Friday, March 4, 2016

Quote: caprice

"Your advantages are prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace—and so on, and so on. So that the man who should, for instance, go openly and knowingly in opposition to all that list would to your thinking, and indeed mine, too, of course, be an obscurantist or an absolute madman: would not he? But, you know, this is what is surprising: why does it so happen that all these statisticians, sages and lovers of humanity, when they reckon up human advantages invariably leave out one? They don’t even take it into their reckoning in the form in which it should be taken, and the whole reckoning depends upon that. It would be no greater matter, they would simply have to take it, this advantage, and add it to the list. . . .that is, that man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose what is contrary to one's own interests, and sometimes one POSITIVELY OUGHT (that is my idea). One's own free unfettered choice, one's own caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at times to frenzy — is that very "most advantageous advantage" which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply INDEPENDENT choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice."  

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Love the sinner, hate the sin?

From a very old comment, a concept that many find difficult or nonsensical:

Sam Harris makes this argument in his book "Free Will". If you "get" this line of thinking, you stop blaming people and you stop experiencing pride and shame, because all those are based on the idea that there is a "you" that "freely chooses" to do things that are either bad (blame), good (pride) or bad (shame). 

The best parts of his book relate to psychopaths like Uday Hussein and how we ought to kill them (of course) while loving them (because they aren't blameworthy). It is a very Epicurean/Stoic/zen approach to things, free of the faulty assumptions that almost all humans share - which is quite sociopathic. 

Sunday, February 28, 2016

Whole vs. wholesome

It's interesting to me that the word whole can mean such different things than wholesome. Wholeness is being exactly all of whatever one is. Wholesome has come to mean good, ethical, moral, etc. I think it's fair to say that society has a general preference, which is that it would rather people be wholesome than whole.

I was reading again a series of articles about Parker Palmer, articles that I know I had read before not more than 6 months or a year ago, but now that I've graduated to every other week therapy, I know exactly what he is talking about.

First, about the conflict between what society wants and what is best for the individual (to be one's true self, whole and complete and in the form that is the most true expression of one's "soul", whatever that means exactly):

For “it” is the objective, ontological reality of selfhood that keeps us from reducing ourselves, or each other, to biological mechanisms, psychological projections, sociological constructs, or raw material to be manufactured into whatever society needs — diminishments of our humanity that constantly threaten the quality of our lives.

(See above link for more on how we know that each person has a unique identity/soul.)

Why do we abandon our inborn identity in favor of a construct, made by society, and our parents, and friend, and ourselves and any other person who has ever had expectations of us to be or do a particular thing?

As teenagers and young adults, we learned that self-knowledge counts for little on the road to workplace success. What counts is the “objective” knowledge that empowers us to manipulate the world. Ethics, taught in this context, becomes one more arm’s-length study of great thinkers and their thoughts, one more exercise in data collection that fails to inform our hearts.

I value ethical standards, of course. But in a culture like ours — which devalues or dismisses the reality and power of the inner life — ethics too often becomes an external code of conduct, an objective set of rules we are told to follow, a moral exoskeleton we put on hoping to prop ourselves up. The problem with exoskeletons is simple: we can slip them off as easily as we can don them.

[…]

When we understand integrity for what it is, we stop obsessing over codes of conduct and embark on the more demanding journey toward being whole. 

Palmer tells of his own experience with this:

I lined up the loftiest ideals I could find and set out to achieve them. The results were rarely admirable, often laughable, and sometimes grotesque… I had simply found a “noble” way to live a life that was not my own, a life spent imitating heroes instead of listening to my heart.

[…]

My youthful understanding of “Let your life speak” led me to conjure up the highest values I could imagine and then try to conform my life to them whether they were mine or not. If that sounds like what we are supposed to do with values, it is because that is what we are too often taught. There is a simplistic brand of moralism among us that wants to reduce the ethical life to making a list, checking it twice — against the index in some best-selling book of virtues, perhaps — and then trying very hard to be not naughty but nice.

