People should have a reasonably
equal chance at succeeding in life, or maybe people should be able to do what
they want to do. Or maybe people should be able to live life according to their
principles without undue hardship. People should be free, except when that
freedom infringes on other people’s freedom, except when their concept of free
destroys the existing systems of society. There are all kinds of ways to
construct a moral framework without using a traditional religion, but none of
them are sufficiently perfect. No moral framework is ever perfect. Everything
needs qualification.
Let me
cut to the chase: there’s no reason to construct moral frameworks. Reject them
when people try to sell them to you, no matter what their intention is. Moral
frameworks only create division and foster “us vs. them” thinking. Do not
reject the people, do not shame those who do build frameworks, but recognize
where that leads. Reject no one.
The irony
here, of course, is that I’m describing a moral framework. I’ve delineated what
is good and what is bad. “Moral frameworks” are something to reject, people are
something to embrace. An enlightened master in my framework is a person who
accepts people and rejects their moral frameworks. So really it doesn’t mean
anything. I can’t tell you how to be happy; you’re going to have to figure that
one out, yeah? Live how you want. Don’t hate other people, not cause it’s “bad”
or whatever, but it won’t make you happy. New moral framework here: being happy
is good, being sad is not. Sad people are failing to live up to moral
standards, happy people are succeeding.
Not
going to work either, happiness isn’t exactly a binary proposition. Sometimes
you’re clinically incapable of being happy, sometimes your experience has
created a problem where you can’t actually feasibly happy. People suffer from
ptsd and depression and all kinds of things no matter whether they are trying
to be happy or not. Life circumstances can cause someone to totally
involuntarily hate someone. Cultural conditioning does that all the time.
Maybe
being happy isn’t right. Maybe you can just not make other people sad. But that’s
another set of issues. Some people get sad over weird things. Communication is
imperfect, and we’re trying to bridge a gap between people with wildly
divergent social backgrounds. We’re all living drastically different realities,
which is why we developed a series of social expectations in the first place.
Society bridges the gap and gives everyone a reasonable expectation of how
another person will behave and maybe what their motivations are. This way we’re
not terribly shocked when someone jabs their open hand at us. We know it’s a
gesture of friendship and meeting and we’re supposed to shake it with our hand
in turn. Similarly we recognize that someone gesturing at us with an angry face
and a middle finger raised means us ill will.
Similarly,
moral frameworks are intended to give us an idea of what we’re supposed to
striving for. When we say something like “people are basically good” what we
mean is that we’re all socialized into a certain framework of social
expectations where bad people would presumably not exist because we responsibly
believe that being bad would make them feel bad, especially because being bad
makes us feel bad. This breaks down in the face of pathologies where people are
incapable of feeling guilt or social obligation, pathologies where nearly every
behavior triggers a guilt response, and rationalizations where people will
mentally justify bad behaviors as actually being good and thus don’t trigger a
guilt response.
Since
so many exceptions exist to this sort of thing that maybe it’s more fair to
just say something like “approach each situation with an open mind.” Or “don’t
prejudge any person or situation” or something like that. I’m not sure that’s
fair either. Prejudgment is something that we do as a species as a way of
efficiently categorizing experiences and making them useful in the future. We prejudge
that fire is hot, for example, so that in the future when we see fire we know
to stay away from it because it’s hot. Shutting off a structural facet of
memory is much more easily said than done and probably not a great idea. I’d
suggest maybe you just don’t behave like you’re prejudging them anyway, but it’s
essentially impossible to entirely separate your thinking from your behavior.
Do you
see what I mean about moral frameworks? They’re slippery, imperfect things.
Like fish downriver from a paper mill. Do what you want. I don’t believe in
free will anyway, so you’re just going to do whatever it is you’ll do.
Godspeed.
Of course, fish UPriver from a paper mill are pretty slippery, too.
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