“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You are a fanatic if you consider (underlined) possible killing for the pursuit of your ideal. For example, your ideal may be — for ideals differ — the production of endless energy for the uses of mankind, and you may believe so fervently in that ideal — this added convenience to life — that you considered the hypothetical possibility of that convenience being achieved at the risk of losing some lives along the way. That is fanaticism.

(10:53.) It means that you are not willing to take the actual steps in physical reality to achieve the ideal, but that you believe that the end justifies the means: “Certainly some lives may be lost along the way, but overall, mankind will benefit.” That is the usual argument. The sacredness of life cannot be sacrificed for life’s convenience, or the quality of life itself will suffer. In the same manner, say, the ideal is to protect human life, and in the pursuit of that ideal you give generations of various animals deadly diseases, and sacrifice their lives.³ Your justification may be that people have souls and animals do not, or that the quality of life is less in the animals, but regardless of those arguments this is fanaticism — and the quality of human life itself suffers as a result, for those who sacrifice any kind of life along the way lose some respect for all life, human life included. The ends do not justify the means (all very emphatically).

1. On April 20, technicians managed to lower below the boiling point the temperature of the cooling water in the damaged nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island; this success was achieved just 24 days after the accident began to unfold on March 28. The reactor hasn’t reached an ideal “cold shutdown,” however, when it will be on a natural circulation of water at atmospheric pressure; that situation will come about when an independent backup cooling system is completed several weeks from now.

2. Here Seth probably referred to material that Jane and I recently came across concerning the views of a “radical” philosophy of change: Violence is permissible in order to bring about a revolution which, in turn, would lead to a new age. In that utopian society man would be free from restraints and could unify his intellect and intuitions. Many people have held such fashionable views in recent decades. Many still do. We speculated about the inevitable contradictions that would emerge should man ever manage to achieve such an “ideal” state, or society — for, given, his always restless and creative nature, he’d immediately start changing his supposed utopia. With some amusement we also considered the reactions of such radicals should they ever find themselves personally threatened or assaulted through the very “permissible” violence they advocate.