Don't mix up Morality with Understanding

[Scholar]

To most people who engaging in this subforum, I recommend that you establish a radical and clear division in your mind, between your moral judgement of actors in the world and your understanding of why things are happening in the world.

 

This division is essential to prevent identity from distorting your understanding of the world. Engaging in politics, especially in this day and age, requires a baseline of maturity. 

 

There is one primary emotion that must be paid attention to. It should be the biggest red flag for you. Once you feel this feeling, you should look inward and recognize what is going.
The emotion is "Moral Outrage". This single emotion is capable of hijacking your identity and distorting your view of reality, such that your intelligence will no longer serve to maximize your understanding of the world but instead will serve to fit your understanding of the world to whatever narrative that is tied to your moral outrage.

 

When I say you have to make a radical division, I am saying that you have to do this to what you will perceive as an irrational degree. As soon as you detect this feeling, you must realize that your intelligence is no longer serving Truth but instead is serving your identity. You have to reject any excuse or rationel your mind may provide for as to why this feeling might be appropriate given the situation. This feeling, in and of itself, pushes you away from Truth. Even if your analysis happened to be spot on, the fact that it is tied to an identity of fear, or primtivity, itself removes you from seeing the world as it is. 

 

The way your identity gets hijacked in the 21st century attention economy is like this:

The algorithm provides you with something that outrages you.

Your identity begins to form around the trigger point (moral outrage being one of the most identity forming emotions that exist).

The algorithm provides you with examples that threaten your newly formed identity. (for example individuals who express precisely those views that you are morally outraged by)

Your identity will feel attacked and seek to defend itself, you begin expressing your outrage in one form or another.

Individuals who are caught in the same feedback-loop, on the other side of the equation, will get outraged at your outrage.

You fight with those people, your identity solidifies as you do (so does theirs as you attack them), you seek information that confirms your identity and outrage, you become an extention of algorithmic profit-maximization by providing others with more fuel to get outraged by.

 

There is no truth in this endeavor. The psychological mechanisms of your identity are being hijacked, be it for profit, ideology, propaganda or just toxic runaway outrage dynamics.

 

Understanding functions the precise opposite way. When a scientists tries to understand how and why a lion hunts his prey, he will not do so from a moralistic lense. If the scientist would get morally outraged at the lion for killing innocent animals, and begin demonizing him, how likely would he be in his endeavor to understand the lion's behavior? Imagine the scientist would then proceed to go on and spread his outrage, all the evil things he learned about the lion, to his fellow humans. Imagine he would get into debates with zebra-haters who defend the lion, about who is morally righteous, who is more corrupt, the lion or the zebra.

Whatever you think the truth is, this whole approach is beyond absurd. Even if you came to conclude the correct thing from time to time, it would still be detrimental to you.

 

Nobody is immune from this, and as these exploitative mechanisms grow in sophistication, your maturity will have to grow, lest you become a mere extention of these dynamics. 

Ask yourself this: How many of the things you care deeply about, that you are morally outraged by, are part of contemporary pop-ethical debates? What feelings fuel you as you engage with others or seek out information about these topics? How many people did you convince of whatever your perspective is? Yet, do you still argue with people about it? Do you feel like your view must be seen, must be expressed, because otherwise the tides of falsehood and moral corruption will take over? Do you feel deep urgency to push against a narrative that you feel morally outraged by?

All of these are indicators that your identity is being hijacked. All of us will be susceptible to these dynamics to some degree, and one of the greatest tragedies of it is that they erase our agency. We become mindless drones, most likely serving some profit-maximizing algorithm, giving us the illusion we are doing something important when what we do is just contributing to the problem.

Edited Sunday at 11:36 PM by Scholar

[saif2]

where does corruption comes in? If it is not from morality then it is from the lack of understanding. Strange perspective and liberating.

[sholomar]

These large corporations , content creators, political parties, etc. are experts at pandering to people's emotions and triggering them with sensationalist content, and making them think the world is "going to hell" along with creating echo chambers and hijacking a person's ability to properly rationalize, similar to being in a cult, because we now have instant access to information, much of it designed to trigger people's dopamine receptors. In truth, this world has always been a hell, depending on your perspective. Life is harsh. Beautiful, but harsh.  Let me be clear no "side" is immune to this. The "right" or "left" or whatever nutcase cult a person subscribes too or votes for. 

You make excellent points. Good stage yellow thinking here. A lot of people here get caught up in their emotions and moral judgements and worshipping their emotions as some grand truth when they are merely animalistic limbic mechanisms that compel an animal to act in it's environment. They are best mindfully observed and acknowledged, along with all impulses, cravings, etc. 

Throw in bots taking over comments and chat, and these bots themselves tend to push a narrative to manipulate people's opinions.  The line between facts and narratives is being blurred by emotional manipulation and sensationalized/fake content... but such is human nature. This has been going on a very long time. The stage green "outrage dynamics" as you describe are still strong here but am seeing more detached yellow perspective lately which is good.  It will literally take genetic engineering to "fix" our behavior at the ADHD sort of speed modern people tend to demand today, because of it's evolutionary origins.   This won't fix the fact animal species are still out there eating each other for sustenance, or that nature itself is harsh, but it will appease the people always so upset about human behavior, thinking humans should know better when their animal impulses assert themselves and they make impulsive choices in a society and culture where we have so much individual autonomy to do as we please, often without "bad behavior" ever being punished or called out. 

 

 

Edited Monday at 07:58 AM by sholomar

[Breathe]

@Scholar I agree with a good deal that you said here, but I'd like to distill it down a framework that I've come up with.

