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As a teenager, I was a massive unkempt slob with zero shame until I took an interest in girls. Once I developed a crush on some girl, I'd look back in horror at my habits (wearing the same sweat pants every day, having a shitty diet), and tried to clean up my act 100% even in private where my actions are invisible. By nature, humans are highly-efficient pleasure seeking machines, and the only thing that meaningfully interrupts this behavior is some kind of ideal. We can gloat that American scientists probably engage in LLM bullshit less than Chinese scientists, but the Americans aren't far from doing it either. If Americans aren't forming cheating circles like the Chinese, it's not because we're above it so much as we're amateurs at cheating while the Chinese are masters at it.
Like most conflicts, it was framed in terms of ideals. Secular moderners don't really have ideals, so we struggle to imagine going to war over anything, really. Conversely if you've got a heightened sense of morality, anything is worth fighting over, and some men like Cicero or Boethius stick to their guns for an entire lifetime and pay the price. The founding fathers modeled themselves after these men, "Give me liberty or give me death", and it worked. Ideals are the only thing that fully override the comfort-seeking monkey brain, so if you want a nation of honest men, you have to make them genuinely value honesty.
Yes. There was a very stubborn principled mindset centuries ago where people would face certain or near-certain death rather than just let some ideological issue slide.
"Admit that Jesus existed always as part of God, or be burned alive very slowly." "I'll take the flames please."
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