To finish off my passion blog I think I should come full circle and assert my own personal philosophies, combining all of my previous blog posts to allow myself, as well as my readers, to reflect on all the philosophical ideas covered in this blog. I would almost like this blog post to serve as a time capsule for my ideas because it is inevitable that as time passes my views will change and it will be interesting to look back on mine today. An example of my philosophical growth was that in high school I was very interested in enlightenment ideas and was entirely focused on individualism while writing off collectivism as a sort of evil. However, my views shifted in recent years to almost find a happy medium between the two because I now understand that communities, a form of collectivism, are integral to the identity and success of an individual in life; individual rights are still paramount to maintain however and I believe that the ideal society would strike a harmonious balance between the two that would provide the foundational strength of collectivism and the freedom of individualism. On the essentialism vs relativism issue I am generally very biased in favor of essentialism although I do acknowledge human constructs. I believe that beyond flawed human constructs is an essential nature to things however, for example, even though the taxonomy of animals is flawed at present I still think that animals do truly belong to certain groupings, we just haven’t figured it out yet. On terms of the “natural way” vs “human constructed society” I fall more in line with the idea of the natural way because like Stoics and Daoists I think that there is a certain orderliness to the mechanisms of the natural world that works better than human constructs such as equality of outcome and the ideas of Hobbes. Now to shift to my post on morality I personally believe that there a certain absolute morality established through a deity because of my Catholic background, but should you remove that I would say that certain moral principles are objectively better than others because of their results and that could establish a true morality as well. When it comes to theology I was also very influenced by my Catholic background, but I also incorporated some lines of secular thought and skepticism into my theological views. I Really liked my nature vs nurture blog post because it’s an idea that really gets to the root of every person’s being and like I said there I thought that human personality and capabilities are established at birth, although how they manifest in life is determined my nurture, and that it’s not such a restricting thing about someone, but rather it acts as a defining characteristic that makes everyone unique. My opinion on Post-Modern philosophy isn’t very positive because I think it offers great deconstruction and criticism and nothing in its place making it rather banal and futile of a philosophy in my opinion. I’ve been very influenced by Stoicism as of late and think that it is an incredible philosophy that everyone should at least explore at little bit (I’d recommend checking out Meditations by Marcus Aurelius if you’re interested). On law I’ve said that I believe it shouldn’t necessarily be ethical and should focus on maintaining the rights of those in the society, while also criticizing religious law being used by a government. And finally on hierarchies, I believe them to be a natural and just occurrence within the world event though it is inherently unequal, these inequalities are how the world naturally functions and to try and create an equal outcome from all of the inequality would only stifle those who are exceptional. Thanks everyone for reading through my blog posts, I hope you’ve learned something about philosophy in reading it and I hope that you will continue to at least consider it in the future.

Mass shootings are the most tragic events that continue to occur and deeply impact the affected communities in our modern world. We, as a society, have been trying to rectify the issue of mass shootings through the two primary legislative goals of gun control and an increase in mental health services, but have either approaches really stemmed this issue? Through viewing the causes for mass shootings we can find a solution that is addressing the illness rather than the symptom. This solution requires the creation of high trust societies that prevent people like Elliot Rodgers, Stephen Paddock and Randy Stair from becoming disenfranchised with society and from committing their heinous acts of violence.