an unusual relationship with morality

i have a lotttttt of stories like this but im going to tell this one bc its the funniest. when i was a little girl i was part of a girl scout troop affiliated w my family’s church. one day (i was maybe 8) we had a meeting to discuss our strategy for selling girl scout cookies. obviously someone suggested setting up a booth outside the church to sell cookies after family mass. & i—an incredibly shy child—raised the courage to like tremulously raise my hand & say, “but what about wwjd? arent we not supposed to turn the church into a marketplace?”

as you can imagine, this made everyone very uncomfortable. especially my poor mother, who could not talk me down from this. the upshot was that everybody but me would sell cookies at the booth outside the church.

i really wasn’t trying to be stubborn or show off. having to speak up to disagree with everyone was so painful & mortifying i never would have done it for anything less important than following wwjd. & if anyone had been able to explain to me that the problem in the story wasnt “selling stuff while physically near a holy place” but rather “(over)charging people money to participate in their religion,” i would have instantly & happily backed down.

what’s interesting to me about this story (& the many similar ones) is that focusing unusually strongly on the moral aspect of a situation, made me behave worse than everyone else in that situation. i made everyone feel weird & bad & though i wasnt thinking about this at the time, i also ended up spongeing off everyone else’s work at the cookie booth! all these other girls got the same moral messaging that i did, but they were able to respond flexibly & cooperate with each other, even when they couldn’t explain why the moral principles i was bringing up, didn’t apply.

whatever is happening in my head when it comes to moral questions, the process is weird enough that i was eg the only girl in my girl scout troop thinking like this, but i think if you’re reading this essay you’re more likely than the average person to have a similar weird relationship with moral principles.

moral messages are (& should be) directed mostly at normal people. people who can easily notice & copy other people’s strategies, people who are good at mimetic desire. i think maybe part of our shared dysfunction around moral messages is that they’re the only messages about “what people should do” that are literal enough for us to understand. the moral messages arent being balanced by this like implicit strategic knowledge that other people are attuned to.

another problem is that moral messages are (ideally) meant for normal people to fail gracefully. take historic rules about chastity. if two normal people break the rules in the heat of passion & end up having a hypocritical shotgun wedding, that might not be the best thing in the world but it’s not the worst. but i think nowadays the people following rules about chastity, are very weird people who have a dysfunctionally rigid relationship with morality. you see a lot of unhappy virgin women who probably could have had a better chance at a happy marriage with happy kids, if they had slept with that cute boy in econ 101. sorry

i think that the ways that people like us tend to fail morally, are weird enough that they don’t get talked about a lot. but here we’re all weird together so let’s talk about them. im the least authoritative person possible on this or any topic so i dont want you to think im trying to sound authoritative jsyk, but someone has to talk about it, & i dont intend to be taken too seriously

i think people with rigid, unusual attitudes about morality tend towards neurotic & hysterical symptoms that might make them suffer a lot but also allow them to get out of doing whatever crazy, impossible thing that moral consistency is demanding of them. (yes, i’ve been reading freud, & i intend to make it everyone’s problem.) you see this a lot around sex. i have no basis for believing this except for anecdotal personal experience, but people with strongly held, unusual belief systems about sexual morality, whether radical or conservative, have a lot more than the usual amount of sexual dysfunction, & it allows them to get out of the weirdest demands created by their beliefs, without admitting that they are choosing not to follow their moral code.

another thing that people like us tend to do, is avoid gaining knowledge or power in order to avoid the increased moral demands that come with it. we especially might purposely blind ourselves to understanding people, because then we will know what they want, & feel that we have to do it.

a kind of paradoxical cope that a lot of us develop is to have so much dislike of the prospect of failing morally or even being judged along some particular moral axis, that we totally reject it & can’t even give it a normie level of consideration without decompensating. this creates a like psychic environment that allows for extremely unusual ways of hurting other people, that are hard for them to deal with because the hurt is just too weird for them to have a cached response.

so what do we do?

one thing we can’t do is just try to copy what it seems like normal people are doing. we probably are just not good enough at telling what people want. also, i don’t know about you but i got into this situation in the first place by trying to do what normal people told me to do & said they were doing

i think we have to lean into a more-than-normal awareness of, and comfort with, hypocrisy & inconsistency. i worry about even saying this because it could potentially allow for weird failures. but i still think it’s true

i also think that we have to grit our teeth & seek knowledge (especially knowledge of people) & power even though it’s scary. most moral messaging doesn’t tell you to do this because normal people figure it out implicitly, especially the power thing. so it’s worth saying “you should seek power”

other than that i don’t really know. maybe you do?