We tend to overestimate our driving ability and we tend to over-estimate our morality.
Manvir Singh writes in The New Yorker Sep. 9, 2024:
Scientists have shattered our self-image as principled beings, motivated by moral truths. Some wonder whether our ideals can survive the blow to our vanity.
Some people claim to make science the basis for their hero system. Whatever the basis of your hero system, however, you will live as though it is 100% objectively true.
What looked like coöperation was, I discovered, laced with sexual conflict. The female beetles, when they had a size advantage, ejected their male partners; the males evidently stuck around less to help than to insure future mating opportunities. Where I first saw biparental collaboration was instead a complicated waltz of organisms seeking to perpetuate their own interests. Was I one of them—another gene machine bent on favoring itself?
Yes, but “favoring itself” has many dimensions due to the power of our hero systems. Beatles don’t have hero systems.
I had, to that point, considered myself a mostly decent person, moved by empathy and committed to self-expression. Was all this actually vanity and delusion, selfishness masquerading as morality? The prospect was unsettling.
Yes, that was vanity. The author apparently found reality unsettling because reality disturbed his delusions. And that’s a good thing. There’s nothing about “committed to self-expression” that correlates with ethics, it’s just part of the liberal hero system that subscribes to the dictum “follow your bliss.”
We’re evolved organisms, I figured, but we’re also an intelligent, cultural species capable of living by ideals that transcend our egoistic origins. What emerged from my musings was a personal ideology, at the core of which was an appreciation of creation—including artistic and scientific work. Even an awkward scribble, I supposed, expresses an incomprehensibly epic causal history, which includes a maker, the maker’s parents, the quality of the air in the room, and so on, until it expands to encompass the entire universe. Goodness could be reclaimed, I thought. I would draw and write and do science but as acts of memorialization—the duties of an apostle of being. I called the ideology Celebrationism, and, early in 2012, I started to codify it in a manic, sprawling novel of that name.
Celebrationism makes no sense. It is unlikely to enthuse many people. How does a scribble encompass an entire universe? “The duties of an apostle of being” is just gobbledygook. How does someone who writes so badly and think so poorly get a staff position with The New Yorker?
The idea of a god that acted in the world had long seemed implausible
How is it any less implausible than the Enlightenment worldview that people are basically good? How is it less implausible than claiming that the problems of black people are primarily the fault of white people?
I thought of myself as a materialist, open-minded but skeptical of anything that smacked of the supernatural. Celebrationism came soon after. It expanded from an ethical road map into a life philosophy, spanning aesthetics, spirituality, and purpose. By the end of my senior year, I was painting my fingernails, drawing swirling mehndi tattoos on my limbs, and regularly walking without shoes, including during my college graduation. “Why, Manvir?” my mother asked, quietly, and I launched into a riff about the illusory nature of normativity and about how I was merely a fancy organism produced by cosmic mega-forces.
Every hero system provides a way for the insignificant individual to believe he matters. It’s no bigger a leap of faith than the belief in God.
Reassured of the virtue of intellectual and artistic work, I soon concluded that fictional wizards provided the best model for a life. As I wrote to my friend Cory, “They’re wise, eccentric, colorful, so knowledgeable about some of the most esoteric subjects, lone wolves in a sense, but all of their life experience constantly comes together in an exalting way every time they do something.” When, the following year, I started a Ph.D. in human evolutionary biology at Harvard, I saw the decision as in service of my Celebrationist creed. I could devote myself to meditating on the opportune swerves that produced us.
This makes no sense to anyone outside of the author.
Just as observation and a dose of evolutionary logic revealed male burying beetles not as attentive fathers but as possessive mate guarders, the natural and behavioral sciences deflated my dreamy credo, exposing my lofty aspirations as performance and self-deception. I struggled, unsuccessfully, to construct a new framework for moral behavior which didn’t look like self-interest in disguise. A profound cynicism took hold.
The author ricochets between the extremes of idealism and cynicism because he lives in his head and lacks the human ties that normally direct a life.
I guarantee you that at the point that cynicism took hold, the author was not married with children. Parents who love their children don’t have the luxury of cynicism. According to Google: “Cynicism is a general attitude of distrust or a feeling that something is unlikely to work out well.” That’s not the attitude I see among most parents.
