Pursuit of Happiness: The Rights to Free Speech and Censorship

My dear child,

Society can be quite a confusing place. Some people are quite vigorous in fighting for free speech while condemning censorship. Others may be the opposite. However, they are actually two sides of the same coin. The perfection of one depends upon the perfection of the other. The purpose of both in the long run is to help us grow.

You are aware of how honey is good, right? It tastes good and has some health benefits. However, do you know that if given to a baby in their first year, they can became gravely sick? As your father, I not only have a right, but I also had an obligation to prevent you getting honey until you turned one. Instead, I must give you food that helps you grow so that your body was mature enough. Then you could enjoy the goodness of honey.

Why do I bring this up? Because this applies to more than just food. I must also protect you from some ideas or things that can be dangerous for you. I must do this until you become mature, that is when you can handle them. Until then, I have a duty out of love and as a parent to raise you with good things and ideas. Then when you have a good foundation, you can endure the evils you may come across.

You also have a right to personally censor things that you cannot handle. A recovering alcoholic should not be receiving advertisements for beer. Likewise a man struggling with pornography should been allowed to avoid corresponding materials. And if someone is worn out from discussing a topic, he should be allowed to rest, though he should be honest and open to conversing later. The noble purpose of censorship is to protect an individual so that he can mature.

At the same time the noble purpose of free speech is to grow. The freedom to speak is deeply linked to the freedom to think. We should be allowed to speak about what's important to us. We also must speak up when we notice areas of concern or improvement. These help us protect our rights, see that our needs are fulfilled, and help others. This right is indeed quite important and must be cherished.

In order to achieve perfection of either right, both need to be in harmony. Can a tree grow if it has little room and access to water? Will not a tree grow weak and maybe even die if given acid? Must not the roots of a planted tree be contained so as to not cause destruction to surrounding infrastructure? So too censorship and free speech must be. The key to understanding the proper limits is love again.

Censorship and free speech are two important rights that help us achieve perfection. They not only serve to help and protect us, but others as well. When these two are put under the guidance of love, they may reach their harmonious perfection.

With Love,

N. D. Moharo

P. S. "Hate speech" and bullying are evils and abuses of these rights. However, you must be careful to limit what you consider hate speech. I say that it it be limited to only words where the intention is explicitly that they hate you. If you must infer the hatred, then it's safer to assume the hatred is really on your side. E.g. Dialog where someone says he doesn't believe siblings should be married to each other due to beliefs is not hate speech, but where someone says he wishes them to die a horrid death certainly is hate speech and should be condemned as such. Falsely accusing something to be hate speech only promotes hatred. Let's promote love and not hate.

Pursuit of Happiness: Right to Life

Dear society,

Life is an interesting right. Without it, the others are worthless. However, it also can be confusing as to what it's purpose is. Now I pretty much covered this in the right to be good, so here I will focus on addressing it's immediate purpose and why it's important.

The general purpose of life is ultimately to be good, which includes true love. The specific purpose of your life is something you find that corresponds to the general prepare. Now the immediate purpose that aids in both of those is to grow.

Unless you are alive, you cannot change. At least that is the philosophy I've interpreted from Thomas Awuinas, Aristotle, and Buddhism. So the purpose of life is to change. Now if we are idealistic in thinking everything has a positive purpose, then life is so that we can change positively, that is to grow. And this purpose covers both physical and spiritual growth, though some philosophies will argue that the spiritual growth is the primary reason.

You might wonder if this means those who cannot grow therefore do not have a right to live. This is not the case as they still maintain the right to be loved and their life brings about many opportunities to love. The moral growth of people who take care of the infirmed and handicap is far superior to those who do not have the opportunities to show this love. Remember that no action is to oppose our purpose of loving, and that means every single person. Otherwise we venture into the realm of selfishness in which we are bound to choose evil.

In the original Spider-Man movie, the Green Goblin gives Spider-Man a choice between saving his love and an elevator full of children. His choice? Save all of them, even though it leaves himself vulnerable to the attacks from his enemy. His choice is instantaneous and he pulls it off thanks to the people of New York. It's not a question of numbers or even status. Every life is worth saving because our nature of love has declared it as so. And if we die in the process of saving others, then we have fulfilled our general purpose of love.

It may sound counter-intuitive, but perhaps the people who need to live the most are the ones who are the most evil. While we certainly need the ones that are good heroes, it's really the wicked that could use the inspiration and opportunity to change. If you believe in a heaven and hell, this is especially true, which helps explain why some religions advocate for abolishing the death penalty.

Life is extremely precious, but in order to understand why, we must the various purposes it has. It's ultimate goal is to be good, the individual goal is the specific purpose that you as a person can fulfill to aid being good, and the most immediate goal is to grow. This purpose of growth stems from that we need to live in order to change. We will change until we die and whatever our state is then will be how we will be for eternity.

With Love,

N. D. Moharo

Pursuit of Happiness: To be Good

To society,

In order to be happy, we must be good, but what does that mean? I'm sure that most people consider themselves to be good in general. However, others may disagree with our personal evaluation. What does it mean in general for something to be good?

When we say something is good, we tend to mean that it fulfills a purpose we have in mind. A good screwdriver should be able to screw in screws. If the handle breaks as soon as I try, then the tool is not good. A good textbook likewise is supposed help me learn about a subject. A bad textbook would make the subject even more confusing. We can therefore infer that for us to be good means that we fulfill our own purposes as well.

