SOCIETY
January 30, 2005
There is only the universe—and nothing else.
Society is based upon nothing that we have not imagined. We fabricated ideas like religion, law, morality and so on, pulled them right out of our proverbial asses.
Yes, we made it all up, every single bit of it.
If you doubt it, the burden of proof is on you to show me otherwise.
If you believe that Society is based upon something, some truly real Something (with a capital S), then show it to me. Show me some morality, some right and wrong, some good and evil.
Show me in the same way that I can show you a tree, or a rock or a star. Show me in the way that I can show you children playing, people working and laughing and eating and sleeping and so on.
For example, when I say the word rock I'm not just saying a word. There are real things that I can point to that match the word, things that would exist whether I (or anyone else) had ever vocalized a word referring to it.
You can't say the same thing about love, or God, or good and evil, or right and wrong. So far as we know, all these things are nothing but words. Stop using those words (love, God, good, evil, right, wrong) and the ideas they refer to disappear. You can't say that about rocks or trees or stars or children playing or people eating and drinking and working and sleeping.
Where precisely is all this morality and/or sin that people are talking about all the time?
Does it exist anywhere but in the words they use to talk about it?
I suspect not. Morality may be found in one place only, in the marketplace of human language, which makes it a purely social phenomenon, not a natural one, and not being a natural dynamic means one thing and one thing only: that it does not actually exist (because it only socially exists).
Stop paying attention to an annoying person and they go away.
The same is true of imaginary objects. Stop talking about them and they gradually disolve.
Christmas provides an easy example. That super-crass commercial holiday would never come if everyone were to stop talking about it. Like morality, Christmas does not exist, except in our minds. If somehow the word Christmas were to be made illegal, absolutely taboo, and if everyone honored the law, the next time it was supposed to come around, it wouldn't.
Christmas keeps on happening because people keep on talking about it. Can you say the same thing about rocks, trees or stars? Would the stars disappear if the word stars were made illegal?