A Very Stupid Video About a Macho Freak « Clarissa's Blog
I’m of the very different opinion that it is both possible and necessary to distinguish between someone’s conceptions of a glorious past and the moral qualities of that past. This is absolutely imperative, because if we do not do this, we cannot distinguish between psychology and morality. These are absolutely two separate things, and I also hold that if they are conflated, one ends up at best with a distorted view of morality and the idea that people are either inherently good or inherently bad.
It is a core part of my philosophy to hold that people could enjoy and benefit from The Third Reich and that nonetheless, the regime was hateful and morally repugnant. It is false to say, “only the bad people found anything psychologically beneficial about The Third Reich”. You would spread “evil” too widely and make many boring, silly, or uneducated people retroactively to blame. I’m very much against condensing all sort of human foibles and inadequacies under the rubric of morality. That makes morality too demanding and impossible to attain within the context of historical time. One would have to overcome one’s lack of education, idiocy and/or contingency to be able to fully redeem history whilst it was actually happening.
It is far better to have psychology as one thing and morality as another, because that enables one to make a better moral critique of the kind of behavior shown in the video. Psychologically, the guy in the video linked to above is obviously depressed about something. Perhaps he misses a different sense of humanity, or indeed regrets a sense of losing male status. It may be entirely logical to miss one’s loss in status. He could be commended for psychological honesty in admitting his truth, rather than condemned for not acknowledging the wrongs of history. (Unfortunately, he himself falls into the stupid mode of conflating history with morality, which makes his whole rant ridiculous.)
I think there would be far fewer angry white men and far more intellectual development of thought if we could acknowledge that their psychological issues are valid and perhaps logical up to a point, but that psychological issues do not constitute morality. One has to consider the moral issues separately, without denying that various people have been hurt by a changing society.
In the same way we could say, “Feminism does not wish you harm. It doesn’t want to deny you your experiences, values or being. It just wants to open up your mode of being to an understanding that is more inclusive, because it is more just.”
Contrast this with, “Feminism sees you as evil, because you are historical oppressors.” This kind of rhetoric creates enemies, because it makes people feel that their subjective experiences somehow amount to evil.
***
The speaker's rant in the video didn't strike me as making a profound political statement, but was as a way of conflating his psychology with broader moral issues, which is absolutely typical of Americans. Australians also make the same equation, albeit in a subdued manner.
I really do think morality and psychology need to be separated.
My memoir is a psychological investigation of what happens when they are not.
****
I also felt like the speaker in the video, and deeply lamented that what I thought was “great” would never return. That feeling went on for years. Then, I got deeper into psychology and history and reality, and when I embraced the sense that all of these were contingent, and far from being morally absolute, as I had been taught, the impossible thing happened: What I felt to be “great” actually returned to me. It was a weird thing, like a second birth. I went back to Zimbabwe, and it had actually become better. There was a mood of left libertarianism in the air, which had always been part of me, but would have been impossible to express in white Rhodesia. Communication had improved and everybody cracked a joke, or were really open with each other.
It became apparent that my sense of reality had been falsely informed by conflating morality with regimes and status. Those assumptions turned out to be largely wrong.
***
The reason there are so many stunted individuals could be because we conflate morality with subjectivity, which we shouldn't. Personally, I was absolutely unable to analyse my position whilst I was doing that. The answer just kept coming up that I was evil -- which I felt I wasn't. I had to come to a point where I actually experienced history and subjectivity as contingent to get out of the moral bind and indeed to get beyond my fixation on a lost, glorious past.
“- I don’t think you can glorify a period in history without approving of everything that took place during that period. Say, somebody is telling you that the Third Reich was a phenomenal thing. Could you avoid reminding them that the low unemployment and very low crime rates of the Hitler era happened alongside of (and at the cost of) murdering crowds of people in concentration camps?”
I’m of the very different opinion that it is both possible and necessary to distinguish between someone’s conceptions of a glorious past and the moral qualities of that past. This is absolutely imperative, because if we do not do this, we cannot distinguish between psychology and morality. These are absolutely two separate things, and I also hold that if they are conflated, one ends up at best with a distorted view of morality and the idea that people are either inherently good or inherently bad.
It is a core part of my philosophy to hold that people could enjoy and benefit from The Third Reich and that nonetheless, the regime was hateful and morally repugnant. It is false to say, “only the bad people found anything psychologically beneficial about The Third Reich”. You would spread “evil” too widely and make many boring, silly, or uneducated people retroactively to blame. I’m very much against condensing all sort of human foibles and inadequacies under the rubric of morality. That makes morality too demanding and impossible to attain within the context of historical time. One would have to overcome one’s lack of education, idiocy and/or contingency to be able to fully redeem history whilst it was actually happening.
It is far better to have psychology as one thing and morality as another, because that enables one to make a better moral critique of the kind of behavior shown in the video. Psychologically, the guy in the video linked to above is obviously depressed about something. Perhaps he misses a different sense of humanity, or indeed regrets a sense of losing male status. It may be entirely logical to miss one’s loss in status. He could be commended for psychological honesty in admitting his truth, rather than condemned for not acknowledging the wrongs of history. (Unfortunately, he himself falls into the stupid mode of conflating history with morality, which makes his whole rant ridiculous.)
I think there would be far fewer angry white men and far more intellectual development of thought if we could acknowledge that their psychological issues are valid and perhaps logical up to a point, but that psychological issues do not constitute morality. One has to consider the moral issues separately, without denying that various people have been hurt by a changing society.
In the same way we could say, “Feminism does not wish you harm. It doesn’t want to deny you your experiences, values or being. It just wants to open up your mode of being to an understanding that is more inclusive, because it is more just.”
Contrast this with, “Feminism sees you as evil, because you are historical oppressors.” This kind of rhetoric creates enemies, because it makes people feel that their subjective experiences somehow amount to evil.
***
The speaker's rant in the video didn't strike me as making a profound political statement, but was as a way of conflating his psychology with broader moral issues, which is absolutely typical of Americans. Australians also make the same equation, albeit in a subdued manner.
I really do think morality and psychology need to be separated.
My memoir is a psychological investigation of what happens when they are not.
****
I also felt like the speaker in the video, and deeply lamented that what I thought was “great” would never return. That feeling went on for years. Then, I got deeper into psychology and history and reality, and when I embraced the sense that all of these were contingent, and far from being morally absolute, as I had been taught, the impossible thing happened: What I felt to be “great” actually returned to me. It was a weird thing, like a second birth. I went back to Zimbabwe, and it had actually become better. There was a mood of left libertarianism in the air, which had always been part of me, but would have been impossible to express in white Rhodesia. Communication had improved and everybody cracked a joke, or were really open with each other.
It became apparent that my sense of reality had been falsely informed by conflating morality with regimes and status. Those assumptions turned out to be largely wrong.
***
The reason there are so many stunted individuals could be because we conflate morality with subjectivity, which we shouldn't. Personally, I was absolutely unable to analyse my position whilst I was doing that. The answer just kept coming up that I was evil -- which I felt I wasn't. I had to come to a point where I actually experienced history and subjectivity as contingent to get out of the moral bind and indeed to get beyond my fixation on a lost, glorious past.
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