Every time I discuss my beliefs pertaining to the behavior of man as being amoral with morality being a clever deceivous lie used to get what people selfishly desire I always get the same response:
“People are social beings and from our sociality a form of morality is necessary.”
Well let’s just examine the social behavior of people for a moment here.
If you mean that people are collectively selfish, vain, greedy, or malicious in a social group setting then yes people are indeed social.
If you mean by social in that people form groups that compete and attack other groups in contrast of their own for their own selfishness then yes I suppose people are social.
If you mean by social that in these groups of competition through conflict whole world wars can be a outcome of death and murder then yes I suppose people are indeed social.
“Well in a social setting people use morality since we are moral creatures.”
Well let’s just examine this moral behavior you are speaking about here.
If you are implying that people use morality in order to control, manipulate, coerce and use other people at their own disposal while feigning a position that they themselves within their moral imperatives are unnassailable or infallible then yes I suppose people often enough do use morality.
If you are implying that individuals use morality in order to set up notions of what is considered right or wrong while at the same time rather hypocritically they go out and utilize the very things they condemn for their own selfishness then yes I suppose people often do use morality.
If you mean that some people use morality to protect their own weaknesses when they are at a disadvantage of not becoming tyrants themselves then yes I suppose people often enough use morality.
Conclusion:
1.Just because people are social doesn’t make them innately morally anything.
Morality is just another form of malicious intent or selfishness by it’s own hypocrisy and how it is used.
Before I can respond to you in depth Joker, here’s a quip:
I believe ‘morality’ as we’ve come to know it has been based off of philosophical ideologies that directly pertain to organized religion. Morals are not inclusive to one or the other though, they are inclusive to both.
So, if a person rejects absolute philosophical ideologies in order to remain ‘undefined’ and also rejects the dogma of organized religion, then what is he/she–my guess is that this person is free from restraints, morals, and everything. This person is amoral, above and beyond the plights of the masses, while still inherently attached to the pile of shit through sociality.
This is the exact ridiculous bullshit that i’m talking about. Yes morality is used for self-interested reasons, to justify oneself, to harm others, to manipulate. However in many CASES IT IS NOT.
Its not a form of malicious intent or hypocricy to say, feed a starving child that you come across on the street. Its not your responsibility moral or otherwise, people do it out of compassion.
People have compassion etc because it was evolutionary advantageous for hunter-gatherers to have compassion towards ingroups (its a bit of misfiring when we do it to strangers etc a good misfiring)/ Period. It let people in the past survive where we spent 99% of our time as a species.
Somtimes just somtimes humans act compassionate/moral because it MAKES THEM FEEL GOOD, it makes them feel good for the same reason SEX feels good, it helped propagate genes.
This is the fucking truth which you constantly dance around while making incoherent points about how morality can never be anything but manipulation/whatever. Its so fucking stupid as to defy reason.
If a person donates thousands of dollars to charity, and doens’t tell anynyone and does it consistantly, they’re doing it because it makes them feel good to help other people. Even depressed people who don’t feel much better about themselves/don’t tell anyone about their charity, probably give to charity.
I believe all morality is used for self interested reasons, to justify oneself, to harm others and to manipulate other people for control.
Such as?
Yet it is rather hypocritical to preach the equality of all men or to speak in absolutes of right and wrong all the while you show the unequalness of man by class stratification through exploitative poverty not to mention by partaking in the same inequality you have condemned simultanously by that of dualistic moral metaphors.
Don’t you mean that people have evolutionary advantages in their pretend mock show of compassion all the while they stab the back of their neighbor simultaneously when his guard is down by their compassionate stage act through pretension?
Don’t you mean that people pretend to be compassionate to make them feel great about themselves after seven days of the week of participating around acts of inequality much like embracing a delusional feel great fantasy during times of extreme chaos.
Oh please…
You are the one sugar coating existence to be this cooperative playground of mindless moral people.
Take a excellent look at yourself for once and then get right back to me.
Or because they are selfishly trying to make themselves feel great about themselves one day of the week since every other 6 days of the week they partake in inequality and they know it.
And then of course let us not forget public philanthropists who do it for public status and recognition in that when they are not donating money they are usually creating big corporations to exploit people at a low minimal wage which ironically most of their large sums of money for donations comes from…
Your just upset because you can’t handle the cut and dry simplicity of man’s predatory selfish egotistical existence so instead you create these feel great moral fantasies to expand on all of existence to stave off any angst of your own acting hypocrisy.
Taking a bullet to the chest to protect a stranger? Its not genetically advantageous, doesn’t make people ‘feel’ better.
