I have, for years, fought with other secular persons over the role of self in living the best kind of moral life that is possible. I have sensed, somehow, the common way of expressing that role leads to self's denial and loss, rather than its betterment. I have observed how the creeds incorporating self-denial, whether secular determinism, religious aggrandizement, or religious predestination, result in zombification rather than truly moral human beings by putting the interests of memeplexes in front and self interest and self-betterment at the rear. Defining virtue as alignment with a creed and its edicts, and so avoiding acknowledgement of personal and community needs (except as within the organizational body of a particular memeplex), the proponents of any memeplex enable themselves to manipulate their followers into a cohesive program of dominance. The sacred self will never be gained by making of millions of humans into brown-bagged sack cloth and burlap garbed beggars, nor by cudgeling them into blank-faced bug-eyed high-fashioned conformity. It will only be gained by acknowledging the self as whatever it is, an expansive process within the process of living.

All the while spent arguing against the abandonment, disavowal or denial of the self, I also sensed there had to be something right about it. What is wrong is not the original aim inherent to their creeds, but in the manner of expression that has served to lead their followers astray, and which has been manipulated to serve purposes inherent to the memeplexes rather than the individual selves or the community to which their processes should have been dedicated.

Denial, abandonment, or any method that leads to a loss of selfhood, leaves only the various creeds for moral guidance. Such guidance leads its followers away from their common (community) interests by subverting it into support and aggrandizement for the various memeplexes. This can be observed by paying attention to the methods followed during the building up of the megachurches that have become de facto models for commercial Xianity to follow and the gathering of flocks of human sheep for their support while the wider communities around them deteriorate morally and oftentimes physically. It can be observed in Islam in a different way, by the ease of gathering adherents and bending them toward willing self-destruction for the sake of jihad, wherein they serve that memeplex's causes while permanently ending their own, often destroying entire sections of communities while so doing (let alone any chances for their own real community involvement). It can be further observed within the rank and file of atheism's own determinists, whose stand-offish attitudes develop as a result of refusal to recognize self as a process and so deny its existence within their own beings and within their own continua of involvement.

 If abandonment of self is not the right way to achieve a goal of being the best we can be, then what is? The question arises from a tendency to see every aspect of existence in only either/or, black versus white terms. A long time investigation of the functions inherent to Nature will lead anyone to someday realize most of Nature arises from following the Rule of Threes: "In any philosophical discussion that gives rise to an argument that seems impossible to settle, a third candidate may be hiding where truth can be found."

The question, therefore, about whether or not self exists can be found not in a 'yes' or 'no' answer, but in the fact of self as a recognizable process.

The question about whether or not memeplexes exist can be answered, in much the same fashion, by recognizing memeplexes as processes arising from a fusion of cohesive ideas to form a school of thought and method that would disappear without it.

The question about whether religion is necessary for moral living by human beings can be answered, too, by looking for that third candidate hiding behind the processes innate to human nature, as we shall see.

In a like fashion, approaching self as an either/or existence has led generations of humans into either/or arguments that seem impossible to settle. The self as an evil presence or nonexistent illusion has vied against the unprincipled self as a machine of personal aggrandizement and material greed, while millions (perhaps billions) of human beings have lived out lives that exemplified neither description. Why?

It is because the unapparent third construct has gone unexamined and unidentified, and so has been allowed to remain invisible. Self is not, as so many argue, an entity that does or does not exist. That argument, like so many, is irrelevant. Events and processes spawn conditions from which arise new processes we can identify by observing the nature of events inherent to them. Self is a process that arises from the fact of our individual existences and our human natures. In a human being, self arises from a long chain of natural conditions wherein the concepts of interactivity and arisal are involved: Strings arise from the interactivity of time and space; particles arise from the interactivity of strings; material arises from the interactivity of particles; life arises from the interactivity of materials; animation arises from life's interactivity with various aspects of itself; human consciousness arises from animation as a process within it; self arises as a process within human consciousness as a sense of personal integrity and individuality; morality arises only from nurturant fostering of those.

Nurturance must be a community enterprise for it to be effective. Nurturing the growth of its individual members is how a community itself grows as a result, the nurtured growth pertaining not strictly to the physical well being and health of its young, but even more to their mental growth. This must be accomplished by understanding all the ways individual humans develop, the links provided by their individual genetic heritages and propensities, their talents, and their own personal visions of what they could become as adults within and attached to their communities. That last is enhanced by widening their awareness of life's possibilities, by exposing them to as many alternatives as match their talents and leanings, and aiding them in their dedication to all the hard work required for their development under the rules of practical hedonism.

In the Complete Universe of Memes, I described a society designated as Syners dedicated to the practice of social synergamy (derived from syngamy and synergy) in a way much like Robert Rimmer introduced me to that term. By its nurturance of the individual selves under its care, a community fosters their fusion into a composite whole process from which its own selfness arises. The process expands as communities build to become nations, and nations build into worlds in a process of nurturance that incorporates the whole of everything.

Rather than see ourselves only as separate, self-conscious animals as in the most materialistic views, rather than deny ourselves our individual rights and identities as in the most officious nihilistic creeds, by seeing ourselves as a result of interaction between communities, their members, and their members with each other in a wholly nurturant fashion, only then can morality be understood as a product that arises from completely natural circumstances. Rather than destructive beasts, humanity can then elevate itself to its highest potential for achievement while diminishing its own high levels of suffering and reduce (if not reverse) our own contributions to the destruction of our planet.

Copyright ©2007 by Lloyd Harrison Whitling. All rights reserved.