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silveradept[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#16: "I'm not Genuinely a Good Person."
There are a few people who will point out that if I'm concerned about being a good person, there's a good chance that I'm not fooling myself about whether I'm a good person. They point out to me that the people who are most often deficient in morals, ethics, or guiding principles are persons who do not interrogate themselves to the point of asking, as the meme goes, "Are we the baddies?" but instead continue on with their behavior, untroubled. They tend to react very poorly when someone points out the problems with their behavior, perhaps uttering some of the classic stock phrases like "But some of my best friends are [Z]" or "I don't have a [Ω] bone in my body!"
Which, admittedly, brings back the previous bit where separating a person's behavior out from their moral character is important to changing the behavior and to trying, at least, to shortcut the part where people stridently defend their moral character against perceived accusations of moral failure. This separation, though, can produce the situation where a person is acting in a proper way but does not believe in the propriety of it. This statement gets at the underlying propriety and belief, rather than the behavior itself (for the behavior, and the low opinion of myself I have had with regard to behavior, see #3.)
Those with more philosophy and religion studies than I have undertaken can probably launch into a great lecture at this point about various theories about the underlying essential nature of a person. Whether they believe that human nature is inherently evil, bad, or sinful, and that humans only do good because they find doing good to have selfish incentives, because they do not wish to suffer the penalties of doing bad, or because there is someone in their life who exudes virtue sufficiently that they rectify their own behavior, wishing to emulate the superior person, or whether they believe human nature is fundamentally good, and people do good because they want to, and people do evil because the incentives to do evil are better than the ones to do good (at least in the short term), or because of social pressure forces, or because they're working for a soulless corporation who is legally required to maximize profit for the benefit of those who have enough spare income to have bought votes in the company's governance. Or because they are being forced to choose between doing evil and dying, and most humans value their survival more than an abstract code of morals. (Or because there are no non-evil options, only options with obvious and immediate evil and options with hidden and long-term evil.)
What defines Good, anyway? Each of the billions of humans currently alive on this planet would give me a different answer to the question. Good might have been decreed as following the rules and commands of supernatural entities, who communicated the rules directly to their followers, or who have the rules communicated through a person (or people) designated as the representative of the supernatural entity among the humans. Good might have been defined as engaging in a constant process of refinement toward an ideal that is either based on legal codes or developed philosophies, where perfection may or may not be possible to any given entity. Good might be defined only in terms of whether other people approve of the behavior and its underlying reasoning. Good can be defined as whether it personally benefits the person doing the action and sod anyone else. Or defined as something where if they benefit from it at all, it can't be Good. Is it "What you send out returns threefold to you?" " 'Do what thou wilt' shall be the whole of the law?" "Nothing is true, everything is permitted?"
(Just knowing about all the different ways that Good could be constructed probably means someone out there is accusing me of practicing "moral relativism" and therefore nothing I say could be taken as true or trustworthy. Those people may be admirable for the strength of their convictions, but more often than not, someone with that narrow a view ends up making some spectacular compromises or deploys a lot of justifications for their own behavior.)
Coming down from the 30,000 foot level to my own personal insecurities, recall (or learn for the first time) that I was raised in a religious culture that has very firm idea about what constitutes Good (since God said so) and what right-thinking people should both think in their heads and do in their lives. Many of those ideas are reasonable ones, like taking care of the poor, welcoming the foreigner, not sitting in judgment of another person's sins when you have plenty of your own to work on, and so on. But there's also many of them that seem much less the creation of people who are trying to get us to behave in ways that God approves of and more the creation of people who have succumbed to the temptation of trying to wield temporal power so they can enforce their idea of what is good and moral on other people, whether they believe it or not. The entire jumble of it is still in my head, because it was a large part of the morality present in my formative years. In addition to the religious bits, there's also the cultural bits of my formative years, whether that's the USian cultural Christianity, the rah-rah capitalism and riches, and all the ways in which the society and the culture of the US reinforces the idea that whiteness is Good. Plus, my provincial upbringing was in the kind of place where the values leaned much harder toward what would now be the MAGA end of the spectrum. There's also the more cosmopolitan values of the university and where I moved to after university, and some of the values of the various places that I have hung out online, so there's at least some other things in the mix of what was trying to influence me than a just a lot of right-of-center material.
Because it was such a jumble of things together, I had to make decisions about which bits of what I had been exposed to and taught were the parts I wanted to keep and use and which parts were going to be discarded. That's where the beginning of the weasels start, because a child who is used to being able to find the Right Answer that someone else can verify is going to have some struggles with deciding on things when there isn't an authority around to give them objective confirmation that they've made the objectively correct decision. (Yet again, managing to step around the toxic manosphere people, because they do promise that kind of certainty, among all the other things they promise.) In the process of continuing to build, refine, and keep gathering new ideas, there's a recurrent question that comes with it. Not only the question of whether this is the best system, but whether I'm actually behaving in a moral or Good way according to the system. There's a lot of perfectionism laced through this thinking, because the religious upbringing wants us to think of ourselves as unable to do good without the grace of God, and the popular and media culture really enjoys exposing people thought to be doing Good as liars, charlatans, and especially hypocrites. Beyond that, there's also a cultural thing impressed into white people that non-white people are always looking to take advantage, and into perceived men that perceived women are always looking to take advantage, and especially that all of the systems in place in law and society are going to side with whomever is looking to take advantage, no matter how slight it is, because the entire system is biased against white (Christian) men. (These are the same kind of people who tell us that we'll all be happier if we accept that rich white Christian men should be the unquestioned rulers of everyone due to their inherent superiority, and if we can't accept that willingly, then they'll force it on us so that we can understand it more easily. That, and neither of their bold assumptions backed up by evidence that hasn't been thoroughly cherry-picked to get rid of anything that contradicts it.) Learning about the concept of implicit bias helped explain a piece of the perfection weasels, because there's a lot in my background that could easily come out if I wasn't thinking about it, or if I went into a situation believing I understood it. That background assumption is not particularly helpful in situations that aren't actualy composed of people from similar backgrounds, so…
Much of the worry about whether I'm being Good is still a variation on the idea of "[perceived] men are afraid [perceived] women are going to make fun of them, [perceived] women are afraid [perceived] men are going to kill them." Because yes, the likely worst consequence of behaving in a not-Good manner in most cases is that I'm going to get an earful about it, or someone asking me if that's really what I intended to do, and possibly explaining to me what it looks like with the expectation that I'm going to recoil in horror at the possibility.
The rest of that worry runs parallel with my concern that the person who I present to others is congruent with the person that I know of as the sum of my experiences, internally and externally. Because, of course, the only thing that other people experience of me is the things that I externalize, whether in writing, speaking or behaving, and that doesn't always communicate what state of mind I was in, what kind of motivations I had, whether I was feeling charitable or vengeful, or any of the rest of those elements that are important to knowing whether something was really and truly Good or whether it was only Good-appearing. I'm not trying to practice conscious deception of others, but there may be some of those things that are done to hold social cohesion, or phrased very specifically, or other such things where I can say something that is positive and truly believed and omit the other parts that I might also be thinking or believing about a thing. That may shine through perfectly fine, but I do think about whether the differences there mean that I present myself as a more moral and Good person than I actually am. Which is probably why I would be mortified to find out if someone asked themselves what I would do in a situation as a way of determining the answer to a moral question. (Possibly also flatterd a little bit that someone thought that highly of me, but likely more mortified that someone thought of me that highly, and would immediately say it was undeserved.)
I don't fully believe that I'm not Good, but in this particular case, the not fully believing is because I'm almost certain my calibration of what constitutes being a Good person is skewed heavily toward an unattainable perfection. And there's probably also a real truth that even if it's all relative, I probably am doing better than several people who are regular winners of the Worst Person in the World award. It's not something that would breed complacency, because there's always ways to improve and to make myself better than I was before, but I could let myself believe that, at least for some things (many things?), given the choice, I'm going to make a Good one.
#16: "I'm not Genuinely a Good Person."
There are a few people who will point out that if I'm concerned about being a good person, there's a good chance that I'm not fooling myself about whether I'm a good person. They point out to me that the people who are most often deficient in morals, ethics, or guiding principles are persons who do not interrogate themselves to the point of asking, as the meme goes, "Are we the baddies?" but instead continue on with their behavior, untroubled. They tend to react very poorly when someone points out the problems with their behavior, perhaps uttering some of the classic stock phrases like "But some of my best friends are [Z]" or "I don't have a [Ω] bone in my body!"
Which, admittedly, brings back the previous bit where separating a person's behavior out from their moral character is important to changing the behavior and to trying, at least, to shortcut the part where people stridently defend their moral character against perceived accusations of moral failure. This separation, though, can produce the situation where a person is acting in a proper way but does not believe in the propriety of it. This statement gets at the underlying propriety and belief, rather than the behavior itself (for the behavior, and the low opinion of myself I have had with regard to behavior, see #3.)
Those with more philosophy and religion studies than I have undertaken can probably launch into a great lecture at this point about various theories about the underlying essential nature of a person. Whether they believe that human nature is inherently evil, bad, or sinful, and that humans only do good because they find doing good to have selfish incentives, because they do not wish to suffer the penalties of doing bad, or because there is someone in their life who exudes virtue sufficiently that they rectify their own behavior, wishing to emulate the superior person, or whether they believe human nature is fundamentally good, and people do good because they want to, and people do evil because the incentives to do evil are better than the ones to do good (at least in the short term), or because of social pressure forces, or because they're working for a soulless corporation who is legally required to maximize profit for the benefit of those who have enough spare income to have bought votes in the company's governance. Or because they are being forced to choose between doing evil and dying, and most humans value their survival more than an abstract code of morals. (Or because there are no non-evil options, only options with obvious and immediate evil and options with hidden and long-term evil.)
What defines Good, anyway? Each of the billions of humans currently alive on this planet would give me a different answer to the question. Good might have been decreed as following the rules and commands of supernatural entities, who communicated the rules directly to their followers, or who have the rules communicated through a person (or people) designated as the representative of the supernatural entity among the humans. Good might have been defined as engaging in a constant process of refinement toward an ideal that is either based on legal codes or developed philosophies, where perfection may or may not be possible to any given entity. Good might be defined only in terms of whether other people approve of the behavior and its underlying reasoning. Good can be defined as whether it personally benefits the person doing the action and sod anyone else. Or defined as something where if they benefit from it at all, it can't be Good. Is it "What you send out returns threefold to you?" " 'Do what thou wilt' shall be the whole of the law?" "Nothing is true, everything is permitted?"
(Just knowing about all the different ways that Good could be constructed probably means someone out there is accusing me of practicing "moral relativism" and therefore nothing I say could be taken as true or trustworthy. Those people may be admirable for the strength of their convictions, but more often than not, someone with that narrow a view ends up making some spectacular compromises or deploys a lot of justifications for their own behavior.)
Coming down from the 30,000 foot level to my own personal insecurities, recall (or learn for the first time) that I was raised in a religious culture that has very firm idea about what constitutes Good (since God said so) and what right-thinking people should both think in their heads and do in their lives. Many of those ideas are reasonable ones, like taking care of the poor, welcoming the foreigner, not sitting in judgment of another person's sins when you have plenty of your own to work on, and so on. But there's also many of them that seem much less the creation of people who are trying to get us to behave in ways that God approves of and more the creation of people who have succumbed to the temptation of trying to wield temporal power so they can enforce their idea of what is good and moral on other people, whether they believe it or not. The entire jumble of it is still in my head, because it was a large part of the morality present in my formative years. In addition to the religious bits, there's also the cultural bits of my formative years, whether that's the USian cultural Christianity, the rah-rah capitalism and riches, and all the ways in which the society and the culture of the US reinforces the idea that whiteness is Good. Plus, my provincial upbringing was in the kind of place where the values leaned much harder toward what would now be the MAGA end of the spectrum. There's also the more cosmopolitan values of the university and where I moved to after university, and some of the values of the various places that I have hung out online, so there's at least some other things in the mix of what was trying to influence me than a just a lot of right-of-center material.