Skepticism about objective morality is nothing new, of course. Michel de Montaigne, in the sixteenth century, remarked that “nothing in all the world has greater variety than law and custom,” a sign, for him, of the nonexistence of universal moral truths—and he had predecessors among the ancient Greeks. David Hume chimed in, two centuries later, to argue that judgments of right and wrong emanate from emotion and social conditioning, not the dispassionate application of reason. Even the more pious-sounding theorists, including Kant and Hegel, saw morality as something that we derive through our own thinking, our own rational will. The war between science and religion in the nineteenth century brought it all to a head, as a supernatural world view became supplanted by one that was more secular and scientific, in a development that Nietzsche described as the death of God.
Skeptics of objective morality cling to a hero system just as much as traditional religious believers. Most people are incapable of living without believing that their choices matter. Everybody lives as though his hero system is objective. When somebody deliberately steps on your foot, or punches you in the face or steals money from you, most everybody becomes outraged because they believe an objective wrong has been committed.
Nietzsche’s response to a godless world was a moral makeover: individuals were to forge their own precepts and act in accordance with them.
People don’t forge their own precepts, they inherit them from their community. If you belong to several communities as I do (academia, journalism, Orthodox Judaism, nationalism), your hero system is a pastiche of these communities.
More than a century later, such forays have matured into an individualist morality that has become widespread.
Belief in individualist morality is the dominant delusion of the left of center, but most people get their hero system from their community and it’s usually more communal and national than individualist.
We behave morally, we often say, not because of doctrine but because of our higher-order principles, such as resisting cruelty or upholding the equality of all humans. Rather than valuing human life because an omnipotent godhead commands it, or because our houses of worship instruct it, we do so because we believe it is right.
What shapes behavior more than ideology is bonds. If you feel bonded to others, you don’t want to let them down. The idea that individuals developed higher-order principles and live life on this self-created ideological basis is absurd.
Although some people may embrace principles for self-interested ends, the story goes, genuine altruism is possible through reasoned reflection and an earnest desire to be ethical… The Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg turned a model like this into scholarly wisdom in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, positioning it as the apex of the six stages of moral development he described. For the youngest children, he thought, moral goodness hinges on what gets rewarded and punished. For actualized adults, in contrast, “right is defined by the decision of conscience in accord with self-chosen ethical principles appealing to logical comprehensiveness, universality, and consistency.”
This kind of naive thinking is only available to single people with few responsibilities and too much time to make up theories that need have no connection with reality.
All this may sound abstract, but it is routine for most educated Westerners. Consider how moral arguments are made. “Animal Liberation Now” (2023), the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer’s reboot of his 1975 classic, “Animal Liberation,” urges readers to emancipate nonhuman animals from the laboratory and the factory farm. Singer assumes that people are committed to promoting well-being and minimizing suffering, and so he spends most of the book showing, first, that our actions create hellish existences for many of our nonhuman brethren and, second, that there is no principled reason to deny moral standing to fish or fowl. His belief in human goodness is so strong, he admits, that he expected everyone who read the original version of his book “would surely be convinced by it and would tell their friends to read it, and therefore everyone would stop eating meat and demand changes to our treatment of animals.”
When people lose their health and develop depression as a result of following Peter Singer’s path, they’re unlikely to stay vegetarian for long.
The routine nature of this argument only applies to people on the left who buy into the Enlightenment’s vision that people are basically good and can figure our morality on their own.
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
There are many advantages to the liberal individualist worldview, but truth is not one of them. We are 1,000,000 more likely to adopt a worldview and a hero system, than to invent one. Even when we fall in love, the social component is important. If your family and friends and coworkers hate your lover, it will be hard to grow that love.
Back to The New Yorker:
Humans have been fashioned by natural selection to pursue sex, status, and material resources. We are adept at looking out for ourselves. We help people, yes, but the decision to give is influenced by innumerable selfish considerations, including how close we are to a recipient, whether they’ve helped us before, how physically attractive they are, whether they seem responsible for their misfortune, and who might be watching.
