Why Bother?
Is genocide a good thing?
If you don’t think genocide is good, why not?
Your reaction to this question may be one of disbelief. You might be thinking, “How can you even ASK if genocide is a good thing?! OBVIOUSLY killing innocent people is wrong!” And you probably wouldn’t be alone in that reaction.
Our society tells us genocide is wrong, that killing innocent people is wrong, and that racism is wrong. However, if you believe these things only or primarily because the culture in which you grew up told you they were obviously true, then you hold little moral authority over someone who participated in genocide, because the culture in which they grew up in told them genocide was a moral imperative.
If you took an average of cultures across human history—the things that most people in most places were raised to believe were true—you would have a culture that believed women were lesser beings than men, that some people are born better than others, that freedom of thought is not a right, and that when you conquer a city, it is perfectly moral to rape, kill, and enslave as many civilians as you want. Why were most cultures in human history wrong, whereas the time and place that you just happen to be born into correct? If you want to believe, with any intellectual integrity, that the culture you were born into or the counterculture that accepted you is more correct than others, you need to develop your own reasons why.
What you believe is a choice you can make—independently, for yourself. If you are reading this book, chances are you have already made your choice and have developed some system of thought-out beliefs about what is worth living for and why. The framework presented in this book will help you structure your beliefs and engage you with choices you may not have known you had. This book will also help you to build a foundation that ensures your life and actions align with what you have decided to believe.
Building this system for yourself will not always be pleasant. There will be moments when you set down the book thinking: “This is difficult to think about! This book is just too dense! Life has worked for me so far. I am done with this!”
This book was not written to be fun or a joy to consume. It was written to make you a better person. Many books that claim to be about some form of “self-improvement” are in reality collections of pleasant platitudes and stories that make you feel powerful while merely affirming beliefs you already kind of had. Much like fad diets and miracle cures that promise easy fixes to tough problems, “comfortable” self-improvement books leave you utterly unchanged and unimproved.
Most self-improvement books are written with the goal of selling more books. They achieve this by offering you the smallest suggested improvements necessary to allow you to feel good about the person you have allowed yourself to become so that you are likely to recommend them to others. We, brave reader, take no money from the sale of this book. This book is only designed to help make you a better person.
Rather than spoon-feed you pre-established beliefs, this book is designed to make you think, challenge your conceptions about the world, and develop a stronger personal system of beliefs without giving you any pre-packaged answers. Challenging personal beliefs is neither easy nor fun or pleasant, but it is a necessary step toward becoming an actualized human being.