This is my 2nd Day of trying to analyze the top ten principles that guide my life. This exercise is more complicated then I originally thought. Since I am travelling right now, I wanted to come up with something “easy” to write about. Now I find myself waking up in the early morning hours and racking my brain for what really drives me. Interestingly, I am uncovering many concepts that are not necessarily my own. There are things that I think I “should” believe in that have been handed to me by others. What I am trying to get to are the things that actually govern me, the way that I act, think, react, and behave. This morning, I started noodling on how I deal with input from other sources. Such as the news, or a person on the street, or a casual conversation at work. What principle governs my thought process here?
I have always been caught between two major philosophical under currents. The first being the absolute nature of truth, consider the philosophy of early Greek thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle. Compare that to the more relative thinkers, which indicates that truth is more about how one individuals perceives it. This is more along the lines of Nietzsche, or the Greek sophists like Protagoras. These camps are always diametrically opposed to each other, one being more religious in nature and the other more existentialist. As I got older and more exposed to the realities of life, I came to the conclusion that these philosophies were both equally true.
Do you want to drive an absolutist nuts? Say something like, “well, this is MY truth.” If you want to irritate a relativist? Say something like, “the truth does not care about your feelings.” This struggle between truth and perspective seems to be constantly raging in our society through many forms. I have seen that when a group of people are advocating for a moral consideration, they invoke the need to consider truth that is independent of perspective. When a group is advocating for the rights of a particular person or type of person, they argue that truth is relative to the circumstance that person is placed in. This dichotomy puts reasonable and rational thinkers in a bit of a quandary. How do I accept universal truths and yet at the same time still pay attention to individual perspective?
For lack of a better principle, I have decided on a simple one to guide me in this conflict. So here it is:
Principle 2 – Happiness is Relative, Truth is Absolute
I think many people mistake or confuse interpretation of reality with the pursuit of happiness. There are always challenges and problems that prevent or make our pursuit of happiness difficult. We all have our own struggles, some more complex than others. I was walking down a street this morning, when a woman in a wheel chair who had clearly slept in a doorway last night was attempting to ask me for money. I could not understand her request, her speech was so garbled. Clearly this woman’s life, perspective and current reality are no where near mine yet here we both were standing on the same corner, in the same city, on the same planet, circling the same sun. For a few moments while we bartered for the transfer of a donation to her cause, we were the same, or at least in the same spot. Regardless of the conclusion to our encounter, there were some inherent truths to the situation around us that were not going to change. There were rules in place both at a cosmic and microscopic level that would continue not matter what happened between us. The sun was still going to shine down on this street, that street car was still going to pass by in 15 minutes, and that 18th century brick building was going to stay standing there long after the both of us sauntered on our merry way.
Our pursuit of needs, our happiness, our desired are dependent entirely upon our actions. Our freedom to exist in our own sphere. That is the world of the relative and you certainly cannot argue with someone that indicates that one person’s sphere is completely different than another. I am watching a small ant crawl across the table next to me. That little ant has a completely different sphere of existence than I, yet we are both intelligent beings both interacting with with this wood table for completely different reasons. Yet, we are both being pushed on by the forces of gravity. We are both on the western hemisphere, in the northern latitude of the 3rd planet orbiting a celestial object that is rapidly converting hydrogen into helium. An observer from Mars would not know the difference between this ant and I, nor care what city we were in. We would be the same spec on the same canvas and represented by the same term. From the distant observer we are both, “earth.”
Truth, is universal and absolute. However, the truth may gain more or less clarity on the distance on which you observe it. I can talk at great length about the plight of inner city vagabonds in general summation, yet not even get close to who Rosemary is, the woman in the yellow Mountain Dew shirt, purple colored hair, wheel chair with one broken wheel and sitting securely in her position on the corner of St. Charles and Royal. The closer to the detail the more relative things become. So in my opinion, and this is my solitary view uninfluenced by any others:
When pursuing your own happiness, or helping to promote the happiness of others you must consider the relative reality that those person(s) are dealing with. When it comes to making decisions on a larger level that impact the lives of many people then we must do our best to view our reality in the most objective and truthful way possible.
It is folly to deny reality, to deny the truth by looking only through the microscopic lens of your personal circumstances no matter how convenient that is for us. We all do this and like to pretend that our relative reality is all that matters, but that catches up to a us pretty fast when we come colliding into the realities of many other peoples, communities and societies. That said, what is relative is what we deal with all the time because even when we gain perspective it is only small increments away from what we are seeing right in front of us on an every day basis.
With this viewpoint I have been able to put emotions, values, and aspirations into these two categories. Honor, integrity are the types of things people admire because the person rises about personal interest and puts the more absolute truths first. When someone is praised for being focused and dedicated, they have a highly narrow view and are certainly dealing only with the challenges and concerns of the relative. The champion of the few and the champion of the many have taken on many forms throughout human history and we are equally moved by both. We will shed tears over the death of a single martyr, who at the same time was sacrificing self for the greater message of absolute truth.
