OK, fair enough. Now I know what’s happening.
Then I should probably bow out. I will not produce a solution to conflicted value judgments, not in the sense of a method to resolve which right.
OK
Is ought, you mean?
Ah, objective morals, monad self.
OK
OK. I can get that, i guess. It was challenging when I started to feel distance from the left. I identified with them. I don’t really now. For most of my life this did not mean I thought in terms of objective morals. But still I identified, felt aligned with them. Preferred how they interacted with children - me being one for a while - and the world they seemed to want to create. Don’t get me wrong, I still tend to prefer to hang out with lefties. There is more of a home there, but perhaps one difference between you and me is I always felt alienated by every group: religious, philosophical, political, cultural. And that included the left. I never thought there was a simple relation to the USSR. I didn’t think Reagan was wrong about the evil empire, though I thought he was evil also. Or really, you could translate that into preferences, but I found little to like about soviet relations to its own peoples and the left’s dismissal of Reagan there seemed anti-right rather than noticing the object of the remark.
I can remember sitting in a theater watching a movie where a cia agent/diplomat character tells a liberal trying to find his child that it was easy for him to judge US foreign policy while at the same time not really paying attention to it and accepting benefits from it. That there was something facile about the fathers position. I felt sympathy for that judgment, though I disagreed with the policy in question. The entire mainly ivy league audience hissed at the CIA agent. I thought then and think now that these mainly very priviledged people liked the idea of hissing, but in the end were happy and snug in policies they claim to hate on occasion. I’ll bet most of them went for Bush 2’s start of Gulf War 2.
I found that all groups had strong taboos and social punishments and seemed unable to quesiton their sources, whether the Nation, the Times, or whatever WF Buckley read.
I hated the way the Left was happy to indoctrinate children. I certainly noticed that the right did this too.
I found it odd that the Left had trouble criticizing hilariously poor systems of belief like the psychiatric/pharma worldview.
In the left’s hatred of religion, I saw all sorts of baby bathwater smugness, the same certainties I could find in the scientific community, based on very little and very little understanding of the phenomena they poo pooed.
Very little actual experiential curiosity. A lot of hearsay certainty by all major groups. My respect went down on all sides.
There were a variety of norms to choose from or around me and in various ways they all made me feel like a weirdo. I might have agreed about many policies with one, but tempermentally I did not fit in. My sense of psychological health. My sense of humor. The depth of my emotions. I just kept encountering limited norms. I don’t think most people want to notice what they really feel - I know how that phrase will hit you but there are degrees of cluelessness around introspection - or through what process they came to their opinions. IOW ceongnitive dissonence, potential hypocrisy, ‘negative’ emotions, confusion, anomolies are regularly denied by most people, as far as I can tell. And then do not feel the urge to explore that.
So, my alienation from categories and groups has been there a long time and this goes way back into childhood. Nothing like childhood trauma to make you curious about the anomolies around experts. I noticed at a very early age that there was a systematic cluelessness and pardigmantic idiocy amongst supposedly scientific experts. Not individual errors or areas that need improvment, but systematic problems. That made me come at all kinds of expert ‘knowledge’ with skepticism.
It is frustrating. I would love to be able to go to an association or church and just hang with my fellow Xs. But it has been this way for a long time.
I have during that time met people who also notice anomolies, don’t fit categories well, and have a vague tribe who I do not get to spend enough time with. And then there is my wife. Took a lot of really messed up relationships to find someone who I can tell all my reactions to. Who knows she has her own cellar with beasts and monsters in it, can sit with contradictions in herself for a long time, better than me.
My focus has then been for a long time unification in myself and finding people who I do not experience I must actively hide much from. Always a matter of degree, but I have found people where there is such a degree of acceptance between us that it is qualitatively different.
And while I try to find the truth, whatever that means, in traditional ways, I am very experientially based. Dewey, apprentice, exploratory. I don’t expect so much change to come through reading or dialogue, though it can sort of aim some of the experiential work.
I follow anomolies, things that do not fit what experts tell us is the good and the real. I see no mainstream paradigm that adequately explains what I can repeatedly experience, not all of it.