Using the descriptor “selfish” seems to be imposing an unnecessary moral judgment on reality.
The author’s subtraction account about modernity (that modernity is the result of subtracting belief in God and tradition) does not seem as accurate as philosopher Rony Guldmann’s more sophisticated work, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression, which builds upon the following insights of Ernest Becker:
…this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules of behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system. What the anthropologists call “cultural relativity” is thus really the relativity of hero-systems the world over. But each cultural system cuts out roles for earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism: from the “high” heroism of a Churchill, a Mao, or a Buddha, to the “low” heroism of the coal miner, the peasant, the simple priest, the plain, everyday, earthy heroism wrought by gnarled working hands guiding a family through hunger and disease. It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that lasts three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count. When Norman O. Brown said that Western society since Newton, no matter how scientific or secular it claims to be, is still as “religious” as any other, this is what he meant: “civilized” society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible.
Guldmann adds:
The proposition that society consists in “a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules of behavior” seems rather banal. And yet this banality is obscured by the subtraction account. For the latter relegates man’s need to “count,” to “earn a feeling of cosmic specialness” to a pre-modern past now transcended by strategic agents. Having been liberated from the illusory teleologies that once stimulated such aspirations, these agents simply maneuver through various coefficients of adversity toward their desired ends, dismissing any urges toward cosmic significance as illusion and vainglory. By contrast, Becker’s facially banal observations posit a certain symmetry and continuity between the pre-modern and the modern, as well as between the religious and the secular, which the subtraction account cannot acknowledge. Becker’s observations speak to well-documented human experience. As he observes, the military leader who “after a short, whispered outline plan of attack, shouts, ‘Let’s go men!’ with proper gravity and conviction, says much more than simply that. He implies that of all times and all places, this is the situation that man should want most to be in; and that ‘to go’ into the attack is unquestionably the greatest, most meaningful act that one could hope to perform.”88Culture, says Becker, “creates us”89as agents. For it provides the language and symbols that allow situations to “call us to action.” Culture is what facilitates individual conviction, and therefore action, because it imbues the world with a significance that would justify action. And justification is what human beings want and need. Though attested to by common human experience, these dynamics are fundamentally incongruous with the subtraction account, and correspondingly with our sense of ourselves as disengaged strategic agents whose ends are not determined for them from without, by “forces to be reckoned with.” Strategic agents operate in a neutral environment where they determine their ends for themselves. The do not need to be somehow convinced from without that these are meaningful and justified. This may hold true of conservative “model citizens.”But liberals believe they have transcended this condition.
Manvir Singh writes:
Most people want to be good. Although “Animal Liberation Now” is largely filled with gruesome details, it also recounts changes that growing awareness has spurred. At least nine states have passed legislation limiting the confinement of sows, veal calves, and laying hens. Between 2005 and 2022 in the U.S., the proportion of hens that were uncaged rose from three per cent to thirty-five per cent, while Yum! Brands—the owner of such fast-food franchises as KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut, with more than fifty thousand locations around the world—has vowed to phase out eggs from caged hens by 2030. These changes are a microcosm of the centuries-long expansion of moral concern that, throughout much of the world, has ended slavery and decriminalized homosexuality. Could there be a clearer instance of genuine virtue?
Virtue, goodness, freedom all depend upon a particular hero system. The liberal worldview looks at moral changes such as civil rights as part of an expansion of moral concern, but ignore that these changes are often accompanied by a reduction of moral concerns in other areas. For example, the ending of slavery in America was accompanied by a decreased interest in the welfare of the formerly enslaved. Decriminalizing homosexuality was accompanied by a dramatic increase in gay-sex caused STDs such as AIDS and monkey pox. Civil rights legislation increased rights for blacks and decreased rights for private property and freedom of association.
Singh writes:
We all depend on trust, yet it works in tricky ways. On the one hand, we trust people who are guided by consistent ethical precepts. I’d rather go to dinner with someone deeply opposed to stealing than a jerk who pockets my valuables as soon as I get up to pee. On the other hand, we’re turned off when people’s commitments seem calculated. The ascent of terms like “slacktivism,” “virtue signalling,” and “moral grandstanding” bespeaks a frustration with do-gooders motivated more by acclaim than by an internal moral compass. The idea is that, if you’re in it for the reputational perks, you can’t be relied on when those perks vanish. In “The Social Instinct” (2021), Nichola Raihani, who works on the evolution of coöperation, refers to this issue as the “reputation tightrope”: it’s beneficial to look moral but only as long as you don’t seem motivated by the benefits.
