Theodicy and Justice

Ozempic, Zoroastrianism, and Spirit Animals

Let me ask you a question. What do you think about Ozempic?

It certainly makes everyone better off when fat people take Ozempic. I don’t have to look at fat people, I don’t have to squeeze around their large and unshapely masses. They don’t have to suffer from their obesity. Etc etc… But wait… They don’t have to suffer from their obesity…

The Ozempic question is… Would you be willing to suffer, if it meant justice? Does justice exist? I don’t think it is necessarily spiteful or emotionally immature to say “fat people should not be given Ozempic because they deserve to be fat”. Is it wrong? Maybe, after all they wouldn’t be fat if they simply weren’t living in the 21st century. But, they are, and if they can take a pill to hide their inclination towards obesity, they are attaining a privilege over people who are not inclined to obesity. I probably wouldn’t bring this up if people who are fat do not choose to remain fat. It isn’t like the original purpose of the drug — Diabetes — which arises from poor life choices but is permanent and cannot simply be erased with good life choices. If a fat person gets diabetes, and then gets skinny, they will still have Diabetes. They may have it under control, but only when restricting their lifestyle far more than the average person.

Due to the way the American legal system works, many people have trouble disconnecting the notion of Justice from egalitarian ideas from the enlightenment and more recent times. In reality, the Greco-Roman notion of justice is better described as “proper order” or “harmony”. We know the Greeks were very keen on Justice from very early times because Hesiod, the oldest and most renowned Greek poet sub-Homer, spends a great deal of time talking about justice in Works and Days and to a lesser extent the Theogony. Justice is also mentioned by Homer and Pindar, but if you have read Hesiod you know he is quite strongly dedicated to the notion of Justice, which he deifies as the daughter of Zeus. Acting justly, as a human being means acting by what you think ought to be, rather than what would bring you temporary pleasure or out of impulse. Note that what brings you temporary pleasure may ought to be, and to take pleasure in such things is not unjust in any way — in fact, that is a perfect instance of justice… It is just for you to take pleasure in certain things, so arguably to not take pleasure in such things would be shirking your duty.

Hesiod seems quite dedicated to the belief that bad people who act unjustly receive bad outcomes, that the power of Zeus enforces justice in the world:

“You princes, mark well this punishment you also; for the deathless gods are near among men and mark all those who oppress their fellows with crooked judgements, and reck not the anger of the gods. For upon the bounteous earth Zeus has thrice ten thousand spirits, watchers of mortal men, and these keep watch on judgements and deeds of wrong as they roam, clothed in mist, all over the earth. And there is virgin Justice, the daughter of Zeus, who is honoured and reverenced among the gods who dwell on Olympus, and whenever anyone hurts her with lying slander, she sits beside her father, Zeus the son of Cronos, and tells him of men's wicked heart, until the people pay for the mad folly of their princes who, evilly minded, pervert judgement and give sentence crookedly. Keep watch against this, you princes, and make straight your judgements, you who devour bribes; put crooked judgements altogether from your thoughts. He does mischief to himself who does mischief to another, and evil planned harms the plotter most. The eye of Zeus, seeing all and understanding all, beholds these things too, if so he will, and fails not to mark what sort of justice is this that the city keeps within it. Now, therefore, may neither I myself be righteous among men, nor my son -- for then it is a bad thing to be righteous -- if indeed the unrighteous shall have the greater right. But I think that all-wise Zeus will not yet bring that to pass.”

—Hesiod, Works and Days, 248—273

This idea may seem sort of farfetched in a time where we see evil all around us, but remember that so much of “evil” is evil because it is self-destructive or self-contradicting. It will eventually eat its own tail, it is just worthwhile to try and avoid being eaten yourself before that point. Also, you probably engage in the idea of a divinely just world all the time without even thinking about it. Do you ever believe that an ideology results in good things that are essentially independent variables from each other? The user

Amos Wollen

pointed out a while back that Libertarians should believe in God, because it would be something of a strange coincidence in a cold, uncaring universe if the ideology which protects people’s inalienable rights the most is also the most economically efficient. I pointed out an even greater example in the comments:

There is much less wiggle room on these variables being independent than there is in Libertarianism. Wollen made a more general follow-up post on this topic where he basically says A) Bias is most likely cause, and B) if you’re not Biased, then you should at least consider the idea that it isn’t sheer luck.

