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More theories and ramblings
Jun. 17th, 2008 07:38 pmWhenever I have exams my mind always goes into overdrive about all sorts of things.
On the Revue mailing list there's been several interesting discussions lately, one of them about the nature of the free market. And recently I've gotten into a long and involved debate about the nature of morality, and whether objective good and evil exist or whether it's all subjective. My own belief turns out to be a sort of free market mentality towards morals. That they're determined by society as a whole and that the market determines what morals are best for society as a whole, the same way that the free market tends to converge towards the fairest price for any given good for society as a whole. And just like the free market, while market forces ensure that in most cases the 'best' morals are chosen, in some places it breaks down and needs to be specifically targeted by governments and so forth. Also it means that you can believe anything you want to but you can't legitimately expect other people to follow it or even necessarily allow it unless your beliefs happen to line up with the market opinion.
It occurs to me though that while I don't have any solid idea of what Good is, I most certainly have an idea of what constitutes Evil, and that's moral apathy/selfishness. Not caring whether something is moral but only whether it suits your purposes for the moment. Or having a set of values that you supposedly subscribe to and choosing not to care because a situation isn't affecting you directly enough to actually apply those morals. Basically, I think that there was evil in the Holocaust but that it didn't come from Hitler, who was a raving loony but was doing his best to save the world from a threat that only he believed in, but instead that it came from all the hundreds of thousands of people who didn't agree with him but let him do it anyway because it was expedient at the time.
The other main thing I've been reading and thinking about lately is feminism, and more specifically into the more radical types, like here. I've found that their stuff can be separated into three broad categories: simple anarchistic man-hate (everything wrong with society is the fault of men, let's make our own lesbian enclaves where we can live without the interference of men!), deconstructing EVERYTHING for hidden messages of feminism or lack thereof and making a fuss every single time a movie, book, ad, or whatever shows a woman being some kind of negative stereotype (cos you know, it's not like men aren't also portrayed as negative stereotypes sometimes or that sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar), and pointing things out that are genuinely wrong (such as the complete lack of strong feminine characters pretty much everywhere, the strong perpetuation of some really destructive female stereotypes, and atrocities committed against women (although again, it sort of invalidates the fact that Bad Stuff can happen to men too). And they frustrate me so much, because here they have all these excellent analyses and legitimate points and then they go and ruin them by throwing in some random man-hate or showing that their only concern is for women and men can go jump off the nearest cliff as far as they care.
On the Revue mailing list there's been several interesting discussions lately, one of them about the nature of the free market. And recently I've gotten into a long and involved debate about the nature of morality, and whether objective good and evil exist or whether it's all subjective. My own belief turns out to be a sort of free market mentality towards morals. That they're determined by society as a whole and that the market determines what morals are best for society as a whole, the same way that the free market tends to converge towards the fairest price for any given good for society as a whole. And just like the free market, while market forces ensure that in most cases the 'best' morals are chosen, in some places it breaks down and needs to be specifically targeted by governments and so forth. Also it means that you can believe anything you want to but you can't legitimately expect other people to follow it or even necessarily allow it unless your beliefs happen to line up with the market opinion.
It occurs to me though that while I don't have any solid idea of what Good is, I most certainly have an idea of what constitutes Evil, and that's moral apathy/selfishness. Not caring whether something is moral but only whether it suits your purposes for the moment. Or having a set of values that you supposedly subscribe to and choosing not to care because a situation isn't affecting you directly enough to actually apply those morals. Basically, I think that there was evil in the Holocaust but that it didn't come from Hitler, who was a raving loony but was doing his best to save the world from a threat that only he believed in, but instead that it came from all the hundreds of thousands of people who didn't agree with him but let him do it anyway because it was expedient at the time.
The other main thing I've been reading and thinking about lately is feminism, and more specifically into the more radical types, like here. I've found that their stuff can be separated into three broad categories: simple anarchistic man-hate (everything wrong with society is the fault of men, let's make our own lesbian enclaves where we can live without the interference of men!), deconstructing EVERYTHING for hidden messages of feminism or lack thereof and making a fuss every single time a movie, book, ad, or whatever shows a woman being some kind of negative stereotype (cos you know, it's not like men aren't also portrayed as negative stereotypes sometimes or that sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar), and pointing things out that are genuinely wrong (such as the complete lack of strong feminine characters pretty much everywhere, the strong perpetuation of some really destructive female stereotypes, and atrocities committed against women (although again, it sort of invalidates the fact that Bad Stuff can happen to men too). And they frustrate me so much, because here they have all these excellent analyses and legitimate points and then they go and ruin them by throwing in some random man-hate or showing that their only concern is for women and men can go jump off the nearest cliff as far as they care.
