Ever heard of self determination, or free will?

Madara plans to rob people of that. It's a good ideal (Utopia) executed in an incredibly bad way. A way in which people have no choice but to conform to what his idea of Utopia is.

 

His plan to create an illusion of a perfect world for other people to live in it is not bad per se. I'm sure many people, like you for example, would agree with him and happily joined him there. The evil part is making other people, these who don't want to live a lie as they may perceive it, to be there too.

 

Madara is really just sounding like an old Taoist, which severely complicates him as an antagonist for me. He keeps talking about these seamless, intricate dualities (really well, I might add) like victory and loss, happiness and despair, and so forth, and the Moon's Eye plan from that perspective just sounds like Zuang Tzu having his dream about being a butterfly and wondering whether his life or the butterfly's was a dream, questioning the reality of both at the same time by doing so. He just wants to change the dream, which of course is still weird and goes beyond the innocence of philosophy, but in some sense, he's kind of right.

Those who hated the dream world could theoretically just...dream about the world as it was? Which brings up all the philosophical questions of the Matrix and so forth, which is really just the film version of a philosophy thought experiment (brain in a vat, the Cartesian Evil Demon, etc.). What makes a perfect dream worse than a shitty reality?

 

Or he is a crazy that can't face reality.

 

How would that even work, by the way? Does the Moon eye illusion capture everyone in a genjutsu world, where there is peace, kind of like Tsukiyomi/Matrix, where they live forever in harmony? If so, who is going to feed the people since most will drop dead after a few days due to thirst and hunger. Save some people with immortality jutsu (most of which are dead, by the way, kind of ironic) that kind of kills humanity as a whole.

Or does it brainwash people into having only peaceful thoughts, kill aggression or whatever? Which is, undeniably, on the more evil side, forcefully altering everyones personalities like that.

Anyway, either way sounds stupid to me. Besides, I doubt this is Madara's plan at all. That doesn't sound like the guy who left the village because he couldn't be the leader and who returned to raze that village to the ground. Everyone ever in the manga, lying whores though they may be, described Madara as someone who loved fighting and war.

And seeing him fight the Kage's, whom he utterly trashed since they disappointed his expectations, he didn't seem to have changed his view on fighting at all. He was disappointed that the new generation was so weak compared to him and Shodai. Doubt that someone who is after eternal peace would be saddened by the weaker fighters.

So yeah, Madara is obviously lying and Obito is a retard for believing him. Fuck kishi for ruining him too. Why was Obito so keen on killing every Uchiha by the way? I mean, I kind of got why Madara would have wanted to get revenge on his family but why would Obito so happily consent to slaughtering his whole family, children and all? He didn't want to change the ninja world for them too? They didn't deserve the happy life in the eternal illusion?

 

Maybe he was planning to hang them off the Gedo Mezou(?).

It also seems foolish to assume that it would be so easy to separate humans from their suffering. I feel like they would make it suck, no matter how good it was. They'd fuck it up somehow. Or the perfection of it all would drive them insane.

 

Yeah, I'm quite enjoying my own. Still, if people need to be pushed to stop being assholes to their own species, then free will is a sacrifice I don't think is too high.
Besides, it's not like he'd force them into labor building his empire or whatever, he'd just force them to stop being selfish pricks who don't give a shit about each other.

Saying that forcing someone is bad in principle is hypocritical. The entire justice system is based around forcing bad people to stop doing bad things, 99% of the time against their will. I see it as something like that.

 

I'd say the justice system is more about maintaining a society in which people don't go around violating the rights of others. Ever since Hammurabi, the whole purpose of any half-decent justice system has been the same: violate another's rights, and you forfeit those rights yourself. Thus, there exists a strong deterrent against criminality and a strong incentive to respect the rights of others.

It's important to note that the criminal's free will is never really violated, because in committing a crime in a state under the rule of law, the perpetrator is fully aware of the price to be paid should they be caught. If they go ahead anyway, then they have effectively and freely willed themselves to be pursued by the Law and punished appropriately.

Criminals aren't forced to be good, but deterred from evil. You can't force someone not to commit a crime, but you can give them a good reason not to do it. If they do it anyway, then they have done it freely and the consequences are not an act of oppression, since the criminal must have reckoned with them from the beginning.

