For The Younger People

THE POWER OF THINKING FOR ONESELF.

I had never intended this column/blog to be exclusively for people around my age – in fact, this is the kind of place I would have actively sought out, to glean some ideas myself from, when I was a lot younger.

I think I might have said before that I grew up around uncles who were both extremely wealthy, and in some respects, historically significant people. 'Kelvin' McClory was my father's first cousin, and, although he was the noisiest representative of the Thunderball movie 'steam train,' he was not the most important one in our family who was involved with that particular escapade. One of my father's stepbrothers (therefore an uncle to me) was MD of Shell Far East at the time and Shell played a huge role in the financing of the movie.

A 'shut up and take my money'
brief case

But overall, the point I really want to get at here is that there is a major advantage in being able to be around these kinds of people when you are young – I mean, not only are they exciting to be around, but they possess all sorts of amazing knowledge and practical experience that is difficult or next-to-impossible for the normal kid to learn about from the usual sources available to the average kid growing up in modern-day suburbia.

Aboveall the most important thing you can learn from these people is 'values.' And for those entering the world of entrepreneurship, or having anything at all to do with big money, 'values' is by far the most important thing to know about, rather than 'value...'

Oh yes, I mean it.

Sure its nice to have nice things but its far better to have real values. In fact it's better to have values than to have either money or a lot of things. There are a lot of people with more 'things' than either you or I or a hundred 'you's and I's' will collectively ever have in our lives – and those things are yet meaningless, useless, and worthless in their hands; even though they will have cost several fortunes to have acquired.

'Values,' are the most complicated, subtle, and sophisticated of things that it is possible for any human to attain to and possess. By 'values' I don't just mean any old religious or ideological or cultural ethic, nor do I mean morality. I mean something you will never hear in the mouths of preachers today, and certainly not in the mouths of selfish people either.

Values are what defines you the person, you the personal identity; they are you – now, tomorrow, and forever more beyond what you regard as your own personal 'lifetime.'

I put it to you that you have no idea what 'your lifetime' is or will be. Tomorrow, you may wake up to find someone can really put your consciousness inside a supercomputer and you will live eternities as a humanoid machine. You don't know that it can't or won't happen.

Values are why you are exciting to live around...

Values are absolutely not, doing 'right' and knowing right from wrong – values are what make you human, and what makes the human the form of the prime intelligent being in the universe.

And here's my proof.

In ancient times, according to ancient legend, the Great God Zeus, cleverly sidestepped the tricky task of deciding which of three goddesses was the most beautiful. Another heavenly being, 'Dischord,' had rolled a single golden apple into a wedding feast at which the gods were in attendance (according to the legend). Upon this golden apple were inscribed the words 'to the fairest.'

Each one of three goddesses sought to pick the apple up and disputed over which should be entitled to have it – Hera, Zeus's own wife, Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, and Athene, Zeus's daughter.

Zeus then demured from the task, and bestowed it upon the Trojan Prince Paris.

What Hera, Queen of Heaven
looks like

Zeus instructed the progenitor of the Ithican Island part of my own family – Hermes – (see, I have some entitlement to speak about these things authoritatively!) to take Paris to some secluded grove far away, in which the Goddesses would each present themselves to Paris completely naked, and following which he would make the decision as to which was the most beautiful.

Now the rest of this unlikely story is that each of the Goddesses attempted to bribe Paris – and that could not be true – and moreover even Athene, according to this untrue tale, disrobed fully in front of him.

Paris gave the apple to Aphrodite, and in her fury, Athene caused another of my ancestors, Odysseus, to encourage the Greeks to go to a great and mythically heroic war, which they did do, and which today is known as the Trojan War.

What Aphrodite, Goddess of
Love, looks like

Now personally, I have to tell you, from my knowledge of what the Ithicans say of the Greek Gods, that none of this story can have been true even in the smallest element of it. The Gods do not bribe, they do not dispute among themselves, and Athene DOES NOT, on any account whatsoever, go naked in front of a human.

But the story is a story and there is a point to its existence and this point clears up why it is important to realise that there are eternal beings who govern all of our lives even those of the amoral and the atheistic because... ...THE POINT OF THE STORY IS THAT IT APPLIES TO YOU, NOW, TODAY, AND WILL IT SO ALSO APPLY, TO EVERY PERSON WHO LIVES IN THE FUTURE.

Let us assume, for instance, that you are an atheist. Well, here is your challenge, as my ancestor once did, I now also bring before you, the three Great Goddesses, Hera, Aphrodite, and Athene, and request of you, that you decide, which one is to get the golden apple, upon which is inscribed, 'to the fairest.'

You see, the story is not for 'Paris' to have resolved. It is for you, the living human being.

That is to say, as a human being, you are daily confronted with choices and decisions that are within the realm of what the mortal is concerned with – complicated decisions often absent of adequate information, and yet, one may be forced to choose something from which choice may proceed consequences both or either good or not good.

The human will live and it will die, but the decision and its components never will go away; and hence they are immortal choices even though dynamic, and immortal components. 'Values' are the result of both how you go about making your own choice/s over these types of challenges, and how 'human' your perspective is.

What Athene, Goddess of Victory in War, looks like

This 'story' is known in the classics as 'The Judgement Of Paris.' Would that I could be, personally, an atheist. But alas I cannot, as I am an Ithican, and the Gods themselves live quite nearby, and regularly bring to me conundrums and puzzles of some definite ornateness though for what exact purpose other than their own sport, I am not quite sure.