The Genealogy of Morality and Immorality; Hatred of Humanity & Criticism of Humanity

‘O Human Being, I defend you, against you!’

 Nuri Pakdil

 

The Genealogy of Immorality: Chosen Ignorance, Stunted Childhood, Uncomprehending Intellect

While we were talking about transhumanism, posthumanism, artificial intelligence, and the techno-digital metaverse age, we have returned once again to the ancient criticism of the human. We are returning to those primitive ages in which everyone hated everyone else, was hostile to the human, no one loved anyone, and people hated social companionship and fled into selfish caves. We are the human, of course; as we produce technology, invent new tools and equipment, and develop different homes, means of transportation, weapons, entertainment and educational tools, we think that we are progressing and developing, that we are evolving into a higher race. Then we look around and see that we have little progress, or even that we have been going around in circles in the same place. Only the forms, appearances, perceptions of time and space, and technological toys have changed in the universe of mind games that produced by our brains. The human being is still the same. ‘People flew in the air, but they died on the ground’ said the poet.

Thinkers, intellectuals, philosophers, and sages are once again grumbling and complaining about the human, once again scapegoating and blaming societies or specific groups, depending on the context; religious figures marginalize and look down on sinners, scientists on the ignorant, artists on the public, and city dwellers on villagers, and at the root of it all lies a peculiar hostility toward the human species.

Yet there is a fine line between criticism of the human and hostility toward the human. Criticism of the human is a form of self-criticism. Ensuring that the deficiencies inherent in the human nature do not manifest in life in various forms as evil, harm, loss, oppression, and falsehood; and the criticism of traits such as the failure to curb desires and passions and the lack of control over one’s behavior, as well as the provision or prevention of refraining from these, all these are warnings intended to admonish human beings so that they do not commit evil and harmful things. Religious teachings, especially the Noble Qur’an, are in this sense a very harsh criticism of the human. The Holy Qur’an criticizes human using numerous descriptors, characterizing him as ignorant, unmindful of using his reason, ungrateful, greedy, overstepping his bounds, deviant, untrustworthy, a worshiper of the world, wealth, power, religious figures, and self-concocted idols, as well as a killer who sheds blood unjustly, one who forgets his responsibilities, one who lacks self-awareness, and so forth. Many of the negative characteristics concerning the human that people somehow express today are already stated by the Noble Qur’an, and it advises human beings to correct these traits, abandon them, and stay away from them. It also shows the ways how to do so. Interestingly, many people blame religions when they see adherents of that religions continuing to engage in the very behaviors that the religion itself criticizes. For instance, both Christianity and Islam have counseled people in this regard, making it almost a hallmark of faith, yet certain circles constantly throw the crimes of Christians, such as the Inquisition, the Crusades, and colonialism, or the crimes and sins committed by Muslims, in the faces of the devout as if these acts were mandates of their religions or the natural consequence of believing in them. Yet, religions were preached precisely to prevent these crimes and sins; to this end, they critique the human being aiming to educate and correct the individual, remedy their shortcomings, and ensure they live without harming one another or themselves.

Hostility toward the human, however, is something else. It is the continuation of the hostility towards the human of the Iblis and Satan in religious narratives. The creation narrative, in which Iblis, out of jealousy towards Adam, deceives him, leads him astray, and causes his expulsion from Paradise, preaches that by heeding Iblis-Satan, the human falls into imperfection, error, and deviation, whereas by refusing to follow Iblis, they can discover both themselves and God. In this sense, hostility towards the human is the work of Iblis-the-Devil. Self-criticism, on the other hand, is Adam becoming aware of the sin and repenting.

Throughout history, as today, the lineage of Iblis-the-Devil has always been hostile to the human being, that is, ontologically to the descendants of Adam. The descendants of Adam, meanwhile, have always made a self-criticism of the wrongs they committed because they followed Iblis-the-Devil.

Within this framework, criticism of the human is necessary, even obligatory. But without descending to the level of hostility toward the human species itself in the manner of the Iblis.  Today, by using as a pretext the various age-old crimes and sins, such as widespread or rather, highly visible due to the media; corruption, moral decay, mass killings, lies, graft, prostitution, adultery, alcohol abuse, gambling, exhibitionism, voyeurism, deviant relationships, unbridled ambition, racism, and fraud, everyone falls into the trap of the Iblis-Devil by harboring hostility toward others, and indeed toward the human itself.

The pedigree of moral depravity lies in heeding the Iblis-Satan that leads man astray, in other words, in becoming like him and then, after causing this likeness to be forgotten, using it as a justification to bear enmity against the human himself, against Adam.

