Saturday, December 13, 2014

The Mistake Of Letting Dead People Make Our Decisions For Us

http://bizarro.com/
From bizarro.com
This comic hits on a point I've mentioned before having to do with letting what we create control us.

Other than the creation of religions that we let control us, perhaps the other most obvious example is the U.S. Constitution (or any set of laws). This document is seen by what is probably a vast majority of Americans as ruling over us in a way that takes control of our lives out of our own hands--and they are okay with that.

The list of things we create and then follow without question is huge and includes just about anything people justify with "we've always done it that way." They can range from something rather innocuous like a recipe to something truly awful like racism.

When we give up taking responsibility for ourselves and, instead, claim we must follow some set of past decisions, we create some pretty appalling conditions.  The society we live in is what we create and accept. To improve we need to change and adapt, not following a set of decisions made during a different time. Blaming what we do on people who are dead is not a valid excuse for anything.

One other area of note where we let dead people tell us what to do comes in the form of wills. It is a fairly common practice that we let people who have died having power over the living by telling us what we can do with their former stuff. People who are dead are dead. They no longer exist. For us to concede post-mortem control, for example, to a dead person over a piece of land they used to own is over-the-top nuts. They are dead. Whatever happens after they die is not their concern because they can't even have a concern--they are dead and can't, therefore, do or be anything at all other than dead. They don't exist, and we should not give things that don't exist power over our lives. The strings a person has controlling their stuff should be cut when a coffin enters the picture. 

No comments: