I think a lot of people are confused by good and courageous people and don’t understand why some people are that way. But I don’t think the answer is that confusing. It comes down to strength of conscience. For some people, the emotional pain of not doing what they think is right hurts them 1000x more than any physical pain. They hate doing what they think is wrong more than they hate any physical pain.
So if you want to be an asshole, you can say that good and courageous people, otherwise known as heroes, do it out of their own self-interest.
Contrary view: The use of self-torture to promote goodness is an s-risk. The kingdom of heaven looks like people doing good deeds for each other out of love and delight, not out of guilt- and shame-avoidance.
If you’re making fun of what I’ve expressed about S-risks go fuck yourself. If you’re not then I think you’re naive. Anger is the main way change happens. You’ve just been raised on a society that got ravaged by Russian psy-ops that the elites encouraged to weaken the population. It can feel good to uplift others while simultaneously feeling fucking awful knowing that innocent people are suffering.
And just to be fucking clear, if you were making fun of me, please say it like a fucking man and not some fucking castrated male. If you were making fun of me you’re a low T faggot who’s not as smart as he thinks he is. There are 10 million Chinese people smarter than you.
To be clear, I only intend the last paragraph if you were being a bitch. If not then consider that it’s only addressed to a hypothetical cunty version of you.
Moderator warning: This is well outside the bounds of reasonable behavior on LW. I can tell you’re in a pretty intense emotional state, and I sympathize, but I think that’s clouding your judgment pretty badly. I’m not sure what it is you think you’re seeing in the grandparent comment, but whatever it is I don’t think it’s there. Do not try to write on LW while in that state.
Sure. The people I’m talking about choose to care as much as they do. Good and courageous people can choose to not have hope and not care about others, but they choose to care.
Also, if it is true that a lot of people are confused by good and courageous people, I am unclear where the confusion comes from. Good behaviour gets rewarded from childhood, and bad behaviour gets punished. Not perfectly, of course, and in some places and times very imperfectly indeed, but being seen as a good person by your community’s definition of “good” has many social rewards, we’re social creatures… I am unclear where the mystery is.
Were the confused people raised by wolvesnon-social animals?
I don’t actually buy the premise that a lot of people are confused by moral courage, on reflection.
This doesn’t match my experience of what good people are generally like. I find them to be often happy to do what they are doing, rather than extremely afraid of not doing it, as I imagine would be the case if their reasons for behaving as they do were related to avoidance of pain.
There are of course exceptions. But if thinking I had done the wrong thing was extremely painful to me, literally “1000x more than any physical pain” I predict I’d quite possibly land on the strategy “avoid thinking about matters of right and wrong, so as to reliably avoid finding out I’d done wrong.” A nihilistic worldview where nothing was right or wrong and everything I might do is fine, would be quite appealing. Also, since one can’t change the past, any discovery that I’d done something wrong in the past would be an unfixable, permanent source of extreme pain for the rest of my life. In that situation, I’d probably rationalize the past behaviour as somehow being good, actually, in order to make the pain stop… which does not pattern-match to being a good person long term, but rather the opposite, being someone who is pathologically unable to admit fault, and has a large bag of tricks to avoid blame.
How rare good people are depends heavily on how high your bar for qualifying as a good person is. Many forms of good-person behaviour are common, some are rare. A person who has never done anything they later felt guilty about (who has a functioning conscience) is exceedingly rare. In my personal experience, I have found people to vary on a spectrum from “kind of bad and selfish quite often, but feels bad about it when they think about it and is good to people sometimes” to “consistently good, altruistic and honest, but not perfect, may still let you down on occasion”, with rare exceptions falling outside this range.
I think a lot of people are confused by good and courageous people and don’t understand why some people are that way. But I don’t think the answer is that confusing. It comes down to strength of conscience. For some people, the emotional pain of not doing what they think is right hurts them 1000x more than any physical pain. They hate doing what they think is wrong more than they hate any physical pain.
So if you want to be an asshole, you can say that good and courageous people, otherwise known as heroes, do it out of their own self-interest.
Contrary view: The use of self-torture to promote goodness is an s-risk. The kingdom of heaven looks like people doing good deeds for each other out of love and delight, not out of guilt- and shame-avoidance.
If you’re making fun of what I’ve expressed about S-risks go fuck yourself. If you’re not then I think you’re naive. Anger is the main way change happens. You’ve just been raised on a society that got ravaged by Russian psy-ops that the elites encouraged to weaken the population. It can feel good to uplift others while simultaneously feeling fucking awful knowing that innocent people are suffering.
And just to be fucking clear, if you were making fun of me, please say it like a fucking man and not some fucking castrated male. If you were making fun of me you’re a low T faggot who’s not as smart as he thinks he is. There are 10 million Chinese people smarter than you.
To be clear, I only intend the last paragraph if you were being a bitch. If not then consider that it’s only addressed to a hypothetical cunty version of you.
Moderator warning: This is well outside the bounds of reasonable behavior on LW. I can tell you’re in a pretty intense emotional state, and I sympathize, but I think that’s clouding your judgment pretty badly. I’m not sure what it is you think you’re seeing in the grandparent comment, but whatever it is I don’t think it’s there. Do not try to write on LW while in that state.
I understand. I’ll try to keep it more civil.
People can just decide to do things of their own volition, without peculiar arrangements of pain or pleasure being in charge of their will.
Sure. The people I’m talking about choose to care as much as they do. Good and courageous people can choose to not have hope and not care about others, but they choose to care.
I claim that I am unusually Good (people who know me well would agree—many of them have said as much, unprompted). This is not how it works for me.
Also, if it is true that a lot of people are confused by good and courageous people, I am unclear where the confusion comes from. Good behaviour gets rewarded from childhood, and bad behaviour gets punished. Not perfectly, of course, and in some places and times very imperfectly indeed, but being seen as a good person by your community’s definition of “good” has many social rewards, we’re social creatures… I am unclear where the mystery is.
Were the confused people raised by
wolvesnon-social animals?I don’t actually buy the premise that a lot of people are confused by moral courage, on reflection.
This doesn’t match my experience of what good people are generally like. I find them to be often happy to do what they are doing, rather than extremely afraid of not doing it, as I imagine would be the case if their reasons for behaving as they do were related to avoidance of pain.
There are of course exceptions. But if thinking I had done the wrong thing was extremely painful to me, literally “1000x more than any physical pain” I predict I’d quite possibly land on the strategy “avoid thinking about matters of right and wrong, so as to reliably avoid finding out I’d done wrong.” A nihilistic worldview where nothing was right or wrong and everything I might do is fine, would be quite appealing. Also, since one can’t change the past, any discovery that I’d done something wrong in the past would be an unfixable, permanent source of extreme pain for the rest of my life. In that situation, I’d probably rationalize the past behaviour as somehow being good, actually, in order to make the pain stop… which does not pattern-match to being a good person long term, but rather the opposite, being someone who is pathologically unable to admit fault, and has a large bag of tricks to avoid blame.
It’s not fear. It’s anger. Also good people are rare. The people you think of as good people are likely just friendly.
How rare good people are depends heavily on how high your bar for qualifying as a good person is. Many forms of good-person behaviour are common, some are rare. A person who has never done anything they later felt guilty about (who has a functioning conscience) is exceedingly rare. In my personal experience, I have found people to vary on a spectrum from “kind of bad and selfish quite often, but feels bad about it when they think about it and is good to people sometimes” to “consistently good, altruistic and honest, but not perfect, may still let you down on occasion”, with rare exceptions falling outside this range.