I reject moralities which consist in Is-ness, which posit that some fact or other about human behavior is absolute and unchanging. I reject even positive ontologies, like “People ought to love one another.”
How could that be bad? Well, have you ever been to a Baptist Church, and seen the fake smiles and the fake love? They are commanded to love, so they conjure it up, even when they don’t feel it.
This is of course a cartoonish description which misses many realities. But fakeness is one possibility I personally have often seen.
I have not put the words together, but how about Moral Motology, where Motology recognizes that what “is” is in constant motion, and which includes within it the notions of Emergence and Strange Attractors.
The system is not defined by what other people ought to do. It is defined by what I choose to do and believe. All definitions are approximate, and all behavioral expectations are approximate. There is no law, merely tendencies.
Self pity is not easily defined or measured.
Perseverance can mean what you need it to mean, anything from not killing yourself to always and invariably finishing everything you start.
Curiosity, too, is relative.
See, here is the thing: all of these things, practiced in any measure, will always tend to make people better. They may go slow and they may go fast, but that will be the general direction in nearly all cases over time. It assumes gradualness, and quiet growth.
And the burst of energy it enables is that you transition–or will tend to transition, if I have thought this through properly–from judging other people to helping them. People become more focused on building happiness than enforcing behavioral codes.
In its way, Socialism is very much an Old School moral ontology, one with important similarities to the worst judgmental tendencies of old religions. It places nearly zero focus on building people up. It’s focus is on tearing down. It does not focus on building happiness, but on reducing misery. It judges and judges and judges. It judges everything that has worked in history and that works at the moment.
It is unpleasant. No lasting beauty has ever evolved from a focus on ugliness. At least, I don’t see how a tendency to hate evolves into a tendency to love.
And we need to be clear that there are Socialist equivalents to the fake church people. They are the people who cry out racist 50 times a day, but have no thought through plan to help black people in this country live better lives. They simply enjoy the ability to sit in judgement on others, because it makes them feel good. Just the same as ugly church people, who love to condemn the sins, real or imagined, of their fellow church-goers.
The people who cry out racist really do think they are Holier-than-Thou, but they in fact are naked hypocrites.
It’s funny: after posting I was going to stop making posts, I had a spasm of posts. There is some part of me that whenever I try to forswear something insists on focusing on it.
But things are getting better day by day. I should be working more, but it has been a beautiful blessing, in the middle (as I hope) of my life, getting this time to simply allow things to percolate.
And I retain the hope that enough people read this that I have some influence. It may be a foolish hope, but the fools have their roles to play too.