Funny, the machinations we devise to skirt the core problem, which is an increasing dearth of fundamental moraltity.
Look around.. Something's gone completely wrong. Everyone is angry and there is decreasing value placed on kindness and decency. In fact, selfishness is increasingly a virtue. Observe how POTUS behaves. I don't care what side you're on, there is nothing normal or healthy about that level of chaos, narcissim, and mean-spiritedness. Yet, this is the leader of the free world? It's a sad reflection of where we are.
We can set up all the incentives and disincentives we can imagine but, as the saying goes, "you can't legislate morality". Until we deal with that issue, we'll continue to see all manner of its manifestations.
I think almost everyone would feel the same way. I know I would. We should reflect on why we feel more like this than in 2010.
Persoanlly, I think it has to do with the moral realm vs the practical realm. We think of morality as a good thing, but it is more about absolutes than goodness. As we bring more things into the moral realm -- who you vote for, for example -- it shuts down reason, discourse, nuance, and understanding.
Traditionally, the moral realm is about what you do. There's not much value in society discussing murder and whether its a good thing to do or not; and there's a lot of potential harm. If murder becomes an issue of nuance, people can rationalize it too easily and you get chaos.
Now, I feel like our thoughts are becoming part of the moral realm, and that's a bad thing. There's no chance to discuss and learn together if one person thinks that the other is evil. It also means that it's easy for an otherwise good person to do horrible things because they feel that they are attacking evil.
I don't meam to say that moralization is new. It has certainly happened in the past, say with McCarthyism, or the Spanish Inquisition. But it does feel like the pendulum is swinging in the direction of everything-is-a-matter-of-good-and-evil.
And frankly, it seems like most of this moralization of thought is coming from the left. There's still some socialism-is-evil sentiment on the right, but that was pretty minor this cycle compared with the Trump-is-evil sentiment.
Although I don't believe this is worse than the injustices of generations past, it's certainly sad to witness politics in 2018 contain a plethora of virtue signalling, charades, and ineffectual action. We support the killings of innocents with our military industrial complex, and our media tells us its necessary because otherwise we will lose jobs[1]. Where is the investigation of 500 million missing dollars of charitable relief to Haiti[2]? Not to mention, where is the media coverage of the CLOUD act, and why did congress underhandedly sneak a law that harms Americans rights into a "must pass" omnibus spending bill without[3]? The war on drugs and prison state? Or any of the homeless crises? Unjust and corrupt healthcare and public health? Cities with murder rates higher than anywhere in Africa or the Middle East? Surging suicide rates[4]? And we are just scratching the surface here, and when you get to the bottom there are things you can't even talk about, like human rights for Palestinians[5]
Tyranny, injustice and oppression were not simply eliminated at the end of WWII. And living today to witness the convenient virtue signalling about a historical artifact of a long-defeated tyrant, juxtaposed with the willingness to tolerate current injustice, is really sad.
But isn't that what made Nazi Germany possible? Our willingness to tolerate injustice, so long as it doesn't happen to us? Our desire to follow authority--to serve in the court of despots? That is the irony here, which calls to light the real meaning of this kind of virtue signalling: If we lived under the reign of any of those other tyrants, in Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, or wherever, would we all suddenly be among activists, not just mere virtue signallers championing the virtues of our leaders?
I don't mean to come down hard on you personally; I just personally wish to see the conversation move away from moral grandstanding to moral responsibility.
Overall morale is declining. Call it the Trump Effect. Having a leader who behaves like he did normalizes this behavior and immoral behavior becomes more commonplace since people feel its legitimized.
I'm far from being a liberal but that guy objectively didn't show manners, so why should the man on the street..
Like any other outrage in the past few decades. We have become soft and there is nothing you can do about it. Instead of writing intellectual comments on the matter, we should go down the street, burn some tires, overthrow the government; stuff like that. Yet here I am,thinking that no one will be brave enough to initialize or follow me if I would. They made us soft and we obeyed. Don't tell me there is a civilized road to solving this because the stakes are way too high for anyone to turn in what we have become.
The reason an entity chooses to behave in an ethical or moral fashion is because they believe it's the right or just way to behave, and not what happens to be the most expedient behavior in some arbitrary moment of time. And principles can cost you in the short-term, but tend to reaps tremendous dividends in the long-run. One of those dividends is soft power. Hearing a relatively stoic adult Russian chess grandmaster start to choke up a bit when describing the joy he felt (as a grown man no less) when the USSR collapsed and 'Donald Duck came to Russia' was something quite unforgettable for me. As he described it, literally everybody was picking up Donald Duck stuff - as much as a symbol of the end of one era, as the beginning of another.
