Discussion about this post

User's avatar
John Wilson's avatar

Great piece! Though I can't help wondering if our American moralizing of politics is correct... perhaps there is more to our unending American exceptionalism than meets the eye. I do think consumerism and empire has tainted it, but it's still the lens through which the crowds see things. (Woke folk!)

I find my cosmic sense of justice leads me to the same conclusions: humility in assessing the minister's call, stepping back in acceptance of my finitude, logging off from the thousand and one voices just as blind as I am. Yet, I still think Russia is a dark place, Ukraine is a sovereign state (we all agreed to that, right?) and that Bibi is the problem, because he is wicked and power hungry.

All this to say, there are two things about humankind that are always true: We are drawn to create ethics and confine ourselves in them and we are AWFUL at seeing second and third order consequences of our 'ethical' actions.

One last thought: There is something powerful in an uprising, it's an idealism willing to throw down. To say, "I'm putting my chips on the table, consequences come what may." That's an incredible stake to claim! But your rejection of it in the interest of disinterest, why? What is the good outcome of politics? lives saved; peace maintained, victory or outcomes at a later date? There's a prior there, and on top of it some more moral assumptions, that we probably agree on, about the best way to achieve the goal. Like NOT fascism.

Expand full comment
meika loofs samorzewski's avatar

What you are talking about is a responsibility for the world. Most outcomes of the 'worlding urge' only deal with this indirectly (Outcomes include : religion/morality~ethics/art). They deal with this responsibility for it indirectly because they highlight some contingent even more derivative outcome or "form" as Platonists might declare, as a priority: (tribe/city/cult/culture/identity/sovereignty/temple/god/).

These doubled-down 'shouldy' practices become dogma and doctrinal "co-ordination dances" which lead to war. They are semi-conscious attempt to world, where the responsibility to world is occluded by outcomes of the (by-products? pollution? ) social process unaware of itself.

This is why you end up taking a moral stance on moralizing. And is the question I ask and discuss the implications of on my substack 'Why we should -- what is the ethical response to morality?"

The main factor in all of this tendency towards dogma and death cults (paranoid sick agency) run amuck, is our inability to police the narcissists on our side, who split us off against each other in self-fulfilling paranoid.

see also (crossposted to/from the substack https://whyweshould.substack.com/ : )

https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/topics-and-projects.html

We are human because we have meetings and meals, not conflict and war. Narcissists unpoliced will always lead us into the death cult, because they confuse the self with the world as a _sweorld_. Thus their confusion of existential threat with their own person/status. Responsibility for the world is an act of empathy, we create this world when we step forth as children into childhood by way of the 'reality principle' that there are others in 'our' world.

Neither the self nor the world exist, but both are what we live. It is a Janus dance.

Expand full comment
24 more comments...

No posts