I am not ignoring you Iam, but I have other fish to fry today…I will
get back to you…
as noted, we act and interact with other human beings… this interaction
is called “morality”…upon what basis should we interact with people?
or said differently, what are the rules we should engage with in dealing with
other people?
let us say, I run into someone named Bob and because Bob pissed me
off, I beat the shit out of him…… but this scenario doesn’t give us enough
information to actually be able to judge or understand it……
from a legal standpoint, it doesn’t matter if Bob and I had other dealings
with each other which has lead to the bad blood between us……
or it shouldn’t matter that Bob is 6’5 and I am 5’8 or that Bob is
4’5 and I’m 5’8……… from a legal standpoint, the particulars are
irrelevant… a fight broke out and someone must be punished
for that transgression… so we have crimes against the law…
but we have our daily interactions between each other…
and though those daily interactions rarely ever reach a legal
standpoint, a fight or some violence between each other,
we have these interactions between each other which is
really the basis of our rules of engagement with each other…
I deal with rude, mean customers all the time… but their being
assholes doesn’t reach the level of a crime, a legal matter…
but it does matter in our day to day engagement with each other…
the reason they are so rude and mean is because they don’t consider me
to be an equal… why be nice to someone who is below you in social status…
this is the basis of much of our interactions with each other…
the same rude asshole who is mean to me will suddenly
become nice when face with someone who is a doctor or
a policeman… why, because those are considered “higher” social status…
we place ourselves into imaginary social status… if we make X amount
of money or have a higher status job, we are of X social status…
but the rules for this social status is not written down anywhere, it is
not discussed or even acknowledge by people…….
let us look at one part of this equation… women…
women don’t dress for men, women dress for other women…
but why Kropotkin? it doesn’t make sense for women to dress for other
women…women use clothes and jewelry to establish social status…
when I look at a woman, I don’t notice what the maker of the dress is or
who makes the purse or what kind of jewelry she has, but other women,
will know this and that is how women mark social status…
my wife grew up in a very wealthy town and she can instantly spot
women with money…and she can even tell if the money is new money
or old money or if the women is pretending to have money…
so much of our interactions with each other is based on perceived
social status…with wealth being the primary indications of the
social status…
now the interesting thing here is because we own a condo and
some rental property, we have a net worth over a million dollars,
but the wealth is in property, not in cash… and I would bet that
a good deal of the time, given the average customer in my store,
we have a greater net worth then a lot of my customers, but because
of my job, checker, I am fairly low on the social status level, so
that the next brick in the wall… the job or career of people also
decides the social status of people…and people react to me based
on job or career… social status…instead of who I am…
the way we react to people is part of the biases and myths and
prejudices and superstitions we grew up with, the indoctrinations
we were raised with…in other words, we judge people based on
our childhood indoctrinations…and for most people, it is an
unconscious reaction to the people we deal with on a daily basis
and based upon how we were taught as children…….
so not only does our childhood indoctrinations teach us our ism’s
and ideologies but our childhood indoctrinations determine
our daily interactions we have with other people…our morality
as it were…….
Morality: principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong
or good and bad behavior… a particular system of values and principles
of conduct, especially one held by a specified person or society…
we can now see that the distinction between right and wrong is
not based on any given principles but were taught to us as children
within our childhood indoctrinations…
we don’t have a set of principles upon which we use to decide our
“moral” values or how we choose to act in our daily interactions with others…
we use a ad hoc basis for our interactions with others… in other words,
we act and interact with others, not based upon any given or set principles
but we usually react to others based upon our childhood indoctrinations…
and not on any set principles we might have created over the years…
and we react to others based in our perceived social status we have in
relations to each other…
so we have legal restrictions which help determine our relationship
with each other and we have self guided, usually childhood indoctrinations
which also guide us in our relationships, our interactions with each other…
so my reactions and interactions to other people, what some people
might call “morality” is really just a complex series of inner
reactions to others based on a perceived social status and
childhood indoctrinations………
However, it is not based upon some set of values
or principles that I have worked out myself………
and for morality to be morality, we must have set
of values or principles that have been worked out
to actually be “morality”…….
we don’t have values or any set of principles to guide our actions
or our interactions with each other… we have some sort of
ad hoc interpretations of how we interact with each other
but those interpretations are wildly different based on how
we are doing that day and not on any set values or principles…
I don’t know if this makes any sense at all to you, but it makes sense
to me……… we react to each other, our moral interactions to each other
are not based on some set of rules or principles but change every day
because they are not based on any set of rules or principles…
and until we firm up morality based on a set of rules/values and/or
principles, our moral judgements are simply made up every single
day, ad hoc as it were…….
Kropotkin