Anyways… Later philosophers incorporate the notion of Justice into the Pythagorean notion of Harmony. The power of justice rests in its adherence to harmony, which both on a personal and societal level is empowering. Harmonious systems obviously function better than inharmonious systems… Heraclitus expounds upon this notion of justice as akin to natural order with his famous quote: “Strife is Justice”… Heraclitus is essentially saying that world-nature is akin to the constant competition for existence (which is not a binary, but a scalar) of all things in the world. That which destroys itself or allows itself to be destroyed, ceases to be… And to Heraclitus, this is the extent of justice. Strife is, perhaps, the very thing which typifies beings to Heraclitus.

Justice is clearly not quite the same as utility, and we all know that… Even Hesiod knows it, pointing out that there is collateral damage to justice being dealt. We all know that punishing certain people is lacking in utilitarian value, but recognize it as justice. Justice is to some extent, like God, something we have to rely on intuition on, and to some extent, like God, something we can think rationally about. But, if God or his intellect is so infatuated with justice, how come the world isn’t absolutely just? How come good things don’t always come to good people, and bad people are capable of temporarily existing? In other words, the question of justice does not answer the age-old question of Theodicy: If God good… Why bad thing happen?

Theodicy

On my post about Perennialism and Chaoskampf (my longest post yet, and still a WIP), I discuss how most religions of the ancient world were enthusiastic about the world in a way that later religions were, hmm, perhaps somewhat less so. A long-time friend from iFunny, who has taught me and some others on this app a great deal about the philosophy of the orient, responded with some criticism of “life-affirming” philosophy, and he made many very good points… Unfortunately, his original comment has been lost, I only have fragments which survived in my response:

“You must understand that the reasons for more pessimistic attitudes had everything to do with the novel condition of sedentary existences, wherein Duhkha [the lack of fulfillment in life] was completely inescapable and couldn’t be ignored […] To have a world affirming and “interested” attitude in the world of modernity is nearly impossible without dishonesty, such a feat is strictly related to ones material conditions and has nothing to do with a flatly objective assessment of how life has developed, or rather degenerated. […] In that way this understanding of a “love for life” is a mere artifact of a concept of self or as an aesthetically desirable position, it is related to reputation-related anxiety.

There is certainly an issue… Many Pagan authors are quite unsure if there is a natural end to suffering in this world. And yet, they are steadfast in their assumption that the world is good, and was created by a good deity. I’ve been thinking about different approaches to theodicy, and these are the following three mainstream ones I ought to mention. P.S. these are not mutually exclusive.

1. Suffering exists because we are imprisoned in an evil world

   Pretty straightforward. We are basically trapped against our will in flesh puppets made by an evil demiurge, and our true immaterial selves belong in the good spiritual or divine world, causing us suffering.

   Side-note: I recently found out that Genshin Impact is Gnostic? Please tell Xi Jinping to destroy. Destroy. This is against Confucian teaching. The communists of China are once again ignoring proper Confucian teaching by letting Tranime video game for discord groomers promote Gnosticism. Or I guess Manichaeism in the context of China.

2. Suffering exists because we attach ourselves to things, it is our choice to live with evil because we foolishly choose attachment.

   2.5 — Suffering exists because there is a contradiction in all duality.

3. Suffering exists because we made the choice to have knowledge of good and evil, and this is good because being knowingly good is better than being good out of ignorance of evil.

4. God is real, but suffering is not objectively contradictory with God and evil is purely a provisional concept.

They all have their good arguments, but I am looking for something older… Why is it that so many ancient authors simply accept the existence of a churning adversarial chaos which is a fundamental part of reality? They explain the origin of evil from a causal point of view, but they are much vaguer on what the point of evil is… Some even err on total Dualism and forget about the ineffable One which Plato speaks about altogether. Plutarch says the following in Isis and Osiris:

“When Isis recovered Osiris and was watching Horus grow up as he was being made strong by the exhalations and mists and clouds, Typhon was vanquished but not annihilated; for the goddess who holds sway over the Earth would not permit the complete annihilation of the nature opposed to moisture, but relaxed and moderated it, being desirous that its tempering potency should persist, because it was not possible for a complete world to exist, if the fiery element left it and disappeared.”

