How Should A Person Be?

The clash of ethical values systems

Dear Friends,

The idea here is that many of our current divisions come down to a clash of ethical values systems, and this is an attempt to taxonomize them. Just, by the way, I’ve been — if only for a moment or two — in every one of these camps.

Best,

Sam

1. A person is in a constant and unremitting evolutionary struggle, modern accoutrements notwithstanding. We are in war always in the sexual market and our security is often more precarious than we might think. We should ceaselessly advance our own interests. This isn’t actually a deviation from ethical norms. It is the underlying ethic, as our evolutionary design laid it out. It’s not really our problem, but this isn’t as nihilistic as it might sound — if everyone advances their own interest, whether in sex, the marketplace, or maybe even politics, everything, by a hidden hand, gets to where it should be, and this ceaseless devotion to personal optimization results in a society that is attractively taut and, secretly, harmonious. We almost certainly voted for Trump and believe he embodies many of those values. You could call us Social Darwinist — although that term has curiously fallen out of use. We certainly hang out in the manosphere or are part of the tradwife movement. We almost certainly had a Japanese phase at one point — whether it was the ethic of the samurai or the writing of Yukio Mishima. We like Lana Del Rey’s music and subscribe to Marilyn Simon’s Substack. We like Succession so much that we bought one of the cashmere baseball hats afterwards. The phrase ‘all is fair in love in war’ has a way of creeping into our conversation, as does ‘it’s a dog eat dog world.’ We’re not necessarily opposed to feminism per se — we see it as a way of advancing women’s status and political share — but we think it undermines a kind of natural harmony and causes chaos through the society.

2. We believe that the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice. Our primary responsibility as an individual is towards maintaining that vast social perspective. We understand the arguments of our nihilistic peers (above) but believe that it refers to an extinct tribalist way of thinking — and that we must strive to do better (and, in any case, modern tools of social organization give us that opportunity). We insist on an absolute equality that runs through all human beings, if not all forms of life. We believe that all humans are born with an ethical responsibility — that they must seek justice by rectifying inequalities wherever they find them. To ignore this is to participate in cruelty and the degradation of the world. We find it striking actually how far we’ve come in the face of so much endless cynicism — and we see that as a testament both to the human spirit and to the ability of some dedicated crusaders to work wonders. Bigotry really is receding. The patriarchy really is being dismantled and a far more natural, more egalitarian gender dynamic is taking its place. We are grateful for these changes but know that there are so many inequalities that demand action. Global warming to us perfectly represents how the earth itself can collapse if we ignore the collective and pursue only our self-interest. We almost certainly like Florence + The Machine. We do listen to ‘60s anthems, and are moved by them, although, on closer inspection, almost every one of those musicians turns out to have been an asshole.

   

   “The arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.”

3. We are in the middle of this. We are what you may call the educated elite. We are sympathetic to the points made by both sides above but are appalled by their excesses. We are very comforted by the editorial page of The New York Times and its sense of steadily-unfolding progress. Our grade school teacher led our entire class in singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ and we still tear up at the memory of it. On the other hand, we secretly listened to Jordan Peterson at a low moment during the pandemic and had to admit that he made some valid points. Basically. Look. We think there is room to be a thoughtful person without becoming a nihilistic grotesque or a Communard constantly chiding their online forums for backsliding. We think that feminism has of course rectified historic injustices and replaced an outmoded division of sexes. Politically, we think we’re stuck with capitalism pretty much as it is because it’s the only system that seems to work at scale, but we think the state has an important function to rectify the inherent injustices of capitalism. What we are is confused. We listen to a lot of drone-y music that makes us wonder if we’re depressed. We’re likely to think that Radiohead is the highest form of art. We do recycle although we’re pretty convinced that it all just goes in an enormous landfill. We take solace in the idea that it has always been thus — that it has always been extraordinarily difficult to be a human being, and now as much as ever, with the planet bursting at the seams.

