It seems that your goal is essentially to find compassion for those with a different value set than yours, and that the confounding element is that other value structures (e.g., truth vs. utility vs. tradition, etc.) often don’t support each other. Is that on target?
It’s worth recognizing that any set of guiding principles is essentially arbitrary if you inspect them deeply enough. What Schopenhauer calls apathy and hedonism, another might call “the human experience.” While I value the ability to introspect and think abstractly, I take issue with Schopenhauer’s disdain for ‘dumb’ entertainment: if my longing for higher understanding leaves me, and only me, miserable, is that really a moral victory? Depends on what your morals are. This is reflected in your writing that people “simply don’t [intrinsically] value holding true beliefs.” I would argue that this is because many truths are existentially painful, so much so that it requires much active cognitive effort to overcome our psychological disposition and place value on these truths.
In your writing, your own disdain for others makes you uncomfortable. If I were in your place, I would try to figure out why the uncomfortable feeling occurs, why the disdain occurs (beyond ‘they don’t think hard enough,’ and into ‘why do I value this over that’), and see if there’s an internally consistent framework that squares the two.
I am trying to write an anecdote as an example, but am struggling to make it coherent. So, let me know if this resonates and I’ll try a bit harder :^ )
It seems that your goal is essentially to find compassion for those with a different value set than yours, and that the confounding element is that other value structures (e.g., truth vs. utility vs. tradition, etc.) often don’t support each other. Is that on target?
It’s worth recognizing that any set of guiding principles is essentially arbitrary if you inspect them deeply enough. What Schopenhauer calls apathy and hedonism, another might call “the human experience.” While I value the ability to introspect and think abstractly, I take issue with Schopenhauer’s disdain for ‘dumb’ entertainment: if my longing for higher understanding leaves me, and only me, miserable, is that really a moral victory? Depends on what your morals are. This is reflected in your writing that people “simply don’t [intrinsically] value holding true beliefs.” I would argue that this is because many truths are existentially painful, so much so that it requires much active cognitive effort to overcome our psychological disposition and place value on these truths.
In your writing, your own disdain for others makes you uncomfortable. If I were in your place, I would try to figure out why the uncomfortable feeling occurs, why the disdain occurs (beyond ‘they don’t think hard enough,’ and into ‘why do I value this over that’), and see if there’s an internally consistent framework that squares the two.
I am trying to write an anecdote as an example, but am struggling to make it coherent. So, let me know if this resonates and I’ll try a bit harder :^ )