Amerika

Some ingenue asks:

How could anything be relevant to the way an individual is treated but the character of the individual itself?

Talking Philosophy

He’s probably waving his hands in the same impotent gesture all people do when, out of logical arguments, they want to appeal to the emotions of a crowd.

He forgot that when humans invented fire, we took over from natural selection.

He forgot that when we formed civilizations, we undertook the burden of thinking collectively.

Although “character” is a vague term (and not defined — at all — in the original text) there are numerous instances where it does not apply, or could be extended to include inherent traits.

A Neanderthal, for example, would not belong in a population of sapiens.

Similarly, you wouldn’t take the brightest and nerdiest kid from your high school and put him in a pit with surly, violent individuals of low intelligence.

People forget that most of “character” is defined by our biological status, and most of the rest is inherited.

We are not kings who create ourselves, and control ourselves; we are servants to our nature.

And this is why his original statement is insane: “individual” means we are small pieces of this world that operate within the world, not small worlds that self-define and self-regulate independently of one another and their environment.

The individualistic thinking that places the individual before all else is another manifestation of rationalism, or linear logic, by which we consider one factor out of many and ignore all other factors as “background noise”,”details” and “irrelevant context.”

We forget that nature forms herself from the intersection of chaotic, dumb and blind natural forces, not from personality, as we like to think we form ourselves.