You’ve met them -whether in the dealings with family, friends or colleagues. They are the philosophers of justification. What I mean by this is that any action a person deems important to themselves is immediately justifiable. All others are the ones who have a problem. I am by no means a great studier of philosophy, but I am decent at the observation of human nature. All of us, including myself, can be judgmental against the actions of others. We can easily justify our judgment and it becomes our own philosophy. We have in fact have become a judgmental society and we can justify this as well. If you are right leaning in the terms of political persuasion, you are justifiably correct – at all things. If you are left leaning, your thoughts are justifiably correct – at all things. There is no middle ground and no need for rational and logical thought. We can’t help it, we are human.
We seek to join others who share in our sense of justification and condemn others who do not. Many believe theory is synonymous with fact. We have already justified this in our minds. It is what we want to believe. Therefore any news, credible or hoax, are immediately accepted as fact because they support our very own justified conclusion. We will not entertain a rational debate.
At times we cannot watch a movie or read a book, because the story line offends our sense of justified intellectualism. An atheist can never read a story regarding a creator, as it offends their thesis that no creator could possibly exist. Even a fantasy story that deals with a creator is somehow offending. We cannot and will not accept anything less.
When I released my mythological trilogy, “The Chosen One of Allivar”, I received a tweet that the title alone would prevent it from being a best seller. Again, someone has justified that anything titled “Chosen One” would immediately be not credible. I had many state immediately that is was a stealth Christian novel. They had already justified it as so. Then I had a Christian state it was so unchristian like. When we fail to open our minds to new experiences and thoughts, then the world becomes closed to us and our growth as a human being ceases. We withdraw from the world and guard our own sense of justification. We do not enter into any discussion, other than to demean someone else who somehow cannot see your light.
As an author, I want to delve into the very reason people behave in the manner they do. So in each of my three completed stories of the mythology and the sixteen to follow, you will see not only narrative of the author who wishes to entertain, but the author that wants the reader to expand his/her grasp upon the thousands of years of philosophy into our being. Two of the greatest gifts we have are the art of listening and observation. Above all, you have free will, the ability to expand your knowledge and to make your own educated and rational decisions. Sometimes those decisions, although justified at the moment of the action, are later discovered to be no more foolish than any one else. This my reader is called wisdom. We the living are no more near wisdom, than we were thousands of years ago when great philosophers pondered and debated our meaning in this universe.
“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” Socrates
“Only the dead have seen the end of war.” Plato
