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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34928 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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@SubstantialFrivolity has blocked me for suggesting that his worldview is rigidly deontological because it is essentially non-materialist

Does not conclude. You can logically accept all the following:

1/ There are no gods and no devils, there is no judgement, no heaven, no hell, no reincarnation and no nirvana, when you are dead you will decompose and be forgotten (at least until AI reconstructs your brain in order to torture it forever).

This world is all what there is.

2/ This world is dirty, muddy and bloody rat cage, always had been and always will be. To live long and prosper you need to learn how to lie, cheat, steal and scam, how to snoop, snitch and denounce, how to plot, intrique and backstab. You have to be total and complete rat to get ahead.

3/Regardless, I do not want to live like this, I do not want to be a rat.

Grim and hopeless mindset that would appeal to few people, but 100% scientific and materialist.

I do not believe behavior that is incentivized by no plausible promise and not even an intuitive expectation of payback is a major part of human behavioral repertoire. People expect good to come from good, else they do not do it at a noteworthy scale.

More importantly, endorsing it is an irresponsible advice to give. There are costs to integrity, as this subthread shows well enough. Costs have to be justified. When Neoreactionaries cheerfully try to sell people on the Eternal Social Darwinist Hell, they say that the other option is worse in any way that could matter – more suffused with impotence and suffering, more tyrannical, more derivative and limited and ugly. How, specifically, is lacking integrity worse? SubstantialFrivolity speaks of the value of integrity trumping material benefits:

Even if you had somehow prospered by cheating (unlikely), and even if you had gotten all the things you think it would've gotten you, that would be a horrible outcome. Because then you would have compromised your integrity, which is far more valuable than any material gains ever could be. So the real question is, and what would those material things have brought you? Nothing worth having, if it comes at the cost of your integrity.

it is valuable, and it's more valuable than anything practical can offer. Your character is the one thing that nothing can ever take away from you. Material possessions come and go, social status comes and goes, even health comes and goes. But your moral character is always exactly what you make of it, nothing more or less. That makes it far more valuable than those other things.

The argument, inasmuch as he makes one, is that integrity is all-important because the character is «the one thing you can control». This, at least, is an ethos. But one can ask then: why optimize for «good» character? Why not express your self-control in building a prideful, cunning, power-seeking character? A character befitting a king or a Khan, rather than a law-abiding serf who rationalizes his self-denial! Possessions come and go, sure, but so does the fruit of good deeds. The argument seems to hold inasmuch as you rein in your urges and act in accordance with a set of abstract principles. Objectivism, Laveyian Satanism, Thelema, weird personal religions, anything goes. Yet it's not the case that anything goes, is it.

So it's clear he does not believe integrity is valuable because of the arbitrary rule that only things an agent controls are truly valuable. And if your logic is applied, neither is it due to any supernatural metaphysical returns to integrity. We are thus left with the claim that integrity is valuable because it is valuable period, it being the only way in which control over oneself is meaningful. This is not an argument but an assertion, a personal moral deontological axiom, a Categorical Imperative that cannot be proven as true to anyone who doesn't feel the charm of having integrity to begin with. I posit that the insistence on this opinion as a somehow true measure of value makes him an archetypal Hajnalbrain Cooperatebot, a member of a neurotype to which @f3zinker or @SaruchBinoza apparently do not belong.

For the record, I understand the allure of of justice, and the tears of tiger in this picture. It's just obvious that myopic self-satisfied Integrity Play is insufficient to actually make the world a more just place. So I can't help but look down on people extolling the virtue of cooperation even with defectors.

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