There may be moments in life when we are so unformed that we need to use values like an exoskeleton to keep us from collapsing. But something is very wrong if such moments recur often in adulthood. Trying to live someone else’s life, or to live by an abstract norm, will invariably fail — and may even do great damage.

What is the damage in this?

Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the “integrity that comes from being what you are.”
***
Here is the ultimate irony of the divided life: live behind a wall long enough, and the true self you tried to hide from the world disappears from your own view! The wall itself and the world outside it become all that you know. Eventually, you even forget that the wall is there — and that hidden behind it is someone called “you.”

How an external standard of behavior, no matter how "ethical" or "good" is not a longterm, stable solution (substitute "vocation" for any other externally imposed restriction on behavior or self-expression):

If the self seeks not pathology but wholeness, as I believe it does, then the willful pursuit of vocation is an act of violence toward ourselves — violence in the name of a vision that, however lofty, is forced on the self from without rather than grown from within. True self, when violated, will always resist us, sometimes at great cost, holding our lives in check until we honor its truth. Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about — quite apart from what I would like it to be about — or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.

What is the solution?

Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.

Do this even at the cost of ruffling feathers, of not conforming to what society demands, of being persecuted and hated for who you are, yes -- and speaking form experience, there really is no other viable choice.  

Friday, February 26, 2016

All men are created equal?

I was thinking recently about why I am oddly so tolerant. It's a great trait to have, particularly in the law when there are some clients with very very good cases who are very very bad people.

I thought one reason might be that we're just a little colorblind when it comes to social norms and morality. A very popular post for people finding this website is the one about love. A controversial segment in that post is where I say that sociopaths can often appreciate certain traditionally undervalued segments of the population at closer their true value than normal people do. I actually have forgotten why it's controversial. Maybe because some people make a moral judgment on that and think that I am arguing that sociopaths are out there doing good amongst the populace like some sort of superhero. But sociopaths are more like stock value traders or contrarians. The price of a stock is the price that the market values it (the price at which there are people both willing to buy and sell at the same price). But the value of a stock is based on how much the actual corporation is worth. It's quite possible to have a valuable stock that is underpriced, just as it is quite possible for society to undervalue a person. A sociopath naturally sees these areas as potential opportunities for arbitraging, or taking advantage of the gap in something's price and its value in another context.

But I also think there is another reason why some sociopaths may be this way is a related belief -- that all humans have value because it often is true and in any case it would be difficult to falsify. That is, assume that humans have value because a lot of people have had some value in the past and it's really hard to know ahead of time which are going to turn out to be fruitless. I think a theme of this is being expressed in this recent comment from an old post:

That actually bothers me in people, how easily I can see something from another's point of view, free of judgement and prejudice but other people can be so quick to criticize an idea just because they don't agree. They don't consider the possibility that they might be wrong but somehow the sociopaths that consider ideas as radical as Hitler's, Marx's or Stalin's on equal ground as democracy, freedom of speech and habeas corpus are the villains, for being impartial. People, jeez... 


Wednesday, February 24, 2016

On killing (part 2)

A little bit of a follow up to this older post, from a reader:

I thought this interview was an interesting contrast to the videos of serial killers that are often discussed on the forum.

I've often said that the ability to take a life is really just a matter of motivation.  This guy had to face that choice because he was drafted.  It's clear that his conscience bothers him - but he has an interesting idea: "It's not that they don't deserve to have been born, but they don't deserve to keep on living."  I think in narrow cases, the death penalty is justified along these lines.  However, given the practical problems (i.e. the high rate of "innocent" people on death row), the cases are really quite few where it's justified.

On a more personal level, my father was a sniper in a revolution and on his death bed he worried that I might judge him for his actions ("I killed a lot of people.  I don't know how many; a lot.").  It was one of those rare moments when being...different as we are...maybe served a better purpose.  He knew that I didn't care - it didn't change how I felt about him (good and bad).  I think he liked that my response was that I wasn't qualified to judge him and I didn't care.  It seemed to give him comfort.


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