Alisha Kang

I am a person whose faith shapes my values and principles. I find it weird that others want to impose their beliefs on others. Societies need ethical and adhesive laws that balance the liberties of the oppressed without infringing on others’ rights.                                                             

I get how religion was a great way for society to control individuals unable to develop beyond stages two to four of their moral development. The trappings of the stick and the carrot moral states.

It becomes clear that, in stage one, avoiding punishment is no longer about controlling people. Jail or the death penalty only apply to individuals whose minds are at the stage one of moral development. Perhaps this was an overestimation of colonizers’ individual intellect rather than of the oppressed’s intellectual abilities.

Most of the human population doesn’t fear their own death or jail. Morality seems to be going to the wayside. The solution isn’t to return to familiar control tactics. Otherwise, it would have succeeded by now.

If humans, as a whole, have evolved to the point of moving toward social contracts from a moral growth perspective, while their intelligence has remained stagnant, we will need a new age of moral enlightenment and human competence.

We are at the stage of human moral development where most humans have awakened from the propaganda of the nation-building determined by the treaties controlled by the victors, the rich, and powerful, determining what is taught, and how taxes are distributed.

We have simply lost faith in the structures, as Western structures are now believed to be as corrupt as those of resource-rich nations without power.

This is evident in the waves of postcolonial migration we are seeing now. Wealthy nations have been extracting people and resources from colonized nations, but not at a fast enough pace during an economic downturn. However, after six hundred years of this, it’s become clear that it’s now tipped into the wealthy rather than nations. We’ve allowed money to determine our moral compass rather than people’s interests. The rich have taken the place of royals, who took the place of the church, who took the place of warlords/military conquest. We have never focused on the real unconscious competence it takes to administer people, and we have monetized the skill set, making it unattainable for most. Rather than seek the best of us, we idolize the most ruthless of us. I no longer believe that power corrupts absolutely; rather, we, as humans, prefer leaders who lie to us and are corrupt to leaders who are incorruptible.

Together we can transcend fear, propaganda, and transactional ethics. I hope I’m not the only one who will choose evolution over destruction.