“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

THE GOOD, THE BETTER, AND THE BEST. VALUE FULFILLMENT VERSUS COMPETITION

Good evening.

(Good evening, Seth.”)

(Pause.) New chapter (10): “The Good, the Better, and the Best. Value Fulfillment Versus Competition.”

(Pause.) Very few people really act, again, from an evil intent. Any unfortunate situations in the fields of medicine, science, or religion result not from any determined effort to sabotage the “idea,” but instead happen because men often believe that any means is justified in the pursuit of the ideal.

When science seems to betray you, in your society, it does so because its methods are unworthy of its intent — so unworthy and so out of line with science’s prime purpose that the methods themselves almost amount to an insidious antiscientific attitude that goes all unrecognized. The same applies to medicine, of course, when in its worthy purpose to save life, its methods often lead to quite unworthy experimentation (see Note 3 for Session 850), so that life is destroyed for the sake of saving, say, a greater number of lives. (Pause.) On the surface level, such methods appear sometimes regrettable but necessary, but the deeper implications far outdo any temporary benefits, for through such methods men lose sight of life’s sacredness, and begin to treat it contemptuously.

You will often condone quite reprehensible acts if you think they were committed for the sake of a greater good. You have a tendency to look for outright evil, to think in terms of “the powers of good and evil,” and I am quite sure that many of my readers are convinced of evil’s force. Evil does not exist in those terms, and that is why so many seemingly idealistic people can be partners in quite reprehensible actions, while telling themselves that such acts are justified, since they are methods toward a good end.

In your country, the free enterprise system originated — change the word to “immersed” — is immersed in strange origins. It is based upon the democratic belief in each individual’s right to pursue a worthy and equitable life. But that also [became] bound up with Darwinian ideas of the survival of the fittest, and with the belief, then, that each individual must seek his or her own good at the expense of others, and by the quite erroneous conception that all of the members of a given species are in competition with each other, and that each species is in further competition with each other species.

The “laws” of supply and demand are misconceptions based upon a quite uncomplimentary belief in man’s basic greedy nature. In the past you treated the land in your country as if your species, being the “fittest,” had the right to survive at the expense of all other species, and at the expense of the land itself. The ideal of the country was and is an excellent one: the right of each individual to pursue an equitable, worthy existence, with dignity. The means, however, have helped erode that ideal, and the public interpretation of Darwin’s principles was, quite unfortunately, transferred to the economic area, and to the image of man as a political animal.

(Pause, then all intently:) Religion and science alike denied other species any real consciousness. When man spoke of the sacredness of life — in his more expansive moods — he referred to human life alone. You are not in competition with other species, nor are you in any natural competition with yourselves. Nor is the natural world in any way the result of competitiveness among species. If that were the case you would have no world at all.

End of session, and a fond good evening.

Again, a fond good evening.

(“The same to you. Good night.”