© Elliot Essman 2005. All rights reserved.

These pages contain the complete text of Human Action, public speaking trainer Elliot Essman's philosophy of human achievement.

Elliot Essman Public Speaking Training
Human Action Table of Contents
Previous Section - Next Section

• Do we do right because we are told by some outside force, book, doctrine or person that something is right;

• Or do we do right because we have independently decided it is right.

When human beings first began to join in organized settlements, some innovative humans decided it was best, more human, not to kill, rape and steal. They reached this conclusion because their human hearts convinced them of their individual worth and the worth of other human beings. The biological imperative naturally led to these precepts being codified in books and oral traditions, then later into laws and statutes. These moral structures are among our strongest reference matrices.

Structured morality is frequently, if not incessantly, manipulated in the cause of convenience. If it's only a book or a combination of a few words, why not? Unstructured morality, on the other hand, is a higher standard. It is personal. It presupposes total responsibility for the consequences of a person's action. You reject violence because it is wrong, not because it is against the law.

If they put a military uniform on you, and tell you to kill the enemy to protect your way of life, structured morality tells you it's all right as long as you've been ordered to kill by your country. With unstructured morality, you may very well decide you must take life in order to protect cherished beliefs, but the responsibility is always your own.

The way you decide your own moral questions will cut to the core of your own personal growth and success. Trans-Biological Kinesis demands that you base your ethical code on a visit to your human core, and that you take full responsibility for every action you take. Encouragingly, billions of humans follow advanced ethics even if they believe they are following habitual static precepts. While there is meanness and violence in this world, we would be much worse off if we had to depend for our protection only on rules rather than on human goodness.

Exercise: Morality

• Take a piece of paper and draw a vertical line down the middle. Taking as much time as you need, on the left side of the paper write down things you personally believe are right, just and moral. On the left side, write down those things you believe are wrong, unjust, evil or just plain not such a good idea to do.

• Now check or underline those items you wrote down that coincide with what you believe a person would write down automatically, based on repeating society's rules of morality by rote.

• On either side of the paper, at the bottom, add those items you did not write down but that seem to follow society's rules.

• There will probably be a lot of similarity between the your list and “society's” rights and wrongs. You might want to compute a rough fraction or percentage of agreement between the two lists.

• In important areas where you and society seem to agree, how does your freely‑chosen view give you more moral perspective over the same view held by someone else by rote?

• In areas where you and society differ, why is your view the right one? Defend your views!