I learned some stuff the other day about the unconditional acceptance of others.
I liken it to laissez-faire capitalism. It isn’t that laissez-faire is the best economic model. Markets do not always function perfectly and sometimes need our intervention. However, the questions then becomes: When do you intervene and when do you let the market work itself out? When do you do more harm by intervention than by simply letting the market function inefficiently for a while? History has not shown us wise enough to consistently make the right decision.
That brings us back to unconditional acceptance. It is not the best idea. Ideally one should accept what is acceptable and intervene in the unacceptable. However, am I wise enough to judge correctly what is acceptable and what is aberrant? Even if I judge correctly, do I create more problems than I potentially solve by the confrontation?
And so, it is often a good idea to practice unconditional acceptance of others because I am not smart enough to decide what is or isn’t acceptable nor can I predict the potential harm the intervention itself might cause.
There is one last point to make about this: Unconditional acceptance is a pretty good idea, probably under-utilized…but it is not a great idea. There are times when intervention is necessary and a judgement must be made. Unconditional anything, whether it be acceptance, love or laissez-faire is easily used as an excuse to do nothing when action is necessary.
So…when is action necessary? Well…it is necessary when you believe that it is. It comes down to your faith in right or wrong. A man with no convictions is truly capable of unconditional acceptance, because nothing will ever call him to act. A man with strong convictions will constantly be called to act.
It is surely possible for a man to have strong convictions and be very wrong about them. Nevertheless, he will be called to act. And there will be others with strong convictions that will also be called to act…all with varying degrees of rightness and wrongness. So who is right?
I can appeal to reality to settle this argument. History has shown that he who is winning is right. He who has the biggest stick and reproduces the most is the most correct.
This is always true, no matter how much we may wish it otherwise. You may point out that history books show that winners are sometimes wrong. But that is only because the current winners have a different viewpoint than previous winners. Although history may have judged a winner to be wrong, I assure you that they felt very right at the time, and since they are all dead now, our judgement of their wrongness has no real consequence.
The religious among you may point out that rightness is not just a matter of who is winning. I point out that religion itself is a consequence of the rightness of the winner. You believe that your religion is right because its previous believers had the biggest sticks and reproduced the most. Otherwise the religion would not have continued to exist to allow us to have this discussion. A religion’s rightness is determined by its number of believers and the strength of their convictions.
This little interplay with people of varying strengths of convictions being called to action has a name. It is called Life.
I now point out that this is a very uninspiring opinion. I started out by learning about unconditional accpetance and ended up with a Darwinian attack of religion and the advocacy of ethical relativity. That sucks, but I can find little fault with my arguments so I guess I’ll stick by it.
Hmm….so I suppose there isn’t really a point to be made here. Just that those were the contents of my head….a brief example of how my brain jumps from one thought to the next. I started with an opening sentence and just wrote whatever popped into my head.
Entries (RSS)