), but I still consider him a nice guy who really should not have been murdered. The reason I don't view Jesus as incredibly important philosophically is because he offered a utopian system of ethics that is truly impossible, and banked everything on divine judgment, despite the fact that there are very good immediate "worldly" reasons to be a good person. Many of these were laid out in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. I don't think waiting a lifetime for the consequences of your actions is an effective motivation for doing anything. People are generally bad at considering anything more than the immediate consequences of any decision, and in my view, therefore, need very good "worldly" justifications for being good, such as having people like you and listening to what you have to say; having true friends as opposed as those you need to pay in order to keep their company, or the fact that helping others triggers a positive emotional response in all parties. Doing good feels good. This says nothing more or less about the integrity of their character than trying to score Brownie Points with God.

But all of this is really beside the point. Remember who Jesus was interacting with, because this will be extremely important later: Jesus was helping the disenfranchised, and eviscerating the wealthy, probably because he saw that the existing system as oppressive. Do not forget that a recurring theme in the Old Testament was also the care for the poor and disenfranchised, and in this way Jesus is still not a complete reversal.

And then there was the Pharisees, who were principally the ones who whipped up the crowd to call for his death because he had gained the support of the lower classes and were thus a danger to their power. Pontius Pilate didn't really want to kill him, but the people, who were manipulated against Jesus by the Pharisees, demanded he be crucified. And so he was.

Socrates was forced to drink Hemlock because of trumped up charges resulting from his cross-examinations of government leaders, often resulting in the exposure of their ignorance. He, too, was a threat to the powers that be.

Jesus was killed because he was a threat to the ruling class; his system of ethics and lifestyle resembled what we would think of as a commune. The problem with Jesus' death, ultimately, is that it was supported by the very people who stood to benefit from and originally supported what he had to say. The ultimate tragedy is that the people themselves wanted him to die.

Let us imagine that Jesus did come back. To be kind, let us even give him the scars he presented to his followers that, according to the story, proved that he was who he said he was when he returned. Let us also allow that he said pretty much the exact same things he said when he was originally alive.

How would people react to him? The reality of this question in its possibility--not of Jesus' factual return, but the reaction he would receive from his audience--should frighten you. In other words, if Jesus ever returned, we as a society would kill him again. It is Dostoevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor"; the irony is that Jesus would probably be murdered for his own sake--in the name of the very institutions that are supposedly attached to his legacy. One could very well argue that these institutions are not really doing what Jesus intended--which would be a fair point--but this line of reasoning would eventually call into question the very nature and authenticity of Christianity itself when matched against the figure it revolves around.

The crux of Christianity, of what follows from the tragedy of his death, the possibility of resurrection and further prophecy, stems from the profound guilt at having killed him. The people who originally believed in him probably saw the profound, cosmic injustice of his death, and devised a story with a "happy ending," in which his spirit endures and his martyrdom guarantees salvation for them. This guilt is further assuaged by a kind of determinism of the whole thing: "It was supposed to happen." But did Jesus himself see it that way? Did he want to become a martyr? Did he think he was intended to construct Heaven and Hell, or participate in a cosmic chess game against Satan? When Jesus says that he was betrayed at the Last Supper, it might not have been any kind of divine knowledge; he might have had someone tell him about the plot to have him arrested. Also, much like Socrates in "The Crito," he might have simply accepted his fate, and dined knowing that he was going to be captured, much like Socrates telling Crito that while the punishment is unjust, because I live here, I must obey them (and form the basis of Social Contract Theory). To shed light on this problem, Jesus remarked, "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they are doing" [Luke 23:34 NSRV]. This single quote clarifies for us that Jesus did not see himself as a martyr, or, even if he did, he did not want to be one. He did not say, "Hey guys, I'll be right back. Everything will be fine." The supernatural elements surrounding his death were artificially imposed precisely because the people who loved him needed something more to hold on to; they could not live with an injustice as the end result. Even in the failure of the Garden of Eden, God did not abandon his creations, and here, too, the people who believed in Jesus would not allow their relationship with God to end in such tragedy.

But I don't see it that way. I don't think that Jesus' death could ever be whitewashed or compensated for. I may be deemed a pessimist, but I cannot deal with the fact that were we to have another chance--or even multiple chances--we would blow it. But the primary reason why I am so upset is that the people who would kill Jesus are the very same people who say they love him. I also don't condone murdering philosophers, but that's a given.