…Moshe argued that humans deal with this dilemma by adopting moral principles. Through learning or natural selection, or some combination, we’ve developed a paradoxical strategy for making friends. We devote ourselves to moral ends in order to garner trust. Which morals we espouse depend on whose trust we are courting. He demonstrated this through a series of game-theoretic models, but you don’t need the math to get it. Everything that characterizes a life lived by moral principles—consistently abiding by them, valuing prosocial ends, refusing to consider costs and benefits, and maintaining that these principles exist for a transcendental reason—seems perfectly engineered to make a person look trustworthy.
His account identifies showmanship, conscious or otherwise, in ostensibly principled acts. We talk about moral principles as if they were inviolate, but we readily consider trade-offs and deviate from those principles when we can get away with it. Philip Tetlock, who works at the intersection of political science and psychology, labels our commitments “pseudo-sacred.” Sure, some people would die for their principles, yet they often abandon them once they gain power and no longer rely on trust. In “Human Rights in Africa” (2017), the historian Bonny Ibhawoh showed that post-colonial African dictators often started their careers as dissidents devoted to civil liberties.
Signaling matters. Virtue signaling, for example, is virtuous as philosopher Neil Levy argued in 2020:
Animals use signals for a variety of purposes. For instance, gazelles famously signal their fitness by stotting (jumping up and down on the spot) in front of predators (FitzGibbon and Fanshawe 1988). Peacocks even more famously signal their fitness with their spectacular tails (Zahavi and Zahavi 1999). Good signals are hard to fake signals: if a signal is cheap, then defectors will co-opt it and it will rapidly lose its value. Stotting is a hard to fake signal because it is costly. The gazelle who can afford to waste energy it might have saved for fleeing is probably not worth chasing. The peacock’s tail is an even more reliable signal, because the more spectacular the tail the more resources have been devoted to it and the better the health of the bird. A good signal of trustworthiness, too, will be hard to fake.
In human beings, hard to fake signals take a variety of forms. Some are costly, like the peacock’s tail. Many cognitive scientists argue that costly signalling is at the root of a variety of religious practises (Irons 2001; Sosis and Alcorta 2003; Sosis and Bressler 2003). Regular attendance at religious services is costly, insofar as it requires forgoing more immediately rewarding activities. More directly, tithing is costly and religious rituals often involve some kind of privation. Fasting is a common signal of religious commitment (Lent, Ramadan and Yom Kippur all involve fasting, of course), and particularly devout individuals may take vows of celibacy, of poverty or even enter small cells for life as anchorites. Some signals are not costly, but nevertheless are credibility enhancing (Henrich 2009). Crossing a bridge may not be costly for the person who crosses (she may benefit from doing so) but it is a reliable signal that she believes the bridge is safe.
We live in a world in which we cannot easily rely on others’ moral record, as conveyed by gossip, to identify those we can trust. Our societies are too large for reputation-tracking to be reliable: gossip may not reach us, and agents move relatively freely from community to community. Formal systems of regulation may help, but their effective development and enforcement depends on a sufficient level of trust to avoid systematic corruption. Costly and credibility enhancing signalling help fill the gap between reputation tracking and formal regulation. For example, because religious observance involves hard to fake signals of trustworthiness, co-religionists may seek one another out as business partners. The role of Quakers in the early years of British industry is, for instance, well-known (Prior et al. 2006). Moreover, trust is not limited to co-religionists. Religious and non-religious people express more trust in religious people, regardless of their religion, than in atheists (Gervais et al. 2011, 2017).
