Goalodicy
Most people,
believers and atheists alike, wonder how a benevolent God could allow all the
evils we see to persist. Oliver Burkeman in his book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking,
writes:
“In theology, the term ‘theodicy’ refers to
the effort to maintain belief in a benevolent god, despite the prevalence of
evil in the world; the phrase is occasionally used to describe the effort to
maintain any belief in the face of contradictory evidence.”
Continuing in the
generalized meaning of the term, Chris Kayes coined an equivalent term in the
context of goals we pursue: “goalodicy”. He describes it as the tendency of
people to be “lured into destruction by their passion for goals”.
But isn’t setting
a goal and working towards it a good thing? Not always. After all, sometimes:
“Clearly defined goals seemed to motivate
people to cheat…Those given a target to reach lied far more frequently than did
those instructed merely to ‘do your best’”.
Then there’s the
risk of getting overly focused with a goal. Like Arjuna, you end up seeing the
eye of the bird that needs to be shot and nothing else:
“You isolate some aspect or aspects of your
life, or your organisation, or your society, and focus on those at the expense
of others…‘When we try to pick out any thing by itself,’ the naturalist and
philosopher John Muir observed, ‘we find it hitched to everything else in the
universe.’”
Also known as the
law of unintended consequences!
Guess what is the most
valuable skill of a successful entrepreneur?
“It’s the ability to adopt an
unconventional approach to learning: an improvisational flexibility not merely
about which route to take towards some predetermined objective, but also a
willingness to change the destination itself.”
Silicon Valley may
be on onto that point since their favorite term these days is “pivot”, the
ability and willingness to switch course…fast.
So why is it hard
to pivot? Why do we get so stuck to our goals? Partly because of the romantic
idealism associated with some goals. Let Michael Brendan Doughertyn cite
an example:
“Ideologues prefer the idea of an ideological
nation, a crusader state. Crusader states inspire great battle poetry.”
And so we get
hitched to a goal, even when it stops making any sense.
There is a clear influence of the Christian-and-White people's ideas dominating the world, even if many Whites are not into believing in Christianity (or other religions). For example, this blog introduces with an idea which has meaning only in the Semitic religions: it is that God is benevolent. Quite simplistic: how can God be bad?
ReplyDeleteAfter that starts the requirement to justify God's, i.e. the Creator's, idiocy: Why the hell he created all the evil and bad along with the good? It went into another silly idea too - of human's wishing the mighty villain, the Satan, who is evil! All bad gets taken care of with Satin heading all bad things! But this idea is completely wrong because Satan is no Cinema super-villain who could be suitably vanquished by the super-hero. Satan is as powerful and as eternal as God. Sorrowfully for the believer, God has to be demoted from his position of Almighty! :-) Satan is the counter almighty, which renders God half as powerful as originally believed!
That apart, the West needs to bring up terms like ‘theodicy’ referring to the effort to maintain belief in a benevolent god, despite the prevalence of evil in the world. All because we are ingrained in false conceptualization of God. And people are desperate for a God! I don't know why we never give up on God!! :-)
While the Eastern mysticism admits that all concepts of God are indeed false, because God is not in the domain of the mind which can only conceptualize. God is not something outside the mind or outside anything for that matter. God has to permeate through everything in and out, if he is a worthy one. According to Eastern mysticism, there can never be a God sitting in his throne in heaven.
These people, the mystics, at least have a better answer to the 'evil question': They ask, if God is everything, and, if that everything (call it the universe or multiverse or whatever name you prefer) has an evil component or ingredient, what about it? All evil is God too! God is both benevolence and malevolence rolled into one. The mystics have no problem with that.
I certainly find this more logical and actually more appealing.
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Sorry I didn't bother to respond to the blog's principal point! :-( I suppose that is OK, I mean the point of the blog, not my not responding to it! :-)