The genealogy of morality, on the other hand, is carrying out ceaseless criticism-self-criticism (advice and repentance) in order to cleanse the human being from the influence of Iblis-the-Devil, that is, from all bad habits, and equip them with a moral character that is honorable, dignified, and responsible.

The lines below, in this sense, are criticism of the human, and even self-criticism.

 

Mass Education; Educated Slavery

Mass education, especially the learning of reading and writing by everyone, is a new development in human history. Everyone being literate is contrary to the nature of the average human being. Because human beings practically learn what is necessary according to their needs and acquire behavioral habits. The main channel of human learning is practical education. Profession and disposition are the only legitimate means by which a person can meet his needs through his own will, ability, and labor. For this, practical training, instinctive habits, and natural abilities are often sufficient. In this sense, literacy too is necessary because it is required by one’s profession and disposition; that is, it is the behavioral habit only of the person who needs it. For the rest, it is an unnecessary burden. (Indeed, most people have now begun to return to their natural state and, without reading or writing, content themselves with the emojis and signs of the digital age.)

Throughout history, the channels of human learning and communication have been memorizing, speaking, and listening.

Listening, in particular, is both educational and captivating. Sacred texts, the Torah, the Gospel, and the Qur’an, along with their commentaries, as well as ideological texts, are memorized through constant repetition. Writing, oratory, and eloquence format the brain. They construct and manipulate according to intention and purpose. In other words, masses are enchanted, educated, and governed through speaking-listening-memorization.

In My Universities, Gorky says, “People seek not knowledge, but forgetting and consolation.”

Mass education-literacy was the first move of the global capitalist world order. In the modern Western system of education and learning, all literate people and all media first question the past, tradition, and their origin and become alienated from them. This process was parallel to the transformation of the peasant into a worker and the alienation of labor from its product. Schools, where people are supposedly learning and being educated, are ideal places not only for a new class design, but also for alienation from the past and from one’s own original nature, that is, for forgetting and consolation.

Compulsory education, school, followed by newspapers, radio, and cinema, and finally TV and the internet… are a continuation of the brainwashing based on listening that existed in the past. They are its modern form and more effective. A person who learns everything-or a little about everything-through mass education becomes alienated from his actual ability and aptitude. Just as unnecessary possessions beyond one’s needs, positions beyond one’s abilities, and undeserved fame, knowledge that one does not need is also a state of enchantment that makes a person obsolete and alienates him from himself. The institutionalization of ignorance through education, much like the organization of coercion via the machinery of the state, has given rise to a form of legitimized vulgarity.

This educational model, developed by the modern capitalist system to condition the new slave-human it needs into a collective way of thinking and behavioral codes, has fully achieved its intended purpose and, almost like a global official ideology, has inculcated the same indoctrinations as history, sociology, archaeology, mathematics, science, law, and theology, upon all of humanity. Being able to step outside these memorized lessons, to question them, and to think differently has been treated as almost irrational, absolutely wrong, and even as a bad idea or belief. Although many intellectuals have tried to describe this blindness, herd behavior, and universal ignorance through novels, stories, and theories, everywhere in the world every child goes to school in the morning and, through television and the internet in the evening, continuously learns, hears, sees, and accepts the same things. Thus, they never grow up, never leave the bubble in which they are imprisoned, and are forced to endure imposed lives until they die. But most people do not complain about this condition; indeed, they learn to use it by cunningly developing methods to survive in their small world or to fulfill their desires. This is called chosen ignorance, and it is the source that allows small people, that is, slaves, to live without assuming responsibility.

A slave always prefers remaining a slave to being free. Because slavery is irresponsible childishness. Freedom, on the other hand, requires responsibility.

Most people grow up, live, and die without becoming Adam, that is, without being purified of the leaven of Iblis and attaining reason and understanding.

Bukowski writes at the end of the paragraph that begins, “The terrible thing is not death, but the lives that are lived or not lived…”; “For most people, death is a deception. There is nothing left to die…” Heidegger is more pessimistic; he said, ‘only human beings die, the rest perish.’

 

Selected Ignorance: Cunning Selfishness

Just as the human being develop secure shelters and means of defense against the dangers of the nature and society into which they are born, they also develop intriguing sanctuaries and defensive reflexes when they perceive their own existence to be in jeopardy. Selected ignorance and exaggerated religiosity are also forms of refuge. In other words, playing the fool, pretending not to know, acting indifferent are actually tactics for gaining time in order to test every development whose outcome one does not yet know. Drawing on thousands of years of experience with enslavement in Africa, people most often play this role and try to protect themselves from new dangers. In reality, the African knows that there is water underground, that all kinds of food will grow if the soil is cultivated, how to care for and breed animals, and how to build better houses and roads; yet, they are well aware that if they were to do these things, they, just like their ancestors, would be taken away in chains and under the lash to distant lands and enslaved, and that their own life would be stolen just as their minerals were. For this reason, they cultivate just enough to sustain themselves and constantly play the role of the starving and thirsty to elicit help from foreigners who, viewing them as in need, are moved by their consciences. Ultimately, aid pours into Africa from all over the world through this trade in compassion.

