Suicordium is about following the heart. The heart can only guide you to what it knows to be true. It knows the difference between what you believe and what you do. If you do not know what you believe, or why you believe it, then you cannot align with your heart.
From the conclusion to this article
I like to consider myself as a person who is always open to reasonable arguments and that I am happy to change my opinions if new information disprove what I previously thought was true. That said, there are plenty of things that I hold dear that cannot be changed by facts.
As a child growing up in Liverpool, every last one of us either supported Liverpool or Everton. Interestingly, Everton F.C was actually the first football team to come out of the Liverpool area in 1878, with Liverpool F.C following along in 1892. During my early childhood, it appeared to me as if there were only 2 teams in the English football league. There was an intense rivalry between the teams and many a league and domestic cup were directly disputed between them. Each and every child was loyal to the football team that he was born into. I say born into, because almost always the child would support the team that his father did, and on the rare occasion that this was not the case, it would almost certainly be the team that his grandfather supported. In the whole of my life I have never met anyone who has changed their support from their childhood team. I cannot be persuaded to change teams as it wasn’t something that I “decided” following a logical set of arguments.
My favourite flavour of ice-cream is vanilla. As a child I had dalliances with lemon and chocolate, but now I will most likely choose vanilla over any other flavour 95% of the time. I rarely eat ice-cream these days, but when I do it’s usually at a traditional ice-cream parlour, that make their own ice-cream. It is at these artisanal establishments that they take the most care when making a vanilla flavour. More often than not, the flavour is intense, a far cry from what is often called “vanilla flavour” – a synonym for “boring, the default”. Although these establishments often offer a wide range of innovate flavours, I can’t help going for vanilla. It’s not so much a mental decision; it’s just something that my body likes.
Football? Ice-cream? What?
So why am I telling you any of this? I am hoping to reveal something to you that, although you may have noticed it, you may not have understood it.
Most of the situations that present to us as choices in our daily lives are not fundamentally choices. You were born into a world where “that’s just the way things are”. You will be told this the whole of your life. What’s worse, you may find yourself poisoning the minds of the next generation by telling them the same.
You can “choose” who to vote for, but you have no way of not consenting whether to be ruled over:- I love ice-cream but if it was the only thing to eat, no matter how many flavours, I would quickly tire and probably get sick. You are allowed to vote for flavours, but a change of menu is never offered.
You can “choose” to obey the laws of your land, but you cannot question their legitimacy:-
The football players voluntarily obey the rules of the game. Although they might not always agree with the referee’s decision, they have all acknowledged the rules of the game before setting foot on the pitch. They also know that the rules will not change during the game, or even during a competition. Being born into a system is not consent. Is it possible to describe as consent an offer that you cannot refuse?
You can “choose” to obey authority, but you cannot ask where does the source of their authority come from:-
The football players are allowed to stop following the rules of football once the game is over. They understand that they are voluntarily modifying their behaviour during a game, but that behavioural modification carries no moral implication. They have shown no higher moral conviction for having followed the rules of the game; if they don’t they are expelled from the field of play.
Can I change my mind?
I started this article talking about the preferences that we all have, that we refuse to change or be reasoned out of. As I said, vanilla is my favourite ice-cream flavour. There is no series of rational arguments that convince me otherwise. Now, I can conceive of the possibility of a series of rational arguments that might stop me from ever eating ice-cream again. I won’t ever support any other football team, but I can conceive of a future where I completely lose interest in football.
I watched a documentary in 2017 that convinced me to stop eating meat. I was convinced there and then before I’d even finished the film. What it didn’t try to do was convince me that meat didn’t taste nice, or that meat isn’t a good source of nutrition. It just showed me the horror of what I was complicit in by eating meat and I chose not to be.
We like to think that our beliefs are rational and well thought through. But unless you have taken the time to analyse what you think your well reasoned beliefs are, you’re likely just fooling yourself.
If you are uncomfortable questioning your beliefs then perhaps they aren’t up for questioning. Maybe you aren’t dealing with an idea that you are prepared to evaluate and perhapseven change. Maybe your support for something is just something that you were born into. Perhaps the reason that you have never questioned it is because to you it is unquestionable. If these unquestionable traits are confined to trivial items such as your favourite sports team or ice-cream flavour then they can do no harm. If, however, they affect how you perceive the world, then it might be worth asking yourself if your beliefs are actually your own. Do you have your own perspective on life or are you just following something that was handed down to you like supporting your grandfather’s favourite team?
Do you have any principles?
The expression “having principles” is often used as a synonym for “being a good person”. Really it is about your personal philosophy. Most people don’t have one. People tend to have a very nebulous concept of what they would say that they believe. More often than not, people tend to delegate what they would call their beliefs to some collective. They pick a team and just go with that. That one decision simplifies life. Now, instead of having to consult your moral compass it’s just a case of seeing what your team thinks and going with that. That is bad enough, but a worse sin is just looking up what the team that you don’t like says, and just being against that. This spiral of negativity is much more useful when herding public opinion. It is much easier to pick holes in another’s argument rather than defend your own. It’s also much easier to rouse a crowd against a group than for an ideal.
My principles have changed over the years. I think that they have become more self-consistent. What they are not are dogmatic beliefs. I would like to think that if someone came to me with a rational argument of how my principles are bad for me or others, then I would be able to reflect on them and improve them. That said, I have held these principles for the best part of 20 years at the time of writing.
Here are some of my principles. They are in order of importance to me:-
- I believe that we own ourselves; I own me, you own you. I cannot own another person and nobody else can own me.
- I believe that I have the right to do anything that does not cause physical harm to other people. I agree that my right to swing my fist ends where your face begins. However, it does not end where your fear of being hit begins.
- I believe that I am responsible for myself. I have the responsibility for looking after myself, and I take that responsibility very seriously.
- I believe that I cannot delegate rights that I do not have. I do not have the right to forcibly take something from you. Even if, in my judgement, I could use that thing to help you, I still would not have the right to take it from you by force. The fact that an individual does not have the right to do a certain thing cannot be changed just because several individuals collectivise. 9 people forcing 1 person to handover a portion of their property isn’t less wrong; it’s just euphemistically called tax or government. A society based on violence and force cannot be moral.
- I believe that you do not have the right to anything that would require another person’s labour. I do not have the right to force another individual to do anything for me. I do not have a right to anything that would require someone else to perform their job.
You might have noticed that the above are not very popular beliefs. They were not arrived at in a day and they are the fruit of a long process of research, thought and refection. If you haven’t been through this process then it is likely that your beliefs aren’t actually your own.
Conclusion
I have tried to shed some light on how what we think of as our personal beliefs are often just a collection of ideas that have been passed down to us. Unless we take the time to consider and evaluate them we won’t make them our own.
Suicordium is about following the heart. The heart can only guide you to what it knows to be true. It knows the difference between what you believe and what you do. If you do not know what you believe, or why you believe it, then you cannot align with your heart.
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