by PF

Here’s a comment which has blossomed into a full-fledged blog post!

Notus Wind wrote:

I am convinced that moral cowardice is a bigger problem for us than guilt.

Morality is not the basis for a social movement. It is a way to control people based on shapes that appear on the frontiers of our knowledge. New knowledge immediately overturns previously existing moral structures, if anyone was keeping score of these ghostly entities, their carcasses are strewn all over every path of knowledge acquisition like the molted exoskeletons of insects.

Social morality is the imposition of a ‘should’ without the understanding of an ‘is’ - one party telling another to do something on the basis of its own authority, not of any understanding. If you didn’t know what an electric socket was, and I told you not to stick a fork in there, but I’m not telling you why - that is what traditional morality has been. No explanation forthcoming, no free choice involved, authority cited as justification. If I convey to you knowledge that its an electric socket, then your choice not to stick a fork in it becomes strategic - and no longer moral.

The extent to which I understand what is going on, to that extent I can act strategically. To the extent that I don’t understand what is going on and have to borrow and imitate from other people, is the extent that I am being ‘moral’.

When people had to respond to realities that they could not explain, we lived in a world that was perforce moral. Now we are in a position where the IQ 120+ set can basically navigate themselves through life quite well using strategic reasoning, absent the ‘should’. This is quite practical because it turns out that all these ‘shoulds’ are vectors for the worst kinds of viral nonsense, such as antiquated or idiosyncratic understandings which have no bearing on our own lives. Trying to blaze a path through modern life by the advice of such a huge, self-contradictory compendium of musings as .... um, the Torah, is difficult. Most of what’s in there its possible to absorb through the common-sense understandings of friends and relatives.

Look for people not understanding their world in the abstract, yet having to function in it, and you find a need for morality. The presence of the emotion of fear is also a good indicator, since the most clueless in a situation are usually the most fearful, and thus the most slavish imitators of whoever is willing to give them some very ambiguously motivated “guidance” (ie control in exchange for information). Morality always gives you a bit of information, in exchange for getting a bit of control over your actions, control used to serve another’s interests. Morality is always part manipulation and part help. This is how it evolved, because if it wasn’t serving the interests of someone else, it wouldn’t be stable for them to give moral advice. If it wasn’t conferring some benefit, it wouldn’t be evolutionarily stable to respond to morality’s message.

It is not necessary that we survive - but morality would pretend it was. Morality will tell us that anti-racism is necessary, or that reconquista of our lands is necessary and just, or that any number of other things are necessary. It will tell you whatever you want depending on how you program the ‘is’-matrix that generates the ‘should’-matrix. People think they can keep morality legitimate - i.e. that they will reason their way to the uniquely legitimate morality, as all prior generations have believed themselves able to do - by keeping a keen eye on what is admitted to the ‘is’-matrix. This is not enough to wash this mechanism clean. It is based on fear of death and abstract neocortex reasoning, both of which constrain the human being into a shallow felt-perception of self which makes the experiential confirmation of being ‘right’, worthless. Yet this is all that morality has to offer that strategic reasoning doesn’t already cover.

If we are going to use morality as a tactic, we should remember that it is just that: an adaptive mechanism of social control that may become vestigial given advances in intelligence.