THE MEANING and SIGNIFICANCE OF MORALITY

Numerous actions of our current President and the individuals with whom he has surrounded himself are being legally challenged for various kinds of crime. These challenges have produced a Special Counsel Investigation which has produced a number of guilty pleas by individuals employed in high levels of the U.S. Government. Also, a number of other Federal and state investigations are underway concerning individuals associated with either his administration or campaign.

However, his recent actions concern the arresting and imprisoning of people seeking asylum in the United States and taking their children away from them, without either their consent, or even, in numerous cases, their realization that the children were being taken, and held in literal chain link cages with little or no professional MSW Children Service workers, nurses, or qualified staff of any kind. These actions have evoked a huge outrageous response from millions of people around the world over the abhorrence of the immorality and fascist nature of his actions.

The actions are being challenged in a number of court procedures on legal grounds. Child abuse is a crime, and placing the children in danger, and causing them untold physical and psychological damage are legal reasons that may be used to prohibit such actions. The moral or immoral aspects, actually the motives that drive the intentions of these actions, do not seem to be a part of the legal action. Fascist immorality is apparently not a crime.

This begs a question. What, exactly, does moral mean. According to Dictionary.com, moral is an adjective “concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior and the goodness or badness of human character.” And it lists a number of synonyms: “virtuous, good, righteous, upright, upstanding, high-minded, principled, honorable, honest, just, noble, incorruptible, scrupulous, respectable, decent, clean-living, law-abiding.”

And once again we encounter the ancient wall of intellectual sophistry. The motivation that generated the intention and the action that implemented these cruel and inhumane conditions which are actual crimes committed against children was, we are expected to believe,  the "high minded and noble" effort to “make America Great Again” by protecting America from hordes of invading rapists, murderers, and assorted vermin.

The sad fact is that many of our brothers and sisters actually "believe" this. Who is to say that this or that motive is immoral?  Who is to say that the motive to create a "super race" of brilliant (probably white, and maybe a bit yellow but certainly not brown or black!) people who have self-acclaimed superior understanding of what is good or bad, is not moral? This has been and is the issue that is being used by not only “immoral” individuals, but actual amoral individuals to gain, keep and wield power from the get-go.

It is as obvious today as it was thousands of years ago, that it is this driving will to gain, keep and wield power over others that is motivating dictators, oligarchs, and would be kings such as Trump to take these cruel and actually illegal actions. This is and has always been the driver of every despot that has ever walked on this Earth.

I find it impossible to discriminate between the reasons that Trump and his administration are putting forth to justify their actions and the reasons used by many other ancient and modern wannabe makers of something great again. Take for example, the Holy Roman Catholic Church's Inquisition. This effort to make the One True Church pure or great again went on for over 200 years. It tortured millions, and burned tens of thousands to death all over the world and all in the name of purifying it of heresy by exterminating random non catholic and other assorted, actually catholic, heretics.  Or consider the reasons and actions that were used by individuals to enslave some 12 million African people in North And South America, or the reasons and actions the Nazis used to exterminate 6 million Jewish people to create their Super Race.

There is no intellectual effective answer to this issue. The vast majority of historical Rulers, Kings, Emperors, Monarchs, Khagans, Caesars, and Tsars were, and are highly intelligent individuals. Many of them, probably most, actually believed that they were appointed to rule by some god or inner voice or other. The primary motive of many of their actions was to protect their hold on and to increase in any possible way their power.

Most of this was carried out in the name of some great sophistic moral principle such as to "Make America Great Again". It, of course, had  and has nothing at all to do with what was said to be moral or immoral. For example, it included murdering (or to use the present mode of eliminating annoying persons,) "firing" any individual person or persons or declaring war on any other power holder who may be seen as a threat.

In strictly intellectual terms, the list of synonyms given above and the basic terms of “good and bad” mean whatever anyone declares them to mean. They are all abstractions. Abstractions cannot be either qualified or understood by Intelligence. Abstractions are not things or forms that can be intellectually measured, or given measurable identifiers. Hence, they mean whatever anyone declares them to mean.

The Declaration of Independence states, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." There is a clear strain of individual American citizens who feel, as the pigs who controlled the government in Animal Farm did, and as a person who has a three hole golf course on his private property in Southern California, and said the water use laws do not apply to him, does that "Some people are more equal than others."

That this Feeling is not based in any kind of rational or coherent Law of physics is obvious. However the persons who feel this way use all of their highly developed intelligence to create social, economic and governmental systems to implement these feelings in systems that fulfill their deepest desires. The Common Good and General Welfare are absolutely irrelevant.

The problem is that it is generally understood that Liberty and Justice and other such Principles have no innate meaning or significance that is independent of any form that anyone employs to manifest them. So actually, for those who are not able to grasp or comprehend the innate quality of such self evident Principles of Cosmic Physics these terms literally mean whatever any one says they mean.

The history of the very long and painful evolution of Humanity is largely the history of very intelligent but woefully ignorant individuals or groups trying and ultimately failing to "Rule the World". In every case these world conquerors have been opposed, and ultimately defeated, not so much by individuals, as by these very Principles of Evolution which drive what we call the Heroes of Humanity.

These dramas, some of which took centuries  to work out and others which required only a few years or so, have usually ended by generating very painful and dreadful suffering for multitudes of others, and with the would be world rulers walking around in circles looking for a horse or being eventually assassinated by the next would be ruler. The present drama we are facing which involves a would be king and the usual collection of lickspittles and greedy sycophants, is getting very near the end. The end is, as it has ever been, unavoidable.

This is the meaning and significance of morality. If it is moral, it promotes the inevitability of what some call The Great Unfolding.  It could as easily be called be called Science, but we know it as Evolution.