Oscar Wilde says, ‘An ungrateful, wasteful, discontented and rebellious poor man is an authentic person, and there is much substance in them.’ Sometimes even negative characteristics contain a positive essence. Ultimately, that which is negative, that is, bad, deficient, or wrong, is the reverse manifestation or fractal reflection of the Good in the mirror.

Instead of being the master of one’s own destiny, playing the victim of destiny is easier. Tolstoy says, ‘What the ignorant person lacks is not intelligence, they are cunning; what is missing is morality.’ This false fatalism is also the root cause of immorality. Because the source of morality is the consciousness of responsibility arising from free will. Every individual who attributes their destiny to God or, in the same sense, to time, chance, or external causes, thereby securing the freedom of irresponsibility, also externalizes the choices they make between good and evil, right and wrong, sin and good work. This manner of relationship that he establishes with God, or equivalently with the fundamental principle in which they believes without calling it God, determines all their actions as well. Every evil, wrong, sin, or shortcoming is easily attributed to their god or, in the same sense, to fate, fortune, the state, or the established order. This state of failing to reach adolescence, a product of the primitive, childhood-era belief that casts God, the state, the system, or nature in the role of a father or mother is, in fact, a highly conscious instinct. The contradiction between instinct and consciousness has disappeared in this matter of selected irresponsibility. This is called cunning.

Most people live by this very kind of cunning. They cunningly rationalize every form of immorality. They knowingly and willingly persist in wrongdoing, commit sins, cheat in weights and measures, usurp the rights of others, lie, engage in theft and corruption, and deceive even their closest ones through petty cunning. They establishes the same hypocritical, false mode of relationship they has with God with the authorities to whom they voluntarily submits in order to secure safety and satisfy their needs. They display exaggerated acts of worship, extreme religiosity, and behavior befitting a devout believer toward God. Likewise, they demonstrate the same kind of loyalty, submission, allegiance, and service toward authorities, toward the state, his boss, or his manager. However, these exaggerated behaviors are actually a means of concealing that deep-seated cunning and irresponsibility and even of using the social capital gained through this display of loyalty to dominate others.

 

The Exploitation of Ignorance: The Usurers of the Sacred

This herd behavior has produced centers of exploitation based on the same cunning and selfish interest. Institutional and theoretical mechanisms have emerged in which selected ignorance is produced and disseminated. Thus, a symbiotic relational order, like a pot and its lid, developed among human communities, and a class emerged that governs irresponsible and ignorant masses through the sacred, science, and magic. This is the class of rabbis, mullahs, sheikhs, scholars, and ultra-religious or ultra-ideological individuals (if you observe them closely you will realize that they all represent a single type of person) acquires knowledge in order to impart it to others, yet is driven by extremism to control them.

In reality, the human being grows when they learn the truth. He who gathers knowledge gathers pain. Pain, too, matures a person; to become of sound mind means to cross the threshold of comprehending the knowledge of life kneaded with pain. Yet, the mullahs of religion, science, and ideology, who insert themselves between the truth and human to act as intermediaries and profiteers, deceive people with words, with a so-called god, with science, and with reality; they use knowledge not to educate or mature the individual, but to bewitch and paralyze them. No one who blindly believes in and attaches themselves to these people can ever become of sound mind, mature, or ever face and learn the truth.

The class of religious figures, synagogues, churches, rabbis, priests, pastors, saints, mullahs, sheikhs, dedes, babas are institutionalized examples of this paradox of domination. The theorists, ideologues, and leaders of ideologically driven religious organizations also belong to this class of religious figures. Today, scientists, philosophers, opinion leaders, intellectuals, prominent journalists, and artists are likewise secular versions of the same model.

 

What brings the class of religious and non-religious men into existence makes them authorities, and grants them prestige, while receiving in return a hypocritical religiosity and false morality that legitimizes every behavior without cost, is selected ignorance. These consciously ignorant people use the same method in a more refined and indirect manner. People who, even in their everyday relationships, within the family, and among relatives and friends, are always adjusting others, judging the other, and behaving as though they are the host in every matter are also like unappointed prophets. Humanity’s thousands of years of history of slavery is the source of these behavior codes based on ruling and governing. At its root lies the feeling of irresponsibility, that is, the failure to become an adolescent and prolonged childhood.

