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The Should Fallacy

In the history of this world, there is perhaps no form of marketing or protracted syntactical destruction that could ever aspire to achieve as much as the word should has attained in the English language.

As much as we rely upon language to convey and interpret meaning, those messages are only worth as much validity as they carry with them. 

In dissemination, the remainder becomes hollow conventional wisdom.

As it turns out, many purveyors of the word should have been selling you ideological snake oil.

The Should Fallacy

All beliefs are harnessed through axiomatic distinctions. This author claims not to have any solutions to this world's many perceived problems, as no honest economist will report anything more than a menu of tradeoffs; moreover, I represent only my own beliefs intimately and inseparably hinged to the limits of my own experience and understanding. This is the human condition, a perpetual struggle to maximize one's lot in life while minimizing the attending struggle.

The human condition is always such that the individual may only represent himself and his perception, which he or she has come to conveniently accept as his or her own useful reality.

To assume that such a reality is ubiquitous is to undermine the possibility of alternative dimensions of thought, belief, experience and perception, which is a claim against the value of the most atomic and fundamental aspect of the individual, and incidentally that which humanity perceives as community, civilization, or society.

Nothing should or shouldn't be. These words disguise a more sophisticated collection of underlying dynamics which often systematically collaborate to effect the consequences or results which escape the individual who is admittedly unable to capture, translate, reconcile or rationalize the phenomenon in his or her own limited sphere of comprehension.

In the end, the reader might benefit from a more thorough examination of the word should before or after sensing the intuitive demand to employ its utility in conversation. In these cases, consider the context and ask why or why not it should be that way. This will aid in the reader's understanding of world dynamics and precisely why the word is a mere disguise for limited human understanding or the dispirited pursuit of it.



The Subjectivity of Should


All human behavior and thought is rational. It is and can be nothing more or less. One's relative inability to understand one's experience or position is not sufficient cause to undermine or discredit this natural dynamic.

In the end, we may agree or disagree; however, this alone fails to justify any claim on the extent to which a case should or shouldn't be. These are merely opinions in a world saturated by them.

No answers can be absolutely known. Truth is only that which man is willing to accept, and then willing to perpetuate, the latter continuing into that which becomes tradition or axiom-laden theoretical dispositions tested only occasionally by a minor segment of the population bearing once more only an alternative set of built-in assumptions, effectively tilting the conversation toward a fresher zeitgeist, but hardly anywhere nearer to universal truth.

This author's guiding principle happens to be that of freedom.

Of course, all discourse may be immediately obstructed by this axiomatic distinction, as this world is full of all types who may make claims against the value of freedom. Are they wrong? No. Are they right? No. They just are. Just as nothing should or shouldn't be, right and wrong are human conventions which dilute the otherwise clearer and purer understanding of human action.

Opinions increasingly populate this planet only to eventually become concrete "evidence" or "tradition" against which all progressive understanding must then operate. This will not only aid in one's ability to understand and empathize with others, but also with one's own self.

And this not only convolutes the meaning of truth, but it makes it far more difficult to find in the tumultuous storm of emerging social inertia which displaces the value of truth in favor of the convenient platitudes and various forms of sophistry which have served those who continue to stock the shelves of intellectual fan fiction.

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