Like all things, mankind has a general purpose and can have many specific purposes. The general purpose is to love, as I mention in many of my letters. The specific "purpose" is something we generally search for ourselves or feel called to. These can be our careers or a passion we do outside of work. For some people, it's simply partaking in the general purpose of love and applying it to their everyday life, such as parenting.

In addition to purposes, we also judge things based off requirements that help aid in fulfilling those purposes. For example if the binding of a book easily breaks, I would consider the book to be bad no matter the contents inside. How important each of these requirements is varies, but they exist nonetheless. When it comes to being a good person, we can find hints in the form of fundamental human rights.

Rights help us understand the various needs of people. They help us move toward fulfillment and therefore perfection and happiness. Understand that I do not consider power and rights to be the same thing. Even if you can do something, it does not mean you should. Just as different books don't share all the same pieces, so too different people don't necessarily need all of the same non-fundamental rights, we just try to make sure they have access to them in case they need them, unless said right contradicts their purposes.

Does a cookbook need a prologue? No, but a novel could benefit from it. Likewise, one man may need to marry, but it might be best for another to refrain from all romance. There are books that instruct how other books should be formed so as to aid in their purpose. Similarly, when we claim someone does not have a right to something, the best arguments are those that show how the right ultimately contradicts their need to need to be good.

An example of this would be when someone is in need of medical treatment. It's good to want to help, but if there are professionals there already treating, then the good thing is to let them work and simply be available when they need your help.

We should note that our specific purpose and rights should never interfere with our general purpose of love. If there is ever opposition, then love should win. Otherwise we are sure to commit some evil, which is the opposite of good. Can we truly say we are good if we willingly choose to oppose good?

Being good is intrinsically linked to our perfection and therefore happiness. When we fulfill our purposes and prerequisites, then there's nothing more we can do to obtain happiness on our end. So let's choose good and work towards becoming happy.

With love,

N. D. Moharo

Pursuit of Happiness part 3: The hierarchy of rights

To Society,

Human rights are essential to society, but we have a tendency to not fully understand them. People fight over the rights of free speech, religion, marriage, etc. all of the time. However, for any debate to really take place, Rights need to be define. After that, we need to properly understand the hierarchy of rights and what their goals are. With this understanding in place, we can better understand if something is a right or an abuse.

A right is simply something that allows you to seek perfection, honored by society. When we argue people have natural rights, we are arguing that these are good and required by nature. Examples of rights are Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom to defend oneself and family, the ability to rest, the right to an education, the right to security and privacy, etc. If you examine each of these rights, you should find that they allow men and women attempt to be the best they can be.

Another thing about rights is that they must adhere to the Philosophical Moral Code. They must exist because they allow men and women to reach perfection. A right can never be to promote selfishness or inhibit the ability to love. For example, to enable someone to sue someone for saving his life would be a violation. This is because it promotes selfishness and limits our ability to love each other.

Now you may already know where I am headed with this. The absolute basic right of man is the Pursuit of Happiness. It is from there that we can philosophically explain the other rights. To help with that, let me present to you a model. Now this is not a complete model and there is room for debate, but this is what I will refer to as I show how the different rights point towards Happiness as it's goal.

For now, I will simply leave you with this diagram so that you can ponder it. I hope to cover every branch in some way or another in the near future. I intended to to it all in this piece, but it was already getting too long and complicated. However, I hope that this diagram itself will help encourage you to think how things are ordered and help make sense of the world.

With Love,

N. D. Moharo

Timing of Feedback

To Critics,

Feedback is an important part of our society. It's when we convey what was good, what was bad, and what can be improved. However, if you truly wish for your feedback to be positively effective, timing is off the utmost importance. Specifically when the recipient is ready to receive it.

Perhaps the best example to illustrate this is taking care of a child. Everyone has different opinions about how to raise children. This is a combination of exposure to ideas, experience spent with children, and your own personality. The stereotypical story is the working father doing something and the housewife instructs what he should be doing. This does not work. People do not want to be doing what they think is best only to be told that they are wrong, especially while they are in the midst of struggling. Instead, they would more likely be willing to receive help and, after things calm down, discuss what would have been the best method.

I think when people are having trouble, they don't want advice unless asked for. Instead, they want to see signs that they are cared about and appreciated. When they think they did the right thing also isn't a good time to critique. Instead they need to doubt first that they were right. However, you probably don't want to knock them of their horse right away either. If it can wait, let them enjoy their pride for a moment or they might start to think every conversation with you will be to criticize what you have done.

When people know they did something wrong, this is a bit more tricky. Some want consolation while others want to know how to improve and others want to try and fix things. Also keep in mind that some may want a break. It could be to reflect on their own or maybe they are tired of thinking about the subject. After all, constantly thinking about something you cannot do anything about is a big cause of stress. Therefore it is important to consider many variables such as time, gravity, appearance, and personality before giving feedback.

Another reason to ponder timing is that you might not be ready to give feedback either. If you are angry, you'll likely be unable to avoid personally attacking in your critique. If you are upset, you likely won't be clearly logical in your argument. Even if you are logical in your head, you'll likely neglect to mention certain key points, making it difficult for anyone to follow your line of reasoning. In addition, they might be distracted by the emotion in your voice leading them to think more like, "How can I get him to calm down?"

Feedback is an important thing as it allows us to praise someone for their work or advise on how to improve it. However, in all cases, we should be patient and consider when is the best time to give it.

With Love,

N. D. Moharo