Does the End Justify the Means?

The truth is simple: do you think you became the way you became without input from outside systems? Do you think you would have become who you are today without the others who provoked certain meaning-formations in your brain self-organizing dynamics? If you can accept that external images - faces, voices, i.e. dynamic configurations of visual information, and audial information - act as intermediaries between how your brain works, then this won't seem so problematic, and so, even more importantly, the concept of asymmetry or symmetry will make sense to you.

Your brain and the brain of most other humans is generalized to have around 86 billion neurons and 85 billion glia. What 'symmetry' and 'asymmetry' mean in this context is this: the dynamics which underlie the transformation of the parts which constitute individual neurons, and the relations they form with one another, in the millions and billions, and the trillions of connections (synapses) which mediate them, have a dynamical correlate in other brain-minds who interact with you.

Generally, and optimally, information flow between humans works through the emergent properties of mind: visual images, audial images, sensorimotor images, all facilitate the transformation of meaning, and so, exist as very complex assembles of a self-other, or point-counterpoint dynamic, best thought of as a circle, with one arc, from the self, moving upwards towards the other, and another arc, from the other, moving towards the self. Fittingly, the part that comes from the other is beneath us - or "concealed", particularly in an individualistic culture which tricks itself into thinking that its agency is a true agency - i.e. as agency that truly derives and exists independently of the other.

But this is a lie. There is no truth to it - even if you feel the need to believe it, all of the evidence from developmental psychology, traumatology, and infant studies, show that you need another person on the other side of your developing brain to afford you - to equip you - with a capacity you would otherwise never have, if it weren't for what you assimilated in those meaning-interactions, and so, came to unconsciously come to experience as "your" abilities - as if "your" abilities just popped up from nowhere.

Truly, the most astonishingly frustrating thing is how power affords stupid, ignorant, and scared-to-death people, to pander, and sell, bull# philosophies which obviously have no truth outside of the comparable - or symmetrical conditions - which must exist for this to be taken as plausible. And what is that? Symmetry, in terms of human functioning, simply means "alike". At the emotive, or affective level, humans self-organize in analogical terms, which means we simply absorb the feelings which underlie how people orient or make meaning in the world. People with contrasting or conflicting emotional maturity i.e. people who have minds which correlate reality properly, and so have emotions that are under the control of minds which understand how they themselves are affected by others (I.e. they know the underside of the circle) avoid one another because they sense that there is no basis for a relationship to be formed. For the most part, ignorant people lack emotional intelligence; but this is not the group I am picking out, but the nihilistic, narcissistic, intellectually motivated, but heinously directed towards illogical and unreasonable ends (i.e. sadomasochistically destructive towards their own self, and worst still, THE OTHER) person who doesn't even relate to their self-knowledge as a function of what happened towards them; or if they do, and in order to preserve emotional equilibrium, they will insert the Hogwartz mystique of "but this is what the universe wills", as if free will didn't exist, as if human beings couldn't still or control the feelings and the object relations they produce in our minds

When the ancients have said, and still to this day, we hear "the end justifies the means", it is only the politically motivated which speak this way. To even have this as a motivation - as a marker within your biodynamically rooted semiosis, implies that you grew up and developed in a cruel, asymmetrically immoral (not amoral; humans are intrinsically designed by moral interactions) relational environment in which your needs, at whatever developmental stage you were at, were denied, refused, and so, forced you to develop so as to close off the presence of needs within your phenomenology i.e. your biosemiosis, that emerged from what you really felt - what was really, in fact, the determinant in your behavior.

Such cruelty ends up becoming 'normal', which is merely to note that the mind relates to it in a positive way: as having made it stronger. But really? Is ignorance - or not knowing - really to your ultimate benefit? Isn't it more likely i.e. because it is fact-based - that you entire existence has been a massive lie - an illusion - borne from a narrative that has been crafted specifically for the purpose of resolving the inner conflicts produced by engaging in rotten behavior?

The end cannot justify the means, because the means changes the very person. The means, are actions; and actions are as much informational as words are. Since we are built from the ground up, the affective dimension - and so our basic interpersonal mode of making meaning - is constructed by the others around us, and so it is not surprising at all, but fully expected by natural law, that the 'elites' would fashion belief systems which would accomplish two things: 1) to continue to justify the way and manner in which they want to continue living i.e. murder, theft, lying, defamation, etc as a way to maintain and/or grow their power, and 2) crafting a narrative, very unconsciously (since this is merely a matter of their feelings directing their cognitive processes) that makes all of 1) not seem so terrible, evil, and unjust, as they of course know it entirely is.

1) is not something they can get around, as it is woven into the very fabric of their affective and emotional character: their modes of enlivening themselves make them people with feelings of intense entitlement to do what they want - and, of course, we all know this in our own form; except most of aren't wired to be that extremely asymmetrical i.e. assuming such entitlement to exercise so much power over the lifeworlds of others.