I am not a Plutarch expert, but I don’t think he ever brings up the Platonic notion of the One in the manner which Plato brings up the One. To Plutarch, there is the One and the Dyad — Being and Becoming, and they do not share an apparent substance. To Plutarch, evil is necessary because the world is dichotomous. Although the One is ascribed as superior in power to the Dyad, it is impossible to get rid of the Dyad completely or transform it, because it is on the same ground of existence as the One and it is equally base and simple in substance.

I appreciate Plutarch’s position on this because I have a serious issue with the typical Platonic argument for Theodicy, which Christians like St. Augustine also adopted — “Evil” is negative, it is not real, it is just a privation of Good. But… Haven’t we established that there is no possible privation of God, who is good? In Christianity, where Ex Nihilo is accepted, then there technically is, but it makes less sense to me in a Panentheistic/Pantheistic system.

I was recommended an obscure Zoroastrian polemic called the Shikand-gumanig Vizar, recommended to me by TheWarg on iFunny. I have asked many people if they have contact with him post-Banocaust, but he’s been silent on iFunny which makes me think it is possible he was banned. Nobody seems to have contact with him, but I wish someone did as I wish he could post some of his old essays on Substack. Plutarch’s dichotomy is very strongly defended in the book, which is not surprising because Plutarch himself talks a little bit about Zoroastrianism.

When reading this, I was at first quite thrown back. I am a monist, I disagree with dualism… But I found the approach of the author quite unique — for he never identifies the duality of the universe with anything other than “Good” and “Evil” — which themselves are characterized only in contrast to each other. In other words, just as Plato ascribes goodness to the simple God, Mardanfarrox seems to treat goodness and evil as simple. All irreconcilable oppositions must be generated by the primordial opposition of Ohrmuzd and Ahriman. There are many issues I have with this view from an ontological point of view, but I had not really been exposed to Dualistic arguments that ever really seemed like Dualism to me before this. Proposing a fundamental existence of opposition and nothing more instead of justifying the provisional existence of opposites with a unity expressed in their basis off each other. And Mardanfarrox goes through a lot of arguments defending the questions we have — why does Ahura Mazda, being superior to Ahriman, not simply annihilate him? And why does Ahura Mazda create things in a world tainted by Ahriman?

Like Plutarch, Mardanfarrox defends the fact that evil exists in this world with the notion that for Ahura Mazda to turn the rotten fruits of Ahriman “good” would be like asking the Christian Jehovah to create a married bachelor. It doesn’t make any sense, it would be in contradiction, an impossibility.

The answer is this, that the evil deeds of Ahriman are owing to the evil nature and evil will which are always his, as a fiend. The omnipotence of the creator Ohrmazd is that which is over all that is possible to be, and is limited thereby. […] Considering that the opponents have been constituted in order to repel each one its own contrary, each one is [only] capable to keep away that which is its own opponent, such as light darkness, fragrance stench, good-deed evil-doing, erudition ignorance. The light is not capable to keep away stench, nor the fragrance darkness, but they have been constituted in order to keep away each of them its own opponent. As for that which they say: “In he dark nigh a righteous man is saved from the lion, wolves, dogs and robbers, while in the light day he is captured by them” It is not proper to consider that as a benefit owing to darkness, nor yet as a calamity owing to light. Because light is created to repel darkness, not to keep away the lion, wolf and monsters and many others alike.

Ahura Mazda can also not simply separate his good divine realm from the discord generated by Ahriman, because these two forces comprise all conceptual space. There is no “neutral ground”.

Plutarch says similar:

“If it is the law of Nature that nothing comes into being without a cause, and if the good cannot provide a cause for evil, then it follows that Nature must have in herself the source and origin of evil, just as she contains the source and origin of good.”

And because of their opposition they come into conflict — the Ahrimanic element of the world always seeks fermentation of the Ahuric element, and the Ahuric element subsequently seeks justice (harmony) against the Ahrimanic element.

“No destructive operation can take place unless there is an essential difference, and beings of different natures. For between beings of the same nature there is the same will and the same mutual disposition, and not a mutual destructive force. Beings which are essentially different, because of their essential opposition, every time they meet one another, clash and destroy each other, while beings of the same nature, because of their mutual similarity, and their community of nature, stay alive and active and assist each other.”

