Legend has it that Siddhartha Gautama was raised as a spoiled prince who lived for nothing but pleasure in his early life. After looking out and seeing the immense suffering in the world, he began to loath his frivolous life. At that point he joined a group of ascetics and spent his days fasting almost to the point of starvation and meditating. He found this equally unfulfilling and unenlightening. While still a hermit, he was sitting on riverbank wondering what to do when barge floated by with a master musician instructing his apprentice about tuning a lute. He said, “Don’t make the string too tight or it will break, and don’t make it too loose or it won’t play.” Siddhartha realized that balance between the two extremes was the secret, and that was when he became the Buddha.
This need for balance really struck home to me when I was watching a YouTube video by TIKHistory about Ideologs. The video had some good points, but it also had some striking failings. And after I thought about and recalled some of his other videos, I think I know what the problem is. Before I go on, I want to recommend TIKHisotry. If you have any interest in the World War II period, you should watch his videos. The author is a British PhD in history who specialized in that period.
Now as I was saying, his video on Ideologs has some issues. In one of his previous videos, he explained how the Nazis were socialist. He mentioned how he received a lot of flak for that conclusion with people claiming he was just saying that because he was right wing. He explained that he came to that conclusion while being a socialist, and it was the realization that Nazis were socialist was partly why he rejected socialism. Then in later videos he admitted that he was now following Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. I realized that like Siddhartha Gautama, the man had gone from one extreme to another.
Socialism is a complete subjugation of the individual for the group. It calls for everyone to sacrifice their needs, desires, and ego for the “greater good.” This greater good is the collective group as whole, or for society. Hince, socialism. In the cases of Marxism and Fascism the state is substituted for society. In all cases the end goal is the erasure of the individual. It is a form of Utilitarianism philosophy where the happiness of the majority trumps all.
Objectivism was born from Ayn Rand’s experience of living through and escaping from a Communist regime. Because of these experiences, she raised the individual above all else and as the absolute good. To her the concept of sacrificing for others was idiocy and altruism was a dirty word. Anything and everything, that checked one from indulging in their personal desires was anathema.
These are the two extremes, and we must strike a balance between the community and the individual. Both are important and valuable. To raise one above the other is a mistake. This is why I like the Star Trek movies The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock so much because they are the yin and the yang of finding the balance between Utilitarianism and Objectivism. In The Wrath of Khan, Spock sacrifices himself to save the Enterprise. When asked why he said, “Because the needs of many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.” At the end of The Search for Spock, Kirk was asked why he and the rest of crew would sacrifice so much to bring back Spock, and he said, “Because sometimes the need of the one outweighs the needs of the many.”
#Buddha, #Utilitarianism, #Socialism, #Objectiveism, #StarTrek, #TIKHistory