Credibility enhancing displays and costly signals of religious commitment are moral signals (at least for those individuals who belong to the High Gods religions (Norenzayan 2013), with their moralized gods, which have a near monopoly on the faithful today). They are signals of willingness to abide by certain, publicly proclaimed, norms. They are ways of signalling our virtue. Displays of religiosity continue to play this signalling function today, especially in highly religious societies like the United States. But as societies secularise, such signals no longer have the same power. Small wonder we have turned to more secular virtue signalling.
Singh writes:
A 2016 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—which Jordan wrote with Moshe and two other researchers—studied uncalculating coöperation, the tendency to willfully ignore costs and benefits when helping others. It’s a key feature of both romantic love and principled behavior. The authors found not only that “coöperating without looking” (a phrase of Moshe’s) attracts trust but that people engage in it more when trying to win observers’ confidence. The motivations that we find so detestable—moral posturing for social rewards—may, in fact, be the hallmark of moral action.
Invested as I was in my own goodness, whether achieved or aspirational, I found Moshe’s ideas both alarming and mesmeric. To engage with them was to look in a mirror and find a sinister creature staring back. The more I sought Moshe out—first by taking a course he co-taught, then by meeting up for Indian food after class, then by working as his teaching assistant—the more I felt trapped within my self-interest. Celebrationism was exposed as a beautiful lie. The search for personally resonant principles was reinterpreted as a tactic not to overcome self-interest but to advance it. Any dignified motivations that had once held sway—making art for art’s sake, acting to minimize suffering—became smoke screens to distract others from my selfishness. Here were hard truths that I felt compelled to confront. I wanted to escape the performance, to adopt values for reasons other than their social utility, but even that urge, I recognized, reflected the same strategic impulse to appear good and consistent.
…The new, naturalistic study of morality stemmed from an array of converging disciplines and approaches, spanning sociology, biology, anthropology, and psychology. It was set forth in popular books like Matt Ridley’s “The Origins of Virtue” (1996), Joshua Greene’s “Moral Tribes” (2013), and Richard Wrangham’s “The Goodness Paradox” (2019). Not everyone in this field understands ethical behavior the way Moshe does. Still, they tend to employ a framework grounded in evolutionary theory—one that casts morality as a property of our primate brains and little else. Appeals to pure selflessness have become harder to defend, while a belief in objective moral truths—existing apart from our minds and discoverable through impartial judgment—has grown increasingly untenable.
Darwin himself sensed the implications. In “The Descent of Man” (1871), he suggested that studying the “moral sense” from “the side of natural history” would throw “light on one of the highest psychical faculties of man.” It took another hundred years for scholars of evolution to appreciate the extent to which a Darwinian world view can explain morality. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, philosophers like Sharon Street, at N.Y.U., were taking note. “Before life began, nothing was valuable,” Street wrote in a now classic article. “But then life arose and began to value—not because it was recognizing anything, but because creatures who valued (certain things in particular) tended to survive.” In other words, moral tenets—such as the rightness of loyalty or the wrongness of murder—do not exist unless natural selection produces organisms that value them.
In recent decades, all sorts of philosophers have added to the pool of adaptive theories about morality. Allan Gibbard argues that moral statements (“Killing is bad”) actually express attitudes (“I don’t like killing”), allowing us to coördinate on shared prescriptions (“No one shall kill”). Philip Kitcher sees ethics as an ever-evolving project invented by our remote ancestors and continually refined to help societies flourish. Richard Joyce has proposed that moral judgments help keep us out of trouble. Given normal human hedonism, we may struggle to stop ourselves from, say, stealing a brownie; the feeling that it’s morally wrong provides us an emotional bulwark. Non-moral explanations like these, whatever their differences, obviate talk of moral truths, construing them as dreamlike delusions.
Like the decline of religion, what’s often called the evolutionary debunking of morality can induce existential panic and strenuous efforts at circumvention. The eminent philosopher Derek Parfit, the subject of a recent biography by David Edmonds, spent decades writing “On What Matters,” a book that sought both to build a unified theory of objective morality and to defend it against challengers, including evolution-inspired skeptics. In 2015, at N.Y.U., Parfit and Street taught a course together on meta-ethics. On the last day of class, a student asked them whether they had learned anything from their collaboration. “My memory is that both of us said ‘No!’ ” Street told Edmonds. “He thought my position was nihilistic. He was worried about it being true and felt it needed beating back with arguments.”