Because it was such a jumble of things together, I had to make decisions about which bits of what I had been exposed to and taught were the parts I wanted to keep and use and which parts were going to be discarded. That's where the beginning of the weasels start, because a child who is used to being able to find the Right Answer that someone else can verify is going to have some struggles with deciding on things when there isn't an authority around to give them objective confirmation that they've made the objectively correct decision. (Yet again, managing to step around the toxic manosphere people, because they do promise that kind of certainty, among all the other things they promise.) In the process of continuing to build, refine, and keep gathering new ideas, there's a recurrent question that comes with it. Not only the question of whether this is the best system, but whether I'm actually behaving in a moral or Good way according to the system. There's a lot of perfectionism laced through this thinking, because the religious upbringing wants us to think of ourselves as unable to do good without the grace of God, and the popular and media culture really enjoys exposing people thought to be doing Good as liars, charlatans, and especially hypocrites. Beyond that, there's also a cultural thing impressed into white people that non-white people are always looking to take advantage, and into perceived men that perceived women are always looking to take advantage, and especially that all of the systems in place in law and society are going to side with whomever is looking to take advantage, no matter how slight it is, because the entire system is biased against white (Christian) men. (These are the same kind of people who tell us that we'll all be happier if we accept that rich white Christian men should be the unquestioned rulers of everyone due to their inherent superiority, and if we can't accept that willingly, then they'll force it on us so that we can understand it more easily. That, and neither of their bold assumptions backed up by evidence that hasn't been thoroughly cherry-picked to get rid of anything that contradicts it.) Learning about the concept of implicit bias helped explain a piece of the perfection weasels, because there's a lot in my background that could easily come out if I wasn't thinking about it, or if I went into a situation believing I understood it. That background assumption is not particularly helpful in situations that aren't actualy composed of people from similar backgrounds, so…
Much of the worry about whether I'm being Good is still a variation on the idea of "[perceived] men are afraid [perceived] women are going to make fun of them, [perceived] women are afraid [perceived] men are going to kill them." Because yes, the likely worst consequence of behaving in a not-Good manner in most cases is that I'm going to get an earful about it, or someone asking me if that's really what I intended to do, and possibly explaining to me what it looks like with the expectation that I'm going to recoil in horror at the possibility.
The rest of that worry runs parallel with my concern that the person who I present to others is congruent with the person that I know of as the sum of my experiences, internally and externally. Because, of course, the only thing that other people experience of me is the things that I externalize, whether in writing, speaking or behaving, and that doesn't always communicate what state of mind I was in, what kind of motivations I had, whether I was feeling charitable or vengeful, or any of the rest of those elements that are important to knowing whether something was really and truly Good or whether it was only Good-appearing. I'm not trying to practice conscious deception of others, but there may be some of those things that are done to hold social cohesion, or phrased very specifically, or other such things where I can say something that is positive and truly believed and omit the other parts that I might also be thinking or believing about a thing. That may shine through perfectly fine, but I do think about whether the differences there mean that I present myself as a more moral and Good person than I actually am. Which is probably why I would be mortified to find out if someone asked themselves what I would do in a situation as a way of determining the answer to a moral question. (Possibly also flatterd a little bit that someone thought that highly of me, but likely more mortified that someone thought of me that highly, and would immediately say it was undeserved.)
I don't fully believe that I'm not Good, but in this particular case, the not fully believing is because I'm almost certain my calibration of what constitutes being a Good person is skewed heavily toward an unattainable perfection. And there's probably also a real truth that even if it's all relative, I probably am doing better than several people who are regular winners of the Worst Person in the World award. It's not something that would breed complacency, because there's always ways to improve and to make myself better than I was before, but I could let myself believe that, at least for some things (many things?), given the choice, I'm going to make a Good one.
