Yes: I value the opinions of others, insofar as I can vouch for their integrity. Yet that requires that they fervently believe that what they say is true, that they can stand beside it, put it into practice, and uphold it as a sacred principle, as though it were a Higher Power which compelled them. It thus follows that, so long as an opinion is valid, one must validate it not by merely practicing that view within one’s own life, but by holding others to it. One cannot impose morality on anyone, because morality is binding on us all, in equal measure, and one’s only burden is to fathom it, to the extent one can, and to uphold it. That is not an imposition; it’s an obligation, and, without it, we have nothing.
You once asked me: “At what point is it an evil to impose one’s views of righteousness on someone else?” I’ll answer with the obvious: at no point, whatsoever, since it is impossible.
Where Righteousness is what’s at stake, one can’t “impose on someone else”, as though one posed an “outward threat” to someone’s “rights”, since Righteousness is binding on us all, and no one has a right which supersedes the aims of Righteousness.
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| Then struggle harder, Soichiro. |
The only evil possible, in this regard, is that of *error*. Yet, so long as every man is fallible, then all men are expendable in the pursuit of vanquishing this evil which is error, through correction.
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| As with Code, so with the Moral Code, too. |
Furthermore, so long as it is only in the realm of action, criticism, and involvement in the lives of “others” that one can escape one’s error, (as the tendency to private bias is a strong one) it is always right to act on one’s convictions, to the absolute extent, until the moment they are proven false, for one must seek what’s Good to the extent of one’s abilities, and, if that’s not enough, one has to take all opportunities available to further those abilities.
The suffering of any person, as a consequence of error, is the price we all must pay for being fallible. As such, it’s never evil to assert one’s views of what is Righteous, even if they’re wrong and even if the error causes harm to others, since the error is corrected through the process which produces that same harm, and the conviction, once enacted in the absence of that error*, helps us to fulfill that which we all are obligated to fulfill: the Good.
(*Conviction cannot be enacted in the absence of an error if it’s not as easily enacted in the error’s presence, since conviction is the antidote to doubt, and doubt accompanies all fallibility.)
In that regard, there are no “others”, only “fellow men”, no “individuals”, but only “denizens”. Refusing to acknowledge this as our only burden is the gateway to pursuits which do not seek the Good explicitly, and to pursue things which may not be Good, for reasons other than the Good, is evil.
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| And he has no shame in the confession. |
It thus follows that one can’t be evil when pursuing Goodness, since it is the failure to pursue the Good which constitutes an evil, and the people who insist that “no one chooses to be evil” have, by failing to pursue the Good, become the very people who choose to be evil, whose existence thus invalidates their own convictions, dooms them to an error, and deprives them of entitlement to life.
**[({R.G.)}]**
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