We’re not talking about whether the human race is more selfish then moral, we’re talking about if individuals are ever unselfly moral. They are, they might only be that way because they’re adapted to act that way because it used to benefit them, but that doens’t matter.
No I don’t because humans/apes form social hiearchies, hunter-gatherers ingroups are violent, but they don’t consistantly betray/kill each other off. Humans needed to get food, protect themselves from predators, protect themselves from other human groups, to do all this you need to work in a group in complicated ways. I’m not saying that people don’t try to get on top of these groups so that things benefit them the most, but that, people are adapted to have compassion for other humans that they’re around, doing so usually implies that you’ll get compassion in return (human hunted big game, where they couldn’t possibly horde the meat to themselves sensically/move it around, this may have facilitated human cooperation/morality in ways the other great apes don’t have).
Things these days are different and people show compassion to people that can’t help them back. We’re not adapted to the environments we live in.
Somtimes they are compassionate, somtimes it makes them feel good because they imagine they themselves could be in the same position and would like to be helped like that as well.
Because I don’t take your painfully simple, naive, idealistically, incoherent and nonsensical beliefs seriouesly i’m ‘sugar coating’ humanity? No, I don’t think I am at all, I have never even once said that humanity had more compassion then it had brutal self interest, i’m well aware of how many people died to violence this century, i’m well aware that human’s are naturally adapted to being violent/brutal towards other humans, but the fact is that they are also adapted to working together (with ingroups) and etc.
I’ve argued consistantly that hunter-gatherers are brutish and violent and that death-tolls even among their ingrroups are extraordinarily high compared to our stadnards, that tribes brutalize each other consistantly. Half of mym time I spend reading I spend reading about ancient hunter-gatherers/modern ones, humans are naturally brutish and ogrish (in ways you probably are too ignorant to even know about) but that doens’t mean they conform to your bullshit pathetic theories. (Mass graves found with heads caved in, human muscle protein found in ancient human feces, modern tribes beating other tribes babies on the group until they’re white brains spill out and their bodies bloat until their purple, etc etc etc etc)
Thats all I read about so don’t tell me I make excuses for humanity or SUGAR COAT BULLSHIT. because I don’t. I just don’t buy your fucking ignorance as fact and niether does anyone else.
Lots of people don’t feel responsible for other people’s suffering, i’m not saying they shouldn’t but they still help/have compassion. Everyone knows they part-take in inequality, not many people feel they’re responsible to fix it, and when they do, they largely do so because out of compassion, they would want someone to help them in the same situation.
obviously. hah, did I ever say mass manipulation of moral feelings doesn’t happen? Quote me on that please. Otherwise stop pointing out the obvious, i’ve only denied your claims, not made excuses for all the evil that does happen, so please, stop pretending otherwise. I love your strawman arguements that you set up, that i’ve never once mentioned. Keep going, keep debating with yourself.
Yet you will gain public status and recognition after death…
For those who you have saved, your name will live forever in their memory until their own deaths and should your action of self sacrifice be famous your name will live forever in history.
Not to mention if you are religious it is a instant ticket to heaven where you get to sit on a cloud with god everyday.
Perhaps through this act of self sacrifice in death you want people to praise your heroic deeds.
Perhaps through this act of self sacrifice in death you selfishly want to change people’s perception to a moral one in thinking exactly like yourself when you were alive as a sort of preaching from the grave.
There is always selfish motives in the acts of self sacrifice…I could list them all day.
Why don’t you want to talk about inequality? Why don’t you want to talk about the hypocrisy of morality?
Are you afraid your views might be put to a test where you won’t come out quite the same afterwards?
Idealistic fantastical claims without a shred of realism.
Evidence? Hunter gatherers have violent feuds and skirmishes all the time.
Opposing groups of chimps become violent all the time.
Yet people are natural born predators themselves and their infighting only illustrates this.
I see you acknowledge the violence of opposing groups of people.
I certainly hope you are not.
There are no guarantees… This idealistic fantastical belief system you have on sociality isn’t realistic.
At best some people are lucky while a great deal of people are not.
Things are no different then they were at the beginning of our species when it took it’s first breath.
Appearances, facades, masks and deceptions might of changed but the inherent selfishness, vanity, violence, and psychologicial egoism of people remains the same in the will to survive.
Yes.
The mask and feigning of compassion in order to get what people want is a strategy apart of man’s brutal selfish interest.
That is all I am saying.
Which outweighs each other? If I was to look at our constructed conceived versions of history statistically or mathmatically what do you think would outweigh one another in a net sum? Malice or compassion.
If I was a betting man I would pick malice just by sheer volumes of suffering, oppression and murder of individual people versus the idealistic notion of a few people living their entire lives in “peace”.
