Foundation series : Enlightened morality (II)
or "an atheist", we are all individuals who happen to have a number of attributes, which include having a certain skin colour, or sexual orientation, or position on religion.
There is no community, only individuals which have become absorbed by a single attribute and try to define themselves around it. This attempt is bound to friction and ultimately conceptual failure, since a single attribute does not create total agreement: there is bound to be disagreement on most of the other attributes that the individuals possess.
My point with this analogy is that the "self" is not any more significant an attribute about you than any other of your attributes. It is not meaningful to define ourselves around it, any more than it is meaningful to define ourselves around our skin colour, or sexual orientation, or position on religion.
As such, the idea that man is the center of all things, which we could call humanism or human-centrism, is to be roundly rejected. In a complete and boundless unity, there is no center, and paradoxically, every single point is the center.
Like any other fact of reality, my "self" exists. It is valuable by virtue of its existence. Questions such as "should we act for ourselves or for others", are then shown to be based on this false "second stage" premise of a confrontation between the "self" and others.
As I pointed out, this is irrational, since our lives are interrelated with the lives of others, both personally and socially. Unfortunately, this always needs to be explained at length to most people because they are still caught in this false dichotomy between the "self" and others.
4. Unity of time.
A more theoretical ethical question concerns the idea of short-term benefit and long-term benefit. As human beings, we start with a bias oriented towards short-term thinking.
A good example of this is the Tragedy of the Commons, a well-known principle of politics, amongst other domains. If a resource is freely available to all, then people will attempt to acquire as much of it as quickly as possible, before anyone else can do the same. That resource will then be depleted. Only quota systems or private property systems can solve this quandry, when it happens.
If people were biased towards long-term thinking, the Tragedy of the Commons principle would not be valid. People would see the value of assembling together and finding ways to regulate access to the resource.
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