Alan Watts - The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions (2023)

Introduction

Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a well-known British philosopher, writer and speaker, best known for his interpretation of Eastern philosophy for Western audiences. He left behind more than 25 books and an audio library of nearly 400 talks, which are still in great demand.

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Content

You see the reason you want to be better is the reason why you aren't.

We aren't better because we want to be because the road to hell is paved with good intentions, because all the do-gooders in the world, whether they're doing good for others or doing it for themselves, are troublemakers on the basis of kindly, let me help you or you'll drown said the monkey putting the fish safely up a tree.

We white, anglo-saxon protestants.

British german american have been on a rampage for the past hundred or more years to improve the world.

We have given the benefits of our culture, our religion, our technology to everybody, except perhaps the australian aborigines, and we have insisted that they receive the benefits of our culture, even our political styles, our democracy, you better, be democratic or we'll shoot you and having conferred these blessings all over the place.

We wonder why everybody hates us see because sometimes doing good to others and even doing good to oneself is amazingly destructive because it's full of conceit.

How do you know what's good for other people? How do you know what's good for you? If you say uh you want to improve, then you want to know what's good for you, but obviously you don't, because if you did, you would be improved.

So we don't know it's like the problem of geneticists which they face.

Today I went to a meeting of geneticists not so long ago where they gathered in a group of philosophers and theologians and said now.

Look here we need help.

We now are on the verge of figuring out how to breed any kind of human character we would want to have.

We can give you saints philosophers, scientists, great politicians, anything you want just tell us what kind of human beings ought we to breed? So I said: how will those of us who are genetically unregenerate, make up our minds what genetically generate people might be, because I'm afraid very much that our selection of virtues may not work.

It may be like, for example, this new kind of high yield grain, which is made and uh, which is becoming ecologically destructive when we interfere with the processes of nature and breed efficient plants and deficient animals, there's always some way in which we have to pay for it, and I can well see that eugenically produced human beings might be dreadful.

We could have a plague of virtuous people.

Do you realize that any animal considered in itself is virtuous? It does its thing, but in crowds they're awful, like a crowd of ants or locusts on the rampage, they're all perfectly good animals, but it's just too much.

I could imagine a perfectly pesticide mass of a million saints, so I said to these people look was the only thing you can do just be sure that a vast variety of human beings is maintained.

Don't please breed us down to a few excellent types, excellent for what we never know, how circumstances are going to change and how our need for different kinds of people changes at one time we may need very individualistic and aggressive people at another time.

We may need very cooperative teamworking people at another time.

We may need people who are full of interest in dexterous manipulation of the external world at another time we may need people who explore into their own psychology and are introspective there is no knowing, but the more varieties and the more skills we have.

Obviously the better.

So you see here again the problem comes out in genetics.

We do not really know how to interfere with the way the world is.

The way the world actually is is an enormously complex interrelated organism.

The same problem arises in medicine, because the body is a very complexly interrelated organism, and if you look at the body in a superficial way, you may see that something wrong with it is chickenpox and those spots that itch that come all out all over the place.

Well, you might say well spots: are there cut them off? So you kill the bug? Well, then, you find you got real problems because you have to introduce some bugs to kill the bug.

It's like bringing rabbits into australia, and that starts going all over the place and getting out of hand, but then you think well now wait a minute.

It wasn't the bugs in the blood there are bugs all over the place.

What was wrong with this person that his blood system suddenly became vulnerable to those particular bugs his resistance wasn't up.

Therefore, what you should have given was not an antibiotic but vitamins.

Okay, so we're going to build up his resistance, but resistance to what you may build up resistance to this and this and this class of bugs, but then there's another one that loves that situation and comes right in see.

We always look at the human being medically in bits and pieces, because we have heart specialists, lung specialists, bone specialists, nerve specialists and so on, and they each see the human being.

From their point of view, there are a few generalists, but they realize the human body is so complicated that no one mind can understand it.

And, furthermore, supposing we do succeed in healing all these people of their diseases? What do we then do about the population problem? I mean we've stopped cholera.

The black bubonic plague we're getting the better of tuberculosis.

We may fix cancer and heart disease.

Then what will people die of? Well there? Let's go on living will be enormous quantities of us.

Then we have to fix this birth thing pills for everybody.

Then we find what are the effects, the side effects of those pills? What are the psychological effects upon men and women of not breeding uh children in the usual way? We don't know and what seems a good thing today or yesterday, like ddt, turns out tomorrow to have been a disaster.

What seemed in the moral and spiritual sphere too, like great virtues in times past, are easily seen today as hideous evils.

Let's take, for example, the inquisition in its own day among catholics, the holy inquisition was regarded as we today regard the practice of psychiatry.

You you see you, you feel that in curing a person of cancer, almost anything is justified.

The most complex operations, the most weird surgery people suspended for days and days on end on the end of tubes, with x-ray penetration burning or people undergoing shock treatment, people locked in the colorless monotonous corridors of mental institutions in all good faith.

They knew that witchcraft and heresy were terrible things, awful plagues, imperiling people's souls forever, and ever so any means were justified to cure people of heresy.

We don't change we're doing the same thing today, but under different names we can look back at those people and see how evil that was, but we can't see it in ourselves.

So, therefore, beware of the chinese philosopher said the highest.

Virtue is not virtue and therefore really is virtue, but inferior virtue cannot let go of being virtuous and therefore is not virtue.

Translated in more of a periphrastic way.

The highest virtue is not conscious of itself, as virtue and therefore really is virtue.

Lower virtue is so self-conscious that it's not virtue.

In other words, when you breathe you don't congratulate yourself on being virtuous, but breathing is a great virtue.

It's living when you come out with beautiful eyes, blue or brown or green, as the case may be.

You don't congratulate yourself for having grown one of the most fabulous jewels on earth just eyes, and you don't account it a virtue to see to entertain the miracles of color and form.

You say.

Oh that's just, but that's real virtue, virtue in the sense of the old sense of the word as strength is when we talk about the healing virtue of a plant, that's real virtue, but the other virtues are stuck on they, their airsides, their imitation virtues and they usually create trouble because more diabolical things are done in the name of righteousness and be assured that everybody of whatever nationality or political frame of mind or religion always goes to war with a sense of complete rightness.

The other side is the devil.

Our opponents, whether in china or russia or vietnam, have the same feeling of righteousness about what they're doing, as we have on our side and a plague on both houses.

Because, as confucius said, the goody goodies are the thieves of virtue, which is the form of our own proverb.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Inspired.

Consider this a quick reminder, god playing, hide and seek.

My mission is to find.