A fairly clear conscience

I was thinking about the title of this blog.

It's changed a few times.

The latest one is to insert the word "fairly" into the heading. I mean, what is a clear or clean conscience?

I mean, is it possible to live shame free? Guilt free?

If having a clean conscience were the biggest priority in life, then wouldn't that mean we'd have to be so squeaky clean, morally, that we couldn't function?

That's where I've had a problem in my life in the past. I mean, how good do you have to be? If one is in society being as kind and nice and wonderful as one can possibly be, doesn't that open you to all manner of unpleasant vulnerabilities? I mean, it's all well and good being loving and caring, but what if you have to prove it on top of that? And that's where a lot of people fall down, and where the hypocrites do rather well. For the hypocrite knows that he has command of the nature of the truth, as well as the mere truth. It's a kind of truth-within-the-truth.

This is the kind of question that Machiavelli raised, too. It's at the root of his philosophy. He argued that while it's all well and good being really generous and wonderful to all, it only takes one person to not play the game, and you're right up shit creek not only paddle-less, but canoe-less as well.

That's the problem so many people encounter with generosity and altruism, isn't it? And it's why people become conservative. Whilst it makes absolute sense to be generous, and keep the flow of energy running through society, one has to be aware of those who don't understand the principle well.

D H Lawrence wrote a poem on this, called We Are Transmitters:

As we live, we are transmitters of life.
And when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us.

That is part of the mystery of sex, it is a flow onwards.
Sexless people transmit nothing.

And if, as we work, we can transmit life into our work,
life, still more life, rushes into us to compensate, to be ready
and we ripple with life through the days.

Even if it is a woman making an apple dumpling, or a man a stool,
if life goes into the pudding, good is the pudding
good is the stool,
content is the woman, with fresh life rippling in to her,
content is the man.

Give, and it shall be given unto you
is still the truth about life.
But giving life is not so easy.
It doesn't mean handing it out to some mean fool, or letting the living dead eat you up.
It means kindling the life-quality where it was not,
even if it's only in the whiteness of a washed pocket-handkerchief.

As he says, it doesn't mean handing it out to some mean fool, or letting the living dead eat you up. After all, some people are vampires, aren't they? They give nothing back, and they have no intention of doing so. They live in fear all the time.

There's a game I like to play that demonstrates this phenomenon rather well, and how a lack of cooperation causes inertia, and the lose/lose scenario rather the win/win one. Two players are required, and the object of the exercise is get as many points as you can.

Two coins are required; let's say pennies.

Now each player gets to lay his coin down as the other player does, rather like you play the stone/paper/scissors game. It's done at the same time, so the other player doesn't get to see what the first one's put down before he makes his decision.

If player one puts down heads and player two puts down tails, then player one gets 4 points, and player 2 gets one point.

If they both put down heads, they each get 2 points.

If they both put down tails, they each get 3 points.


What I've found always happens is that one player will put down heads at the start, get his 4 points, and just keep playing heads. He knows that by doing so he keeps the advantage he's gained right at the very start.

Even if the second player has played the first round playing tails, then changes to heads, the first player will often just keep with heads, knowing that there's nothing that the other player can do to catch up.

And this is at the root of competitive play. One person wins. There is a winner and a loser.

But it isn't the same with co-operative play. If you notice, I said that the object of the exercise was to get as many points as you can. That doesn't say "to win". It just means to get as many points, or bags of grain, or gallons of water, or whatever the points stand for.

At the end of a match of say, ten rounds of that game, the "winner" will have 22 points and the "loser", 19.

But had it been played with both of them laying tails, they'd both have 30 points, or a total of 60 bags of grain, gallons of water or whatever.

Essentially, it isn't a game at all. It's kind of boring as well, in that neither of them actually "beats the other".

But when you consider it, in the first game, the guy who "wins" is actually the stupid one, isn't he? Because he's only got 22 points when he could have 30 and a good friend.

So that's at the root of my philosophy, and the moral of the story.

Co-operation is best, but unfortunately some people are idiots, and you have to be on guard against them.

We don't, as it were, live in an ideal world. And so I can only live with a fairly clear conscience, as when one is in Rome, it is best one does as the Romans do.


End of lesson.