2) shows us how human they really are. Nobody wants to be evil - and everyone, even if they are evil, and know it, cannot live comfortably or happily if they are aware of this about themselves. They need to salvage and maintain at least the semblance of being good - they need to believe it -even if a part of them knows that what they believe is self-serving and irrational, that very idea "self serving" and "irrational" will become generalized as the highest metaphysical principle, and so, they will find themselves feeling better so long as the narrative, seeming coherent, functions to arrest, or restrain, or regulate, how those asymmetrical feelings are working within them.

You can't get around this: the above picture describes the physics, and also the metaphysics, of what is real.

We are created by our interactions with others, and after having become wired and programmed by our very animalian brain to pursue meaning in certain ways - and in ways that, if we seek to change them, necessitates a complete ecological makeover: friends, or the objects which activate certain processes in our neurophysiology, need to go, and new ones - compassionate ones, ideally - need to be found if change is going to happen.

It is because change is genuinely hard, and existentially onerous, that compassion really is the appropriate response for people who live like this, and believe lies to help themselves feel better about the disastrous existential situation they find themselves in. But, being "so up in the clouds", and very, and profoundly wrong about how much leeway humans have to 'change reality', they tend to return again and again like a broke record player to the same song, the same tune, because their mind-brains are literally too hampered by dysregulating "truths", or facts about what structured their present day brain-mind, to see things as they are, and not as they would like it to be.

People who believe the end justifies the means will destroy themselves with that belief. There is only, and has only ever been, agents, or dynamically objects, which, when they become very complex, as in multicellular organisms, MUTUALLY construct one another in their way and manner of becoming.

Humans are ineluctably, and irreversibly, one in our functioning. We are happy and at peace when we exist with others who are loving and kind, and likewise, we feel a profound pleasure and inner goodness when we respond truthfully to the conditions around us; if I see pain, and understand the conditions which generate such pain, it is wisdom, it truth, and it is beauty, to respond with goodness, and kindness, in such a situation.

All other claims to the contrary, that dissociate from the moment - to the situation - and superimpose some whimsical fantasy of some 'future aim', is merely humans pretending to be what they aren't, and can never be, so long as they are a biological structure governed by physics/entropy/symmetry: God.

You are not this, and can never be this, so stop torturing yourself with the wish that 'if only things were different'. We are only a part; the other half, the half beyond us, is the Universe; call it God, or what have you, but the truth is, it's a bidirectional relationship, with us, the Human being, very much on the receiving end of things i.e. it is NATURES laws we study, NATURES symmetry we discover, and indeed, our own consciousness, our mind, is now understood by educated human beings i.e. people with an interest and a sense of value in the brain sciences - an expression of material dynamics undergoing very fast electromagnetic transformations.

Within one's scope of their conceptional reality can they only begin to understand. Most people are still under the conception that their reality is also other's reality. The only place we really live is within our minds.

That was a lot to read and comprehend. After much thought, I agree pretty much totally. I had a hard time grasping (because I am not an intellectual) but do think we form our opinions and morals based on feedback of our peers and those we grow up with.

This has been proven time again by many studies I have read. Wish I could produce them but my memory is not what it used to be.

You are obviously well educated and provide extreme intellectual examples for your premise and a distinguished conclusion.

Simply said, again, I agree. The end does not always justify the means.

I think that we form our opinions not only from the logic that others in our past and present have supplied, but also from some very latent and obscure lessons from our previous lives, that help to substantiate and invoke relevance in what we observe presently.

If there is evolution in the human spirit, what else could cause us to be tuned in, as it where, to such obscure concepts of thought, only to have them become important to our own contribution in our present lives. It is as perplexing as it is overwhelming, as far as I am concerned.

no, the means beget the end


like master yoda said

The simple answer is NO. Without inter-action with other beings you would not even be able to communicate as there would be no-one to teach you language and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

originally posted by: crayzeed
The simple answer is NO. Without inter-action with other beings you would not even be able to communicate as there would be no-one to teach you language and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

I wonder who taught the first one to speak this language.

a reply to: Astrocyte


A problem with your argument is that your are claiming something that you disagree with is false without providing evidence to support your claim. For me the real problem with human civilization is the extremists ethic, is so far a whatever ideology including, Atheism. The vast majority (really like everyone) of the population of this planet are adherents to some kind of belief system. To suggest that individuals are motivated by an Institution to commit violence, seriously who is more likely to survive a mass extinction event? Those who are so opportunistic, they are ready, willing and prepared to commit violence as a means to any end, or those who are not?

All institutions are subject to abuse as in reality they are not perfect. And what perhaps has led us to this point is that, as much as there as some that that want to tear civilization apart. There are enough individuals who want to keep it togetherto counteract such behavior.

Religion is not an anchor. When it comes to the majority of the people on Earth and while they generally adhere to, in general the holidays in question. Otherwise the general mechanic who tells you that the problem with your car is with the transmission and it will cost $1500 to repair. Despite the fact that all you need is an $80 part replaced in your engine exist in every culture despite race, creed or color.


Take for example the fall of the Soviet Union where adherence to an Atheistic ethic did not result in the ideal John Lennon (Imagine there is no Religion, Resulted in a failed system of governing where the official leader of that country also is titled as ruler of organized crime (actually if you look into such issue you will find me to be correct).

As far as I know the end judges the means, so it depends whether or not the means are justified.