In a single modernized war…Millions of people can die in a single day.
Better check those statistics again before you paint modernity as being more cultivated than it’s past counterparts.
Whatever.
Well that is apparent captain obvious…
More soap opera idealistic fantasies…
Isn’t interesting that inequality is never entirely fixed? Isn’t interesting that within 25000 years of promises by various civilizations, cultures, and governments that oppression is renewed in every generation?
Now what exactly could the problem in all of this be? Let me think here…
Oh, that’s right man’s dispostion is centered around malice, control, domination and subjugation with morality being merely a clever counter control device used for subduing rebellions.
After 25000 years of political propaganda, promises and foolish notions of progress no salvation has been brought fourth where the condemned far outweigh those living happily ever after in some conceived fairy tale.
Most likely because they can exploit such people in those situations.
I’m not sure what your definition of morality is, but selfishness is inherently human and should be channeled into enlightened self-interest supported by law that prohibits ANY double standard.
My definition of morality is the equal protection of everyone’s life, liberty and property from violation by force or fraud. Enlightened self-interest is the behavior that following such a moral code is to one’s own benefit, as long as you’re prepared to honor and defend that code by the example of your actions.
it can actually make people less moral . and really actually does . monkey see monkey do ( no questions asked . because they take no time to think and question a thought , action or action based on a thought or thought based on action )
the damage done in the end is incalculable , towards Humanity , when selfishness , hypocrisy and the manipulation of both alone and together are used against ourselves. it could in the end whipe us out , completely and absolutely for infinity
Some places, yeah, even in most places, but not in all, and that’s a lot more than it used to be. If we’d always looked at justice as unrealistic, then we’d never have gotten this far.
You call attempting to insure equal rights for all manipulation because you assume no one has the integrity or character to do the right thing. There are those who will not sell their soul for a price. And we can work to insure that good will outweigh evil but we would have to get off out butts and look around. (Now that might just be unrealistic. Therefore, I say scrap the one man one vote imperative and limit the franchise to only those who can demonstrate a minimum 5th grade level of understanding of government, education, politics and economics (prob’ly only about 20% today). Things would change in a hell of a hurry. (Oh, please please please compare this to the literacy tests under Jim Crow.)
Not in this case. It could as easily be called rational self-interest.
When someone else jumps in front of a bullet do you really think the thought is running through their head. “They’ll remember me forever for this, FUCKING AWESOME”. No, I don’t think so.
YOu persume to know the minds of every individual who has every sacraficed himself for anything?
There is in a lot of cases, but you wouldn’t be hard pressed to find one that envolved genuine self-sacrafice. On top of that, anything humans ever do for their genetic propagation, they are usually doing unconsciously, that is, when a mother saves her child she’s saving her genes, but for all she CONSCIOUSLY knows, she’s saving the child out of love, well it is love, thats the nature of the genetic mechanism for child-survival or whatever.
I talk about them all the time.
If you see a person walking along a beach and they are throwing up on their back and shivering, no one else is around, does every human walk by to let the person die? No, they don’t. Does it make them ‘feel good about themselves’ so much that they do it for ONLY that reason? To turn someone onto their stomach in the middle of nowhere as they lie dying, do you really think the MAIN concern is to make themselves feel better? Thats not in practice how people feel when they walk upon someone injured/knifed. People don’t think of being heroes as this shiny star that they risk their lvies for etc.
You are seriously childish if you think otherwise. In real life when people walk upon horrible scenes they feel compassion. Are you saying that the allies who found jew concentration camps never say, handed over a piece of bread, not even one of them, because they’d want bread if the situation was reversed?
No one in the hsitory of humanity has ever done a moral act because they feel like they would want to have someone do it to them if the situation is reversed? That is the fucking basis of morality in humans, we constantly misfire now, but in hunter-gatherer relationships it was an issue of TIT FOR TAT or Scratch my back i’ll scratch yours.
That doesn’t mean the evolutionary mechanisms that assure people get these social arrangements is CONSCIOUSLY recognized, its NOT. When you see a huhman suffering the instinct is to help a lot of the time we get this instinct because theres a good chance where we spent 99% of our time as a species, that we’d be seeing this person AGAIN AND AGAIN, and helping them in situation X is a good indictator that they’ll be there to help you in situation Z (as people have hardships at DIFFERENT TIMES).
No one is saying that humans don’t ruthlessly not return favors, stab each other in the back and etc. What I am claiming is that people act selflessly (consciously unaware of the evolutionary benefit) and help people.
Thats right they do, they have skirmishes with OTHER hunter-gatherer groups. Chimps get violent with OTHER opposing chimp groups.
