Introduction to Maximum Advantage Collection by Travis B. Part 4

Most people, when they hear the world “moral” or “morality”, anticipate or reflect on its usual religious implications: to be good; to be righteous; to support others. Morality even in its vaguest of terms conveys the essence of goodwill. Even in the respect that goodwill carries the connotations of a relative definition, it is maintained within a philosophical and attitudinal frame of reference that continues to be correlated with humanity. Humanity as a subset of goodwill contains the implications of family and community, which subsequently rely on our instinctual drive to protect, nurture, and procreate. As a result morality, goodwill, and humanity can be argued to provide a frame of reference that intrinsically promotes self- preservation.

Although an admittedly indirect argument, morality can be argued to be a platform for our own individual as well as group preservation. This will to preservation is a main theme throughout this book, with a direct correlation with Jung’s shadow archetype. You may ask yourself, “Clearly you can not have a fine red wine with treif? It simply would not taste good!” I argue that you can. It may not taste good, but it must be experienced in order to develop any such distinction[5]. Similar to SRL’s correlation of the will to preservation with the cultural- shadow archetype, it may taste poor to the unsophisticated intellect, but is essential for us to properly process and digest our current cultural and societal condition- if we are ever to transcend it.

[5] This jest is similar to the following discussion of the concept, “relative deprivation”. Only the intellectually inexperienced take the given word for-granted. An argument consistently inferred in SRL’s book.