Equal

Back when I was young, I sought some kind of order to the world. Day and night I would sit and think about how our society and our universe works. More than once, this search brought me to a crisis of faith, a break through of thought o a period of massive and pervasive confusion and despair.

The problem is this: whenever I look for order, I find chaos. Evey rule has it's exceptions, every truth is it's own lie and the world as it ought to be, isn't.

I have struck on a few points which seem to be stead fast in the flow of the universe. No matter how often I get lost in the flood of chaotic creation and thought, these points always arise as stead fast bulwarks to calm my flailing mind.

- Everyone who is, was or will be will go from nonexistence to existence. Afterwards, they will cease to exist. More to the point, we all came from nothing, were born, live and die.

- The world as you see it is not the same as the world as I see it. Our nature as individuals prevents us from ever knowing what another person knows, feels, thinks, believes or hopes for. Our lives color our perspectives.

- The world as I see it is the only one I will ever know. The only guarantee I have that the wold exists is that I interact with it. In many ways, the world only exists for the person who is observing it. You and I have no guarantee that the world we are interacting with is not a dream, and all we know only figments of some imagination. More exactly; I experiance, therefore I am.

- You are unique and special, just like everyone else.


From the above, I have drawn two conclusions. Each conclusion is mutually exclusive, and therefore I apply a qualifying agent to them, so as to have a basis for further exploration.

Either only one person an ever be 'right' at a time and the rest of us 'wrong,' or we are all 'right' and 'wrong' at the same time.

Our culture is filled with stories of 'The Chosen One' who leads the rest of us on the path to enlightenment and fulfillment. A person is born who is destined to hold each of our fates in hand and guide the whole of the earth to it's preordained destiny. This conclusion creates a mythical god on earth who knows what is best for every person on the earth and is given heavens mandate to take those people like so many sheep and usher them about, all for their own good.

Alternately, since each person has a unique and special perspective of the world and each person makes decisions with only the accumulated knowledge and experiance they and only they could collect during their miraculous lives, then it may very well be that each and every one of us is 'right' from our own perspectives, but possibly 'wrong' when viewed by other people.
A western Man, when meeting a western Woman, will generally show the respect of standing and offering his hand for a hand shake. This is considered correct and polite by western society. In some middle eastern societies, a Man would never under any circumstances even attempt to look at a Woman he was not related to, let alone touch her hand. This would be considered a horrible offense not only to the woman, but her entire family.

Since the only qualifier I can ever really have is to ask howI would feel if I was placed on the losing side of a situation, I side with the miraculous position that every single person on the face of the planet is simultaneously right and wrong at the same time. Evey one of us, we whole human race, is bound up in a morale equivalent of a quantum theory light beam: we are a particle and a wave, only depending on how you look at us at that moment. Perspective is everything, and since each perspective is unique and miraculous, then I side with the outcome which leaves the possibility I may be right, as opposed to the side which only allows one person to ever be right, and the rest of us are only sheep or cattle to be lead around for our own protection.

Thus, we find the source of this post's title: We are all equal in our claim to being right, with the only difference being our perspective from which we view the world. I want to note that this is only a starting point and not the final destination of this meditation. Over time I will flesh this idea out to some logical conclusions, but that is for another time.