Sittlichkeit: The ethical life…
these past two days have been spent in a little town called Jackson,
in California… we were visiting friends…yesterday, we headed
down the hill to come home… we stopped at a coffee shop to
get my wife some coffee… there the car refused to start with some
weird message about a “P” lever needing to be set… well, we called
the friends we were staying with and Hector came down… he is
an electrical engineer… so we tried all the tricks we could use
to start this car… as we were in the parking lot of a small church
on Sunday morning, people were coming and going…a gentleman
came out of the church, he was tall with a shaved head and tat’s
all over his arms and neck… I instantly pegged him as a skinhead…
as over the past two days, we saw a lot, a lot of signs, t-shirts
and hats offering support for IQ45… and so I pegged him as another one
because of his shaved head and Tattoos…but he was offering us help
and we were in no position to refuse him…it later turned out he was
a mechanic…and the tattoos he had, they said family on one arm and faith
on the other side…he stayed with us for almost 3 hours trying to start our
car… finally before AAA got there he managed to start the car through some
hack he had found online… we were then able to drive home never turning off
the car… but the lessoned learned was I prejudge, I was prejudiced
against him because of his appearance… so, we return to
Sittlichkeit…. the ethical life…is my act of bigotry, of
prejudice really the ethical life? I really don’t see how…
this Sittlichkeit really is about our beliefs, our actions…
how we face every single situation is another
possibility for us to act ethically…if we prejudge,
or act upon our prejudice, we are not being ethical…
we are not engaging in an ethical life…….we can judge
ourselves in the ethical sense that we do not act or judge
based on preconceived notions of the other person, which
is based on some superficial, some accidental fact about
a person, be it the color of their skin or the clothes
they were or their age… don’t be like Kropotkin…
don’t prejudge based on looks or skin color… which
means we must not judge large groups of people
any different they we judge individuals… in fact,
the word that must be understood in terms of the ethical
life is “JUDGED” we judge all the time and mostly based
on a superficial understanding of people…we see someone
in a suit and we judge them differently then we would
judge someone in rags……. it is in this judging that
we must learn to become ethical… we must learn to
hold our judgements in order to avoid practicing
bigotry and prejudice… for if we practice bigotry
and prejudice, we are not acting ethical because
bigotry and prejudice is based on a superficial
understanding of both individual and collective people,
be it white people or black people or Hispanics or
any group or individual………
I failed to act ethically in my prejudgment and
bigotry…… I don’t throw myself off a cliff now,
no, I simply learn from this and learn not to
judge until I have actually had some contact with
or some interaction with individuals or collective
people……
I failed to act ethically……
Kropotkin