Madara and Obito want to take free will away completely and coerce the whole world to live at peace with one another. Whether this is moral or not depends on what you value: freedom or security. In our modern world, obviously most people would choose the former. But there have been plenty of societies to choose the latter in history. I've heard good arguments for both, really. Personally I'd rather keep my free will.

EDIT: Also, as for Madara being like a Taoist, I disagree. Taoists accept, and do not question. Death, pain, loss, injury, grief, all these things... they are worldly. These things are, in Taoism and most brands of mysticism, the very nature of the world in flux. They are not things to be resisted or hated. Passive acceptance is the way. Madara comes across as a rampant materialist who fears the destruction of his profane body, who wishes to dominate the world and make it a static fantasy, without change, without the natural harmony of the cycle of life. He's pretty much an anti-sage.

 

Completely, you say. I dont‘t think of it like that. The Matrix may have been a world forced upon mankind, but men still acted freelly within it‘s boundaries.

What Madara plans is not the ability stop people from commiting crimes against each other, but to take away the need or desire to do so in the first place. So free will won‘t really be violated, because things like murder or injustice will sipmply not exist. He doesn‘t force people to do the right thing, he removes the alternative option.

Removing selfishness, greed and hate from humanity is a major improvement, which might allow it to actually reach greatness, imo.

Edit: Aditionally, the same thing you said about ciminals goes for everyone who acts selfishly and/or immorally at the expense of other. They know they open themselves to retribution. Should this cycle not be stopped?

 

And completely violates Balance.

Good and Evil, Darkness and Light, Violence and Peace, Love and Hate.

Each have their place. And to try and completely remove one from the equation is WORSE than unnatural. It's despicable, and selfish.

And if you remember, in The Matrix, they tried to make a 'perfect world' first.

It Failed.

Besides, it's all FAKE anyway. It's not truth. It's not reality, it's a lie. An illusion.

How can you Triumph if there is no Failure? How can you Love if there is no Hate? How can you Persevere if there is no Challenge?

How can you Excel, if everyone is always equal?

Answer: You can't.

 

The concept of balance is speculation. A theory in which I don't personally believe. Human history, however, is fact.

The Matrix is a movie. The fact that it said a perfect world failed doesn't mean it has to be so. I only used it as a parallel for how free will is affected.

"What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then "real" is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain."
If one was able to remake reality, instead of twisting it, then it would still be real, not a lie. If a part of reality is replaced, or removed, then is what remains any less real that what used to be? It's still real, if it defines the world in which we live in. The removal of a part of humanity's character does not make the new state of affairs a lie, merely a new, or different, reality. A better one, or so I believe.

You can triumph, fail, hate, love, persevere, and be challenged eternally. A removal of human selfishness doesn't change that. What it does change is that instead of living these things singularly and at the expense of each other over petty things, humanity can triumph, fail, hate, love, persevere and be challenged as a race, by and towards things that affect it as a whole, or singularly, but with the help of one's fellow humans.

Would that not be a better world to be in? A world still dangerous, still full of emotion, positive and negative, but with a humanity that has a united conscience. With people who can think "we" instead of just "I".
I believe it would be.

 

Clearly, Naruto is going to succeed where philosophy failed.

Sorry guys, Naruto is hardly the series that is going to tackle those issues with any kind of seriousness.

 

New chapter is up

http://www.mangapanda.com/naruto/607

And of course its time to take a break for a week again. Oh well.

 

So if Kakashi hadn't felt the need to talk out loud to a grave about top secret information...

 

Did anyone else think at first that the chapter title was just what the translators thought?

Well, we finally found out Rin's last name. Not that anyone was really dying to know. The wood dragon's kinda cool too.

 

At least it didn't turn out that she was a Haruno or somehow related to Sakura...

And that was the one good thing about the chapter.

 

Best part of the whole chapter.

On a serious note: Get ready for a host of 'Kakashi keeps his damn mouth shut' AUs.

 

I wasn't under the impression that that was supposed to be the first that Obito knew about Kushina having a kid. The sort of attack that he pulled off would take a lot of time and prep, and given Obito's skill set it would have been easy for him to find out that Kushina was pregnant.

And remember, he didn't go after Naruto because he was Minato's kid. In fact he didn't go after Naruto at all except as a target of opportunity. He was there to take the Kyuubi from Kushina and all we saw was that at that point, he didn't care that he had to go against his old teacher to do it.