And all the various major belief systems out there tell me, in one way or other, to not have the feelings I have. I decided to test whether they were right, treat their judgments of the limbic system as falsifiable. I think they are wrong. Though this is more lived than asserted. I stopped trying not to feel what I feel in all the ways everyone from the scientific community to the various religions to pharmapsychiatry to the new age to the business world to folk beliefs to ‘common sense’ say that one must. It is amazing how much these seemingly different groups have overlapping, often nearly the same judgments of the limbic system. Going in precisely the opposite direction to all their objectivisms about emotions, I find myself less crazy, quite grounded, not violent, able to be rational and more able to make the life I want, at least around those parts I can affect. IOW their judgements do not seem to be grounded in reality and the people I am intimate with have, over a long period of time decided not to accept these actually not supported by research judgments to lock emotions down.
I can imagine this sounding like an objectivism, but I see it as a decision not to listen to all these ‘truths’ about how I am suppose to judge, lock down, eliminate, suppress as a rule my emotions.
I mention my history since it is relevant regarding fragmentation and fracturedness.
So while I certainly look at the world and am horrified and do wish to make nudges in directions I prefer and this includes nudges coming from empathy about all the horrors out there, my efforts are not trying to prove this or that is the objective good, though that might be a tactic in some interaction.
If I can’t treat those I love well, I doubt I will save the planet.
I don’t think that is the case. I can’t figure out what works for me via everyone. Shit most people thought slavery was working.
I thought when you said ‘it works for you’ referring to me, you meant somethign more personal. You can’t have meant that everyone thinks it works. Nearly everyone is quite ignorant of what I do, think, feel and how I approach making things better. When I returned the question, I mean, t does what you do work for you?
Everyone has not yet agreed about anything. Not even scientific conclusions.
I gotta make choices when I wake up in the morning. I can’t wait for everyone, especially since I don’t respect many of everyone.
Sure, I get that. I am asking if your approach to life is working for you. The seeking to find a way to resolve conflicting goods via rational argument. That in combination with distraction. And then if it seems like it will work, maybe some day. Looking at it as a choice. You respond with the world’s experts not being able to prove or disprove the bestness of fascism.
It seems like you are evaluating how you approach life by looking at the arguments of experts about huge political systems. To me these are in different categories. Which does not mean that your concerns about the inability of experts to resolve such HUGE issues should not be important to you. It just seems like trying to figure out what to eat for dinner tonight based on Confuscism vs. Mormonism. And not cooking anything while the debate goes on. Let’s say there is a solution. That one day the types of people who get drawn to the right and the type of people who get drawn to the left finally together somehow come to agree on THE GOOD. That sounds like generations away if ever. Vietnam puts you at the youngest possible 18 in 1975. So 1957, so now youngest possible 61. Likely your body has been through some shit, even if, say you got no Agent Orange, direct traditional wounds or severe PTSD. Working class possibly threw some problematic dietary routines at you for a while. It seems not unfair to say that the chances of these broad categories coming to unity, in your lifetime are small. Not because of a decade here or there, but orders of magnitude away from that. Philosophers have been trying for thousands of years and I would say, aren’t, in the main, trying so much for objective morals. Some may argue within morals, more or less leaving alone as an axiom that there are, and others more focused on pragmatic approaches to heuristics. Objectivists, in the main, are not trained in philosophy, so they likely lack the tools to examine their own arguments very well. It would be a bit of a miracle if it happened in your lifetime.
To me that response you make above to is it working and will it work seems so abstract. If you were Bernie Sanders, before his campaign collapsed via Hillary and DP back room shit…no even then, even before it fell apart, it’s so abstract.
Ah,this will come off as me saying you should be doing something else. But it was as if I asked a person what he was up to and if it was working and the answer was a quote from Hegel commenting on a particular war.
But you want someone to give you the tool that will convince everyone how to choose objectively between two moral positions on any issue.
I do not possess that tool, nor do I have a direction to nudge you in where I even remotely intuit the answer might lie. Stanford Phil Encyc has this article…
plato.stanford.edu/entries/mora … gy/#NatFac
I’ll leave it here.