Ethical Dilemmas

Are you your own god? That's a question I've gotten before. There's an underlying assumption in that question that a person is incapable or downright prideful when deciding right from wrong without a god or some higher authority to validate. 

Aristotle was cool. He argued that arguments from authority are the worst kind and that an argument should be evaluated based on content rather than on who said it. Celebrities would be in a world of hurt if everyone thought this way. Most of the shit they say has meaningless/virtue-signaling content with little to contribute. And I'm probably breaking my own rule by arguing against arguments from authority after basically calling Aristotle an authority!

As humans we have a collective anxiety about our futures and pasts. I went through agony trying to pick a new apartment last week. This anxiety causes us to tend to rely too much on others for answers and to seek quick fixes to hard questions. 

How did the world begin? God. Why God? God said so. 

What am I supposed to do with my life? Business. Why business? It's what people have always said I'm good at. 

Rather than think for ourselves and experience the anxiety of making tough decisions or living in a state of "not knowing", we tend to look to a god or human we consider an authority for clarity. And we can't be blamed for this tendency any more than we can be blamed for wanting to murder someone who honks at us at a stoplight (sorry just watched Unhinged, thought it was unrealistic). We humans are just wired with certain tendencies that we would be better off without. 

But we can work with these tendencies. Rather than pretend they don't exist or repress them, we can embrace the anxiety/bad tendency and grow. I've noticed in sales that the more data I have about an issue, the easier it is to make a decision. I think the same works in life. The more we know about ourselves and understand ourselves, the more power we have over a decision we make. 

And we can't know everything, so every decision anyone ever makes will have some amount of risk/anxiety. All we can really do is mitigate it as best we can, I think. I'd be wary about anyone promising an end to anxiety or risk. And honestly I think sometimes working with weird feelings colors life and makes it interesting. If we never had negative emotions to work through, maybe we'd just be bored or something? Or maybe life would be fucking amazing and I'm insane. 

We humans love trying to put a positive spin on shitty experiences.