Morality is a tricky subject, so I don't want to get lost in the weeds there, but without opening that can of worms I will say that I have values. I align my political views with those values. And yes, I will speak out when I disagree. I will also walk away when once I sense that I'm not getting through to someone.

At some point you have to recognize that your own views change. This also means that other people's views are susceptible to change. If you really get that, then you understand that it's fine for people to have opposing views. People are where they are at and there's little you can do about it. Also, it's good to recognize that how you see things now isn't how you'll see things in the future. If you don't get that, then you will never grow. There has to be some semblance of self-doubt, the willingness to challenge yourself, to open up to the possibility that you may be wrong. And lastly, be ok with ambiguity and patient for the truth to reveal itself.

Back to values... I value kindness, equality, and truth.

I will call people out if they are not acting in accordance with those values, but I will also hold my self accountable if I'm not doing so myself. The latter is easier said than done.

Why is this important? Because it prevents me from becoming ideological, limits my tendency to see things through the lens of my own biases, and lends itself to a more harmonious life.

@saif2 Good question. Refer to the values I listed above... Corruption proof values.

[zazen]

Great write up. I commented in another thread and your points tie in well with what I wrote. I was writing about how morality is hijacked by circumstances, your writing about how identity is hijacked by morality itself, especially moral outrage driven wild in the digital age. We can have moral clarity ( as you said we can be spot on in analysis ) but problems arise when we make it our identity. Some people may have the same moral positions as each other but may arrive at them differently - one by being a NCP jumping on a trend to feel identified with something (many activists), another through critical thinking and having moral clarity on a issue.

12 hours ago, Scholar said:

establish a radical and clear division in your mind, between your moral judgement of actors in the world and your understanding of why things are happening in the world.

Our moral judgment of actors is how we wish the world to be (idealism - Jeffrey Sachs pov) , our understanding of why they act the way they do is how the world is (realism - John Mearsheimers pov). We can understand power as it is, without surrendering our principles about how it should be wielded.

Principles are the souls universal morality - power is the worlds conditioned, contextual reality. I think that deep down we have a universal morality, a soul morality  (fitrah in Islam, Dao or bhudda nature, telos in Christianity). Its pre-duality, pre-political, pre-cultural and conditional. But then the world of duality means we must contend with circumstances and conditions that distort, suppress or invert our access to that soul morality (which I generally map in the below comment).

That's why religion and spirituality usually refers to revelation or a home coming - in the sense that we have good in us that we need returning to, or revealing of.

4 hours ago, zazen said:

 I have critically thought about the situation, and have come to conclusions as to who’s the most de-stabilising force in the world that’s causing death and destruction. It’s not bias to point that out, just clarity - and I don’t have any cognitive dissonance doing so as I don’t identify with any nation, religion or people.

Heres how I make sense of it all:

If we lived at the time of the British Empire or during the Holocaust - would it be okay for people to just say “well that’s power isn’t it, that’s how the world and geopolitics works, it’s not about morals”. The point is we are humans, not robots. On some level we have a sense of right and wrong which stems from the soul. But then how do we explain why people do wrong yet don’t feel it to be wrong?

I think what happens is that peoples moral compasses get hijacked due to external circumstance, but that doesn’t make it an internal condition which is a racist or essentialist claim. Context (circumstances) distort, suppress or invert our conscience (morality). Germans turning around from Nazism shows that context > innateness.  Nazism was a perfect shit storm of contextual forces that hijacked human morality on a mass scale leading to the worst atrocities.

Moral distortion is psychological-survival based, moral suppression is empire-domination based, moral inversion is ideological-puritanical based.

Resistance groups belong to the first category (localised geopolitical struggle), Zionism is mainly a mix of the first two (started with geopolitical survival but became dominating), US nuking Japan and doing all they’ve done till today is mainly moral suppression (morality suspended for the cold calculus of empire), Nazism and ISIS are the last two (global domination to purify the world - apocalyptic politics not just geopolitics) in other words: evil.

Distorted morality is survival logic (liberation), suppressed morality is empire logic (domination), inverted morality is purity logic (evil).

Israel right now seems to be locked into a distorted feedback loop of (past) trauma justifying (present) domination. The context today is that they have power that is distorted by paranoia, rooted from a time in which they lacked any power to survive. Their moral compass is hijacked by a permanent sense of threat that has been heightened beyond what it really is due to past trauma. And despite being materially developed (powerful) they are morally compromised (in principles).

This is the key tension that causes a lot of confusion (even politically between left and right). To defer to power (conserve to survive - quality and might make right) or to defer to principle (liberate to thrive - equality and fairness are rights). These need to be synthesised.

The lefts blind spot is to deny the reality of survival and power dynamics because it counters their own idea of human goodness. The rights blindspot is to just succumb to raw power dynamics without principles to buffer and refine power itself.

The realities of survival and power threatens the lefts moral framework because they haven’t synthesized the ideals of principles - with the realities of power and survival. They either deny those realities or have an incorrect relationship to it - viewing hierarchy and power as bad ie communism being the extreme political manifestation. The right succumb to power dynamics with little to no moral framework - only justifying power as principle itself, with facism being their extreme political manifestation on the other end of the spectrum.

The bottom line is that the physical nature of power isn’t good by default - the concept of good doesn’t even exist in that plane. It’s just raw and neutral - and only becomes good when nurtured by principles from the non-physical plane of the soul. We are both ruled (down to earth) by power and pulled (up to heaven) by principles.

Civilization is about buffering the reality of power with the conscience of principles - or them finally coming together.