You rarely ever see a group of chimps descend upon one of their own and tear it to sherds (like they do to outsiders) why? because those chimps can hunt for food with them, they can help defend. Yeah, ingroup violence erupts between chimps (alpha and beta males and etc) but its not the type of all out aggression/violence directed at outgroups.
Humans are violent beyond any sensical belief just like chimps are. Theres a book called “The most dangerous animal” Its about humans, it covers a lot about human violence. Brutality is our birth-right. I never once denied this.
If you wanted to talk about human brutality and moral posturing we could talk about people sending children into machine gun fire, or people giving golden keys to children telling them they open the gates of heaven before sending them across a minefield, we could talk about hunter-gatherer brutality, how the very FIRST cities had massive walls to protect themselves frrom outside, how that ice-man who was found (otzi) was armed to the fucking teeth covered in like 3-4 other people’s blood with an arrow in the shoulder. we could talk about the most disgusting violence between tribes, where chieftoms mock their fallen foes as they COOK their fucking heads and use their women/children as slaves, we could go on about cannabilistic brutal tendencies, tribal women smashing open the skulls of fallen opponents. We could go on forever, about a million different aspects of human violence/immorality, and they’d each be as interesting as the last.
Humans can be that evil, this brutal, this violent, this immoral, and STILL have feelings of moral compassion towards others that is selfless, because in the past where we spent 99% of our time as a species, doing such, could ensure your survival. Its genetically ‘selfish’ but if people aren’t conciously aware of it (they’re not) it’d be hard to be called selfish in any sense of the situation. “Selfish” genes, aren’t actually ‘selfish’ its just about which traits survive and which don’t.
Sure, but that has nothing to do with what I said. I said that, since we don’t live in hunter-gatherer groups, that our compassion to be moral to random people is a MISFIRING, because we wouldn’t see strangers and etc in hunter-gatherer groups, theres a good chance they’d either be family, or people you’d have to live with for a very long time. In those situations it was GENETICALLY beneficial to act compassionate towards someone who got speared or injured in a hunt/raid/whatever, because if the person survives they might be willing to return the favor AND you don’t lose a hunter/defender.
but because of evolutionary reasons people actually DO feel SELFLESS compassion from TIME TO TIME. They might only FEEL that because an evolutionary adaptation is MISFIRING when it would have been genetically advantageous in hunter-gatherer groups.
I don’t think you could weigh that sensically or scientifically , but if you think we can lets discuss proper methodology. I think each is more powerful in thousands of different situations. In a hunter-gatherer group, you probably spend as much time loving your family/friends, as you do hating your enemies/enemies in the outgroup.
Also, theres the fact that if someone’s brother was drowning they might drown themselves to save the brother, with no “self interest” but interest to perserve the 50% of fucking genes that you share with him. You do realize that a brother or parent is walking around with 50% of your genes? Saving a family member is genetically beneficial, VERY, much so. Just not to the genes, in YOUR body.
I think lots of people today feel more compassion then malice, but a lot more people today feel a lot more apathy compared to both. Love your family friends/ let the rest of the world die without a thought. Thats not neccessarily malice.
Theres more self-interest for the individual/carrier of their genes (family) then compassion for other people by a long shot.
apathy and self interest aren’t always the same as malice and violence. Inequality is impossible to fix by definition, but no one has really but a sustained effort into it either, I never denied that.
Theres different population percentages, the death ratios in each are different, as in, if we had hunter-gatherer death-rates, 2billion people would have died this century instead of a count in the millions.
We both know that hunter-gatherers were more brutish then we are today. If I was thrown into the wild with a spear, and had to find my own food, shelter, allies, and etc against a harsh environment of predators/other humans. I’d be a lot more violent today. Infact, throw me into a violent situation that hunter-gatherers have to deal with more routinely then I do (defending themselves against someone with a spear) and we’d see a bit of the true brutality that isn’t randomly envoked in us outside of our control.
Theres no reason to believe even in principle that our ancecstors were slightly more peaceful then us.
If you want to talk about immorality of humans, its almost surprising you haven’t touched on blood-lust. The feelings of extacy/joy that people get caught up in while watching body-parts fly, the almost erotic joy that almost anyone can be caught up in during slaughter. Just like sadness comes without a lot of control after a family member dies, this ‘blood lust’ isn’t somthing that only insane people feel, its not somthing humans call upon in battle, it comes without control.
Like the pleasure of having sex.
The fact that cognitively normal humans consistantly experience shit in battle that our societies would never label as ‘normal’ shows the huge gap between human nature and what we’re willing to admit about it.
Well let’s just examine the social behavior of people for a moment here.
