EPTLately I've been writing some essays to no one in particular, and maybe one day I'll have a collection or something to make a book (fat chance, but still).
I don't know if anyone is interested, but here's one of my ideas. It might be a boring/confusing read since my English skills aren't exactly where they should be, but w/e, I will probably flesh it out later with a lot of historical evidence.
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The Two Levels of Acceptance
In order to embrace one’s reality, one must first accept anything and everything that has happened past, present, and future as real and as normal. Only then can one begin to judge things as right or as wrong. These two statements comprise of the primary and secondary levels of acceptance.
At this point, the reader may be wondering as to how such a trivial or even ridiculous matter can be so important. The importance of acceptance is that the lack thereof is one of the main reasons for conflict between peoples throughout history. The lack of acceptance is what leads to failures in communication. By accepting as many perspectives and ideas as human limitation allows** as true or normal, one will have a much wider conception of any given situation, and will be much better equipped to deal with it in a middle-ground fashion. Let us now look at what the two levels of acceptance have to offer.
The primary level of acceptance involves the acknowledgement of everything that has happened and that is happening as the truth and as normal. This includes all events that seem negatively extreme to most people- serial killers, torture methods, and even genocides. It is critical to understand that acceptance is not a down play of these horrors of life. The purpose of acceptance is merely to open ourselves up fully to these events as human beings looking upon human beings in the past, to liberate our minds from the artificial barriers that our minds build to protect us from the truth. These events are perpetrated by humans upon other humans- all perpetrators and villains are humans just like you and me.
A second purpose of this acceptance is to kill the concept of shock, or extremity. Shock is what tends to guide our minds to unconsciously build barriers against the harshness of reality. It is also the key concept that keeps the average person from thinking as freely as possible. It is what keeps people from protesting injustice (because surely in the 20th century such atrocities cannot be happening), and what keeps people from being critically aware of how much evil a single person is able to achieve (for Hitler could not have been human, but a demon from birth who was simply pure evil in bipedal form). By switching off our shock tendencies, we will have liberated our minds to face the full truth.
Here, one could argue that it is true that shock is a natural human reaction that helps our moral guidance and forces us sharply from committing heinous acts against our fellow organisms. However, later on, I will prove that shock is not essential for the maintenance of one’s moral integrity. This natural instinct can be replaced by a conscious will, which will in time become a habit.
The second level of acceptance is much like the acceptance most people have already. It is the total acceptance that encompasses only what falls within our moral boundaries. Things that fall within this boundary may be opinions such as whether or not human cloning is ethical, or whether or not the development of nano-technology will lead inevitably to abuse and unprecedented terrorism attacks. This level is where people judge something as right or wrong.
The most important key here is that the second level should only be established after the first. The destruction of the shock tendency by the first level of acceptance is crucial in widening the scope of one’s perspective. Such a perspective change will more often than not change what a person deems should be right or wrong; even if it does not, it will at least cause a person to think more closely about exactly why he or she thinks something is right or wrong.
Ultimately, the purpose of having two levels of acceptance is to encourage the critical thinking of truths and the question of why. These levels of acceptance are not meant so that everyone will have similar opinions after having accepted everything as reality already. It is merely to align our moral compass more truly with what experiences and knowledge we hold. Because each individual holds different perspectives that never completely overlap with another’s, there will always be arguments. The use of the two acceptances in these arguments, then, is to have both parties argue on the same playing field, drawing less from emotions and differing moral opinions and more from the different facts and opinions that each party holds.
**The reader should note the importance of the phrase “human limitation.” It is clearly impossible and also impractical for a person to know every single perspective or detail about any given thing. Therefore, we can only do the next best thing, which is to absorb as many true ideas about the thing as possible.
