On Reincarnation

Recently I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the world in which we live, and the one which we will leave behind, and it's led me to an interesting, and rather pessimistic, view of reincarnation. To attempt to analyze all of the flaws in modern society would be futile, simply because they are too numerous to even consider dissecting, but in these past weeks and months I have discovered the greatest flaw in society, and how this issue will cause what we consider to be civilization to spiral into chaos if no grand alteration occurs in the way in which we perceive and exist in the world.

To begin to understand this problem, we must first go back to a conversation that Socrates had with Zeno, as told in Plato's Republic. Although Athenian democracy was a revolutionary system for its time, and was the basis from which all Western democracies were constructed, Socrates often defamed the system, and when asked why by Zeno, he answered with a good metaphor, which I will paraphrase here. He likened the governing of a country to the captaining of a vessel in a storm. He asked of Zeno who he would rather have in charge of a ship, some random member of the Athenian public, or an experienced captain? Zeno of course answered the latter, to which Socrates then rebutted with a couple interesting questions. Why then do we allow anyone to govern the country? And furthermore, why is this decision made by a largely uninformed public? These questions form what I like to call The Socratic Flaw in Democracy. Socrates recognized that the strength of a democracy can be directly measured by the quality of the education system which surrounds it.

So the first part of this problem critiques a construct of society, but the second is purely biological, evolutionary, and also of my own discovery, though I can't claim that no one else has thought about, or published anything relating to, my own conclusion. I simply formulated this belief on my own, as follows: We are uniquely human. Our faculty exceeds that of the common animal so much that to compare us to any other creature would almost be laughable. However, we are not so apart from animals as we may like to believe. In fact, we are still governed by largely animalistic instincts. Instincts like sexual motivation, violence, and tribal prejudice are a critical part of our decision making, be they conscious or subconscious. In it of itself, such incentives are not bad, but when coupled with higher thought and advanced technology could be disastrous. We possess weapons of mass destruction, but as tribal and pack creatures are innately wary at best and violent at worst towards anyone not in our own groups. We relentlessly attack the character of anyone who does not share our views, when any creature claiming to be of "higher intellect" would dismantle the arguments rather than the person. The list only goes on.

These two flaws manifest themselves in every part of our civilization, and are so deeply ingrained in our psyche that it may be impossible to extricate them from our being. Recently, I've seen this instantiated in the election. So many people, both who I know and who I do not, make uninformed voting decisions, voting tribalistically along party lines.. That alone may be troubling, but many people are also unwilling to even break down the points as much as required to understand how to vote on them. They only see each candidate as a figurehead for one particular ideology which they care deeply about, and without learning more about the issues, they vote for the candidate which will either ensure the status quo, or bring about the change "required", be it right or not. People vote with their "hearts" only, when, while emotions are a necessary contributor to the decision making process, they should not be the be all and end all of a vote for the governance of any major land, whether that be a town, city, state, or country.

As a bit of an aside, the voting process should look something like this: Take two candidates, even though a two party system reeks of corruption and tribality, and view all the issues on which they have a stance as cards spread out in front of them, with each card being unique. Next, without looking at what the candidates opinions are on the matter, formulate your own, and not through just one source of information, such as a cable news channel. Look at the beliefs of every side, the science, if applicable, and then look at the morality and ethics of the problem. Once you have an amalgamation of information, from various news sources, books, journals, and your own sense of morality, make a decision on the proper course of action, and then mark off which candidate would fulfill that need. Do this for all the issues which you believe will impact the country most, and then vote for whichever candidate meets the most criteria, taking your own feelings on each candidate into account as well, of course. Now you may see why so many people vote blindly. The difficulty of the process by which one tackles complex subjects cannot be understated, and people don't have the patience to go through with it. But they must, if we are to have an equitable method of governance, and thereby a stable nation.

So now you may be wondering what this all has to do with reincarnation, because it seems like a lot of complaining up to this point. Well, it actually has relatively little to do with analyzing the possibility of resurrection, and more about the implications of it. I was raised in a Hindu household which believes strongly in reincarnation in some manner or the other, and I've seen with my own eyes some, rather weak, evidence for the phenomena. However, I've never been too inclined to believe it myself. At my most transcendentalist moments, I do ponder the existence of consciousness as a universal aether, or the Hindu concept of Maya, and how consciousness may be an excitation of that field, like Higgs Bosons are excitations of the Higgs field, but when push comes to shove I find that resurrection seems more like another method of indoctrinating a moral code into the populus and providing absolute justice than an actual theory for the afterlife.

So all things considered, I've never believed it with my full heart and mind, and that hasn't changed. The only alteration in my thoughts on reincarnation has to do with the manner with which I approach the subject. After realizing the two major flaws in our society, and seeing for myself the increased polarization, violence, and general chaos in our world, I find myself actively praying for reincarnation to be false. There seems to be no solution to the problems which I've outlined, since the first is merely a byproduct of the second, and the second lives so deeply rooted in our psyche that it's difficult to extract and abandon without a lot of grief. Not impossible, per se, but so difficult per capita that to ask a whole society to try and sunder their animalistic instincts from their higher thought processes would be like asking a mountain to move aside as you walked along a path. I pray that reincarnation is false, because I shudder to imagine the world after I'm gone, and I'm terrified to envisage myself living in the reality which I, willingly or not, helped to create.