«
»

what does life value

in reply to: http://odewire.com/46323/size-six-the-western-womens-harem.html

I liked the article. However, the way of presenting an idea along the lines of “all men oppress all women” is odd to me, though.

, *1938-07-21, 78th Attorney General of the Un...

, *1938-07-21, 78th Attorney General of the United States (1993–2001) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the West, there is a great value on young, virgin femininity- or at least the appearance of feminine, virgin youthfulness. Certainly men value it, as do women. No, a crumpled old George Burns at age 95 is not especially sexy and neither is Janet Reno or Margaret Thatcher– at least not to any heterosexual men that I know.

English: Margaret Thatcher, former UK PM. Fran...

Margaret Thatcher –  Image via Wikipedia

Yes, there are ideals of male and female physique– some more universal and some more cultural. Besides physique, other qualities are valued in a mate. However, with the whole thing about women being the ones who actually get pregnant and bear and nurse children, maybe it is a simple fact of nature that for the future evolutionary viability of an offspring, the health and physique of the female parent is more important than the health and physique of the male parent. (Also, I have noticed that among the healthy, fit, teenage women that I know, there may be a relatively low frequency of complaints about societal valuations that honor healthy, fit, teenage women.)

See https://jrfibonacci.wordpress.com/2011/10/23/what-does-human-dna-seek-in-mate/

In the West, it is sometimes celebrated that in recent decades, women have become more involved with commercial activity, like taking on jobs more or less the same as men have since the industrial revolution and concentrating of humans in to cities to work at factories. When a society‘s population grows to a point of excess or saturation relative to present resources and infrastructure, it is natural for the social value of the act of child-bearing in particular (and in general the value of women and children) to decline, sometimes suddenly, like during wars.

Girls may be sent off to public schools just like boys. That does not indicate a huge value by families on their children of either sex, but a lack of value. A society in which children are more valued shelters them and apprentices them- at least the aristocratic ones. A society in which children are less valued sends them off to warehouses, but that is a much more sheltered life than abandoning them totally, or shipping them to an orphanage, or selling them like slaves (which may happen much more in impoverished families than sheltered westerners may wish to think).

So, let’s say that in a particular society and culture, there are a set of values in my midst- though those values are subject to change. I could be a newborn or a visitor from afar or a native of many decades. So what are some ways that I could relate to the values in my midst? Do I reject the actual values in my midst? Do I condemn them, or question them, or insist that they are inherently the best, denying the entire history of anthropology and economics? Values change. Values vary.

Institutions organize society by influencing different folks in different ways. The same is true in a bee colony in which one embryo (though genetically the same as hundreds of sisters) is nourished distinctly (with nutrient-rich “royal jelly” rather than the regular honey for the masses of bees). Should we condemn this injustice and intervene to bring equality to bees? If beekeepers tried to do that, it might hasten the extinction of bees.

Life has dictated that bees favor particular embryos and nurture those in to queens. All of the other bees cooperate to gather honey for the “lower class bees” and to gather royal jelly for the selected future queen. The queen is not elected democratically after maturing and campaigning. She is “advantaged” from the earliest age. However, to say “advantaged” is a bit odd.

Are the heart and brain “advantaged” over the skin or the digestive organs when there is a hormonal shift resulting in the directing of resources like oxygen-rich blood to those organs and tissues rather than toward others? Isn’t it that for the benefit of the entire body, lower priority functions like growing hair and growing fingernails will lose nutritional resources (resulting in things like baldness) when other functions are “valued” by the hormonal system of the physiological genius of that particular creature (which could be a mammal or a fish or a reptile)? Is the hormonal system of mammals or fish or reptiles “the best?” It is a silly question, right?

Many humans have been programmed or indoctrinated to relate to life (through language) as something to be rejected, judged, condemned and fixed. When I relate to life as something to be rejected, judged, condemned and fixed, I am life too.

Do I criticize celebrities (including politicians) arrogantly, as if I really know what their lives are like and have some special insight that they should have known to humbly come to me to learn? Do I criticize their arrogance or their naivete or their ambition or what?

Spiritual traditions may teach us to refer to that manner of operating as hell or sin or maya or agonizing or even mental illness like anxiety or paranoia. The archetype of the accuser or slanderer (or, from the Greek word “dia-bolos:” the devil) is referenced as a particular spirit or attitude and many humans are warned about it. We may be taught of “the spirit of the divisive one” as distinct from the spirit of the sage: one who recognizes persona as like a branch of a larger tree. Ego or the identifying of individuality is a process in language as in a process of symbolic metaphor or spirit, and the process is not observable in matter, or at least not without mapping complex neurological patterns of language and perception.

The ego is just a process or pattern of neuro-linguistic biochemistry, and that process is the system of the filtering of all perceiving. The ego cannot remove the ego. The ego is not a mistake. The self-image is the relating to life as if one is isolated from life. We can label the ego as a distinct developmental stage among others.

The ego is one linguistic function of life, like reading these wordy letter shapes is a linguistic function of miraculous neuro-chemistry. Reading does not require the linguistic identifying of an isolated individuality, but reading does require language. Likewise, the perceiving of an ego does not require reading, but the perceiving of an ego isolated in language and through language and by language does require language.

So, life prioritizes by favoring certain functions and capacities over others. Hormones do it when directing blood to various organs and tissues. Bees do it when selecting an embryo to nourish in to a queen. Human populations do it through wars and propaganda and trade- with particular human populations coming to global dominance or regional dominance or local dominance or whatever. When trends of the behaviors of lending and borrowing balloon prices of real estate, that reflects a temporary shifting of social values. When prices of fuels (like crude oil) rise from $11 in 1999 to $148 in 2008, that reflects a temporary shifting in social values.

see http://www.theDominOILeffect.com

Values change, sometimes quickly, like when your child starts choking or when a war ends. How do you relate to the fact that there are values that vary from place to place and time to time? How do you value your own life, life in general, and human social values?

Do you reject, judge, condemn, and obsessively to try fix? Do you practice the spirit of inner and outer divisiveness, of the devil? Do you condemn condemnation? Do you judge against judgmental systems of valuation and evaluation? Do you de-value values? Do you value the relationship between that particular function of life labeled “language” and all of the other functions of life?

Is language better than the rest of life? Is language isolated from the rest of life? Is language a function of the rest of life?
http://www.OneEyedKingsWealthClub.com

Related articles

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This entry was posted on February 12, 2012 at 7:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a comment