Mardanfarrox justifies the creation of a world with Ahrimanic elements as only being possibly explainable as a means of trapping the adversary within a sort of emulsification of goodness and evil, just as how Plutarch suggests that the creation of the world involves a process of rationalizing the chaotic Typhon into the pleasant world-soul. Mardanfarrox also, despite seemingly denouncing the Zurvanites, does occasionally suggest a presupposition that “Infinite Space-Time” or what the Greeks called Aion, is an all-encompassing principle, and what the Iranians called Vata-Vayu which was sometimes associated with Zurvan. This is not the physical concept of “Spacetime” by the way, but the sort of full integration of the perception of space and time which many argue is actually a priori — you don’t need any sort of sensory information to recognize the passing of time, nor do you need it to distinguish two points in space. Being the full integration of these things, eternal time is supra-temporal. Other books which are similarly dualistic on paper also recognize this sort of abstraction of “eternal time” as preceding the two powers. But I digress.

While the entrapment of the adversary in this world leads to suffering for the inhabitants, it is necessary for things to exist in the world and be subject to suffering if divine justice against the adversary is to be correctly enacted. Human beings, in this context, are a weapon against evil in the eyes of this creative spirit.

It is systems like this that have created peoples very enthusiastic about life, despite being very focused on the moralization of suffering and ugliness which is within this world. If you live life with a total acceptance of the suffering of this world, an embrace of it, then that is probably going to result in not much enthusiasm about life. It is, and always has been, the good things in life which we live for, and the entropy and decadence which constantly erodes away at good things which is bad. Any religion has to establish that you cannot live *for* the good things in life, because this is a corrosive form of attachment, but if it can justify living *for the sake of* the good things in life, it can inspire a non-attached enthusiasm about this world. You see this quite heavily in Zoroastrian texts. The world they were living in was in a state of calamity arguably far worse than what we see today in the west. The only comparable point in their history was the humiliation of the Persians by Iskandar, but this was far worse. The Arabs destroyed the Sassanid Empire, Zoroastrianism was dying, Iran was being divided between Turkic and Arabian despots, and with them came the dreaded Zanj. And yet, many of these books display a lot of interest in the natural world — in animals, plants, the stars, in the goodness of people and creation.

Tolkien has a somewhat similar sentiment towards Germanic morality before Christianity, which he admired despite it not being a Christian form of morality. The Norse proudly desired an afterlife which involved a final act of destruction against the enemies of the gods, a self-sacrifice in order to rejuvenate the world not too dissimilar to the Mazdean prophecy of Frashokereti.

“The monsters had been the foes of the gods, the captains of men, and within Time the monsters would win. In the heroic siege and last defeat men and gods alike had been imagined in the same host. Now the heroic figures, the men of old, hæleð under heofenum, remained and still fought on until defeat. For the monsters do not depart, whether the gods go or come.”

This is not a mentality that is maintained by “love of fate”, but from “love of justice”. Although I’m not in favor of the notion that Ragnarok is truly a “defeat” of the gods. Although the world is rejuvenated in the Ragnarok myth, it is not ever implied that those who died in Ragnarok are returned to the earth, although it is still in good nature that the earth is restored. They are described in the Prose Edda as spending their pastime in Valhalla fighting each other to the death, and presumably being unable to die from this method just as the boar Sæhrímnir is made whole every night just to be roasted again in the morning and eaten by the warriors.

The notion that is expressed among dualists like Plutarch and Mardanfarrox and in other decisively dualistic Zoroastrian texts like the Denkard, is shared by many Monistic approaches as well though. In the case of the Zoroastrians, Zurvanite texts such as the Menog-i Khrad do not promote a particularly different form of Zoroastrianism than others. Monists like Plato also do not recognize the suffering and badness generated by necessity in order to complement the goodness of the intellect as contradicting the identity of God as The Good. The Egyptians likewise, do not see a problem with Apep and Ra originating from a common, yet perfect source. While the “Goodness” of God is a form of Goodness, it is a Goodness beyond “Good” as a moral parameter. It is beyond both “Goodness” and “Badness”, in fact the Monad is beyond any positive qualities. And this gets to a broader point about evil — while evil has an existence, it does not have an essence. And while this negative thing comes out of the Monad is not a “will”. “Will” is a faculty of the intellect, or maybe even something lower, what is going on here is unable to be described as a “choice” because there is no possible other choice, God’s generation of duality is yet another identity of God. This is not a “choice” so much as it is a “convulsion”, and I stress that this is an “identity” and not a “quality” by the way because “quality” is obviously secondary (a∈A) and intellectual, while identity is primary (a = a). From this position, where we have justified the existence of this duality within a Monistic universe, the question of choosing the thing associated with “moral goodness” becomes equal to the question of choosing this thing in a universe which is entirely dualistic.

