THE MAZE I've talked before about my personal philosophy of loving and hating everything simultaneously. I can choose either, but it is the one, or at least the point between the two, that I feel most comfortable with, which decides my overall opinion. This also tends to sway around, leaning at times towards more weird or extreme conclusions. At the moment on the topic of humanity I am falling on the side of hate. But not for the popular reasons, the destruction of the environment, lack of morale ethics, etc., it's actually those ideas that I hate. The concept of humans as a whole being above their own selfish, animal, motivations. Clearly, they are not. Until the last few days when there's been a new outbreak of the virus up north, the Australian TV news has been saturated with endless babble about sexual assults between MPs and their staff. What annoys me about all this is all the shock and fury about something that seems to be inevitable. The future is set to have men and women working not just at the same level, but together in every job, so much as they can be persuaded. From the abolition of all forms of gender segregation this is an obvious outcome. There will be sexual desires between them, and with all the physical barriers previously separating them removed, a percentage of individuals will always be reduced to indulging in them. It's actually exactly the same as the problem of corruption in government. You put people in positions that they can exploit for their own benefit, and some will do so. The greater someone's individual power in a trusted position, the greater the likelihood that they will abuse it. This is why communist dictatorships always end up rife with corruption, because some individuals are inevitabley able to manoeuvre so that they have much more power than the rest. There are fewer barriers to that than in a democracy, though hardly enough. People generally accept the risk of government corruption, it annoys them but is expected at the same time. The anger is funnelled towards putting up new barriers, and there the public get lost in the complexity of their implementation. But with gender equality, much of the public wants barriers between the sexes taken down, so that they mix in identical roles in both work and social life. Yet with politicians and beauracrats these are the same people who the public don't really trust to put their country ahead of themselves, what logic is there in assuming their sexual desires will be held back with any greater restraint? My point isn't against the movement of gender equality (though I'm guessing I'd be better off not getting a position on the FSF board), but against the mislaid perception of people that lies behind the infantile assumption that we are more than just self-serving animals. We all run endlessly through interwoven tunnels of social acceptability, bending our path into the shapes of morality and responsibility while really our intended direction is always set for nobody but ourselves. We are lost in this maze. It is a maze that we as a society have built to be lost within, bumbling through all sorts of arcane rituals and obligations just so that we can serve our own universal animal pleasures. But we don't believe we are animals, we believe we are the maze. - The Free Thinker