4. We are the same as the above except that we dropped acid and are now scheduling our trip to the Amazon to take ayahuasca. We are high-vibrational at the moment but know that the real work is to be grounded. Curiously, our trips didn’t have much about politics or the state of the world in them — except for the one time when we took DMT and saw the machine elves knitting the world together and that has made us doubt the theory of evolution as well as most of what we learned in school. It is possible that magic mushrooms have brought us closer to nature. But our experiences have taught us to focus more inwardly — to believe that a person only ever has control over themselves (and that it’s a real lift to get even there). So we practice self-love, radical acceptance. We don’t talk about this stuff very much, because everybody gets weird when we do, and we also think that everybody has their own journey. We do have some kind of belief, though, that if everybody does this, or if enough people focus on their own energy, then that will radiate outward — that that can help the overwhelmed Great Spirit in taking care of the world.

5. We are totally turned off by the above. We also don’t have the pessimism that everybody else does. We actually like our jobs and like our phones. Yes, it’s maybe not great that we spend eight hours a day on a phone and that our kid has brain rot, but we just don’t really see this apocalypse that everybody is so sure is coming and in any case we have safety in numbers. We are the global majority, actually. We think the world is steadily getting better — or, if it’s not, we have no bright ideas to fix it. We’re very impressed with what’s coming out of Silicon Valley and there’s a chance that we know how to spell Marc Andreessen’s name. We cop to being a ‘dude bro’ and it hurt when the weirdos discovered the term ‘basic’ and made some very scathing videos that hurt our feelings, but, look, at the end of the day, it’s like just take a chill pill. There will be jobs and there will be schools and things will be about the same as they’ve always been, and we hope somebody reliable is watching over the nuclear missiles and if we fry the planet maybe we can all move to Mars where, we are fairly confident, there will still be Amazon delivery.

   

   “Basic”

6. Of everybody above, we are most upset with the last one. What bothers us more than anything is when the mass stops seeing themselves as the wretched of the earth and starts viewing themselves as satisfied consumers, even though they are actually hopelessly in debt and don’t have enough saved up for an emergency. We’ve been listening to a lot of grainy YouTube videos of Woody Guthrie recently and are convinced that we have to get back to basics. That means expanding worker protections, working towards a Social Democratic state — even if Bernie Sanders is the only person who believes in it — forgetting about all the cultural bullshit and focusing on what matters: on how enough people can live meaningful, dignified lives in societies ripped apart by capital. Part of the tragedy of this is that we think our societies were on the right track with more socialist — not communist, well, ok, maybe a little communist, since we have to admit that Marx was searingly right in many of his critiques — policies, and then were basically bought off by consumerism. What we think about, above all, when we listen to Woody Guthrie is how to rectify this wrong turning. Our shirts are always untucked and we have lost every election we have ever voted in.

   

   Frequently outvoted

7. We are repelled by all of the above — and we think that the confusion speaks for itself. We believe that these questions have been worked out a very long time ago in the ethical codes of the different religions of the world, not so much because they are the revealed word of God (although that’s certainly a possibility) but because traditions represent something like real-world laboratory settings in which, over a vast period of time, what works is selected and what doesn’t is discarded. We ignore those findings at our own peril. Does thinking this way make us squares? Well, ok, it makes us squares — we have real trouble with things like the sex revolution and gender fluidity, and, just by the way, these things seem to go in and out of fashion every two seconds, which suggests that nobody is really thinking through the consequences. But what we lose in being squares and, ok, being a little bigoted we gain in the strength and undeniable power of our traditions. It’s not so much that our particular tradition is right — although it probably is and there’s a strong case for stoning anyone who thinks differently — but that a moral tightening almost immediately results from taking it seriously. Technological modernity may be an inevitability, but it should absolutely not be confused with progress — and, as we can see from this Substack post, it has led to a whole welter of chaotic perspectives about how a person should be. Whatever our sectarian differences may be with him, ol’ Ecclesiastes was on to something when he said, “There is nothing new under the sun.” We feel that there is something to be gained from not trying to sort through the ethical mess our own selves but to turn our power over to the wisdom of our traditions — and a remarkable peace appears as soon as we do that.