What troubled me was less the notion that morality was our own creation than the implication that our motives were suspect—that evolutionarily ingrained egoism permeated our desires, including the desire to overcome that selfishness. Sincerity, I concluded, was dead. Just as the natural sciences had killed the Christian God, I thought, the social and behavioral sciences had made appeals to virtuous motivations preposterous. I became skeptical of all moral opinions, but especially of the most impassioned ones, which was a problem, because I was dating someone who had a lot of them. (It didn’t work out.) A close friend, a punk physicist with whom I often went dancing late at night, found my newfound cynicism hard to relate to, and we drifted apart.
Singh seems to have a hard time adjusting to the reality that he is human. If you don’t believe that human nature is basically good, you should have an easier time dealing with reality.
Singh writes:
When I asked people on X how they have dealt with evolutionary debunking, Oliver Scott Curry, a social scientist at Oxford and the research director at Kindlab, which studies the practice of kindness, warned me not to confuse the selfishness of genes with the nature of our motivations, which apparently are more gallant. He was echoing a distinction often drawn between a behavior’s “ultimate” causes, which concern why it evolved, and its “proximate” causes, which include psychological and physiological mechanisms. The cognition underpinning moral judgment may have evolved to make us look good, these scholars grant, but that doesn’t count against its sincerity. In “Optimally Irrational” (2022), the University of Queensland economist Lionel Page explains, “There is no contradiction between saying that humans have genuine moral feelings and that these feelings have been shaped to guide them when playing games of social interactions.”
Such arguments make sense to some degree. An impulse can exist because of its evolutionary utility but still be heartfelt. The love I feel for my spouse functions to propagate my genes, but that doesn’t lessen the strength of my devotion. Why couldn’t this shift in perspective rescue goodness for me? A major reason is that the proximate-ultimate distinction leaves intact the unsavory aspects of human motivation. As anyone who has spent more than twenty minutes on social media can attest, humans are remarkably attentive to which moral proclamations garner esteem and attention. We weigh the status implications of claiming different principles. It’s true that we often assure ourselves otherwise and even internalize positions once we espouse them enough. Yet this fact didn’t redeem moral sincerity for me; it corrupted it.
Singh finds reality corrupting of his delusions.
After my first year of graduate school, in 2014, I travelled to the Indonesian island of Siberut and stayed with its Indigenous inhabitants, the Mentawai. I returned for two more months in 2015 and then spent much of 2017 with a Mentawai community, studying traditions of justice, healing, and spirituality. As I learned more of the language, I saw how rarely Mentawai people invoke abstract concepts of right and wrong. Instead, they reason about duties and responsibilities in a way that seems both blatantly self-interested and refreshingly honest, and which I’ve since adopted when speaking to them.
The Mentawi likely lack the IQ to think in abstract terms.
Singh writes:
How does one exist in a post-moral world? What do we do when the desire to be good is exposed as a self-serving performance and moral beliefs are recast as merely brain stuff? I responded by turning to a kind of nihilism, yet this is far from the only reaction. We could follow the Mentawai, favoring the language of transaction over virtue. Or we can carry on as if nothing has changed. Richard Joyce, in his new book, “Morality: From Error to Fiction,” advocates such an approach. His “moral fictionalism” entails maintaining our current way of talking while recognizing that a major benefit of this language is that it makes you likable, despite referring to nothing real. If you behave the way I did in grad school, going on about the theatre of morality, you will, he suggests, only attract censure and wariness. Better to blend in.
Singh concludes:
I still accept that I am a selfish organism produced by a cosmic mega-force, drifting around in a bedlam of energy and matter and, in most respects, not so very different from the beetles I scrutinized during that summer in Colorado. I still see the power in Moshe’s game-theory models. Traces of unease linger. But I no longer feel unmoored. A sense of meaning has reëstablished itself. Tressed, turbanned, and teetotalling, I am, at least by all appearances, still a good Sikh. I have become a teacher, a husband, and a father to a new baby daughter. When she smiles, a single dimple appears in her left cheek. Her existence feels more ecstatic and celebratory than any ideology I could have conceived, and I hope that she’ll one day grow up to be empathetic and aware of others’ suffering. I have moral intuitions, sometimes impassioned ones. I try to do right by people, and, on most days, I think I do an O.K. job. I dream on.
