Well, here we are again at the start of another new year. I suppose many of you will be considering what New Year’s resolutions you could adopt to make yourself a better person and maybe avoid some of the problems that last year brought. Without wanting to deliberately feed your need to stay just as you are without the inconvenience of self-improvement; I have to say why bother?
Just recently, I have been writing about how society has been trained to run on its emotional responses, by infantilising the majority of the population through obstructing maturity to adulthood in various ways.
Because running on emotions is currently de rigour, it presents an ideal opportunity to redefine them, that discourages ordinary people from experiencing their emotions in their own way. Everyone who does not have psychopathy, experiences a range of emotions, some of which are classed as “good” and to be strived for and some of which are classed as “undesirable”, and to be got rid of as soon as possible.
The undesirables, such as anger, anxiety, jealousy, spite, guilt, fear etc are undesirable by the nature of the way they cause people to feel when they experience them. People have a natural inclination to seek ways to rid themselves of unpleasant feelings without having to be told to do so and being accused by others of displaying such emotions, will increase the unpleasantness felt.
These are some of the things people often pledge to do better to control when they make their resolutions. I call these sorts of emotions “doing emotions”. That is because they urge us to act as soon as possible to change things so that we don’t feel them anymore. Whether the “acts” that people perpetrate in order to dissolve the feelings are useful or not, depends on what conclusions they come to about resolving the situation that was responsible for them.
However, the “good emotions” are what I call the “internal highs”. This I because they give us pleasure and make us feel safe and secure in the world and in some cases powerful and in control. I am talking about love, kindness, acceptance, understanding, joy, happiness, forgiveness, caring, striving etc.
Reading this back, it sounds a bit biblical! The virtues and the vices. However, whether you are a good person or not nowadays, seems to depend not only how much of the good emotions you show, but, and this is most important, that you show them in a way that is socially acceptable. By this I mean that both types of emotions are nowadays, pre attached to specific circumstances in which they are to be expected and specific circumstances in which they are not.
An example of being kind in the modern sense is sending money you don’t have every month to a country you know nothing about because they are all poor. This sort of action makes you a good person. Refusing to do so because what money you have is needed to support your own family is considered selfish. It is assumed that as you live in the western world, you have far more than you need anyway and should just give something up. The subtext is that you have probably ended up in this position because your ancestors robbed the country in question hundreds of years ago so technically speaking, it’s their money anyway.
The accepted underlying subtexts are what has made it possible for virtues to become weapons to beat the general population in the western world with so effective.
The top vice, guilt, has weaponised the virtues into vices very effectively. The virtues are now unacceptable in the mainstream unless they are compensating for perceived guilt, past harms or to demonstrate a person’s “goodness” to the world. They no longer mean anything for their own sake.
Before this became mainstream, people decided for themselves how they felt and when to express their virtues or vices as they saw fit. They did not require public appreciation, nor did they imagine atoning for past generations. The recent or immediate present was what caused these emotional states to occur, and they were dealt with in that context.
Now, people automatically look for clues as to how to respond to different situations and no longer trust their own judgement.
Of course, there have always been public opprobrium for vices that seriously obstruct social cohesion, such as murder, theft, GBH etc. I am not arguing for complete anarchy here, but for such social censorship as is needed to be kept to a minimum and based on personal safety, rather than punishment for not being virtuous in the “correct way”.
For those of you who are over the age of fifty, I’m sure that you remember what sort of rules you developed for yourself about how and when you felt justified in expressing both your virtues and your vices. This was your individual moral compass. Now acceptable group compasses that conform to a set pattern seem to be the norm.
My definition of kindness for instance is a spontaneous act of doing something for someone because at that moment, I want to assist or support in some way. It’s a bit of a loose definition, but I would argue better than how it is conceived in the mainstream today.
