From good-vs-bad to good-vs-evil: guilt morality and spiral dynamics

I've a thread to weave, not sure what my point is yet but let's string together some bits. Okay, in ContraPoints' stellar new video on Envy, she summarizes Nietzsche re a shift from a morality of good(power)-bad(weak) to good(meek)-evil(power)

Aug 10, 2021

(I'm basically writing the rest of this thread assuming that you've watched that video or read Nietzsche or otherwise have the context on this shift thing)

I've described before that "if people weren't afraid of hell, they'd murder and steal and stuff" is basically Christian propaganda

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Dec 24, 2019

@patrissimo @OperationMoksha @QiaochuYuan I have some sense that this concern is structurally similar to the classic Christian propaganda "if people weren't afraid of hell, they'd murder and steal and stuff" 😱 ...turns out that there are lots of atheists who are totally prosocial, because they care about other ppl 🤷‍♀️💞

but... huh, what if in some sense that *was* largely what was happening between the dawn of civilization ~10k BC and Christianity's advent of a sense that this was "evil" and we shouldn't do it? (there's also ofc the Q of what tamed non-christian cultures similarly)

While watching the vid w/ @LordChisholm, I brought up this spiral dynamics graphic and pointed at how "good-vs-bad" ~= RED & "good-vs-evil" ~= BLUE. I put out: "did we need to go through BLUE to get to ORANGE?" He said "ORANGE critiques BLUE's objective truth, which RED lacks."

I'm getting a way better sense of how each of these value memes critique the one before them. @HFreinacht has a hilariously spicy take on how that works for BLUE→ORANGE→GREEN→YELLOW so I guess this mostly fleshed out the RED→BLUE bit metamoderna.org/from-premodern…

anyway, the RED value meme is uhhh kind of sociopathic! the hierarchies and surpluses of agricultural societies enabled this kind of approach to succeed, and the winners wrote not just the histories but also the norms or so the just-so story goes 🤷‍♀️

perhaps the dominators were initially psychopaths, ie ppl who genetically lack empathy, but then over time as it got normalized, others started doing it perhaps it was needed to justify or dissociate from the horror of some ppl starving while others ate

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Oct 27, 2019

@MSlavin But clearly there's a sense in which hunter-gatherer societies were less crazy-making than ag/GameA ones. I have a few theories as to why, the most interesting of which is that in agri society you have to let your kids starve to have seedcorn for next year → dehumanization.

in any case, with Judaism & Xianity came guilt-based morality that condemned the harms of egocentrically just following one's impulses but by using guilt, it failed to adequately create a frame that acknowledges that we ALSO *want* to find win-wins; we care about each other

but unless we're plagued with guilt or some other sort of externalized should, we basically *don't* want to give up satisfying our own desires & impulses and we shouldn't want to give that up! that's the font of value! so the puzzle is: can we have both?

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Aug 10, 2021

what would we need in order for everyone to be able to do what they feel like doing, and for the result of all of those doings to be that everyone gets cared for in a way that everyone feels deeply satisfied with?

and it seems that folks at the forefront of culture are answering "yes, broadly speaking, but we need to learn how"