Outside the automatic realm of pure physical instinct, the notion of right and wrong, natural and unnatural, or true and false, is materially meaningless. Any meaning that any cultural activities have to a man, are simply those which his mind gives to them, an act itself, neither proper or improper, unless you want to understand more than the rest of humanity does. (And it can be useful to note that not only do men not have a clue, but that they do not want a clue).
The already divided mental areas of true and false and right and wrong, into which everyone is born, are made even more captious by them being given an emotional component. It is life directing men to treat their cultural inventions, and conventions with a seriousness for which there is no visible justification. Whether you pay homage to the local god or not, it provides no food and men are made to talk and often act, as though ‘twere otherwise, via the collective position that it is a man’s spiritual duty to do so.
To get men to submit to a non-physical responsibility, with no material benefit required; that such activity simply be arbitrarily accorded significance, that no one sees extant. To help them tolerate their participation in the game, life arranged for them to pretend that they thought these actions contained within themselves. Some supernatural significance which men cannot presently comprehend, but submit to them simply on the basis that such are the right things to do, and the ideas promoting them – the true ones. It is not confined to one cultural facet, but is present in politics, religion, art, social position, education. Anything man cannot physically touch is wholly defined by the idea of it being either true or false, (which ultimately is to say: right or wrong, proper or forbidden).
Every single thing that to man’s mind exists, and which is entirely a product of his mind, must be deemed by his mind to be either true or false; proper and valid or useless and unnatural, Without any notion of true or false, corn and the stomach’s enjoyment thereof can survive. Not so, political philosophies and the mind’s pleasure therein, and above all, not so, any of man’s ideas about his invisible self.
J.