Tao There Was a Difference

Tao

There was a difference between Gaius and Titius (Alex King and Martin Ketley) and the Conditioners. Gaius and Titius believed that our statements were based on what we were feeling at the time and not based on fact. If a person said an object was beautiful, they felt that he was not expressing how he actually felt about the object, but rather the individual was expressing what he was feeling at that moment. Gaius and Titius's teachings were designed to condition the thinking of individuals. On the other hand, the Conditioners are those that seek to completely mold and reshape individuals so that their way of life falls in line with that of the Conditioners. The Conditioners assume a God-like role over humans and the want to tell us how to behave and how to think. They want to conquer human nature and shape it to fit their own standards.

The teachings of Gaius and Titius can be confusing because they say that when we are saying something that we feel is important, we are actually stating how we feel. This reduces everything to our feelings and therefore, nothing is of importance. They are training us to ignore our human nature and rely on feelings and emotions only. This does not serve a good purpose because what it teaches us to become non-thinking humans. It pushes aside our logical thinking and tells us to base everything on our feelings. As humans, we cannot rely on our feelings to lead us through life. It will not work because our feelings and what is real are two totally separate issues. It is possible to be in a situation where a person knows that he needs to go to work because if he misses one more day, he will lose his job. He may not feel like going to work, but in not going and following his feelings he will be jobless. Gaius and Titius do not teach humans how to think logically.

The Conditioners seem to be on a path to build a master race. This is similar to what Hitler tried to do during the Holocaust. This is not to compare the Conditioners with Hitler, but in a way they are similar because they want to create a race of people who will think act behave exactly as they want them to. Unlike Gaius and Titius, they are not trying to condition us to think in a certain way. They actually want to create a race of people through selective breeding, much the same as Hitler wanted to create a race of blond haired, blue eyed people. In doing so, they will have created humans that behave and think exactly as they were designed to. Human nature will have no place here because the individuals are already programmed by the Conditioners.

The Taoists believe in living in harmony with nature. Unlike Confucians who believe that we should play an active role in shaping our environment, Taoist feel that our role in shaping our environment is limited and we should let nature do its thing. Humans are not to try to improve the world. Rather, we are to learn to exist in harmony with it. Taoists believe that we must follow the path of least resistance and go with the flow instead of going against it. They did not believe in forcing education on individuals. If a person wanted to be educated, that was fine but education is not something to be forced on someone (Kingsley 1995).

The Tao values the importance of the people, but Gaius and Titius clearly do not so it is safe to say that they were on the opposite side of the views of the Tao. Gaius and Titius, through their teachings do not follow the belief that man has an innate sense of what is right and what is wrong. They cannot believe in natural law because if they did, they would not want us to believe that all of the statements we make are based on the emotional state of the person speaking ("Outline of the Abolition of Man"). Unlike the Tao, Gaius and Titius do not want man to be in tune with human nature. They are teaching the young that it is incorrect to place any value on their thoughts. The Tao does not encourage this type of thinking. Rather, the Tao believes that it is natural for man to think for himself and to think logically. When we as humans are not allowed to think for ourselves, we take away the options we have to experience live to the fullest (www.columbia.edu/cu/Augustine/arch/lewis/abolition1.htm).

The Conditioners are not proponents of the Tao, either. Selective breeding goes completely against nature. The Conditioners have stepped totally outside of the Tao and created their own values system. Instead of allowing mankind to grow naturally, they seek to remake mankind to fit their mold. If this is allowed to take place, then we have a race of people that do not know how to think independently or behave. Instead, they think and behave in the manner in which they were conditioned and created. In doing this, the Conditioners ultimate goal is to control and eventually conquer nature itself. A move such as this falls completely outside of the Tao.

What Gaius and Titius recommend does not and will not work. If we listen to them and relegate our statements of value to our emotions, we will wind up with generations of people who cannot think for themselves. We will lose our ability to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong because we've been conditioned to believe that our values do not matter. Eventually, we will not have any values if we follow Gaius and Titius. This will also not work because if we look at the large picture, we are producing a nation of people who cannot think for themselves. This would put us at a definite disadvantage with other countries and with life in general. We will become a nation of subjective thinkers as opposed to objective thinkers. There will be no universal objective that we can rely on because everyone will be trained to think subjectively ("And Introduction to and Themes from C.S. Lewis's the Abolition of Man," 2003).