Home Fixation

In a world where insanity is sane, people will accept even the darkest lie even if drenched in boots of white. One of the ruling problems in the modern world today, is that of the absolute and definitive moral. It plagues, divides and destroys an otherwise natural view on life and its place in a larger scheme. To understand the inherent problems with an absolute moral, one needs to examine this phenomenon deeper.

In a famous Swedish piece of cinema directed by Ingmar Bergman, called "The Seventh Seal", a knight by the name of Antonius Block arrives at an Inn. During a conversation with one of the men sitting by a table, Antonius is given a very strange statement from the man: "Love is perfect in its imperfect form". What does he mean by this? What lies behind such a comment, in an otherwise joyous house of entertainment and laughs? To understand why an absolute perfection in actuality is imperfect, one needs to draw examples from the outside, as well as the inside world in which we're living by and in contemporary time. I was once asked this question: "Why should people separate races, and thereby preserving them, when no man in the whole world is 100% Norwegian, Dutch or Swedish by blood?"

Yes, why? It was here an immediate response came to mind: "Why should anyone read books, since no man holds all possible knowledge in this world?" This counter-question describes one of the inherent faults with an absolute moral. When you claim that all is already perfect and done, or on the other hand, will never be perfect and done - you thereby announce a fatalistic view on life. You stop striving towards a higher cause or ideal, and instead sit back and watch while the world is passing you by. It is a cowardice way of not caring about important issues and instead settling with less or nothing. One can still hold, love, preserve, live and worship ones own ancient culture without being "100 % clean by blood". If you have more than 4-5 generations of clean blood in your veins, you will most likely feel very strongly attached to your own racial culture. This is not to say that a line should not be drawn where "less good" becomes "unacceptable" for a standard to follow, but merely that the majority of people who refuse to do some work just because something already isn't "perfect", inherently are giving up on life itself.

When mastering all the knowledge in this world, you automatically also master the ability not to possess any knowledge at all. An absolute moral rejects itself, as it is a paradox by inherent structure. It claims to possess "freedom", "eternal love", "constant joy" or "a feeling of satisfaction lasting forever", yet all these things stand against themselves. Not only because a man who knows everything also thereby knows nothing, but since constant and unchanging patterns lose their meanings. Compare this to the Judeo-Christian notion of "heaven". It sounds good on paper to always feel joyous, but in reality, it would be internal torture. To never meet failures, to never experience pain, to never feel the variety of what an earthly life may give you. It is more pain than pleasure, in the end.

One of the reasons to this, is that the world often depends on situations and variables. It's like solving a math quiz, realizing that by changing the x in Y = x + 6, the answer Y will change as well. An absolute state does not take this in consideration, as it only sees Y1 = good or Y2 = evil. Sadly, by diving a quiz you also divide the outlook on life. Heaven becomes separated from earth and if you by moral choose one quiz over another, you have successfully rejected one part of the original quiz - one part of the original worldview.

In this sense, Ingmar Bergman does not announce hate towards love. He realises that love being perfect in itself never will achieve perfection, as it becomes inhuman and unearthly. It does not lay in the nature of a relationship to always aspire and generate "good" things, and maybe that is how it should be. Without something to perfect, strife towards higher and better things becomes meaningless and instead passivity, pacifism and fatalism will rule the human mind. In order for the modern man to gain a new and healthier perspective on life, he must go beyond absolute good and bad and instead analyze and live by the world as it is. Everything else is a rejection, a dividing, serving no other purpose than to moralise and thereby saying no to life itself.

March 5, 2006

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