Corporate Machiavelli on Substack has some sharp insights, including:
The higher your position in the macro dominance hierarchy (the higher your station in society)
the more scrutiny you will be subjected to.
If you are a low paid janitor, what is the probability people will dig into your political opinions, and get you fired for expressing an unpopular political opinion?
Zero
If you are a highly paid C-suite Executive or Financier, what is the probability people will dig into your political opinions, and get you fired for expressing an unpopular opinion?
Significant
See Larry Summers (Harvard President)
and Brendan Eich (Firefox CEO)
“Has society shifted to a point where you cannot separate personal life and work life.”
Yes
Yes it has.
Fools and Cowards:
Fools tell you to always be risk aggressive. Cowards tell you to always be risk averse.
Wisdom lies in knowing when to be risk aggressive and when to be risk averse.
You will encounter many fools going down high risk paths because they think they have ‘nothing to lose’, when in truth they have a lot to lose.
You will also encounter many cowards whose lives are on track for failure and who in truth have little or nothing to lose, who refuse to use high risk strategies because their fear is biasing them.
Enter With Boldness:
“If you are unsure of a course of action, do not attempt it; your doubts and hesitations will infect your execution…Going halfway with half a heart digs a deeper grave.” -Law 28
Take as much time as you need to carefully consider whether or not you want to embark on a high risk course of action, or continue being risk averse.
However, when you embark on a high risk course of action you must do so with total confidence.
During the analysis that takes place before action, consider every doubt and hesitation conceivable.
In the moment of action, banish all doubts and fears; launch with boldness.
Fight and Win, or Don’t Fight:
There are those who will tell you it is better to try and fail than to not try at all. When the stakes are low (as is the case with low risk low reward strategies) this is true. However when the stakes are high this is wrong; dead wrong.
When the stakes are high or when considering a high risk strategy, it is far better to have not tried than to have tried and failed.
Better to have not tried, when a little foresight and a little caution could have spared you from so much unnecessary suffering.
Nobody has ever gone from the bottom of a hierarchy to the top by following the rules.
Why?
Because rules are made by the powerful, for the powerful.
In most hierarchies, the rules aren’t designed to facilitate upward mobility. They are designed to prevent upward mobility.
The powerful design rules that ensure the people who are already at the top (themselves) stay at the top, and that those beneath them cannot rise.
If you want to get ahead,
your private life must separate itself from your public life,
in all aspects of who you are.
Your intolerance towards others is what preserves your values and integrity.
But it’s also your intolerance that ruins your popularity.
To speak your mind and convey the beliefs you uphold is always a tactical error,
for most people will not share your values,
and so they’ll secretly despise you.
You must remain intolerant, but not exhibit your intolerance to others.
You have to seek to buy your popularity,
at the cost of manipulating your beliefs to what best fits your surrounding.
The more you express your intolerance and high standards,
the less popularity you will accrue, at scale.
The cost of not being popular among your surrounding,
is the loss in opportunity to leverage word of mouth, and by extension,
a credible reputation.
Your beliefs, your philosophy, your principles,
MUST therefore differ publicly,
to what they are privately.
I would not be who I am with you on here, if I was not anonymous.
I am not who I am outside my home.
I become what best satisfies others.
So I can bend them to what best satisfies my needs.
Your values, beliefs and philosophy in life,
must remain flexible to change outside your home.
Conveying your values to others does not matter.
Charming others with values that appeal to them does.
Very few in your life,
will earn the right to be exposed to your true values and beliefs.
Family & blood.
Play the game with the rest.
We never get to graduate from being human at a certain place and time in history. Change your place and change your time and your morality changes. Change your humanity through medication and your morality will change. For example, when I began taking adderall for ADHD, many of my moral problems disappeared. When I change my situation, for example I make sure I get enough face time with people I like, many of my self-destructive obsessions (such as for attention or for lust) diminish.
I’ve found that appropriate medication and bonds shape my behavior more than anything else including the adoption of moral principles.