The essential struggle

A motto I've used from time to time on this blog is:  "Leaders come and go.  Political parties come and go.  Nations come and go.  The essential struggle continues."  Here is a brief overview of what I mean by "the essential struggle".

1)  The struggle for knowledge against belief.  That is, for an understanding of reality based on evidence and observation, as opposed to errors and misconceptions based on religion, superstition, spirituality, faith, tradition, wishful thinking, etc.

2)  The struggle for individual self-determination against external control (it used to be possible to just say "freedom", but various groups have now promoted such weird re-definitions of that word that I need to say "individual self-determination" to be clear).  This is the principle of non serviam, of disobedience -- the assertion of the individual's will and right to make decisions about his or her own life, against restrictions, commands, or interference from outside the individual.  It rejects any "higher purpose" imposed on the individual's life by any "god", government, or society, in favor of the individual's own choices about that purpose.  It rejects all restrictions on thought, artistic creativity, or expression of opinion.

3)  The struggle for individuality against conformity.  For the strengthening and emphasis of the individual's distinct personality and ego; against all schemes that brainwash the individual into conformity to an ideal or to the typical; against all philosophies and ideologies which advocate suppression of the ego; against the mentality of the eastern religions which long for "nirvana" or merging of the individual consciousness into some universal psychic blob; against any claim that there is just one correct or ideal way for a person to live and be.

4)  The struggle for compassion against cruelty.  Both happiness and achievement flourish most when people's default approach to one another is helpfulness and cooperation.  The more pleasure and the less pain the world contains, the better it is for everyone.  This opposes the view of suffering as somehow ennobling or conducive to virtue, the impulse to shun and exclude those who are different, the mentality whose first reaction to human need is judgment rather than sympathy.

5)  The struggle for the supremacy of the human will over the mindless universe.  Most other animals exist at the mercy of their environment; humans can work to control their environment and reshape it for their own benefit.  This has included the development of agriculture; the deployment of countermeasures against the epidemic diseases that once killed us in great numbers; the use of dams, solar power plants, etc. to collect and transform energy for our own purposes, and so on.  In the future it will embrace the Technological Singularity, the eradication of aging and involuntary death, and the spread of human life beyond our solar system.  The enemy here has been concepts such as "hubris", belief systems which view humans as just another part of nature which should remain subject to the same mindless forces that shape the lives of other animals, the "there are things man was not meant to do/know" mentality, the eastern philosophies which view desire as something to be brainwashed into oblivion rather than achieved, and above all the resistance of religion to the progress of science and technology.

Both sides of this struggle have been represented in most times and places.  The above points should clarify how I define good and evil, allies and enemies.  Taking the long view, we have made great progress over the millennia -- but there is still much to do.  The essential struggle continues.