At the moment I've been struck by a paralell of perception. I was thinking about the way that war is accepted by our society as inevitable.
I was led to this thought by thinking, "I wish there wasn't a military, that there wasn't a need for a military." I imagined also that as soon as it disappeared America would be under attack and overthrown.
This is because everybody has a military and even though they may hate war they also agree it's necessary. This is essentially the definition of fatalism, you accept failure.
There are many simliar fatalism-endorsing compromises that happen every day in our lives. One example is accepting the prices stores charge for goods or the amount of money we get paid or the amount of commercials we see on TV. In this sense we're able to tolerate and accept a lot of shit this world dishes out. The number of times a person compromises away from their ideal world the lower their standards become.
I started to think of the source of our acceptance of less in life and then the paradigm of christianity popped into my head.
The Christian doctorine teaches people that life is going to suck and you shouldn't try to acheive perfection because perfection awaits you in heaven.
Now, some people might disagree with the above statement, but the nuts and bolts are there. There is a self-fulfilling prophecy of persecution in the Christian doctorine. This is how heaven is a model of fatalism. If we essentially believe that nothing can be done to fix our world and that the best things happen after death, there isn't really an incentive to find peace on this planet.
We are trained in church from our earliest ages to accept mediocrity. It's a model that our country and others have followed.
It's a philosophy of fatalism and defeat that can lead to accepting lower standards and accepting war and famine and disease and, more comically, improper pronunciation of spanish words.
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