But now? In my lifetime it feels like America's soft power has gone from the sort that could make grown men cry with joy, to basically nonexistent. And I think a big part of it is that we are no longer seen as behaving in a principled fashion. We just do whatever is convenient at the moment and then wrap it in some grandstanding and a whole lot of propaganda. Even with this silly event, I think there's an interesting nuance. The government was so concerned about the tremendous national security threat of TikTok that, just 2 months, ago Biden decided to start his very own TikTok account. [1] It went like you'd expect. But imagine it didn't. Imagine he actually managed to gain some traction. Would he, today, still be looking to sign off on a ban of it?
We have allowed our egos to be so affected by contemporary politicians’ rhetoric as to forget the core principles we all want to believed in.
Perhaps Trump was put in place (by somebody in a smokey room) to get the political left (who were previously notorious for promoting free-speech) to beg for censorship. Perhaps this viewpoint is cynical, but it certainly mirrors the end result we’re seeing.
The president's new outrageous tweet / orange man = bad, another wedding blown up in some middle eastern country, someone famous said something inappropriate / groped someone that got them fired, earthquake/fire/tsunami wiped out a few thousand people in some distant land, another school got shot up, "clear signs we're in a bubble" and the market is about to crash, something generic about Silicon Valley's hubris, something about how another oppressed group is being screwed over etc etc.
I don't think we're really meant as a species for this constant stream of depressing information we can't act upon, it's not good for us. Apathy seems like the only natural response to this barrage of stressors.
Amen, It is really creating a system where only wealth and nepotism are acclaimed. In many ways too character assassination and spreading false information have become exponentially worse and more weaponized. I worry about the future of where all this is going. :/
I think its more like a fire that is burning a system we might have called ‘civic discourse.’ Our societal communication is sustaining damage, it looks like Fury Road on the other side.
The theory of moral sentiments, the ideas of The Republic, are an architecture built over centuries of human civilization. The forces of anarchy and disorder are hard at work pulling it down.
It is dangerous that political differences are now being moralized. You vote for Biden? You're evil and should be fired. You vote for Trump? You're a Nazi and should be fired. Then what? What's the next step? I used to read about the French Revolution in horror. Parisans cheered when a Guillotine dropped, for they thought it was the righteous thing to do. And the history repeated itself in China 55 years ago and then 35 years ago, all in the name of upholding superior morality.
I said "we are becoming". I didn't say we are there, but it's a disturbing trend. Take it from someone who worked on the inside, it's only getting worse.
On the contrary I think your perspective represents a clear problem: you seem to think the spread of DEI and woke bs in certain segments of society can somehow be equated with a literal attempt to turn over the results of an election, a storming of the fucking capitol like we're some 3rd world country, QAnon, attempts--some successful, others less so--to make cruelty a major point of immigration policy, etc. Not to mention issues such as climate change.
There is no sense of morality in what you're saying. I have traditional values and would vote for a center right party over Dems, if we had one. But what we have are two parties very unequal in terms of morality and intellectual credentials.
We are living in the age of moral indignation and outrage rather than intelligence and understanding. On the one hand, it does nothing to address the problem. On the other hand, that's good because it means there is more fuel for outrage in the next election, too.
The injustice is the negative peace we have been living in. At some point the Executive sins of the Bush/DNC dynasties has to be rolled back. I mean, it's not like he invaded a country and got people killed. It's fantastic that Trump's small steps have lit a fire, albeit misdirected. Maybe it's just a side effect of the massive unemployment married with the social phenomena.
It’s definitely gotten worse in politics over the last decade. It used to be the case I could look at politicians and hate their policies and values, but know that they were genuinely trying to shape their country into what they thought was best. Now it seems to be overtaken by shameless grifters who will happily tear everything down if it profits them in some way.
I'm not sure what the solution is and I'm certainly no fan of Trump but I think his rise is strongly related to things being so bad they provoke protest votes.
There has been American ruling for a long time, certainly the period we might now call the good times. IE, once they did an adequate job. If there's a cynical nihilism among the voters, the willingness of the broad political class to provoke this feeling has to get a lot of blame.
Look around.. Something's gone completely wrong. Everyone is angry and there is decreasing value placed on kindness and decency. In fact, selfishness is increasingly a virtue. Observe how POTUS behaves. I don't care what side you're on, there is nothing normal or healthy about that level of chaos, narcissim, and mean-spiritedness. Yet, this is the leader of the free world? It's a sad reflection of where we are.
We can set up all the incentives and disincentives we can imagine but, as the saying goes, "you can't legislate morality". Until we deal with that issue, we'll continue to see all manner of its manifestations.
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