RE: Do You Care About Being Right? Why It's Good to Be Right
@krnel another thought provoking post.
Would it be too much of a stretch to conflate the terms "right" and "just"?
Martin Luther King's letter from the Birmingham Jail discussed "legal" & "illegal" acts:
We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers.
And there's the poem by Martin Niemoller (regardless of the controversy that surrounds the man):
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Doing the "right" thing isn't always the easy or even the popular thing.
Yes. With reasoning higher degrees of consciousness, human animals can come to recognize certain aspects of living and life, and name them with word symbols, or pictographic symbols. Right, good, and true is what is just, ordered and lawful. The correlation between various words encompasses a larger framework for higher living, known as moral living, moral truth, moral law. Righteous, just, true, honest, authentic, being real, are all aspects that can be applied to ourselves as well. And this is how many ancient cultures symbolized aspects of ourselves, externalizing and projecting them as "gods" and "goddesses" in narratives to express understanding of self and reality. Of life.
In Ancient Kemetian Egypt, justice, order, law, truth, etc. was the one of two overarching foundational concepts, called maa (or ma'a), and this was personified and anthropomorphized as the goddess Maat (or Ma'at).
How far down the social ladder did these concepts, principles, teachings extend?
i.e. Were these concepts for the masses or just for the ruling class?
I think we face a similar situation now where people lower on the socio-economic ladder either aren't aware of the principles or they just don't care. The real twist is that the people at the top don't seem to care about them either.