I have tried for a long time to construct an objective reason as to why the principle of order, form, intellect, and orthogonality is superior to the principle of disorder, chaos, entropy, and change from a “God’s-eye-view” and I have failed, because every attempt ascribes attributes to God, who is beyond attribute. The issue is that they end up suggesting certain qualities about God in-himself which are in reality qualities of the Absolute from the position of the relative, which in actuality is identical to the Intellect according to many authors. Proclus calls the Monad “Once-Beyond” and the Intellect “Twice-Beyond”, or even “One-One”. It is the self-reflection of the One, the projection of the One onto itself. And if this is the case, then whatever is left over — the “word not spoken”, the “conceptual space”, the “empty receptacle”, must be the disorder and entropy which characterizes the decay of good things in this world. With this, there are two reasons which perhaps do not assign “objective superiority” to one over the other, but give two valid reasons for identifying a particular side with good. 1) It is the closest intelligible thing to the Absolute God, and 2) within its realm exists that which we desire, an escape from temporality, a state of familiarity with the ideal forms of things in all of their glory, a place where the spit holding Sæhrímnir is never depleted because there is no longer a hunger that needs to be satiated, there is only an appreciation and imminence of pleasantries which we associate with satiation.

So, while the best case would be to live in this heavenly state, we still engage with the toxicity of the world out of a sense of duty. Note: this is not me becoming a “Deontologist”, I am still a believer in Virtue Ethics, but Virtue is part of the process below this which is crucial for spiritual ascensions. This idea, from what I am able to surmise, is one of the things which distinguishes Mahayana Buddhists from Theravada Buddhists. The Mahayana Boddhisattva Vow is a vow that Mahayana Buddhists take to achieve and participate in Buddhahood before achieving full enlightenment, remaining in the world and engaging in the cycle of rebirth simply to spread the word of the Buddha and create conditions ripe for a greater sum of beings to achieve enlightenment. It’s really quite incredible stuff… I can’t believe Buddha did that for you and I when he could have left. Wow. Thank you Buddha. Thank you

This is really, in essence, a form of justice. Being a Boddhisattva is not done out of a desire to personally escape Samsara, it is done out of an intuitive sense of compassion, just as Justice comes from an intuitive sense of harmony or “proper order”, be it from your own perspective or in a more objective sense. And this is part of why the Gnostics are incorrect about the creation of the world. This is what Mardanfarrox is getting at when the time comes for him to attack the Manichaeans, a sect which he was formerly a member of. He again stresses the simplicity of the two primal forces:

Again, I say this, that the unlimited is that which has an undisturbed position and an unbounded individuality, and there is no other position or resting-place for it disturbed apart from it. That implies, when two original evolutions are said to be unlimited and of unbounded individuality, that the skies and earths, the rudimentary bodily formations, growths, and lives, the luminaries, divinities, and archangels, and the many congregations whose different names are owing to the difference of each one of those two from the other, cannot be limited. What produced all those within them, and where is it, when the two original evolutions have been eternally in an undisturbed position? Unless that individuality of theirs, which is unlimited, be made limited, how is it possible for a place to exist for all these things that are and were and will be made? If a nature that is always unlimited can become limited, that certainly implies that it could even become nothing; and that which they say about the unchangeableness of a nature is strange.

Unfortunately, it seems that the notes on the Manichees that survive today do not extend far past a description of their characteristics, such as their anti-natalism, their belief that the world was artificed by and within Ahriman, and other things.

P.S. I have been speculating, that Boddhisattvas, they come back as Animals. Not people. And the animals sometimes appear to help people. This is like spirit animal shamanism which often integrated with Buddhism. And some Buddhists say animals exist in an enlightened state.

Ok, I am sick and also injured. And I have to study. Enough of this.