Kindness today is conflated very much with the modern version of empathy. If you have empathy for a person or a cause, it seems to follow that you will want to be kind and supportive of them no matter what they do. In fact one of the pre requisites of being “kind” in today’s society is to adjust your own moral standards and reframe the narrative whenever needed, so that criticism of the favoured individual or cause can be refuted and immorality attributed to the antagonist of the said person or cause. This of allows you to attack the antagonist and sometimes do truly evil things to them on a wave of self-righteousness and what is laughingly called “the moral high ground”.
This conflation of kindness with empathy is a false flag. Having empathy is not the be all and end all of understanding how another person thinks and feels. Often, we project our own feelings and intentions onto the person we are empathising with, and pretend they are just like us.
There is an excellent article in Unherd which exemplifies this using the retrial of the Menendez brothers as an example. Although I disagree with some of the article’s conclusions about the toxic feminisation of psychology, I really liked this quote: “A chief reason empathy misleads us is that we never empathise with people, only with the people we think they are. Sometimes we fallaciously use ourselves as the model for others, presuming our own feelings and motivations are theirs. More dangerously still, we begin to idealise them, clouding our better judgement”.
As psychology is now seen as a mainly female profession and women are naturally more prone to be empathic than most men, it is assumed, that like schools, the feminisation of the profession has done irreparable harm to society. I would argue that it depends on the woman who is the professional in both cases. The fact that women have been encouraged into the social sciences is in itself not a bad thing, if you have the right calibre of women. This is the same for men and any other group who wants to engage with what it means to be a human primate and find out how we work.
Religion is another organisation that often suffers from the “wrong sort of woman”. That is, a woman who does not have a history of religious devotion and scholarly research but sees herself as a progressive social worker who is the godlike shepherd to her sheep. The corrections are not based on scripture, but on how much people deviate from her world view. This, in her mind, gives her the right to define how the virtues are expressed and to identify the vices in others.
Ever since the rise of lived experience, the social sciences have suffered from the idea that feelings and personal experiences trump everything else. In other articles I have already talked about how empathy and its little brother kindness have been used as tools of oppression. Just as too little empathy for others leads to tragic outcomes, too much, by strange coincidence leads to almost exactly the same tragic outcomes.
Psychology is starting to become like that. Seeing things “through a different lens” is de rigour and allows people to belong to homogeneous groups without any sense of personal identity, or the need for a personal moral compass. Acted on with genuine spontaneity harmonising with a true emotional response based on an individual’s own moral compass, the virtues can give genuine pleasure and feelings of “rightness” to both giver and recipient.
When faked for effect or dragged out of people by using psychological tricks, they cause nothing but damage and foster increasing resentment. The trans issue is a case in point. To be honest, most ordinary people couldn’t care less how another individual leads their life, as long as it is not interfering with theirs, or their immediate family. This was also true when homosexuality was a crime. Everyone knew what was going on and no one cared that it was against the law. I’m sure that there were some people who gave homosexual men a hard time, but they were so minuscule a group as to be easily dealt with under the law as it stood. Why do you think everyone laughed so much at Round the Horne? The trick of these so-called emancipation groups is to take one or two extreme incidents and extrapolate from them the idea that everyone in society feels that way. Because it so obviously doesn’t, the law has to be extended to personal everyday things or nothing would happen and the much hyped thesis would collapse.
Racism is the same. When I was young, there was a few city skinhead gangs who would go round “Paki bashing” as something to do at the weekend and were quite happy to “bash” other groups if Pakistanis were not available, being general lowlifes in most people’s eyes. There were not anywhere near as many as the media wrote about and the police had ample means to deal with them. Somehow though, this became morphed into something that all white British were itching to do and was one of the first attempts by the Establishment to start separating, rather than bringing together, the different groups calling this country home.
So, when you come to think about your New Year’s resolutions, instead of sweating the small stuff and then disappointing yourself, why not go for the ultimate goal of developing or reconnecting with your own moral compass; by protecting it from the psychological jiggery pokery thrown at it by the establishment and its media. It is after all, your true best friend.