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High moral principles reduce room for compromise. In fact, compromise itself is often seen as suspect.
Inverse to our lauded praise for "moral steadfastness" its rigidity and idealism lead to evil.
This happens when the desirable ends provide justification for violent and oppressive means. Or, you want good so much that you become bad.
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In the pre-digital era, a universal similarity of content was reflected back to the mass audience (the public): they gazed into the mirror of media and (mostly) saw their values reflected back. (This is the pre-collapse tower of Babel.)
The digital era fractured the mirror into shards, which captured groups and separated them, provoking fragmented views from which yelling erupts.
In a mythic, psychoanalytic reading, the fragmentation and subsequent rage is a tantrum of yearning for wholeness. We wish to rejoin the primordial Eden or heavenly parents from which we have been expelled.
partially from Jonathan Haidt
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The shock of witnessing high craft with an element of absurdity is extraordinarily endearing and pleasurable.
We crave the seriousness of mastery (slavish hours of discipline and excellence) to be thoroughly commingled with blustery foolishness. It recognizes the best of being human.
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People cry out at the injustice of America and Israel’s wars in a way they don’t for Ukraine versus Russia. In the West, we claim it is hypocrisy for colonial empires to claim civilized, liberal values while destroying innocents.
Of course, there is a more profound truth behind the motivation, which is that liberalism announces aspirational values, but ideals are not principles.
Any civilization that can survive genocide and withstand the brutal attacks of religious fanatics must foundationally exist on an earlier primordial law; which is evoked under stress and sheds the aspirational.
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As we know: rhymes aren’t right. (neither is alliteration)
“Might make right” is an intentional slur against bullies, but proves poignantly enough the fragility of righteousness in the face of reality.
To make right our reality, do we destroy might?
If so, have we become mighty bullies swinging our glorious righteousness?
Have we inverted it: Does weakness make warriors?
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Being bad is a value judgment; being wrong is making an error. (A recipe can be “bad” without being wrong, i.e. you can follow the recipe without a mistake and still make a lousy soup.)
To be wrong is to be incorrect (such as selecting the wrong answer), while a bad decision is intentionally harmful (to decide not to study for the test).
This distinction (and most language distinctions) matters because those who re-label a “bad” (moral) choice as a “mistake” (incorrect/wrong) will allow them to dodge responsibility.
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Our uniqueness is at hand; it is merely a matter of believing in its value.
The rub: People say “Follow your passion,” but that rarely provides payment (which is tangible value.)
Over time we undervalue uniqueness by aligning it with what the market will pay, devaluing it, and, therefore, ourselves.
Capitalism, mostly, pays people for things almost no one wants to do: painful chores, abnormal skills, or sociopathic cruelty are well compensated.
The intersection between your passion, how you are paid, and your unique ability becomes the overlapping Venn diagram: what you care about, can do happily, and get paid for is a very tiny cross-section.
Consider instead of getting paid and narrowing this range of happiness, you can freely and complicity contribute to the “invisible hand” that keeps society moving.
The economic side will attempt to take a bite out of the hand that feeds it, that is the hand of passion and uniqueness.
Still, you can refuse to devalue yourself by separating your passions from payment: you can forego bland contentment and false subjugated uniqueness. Instead, save you for yourself.
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Jordan Peterson decries Marxism by considering “the great leap Forward” in China, which cost 40 million lives. Peterson asked whether or not that change was due to “love or hate” and claimed it was instead due to delusional ignorance.
I agree, and he is right to escape the moral value binary.
Applied to Western societies, nationalism, capitalism, and Christianity also manifest deadly delusional ignorance.
However, from a stance of Buddhist detachment, everything can be declared “delusional ignorance,” which may simply be the state of man no matter how far we assume we have progressed.
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Our naivety can be a virtue.
When wisdom accepts brutality and evil out of an overly weary and worldly common sense, aspirational hope is patronized.
This brand of wisdom accepts the unacceptable, promoting a moral deficiency of stagnation.
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Who you are is strengthened when you unearth and convey the times you were deeply fulfilled.
Don’t spend your valuable time with friends dismantling yourselves. Instead tell of the acts that fulfilled you, the personal small tales that reaffirm your unique value in the world.
The trick is to recall that odd moment that thrilled only you, not others.
from Luke Burgis
