Manual 1.0: The Bedrock

Note: This is not really a standard blog post, it’s more a set of thoughts and self-questioning organized into a more cohesive whole. I may end up changing and working through most of this. If you do decide to read this, I hope you enjoy it!

Confusion is our natural state of existence. We’re dropped into a video game called life and given no instructions, no manual. So we make up our own manuals, and we try to convince others that we’ve found the true path to a good life. “We” can be a person, a government, a religion, a cult, a family, a tradition or all of the above – the common thread is the prescription of an ideal way of living life.

I see no reason to believe any of these manuals will ever stumble upon an answer we can all agree upon, much less a true comprehension of the universe. Millennia of recorded history have done nothing but prove that outside of a few basic certainties, everyone will never be able to agree on anything. Humans being social animals, living in a world of humans means accepting this fact.

Yet my own experience has shown me that most of us (though I can only truly speak for myself) crave a sense of certainty. Sartre said we all have a god-shaped hole inside us, but I’d characterize it more as a need for a compass to guide us across an endless sea.

In this confusing tumultuous landscape we all find ourselves in, perhaps it is important to go back to the one anchor we have: the things which are certain and self-evident, however few and far between they might be. Maybe it is possible to create a template for a good life out of this?

I’ll enumerate 4 relevant certainties here:

1. All of us will come to an end someday. Outside of suicide, there is no way of knowing for certain what that day will be.
2. We cannot control everything that happens to us. We will be the target of actions and events that we could not forsee nor prevent. Nature inflicts these by chance and patterns, institutions by inertia and structural blindness, other humans by their own confusion. During the time we have before our end, we are hence at the mercy of a permanently uncertain future.
3. The only control we certainly have is our own actions in the present. As we can’t control the future through our actions (see above), we can’t hope to morally structure our actions on the expectation of what they will bring in the future, because that future is out of our hands. We can only control what we can do right now within the constraints imposed by the situation we find ourselves in.
4. Rational humans will never universally agree on any value judgment. I base this certainty on the historical precedent I mentioned before, as well as upon the fact that opposing ideologies and value systems can arise (and have arisen) from reason due to differing perceptions. Even rational adherents of the same ideologies, beliefs, and values have and will always find specifics and implications to disagree upon, at least at the group level. This implies that, assuming you don’t believe in one single superior god with a set of universal value judgments, it is impossible to consider any value judgment as more or less objectively valid than another, simply because there exists no ethical instrument besides humans that can create value systems.

These certainties do help derive certain principles and guidelines for action within our own lives. However, they don’t dictate what value systems to follow, but rather how to follow your value system well with regard to yourself and others:

1. If we’re judging the morality of our actions, it has to be based on the means, not the ends. This is because of the uncertain future meaning that any “well-intentioned” action (focusing on an end goal) can end up in completely unpredictable consequences, and hence such actions focused on “good” ends can’t be considered moral if their means don’t align with our value judgements. In addition, the possibility of death and hence never being able to fulfill our ends necessitate present means as the only way to be moral.
2. The circumstances we find ourselves in do not matter – all that matters is what we do within these circumstances. Since the past and future are out of our hands, it makes no sense to question the morality of, or to aim our actions against, the “constraints imposed by the situation we find ourselves in (certainty 3.).” This situation wasn’t of our making and will never be, it was the product of a series of interconnected decisions. It’s easy to reconcile this with nature and institutions, but what about the decisions of other humans? My answer to this is: if circumstances are imposed on us by the actions of another person, it is the product of their value judgments in their own circumstances. Since we cannot determine whether their value judgement is more or less correct than our own (by certainty 4) and whether they had any control of their circumstances that caused them to make this value judgement (by certainty 2), trying to rectify the circumstances we find ourselves in by means of attacking the people who created these circumstances is futile.
3. Belief or faith in any value system cannot be unreserved. While this is almost self-evident for atheists or agnostics, it also applies for the rationally religious. If an omniscient and omnipotent God has rendered it impossible to convert every single human to their worship, perhaps the intention was to learn from the value judgments of heathens? No harm trying to court the religious I suppose.
4. It is not rational to either dictate or be dictated a value system. To dictate a value system is to ignore another’s experiences and circumstances and to ignore the impossibility of your value system being superior – the inverse also applies. However, this does not mean that we can’t learn from the value systems of each other and apply them to our own circumstances.

TL;DR: in our day to day life, if we live by certainty, the value systems we choose for ourselves should guide our present actions towards good in whatever present situation we find ourselves in, and we should be both skeptical and open to the value systems of ourselves and others.

This isn’t a cohesive way of living life by any means – as I said at the start, there really isn’t any that I can expect to apply as certainty to everyone. But maybe keeping these principles in mind can help us lead our day to day lives with a little more tolerance and peace? The only way to find that out is to try.

However, I do have more to say (I apologize in advance) about how this affects an outlook on the world as a whole, but that moves away from certainty and towards some more shaky logical territory, so I’ll save that for another post. If anyone did read through all this, I’d love to hear what you think about it!

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