 

Irresponsibility: Childhood That Does Not Grow Up

Wars, conflicts, murders, fits of madness, massacres, outbursts of rage, torture, and acts of oppression, most of these are perpetrated by these very ‘children.’ War and violence are, in fact, childish behaviors. Lust and fame, ambition and domination are also, in fact, illnesses of human being childhood. These qualities are childish forms of play. At its core lie instincts and behaviors stemming from the eras of primitive hunting and gathering such as the drive for power, games of possession, and the desire to vanquish images of imaginary enemies. Throughout history, the hunting ceremonies of kings were organized not merely as military exercises, but also as exercises in governing society. Ultimately, states are shepherds. Politics, meanwhile, is the profession of shepherding. Anonymous masses are accustomed to being herded, trained, conditioned, and made obedient, like sheep, goats, and horses. These animals that human beings domesticated taught human beings that human beings themselves could also be domesticated. The childhood states of human beings are just like those of animals. In fact, animals trained primitive humans and taught them many things. Most people add nothing to this primitive education and instruction throughout their entire lives. Even if they become literate, even if they grow older, even if they undergo many experiences, they never grow up, never comprehend, never become of sound mind. Because their instinct flees from responsibility.

This childishness is tolerated as an endearing mischief in those who are genuinely children, but in people who have failed to grow up and have failed to become adolescents, it leads to cruelty, deceit, and immorality. In nature, animals hunt only as much as they need. Humans, however, desire both more than they require and what belongs to others. This impulse is a manifestation of that deep, primal envy, a sense of lack instilled in human by the Iblis. The lineage of Iblis deceived Adam in the name of completing-perfecting-immortalizing him, that is, making him like the gods, but through the implantation it carried out, it actually diminished him, gave him a feeling of deficiency, and bestowed upon him an insatiable ambition to complete himself. Excessive and deviant sexuality, alcohol, drugs, gambling, sorcery, magic, the ambition to win, the lust to accumulate, the desire to rule… All sins are the product and consequence of the effort to eliminate and complete this mistaken feeling of deficiency.

Humanity has often fallen victim to aging yet undeveloped tyrants, bullies, and thieves, individuals driven by the urge to compensate for their own inner voids by dominating others and usurping their rights, achieving this through violence or cunning deceit rather than honest effort. Hatred toward the human species itself because of these Iblis-Satanic crimes is once again a Satanic trap.

 

The Genealogy of Morality: Awareness of Responsibility

The behavior of ruling over another, stealing another’s rights, and judging another is the behavior of a deficient human being. The relationship that people who do not see themselves as deficient establish with others is only sharing and solidarity. (Salat and Zakat.) And taqwa, that is, avoiding evil, does not mean avoiding evil for the sake of others or for the sake of God, but avoiding evil-falsehood-doing wrong, through an inner naturalness, simply because it is already a requirement of being Adam. This moral measure, known in modern philosophy as Kantian morality, is in fact the distinctive characteristic of the Abrahamic tradition. Morality already means choosing good and avoiding evil through free will and a sense of responsibility. Moralism, on the other hand, means exploiting morality as well, using moral rules and values for show before others or in order to rule over others without internalizing them. This is the trade in morality, compassion, and sacred values. Whereas true morality is ashamed to do good for God or for someone else. Because this is something shameful. ‘Do not do good for God’s approval; do it because it is good, and God is pleased precisely with this.’

Feeling shame is the first Adamizing emotion of the human being. Shame, bashfulness, decency, and embarrassment are the means of becoming a true human being, to the Adam. They are the root of the sense of responsibility. They are the source of sound reason and free will. Only a person capable of feeling shame refrains from harming others, knows their own limits, and respects the rights of fellow human beings, other living creatures, and nature. This is virtue.

Morality is for the human being. No animal is immoral. They live according to behaviors encoded in their nature. Human beings, however, are the only living beings possessing the capacity and right to choose. Therefore, they have to act with an awareness of responsibility. Otherwise, they fall into the pit of immorality and become a bad creature that harms itself and others. This is the pit of Iblis-Satan. Knowledge and wisdom provide a genuine education in truth only insofar as they teach this ethic of responsibility. They lead one to the very essence of truth. This moral endeavor is the only way for a human being to purify the self, that is, to discipline the Iblis-Demonic element inherent in their nature and to attain nobility as a descendant of Adam. Religions, philosophies, and other value-centered teachings are, in fact, different streets leading along this path. ‘The wise learn to carry their burdens with grace and to protect others from the emotional violence of their own suffering.’

Any doctrine of humanity, formula for social liberation, or philosophy of individual freedom must, first and fundamentally, clearly and unequivocally define, articulate, and focus upon this very goal of moral humanization, that is, reuniting the human being with their sacred, honorable, and dignified essence, and thus with the mission of the lineage of Adam.

This is what is needed today.