In today’s world it seems that few are willing to do what it
takes to live a truly moral or ethical life.
That’s part due to changing definitions allowing behaviors previously
considered outside the realm to be justified such that they can still remain within
the magic circle. The other part
contributing to this newly emerging narcissism is, well, let’s face it; doing
the right thing can be really hard. And
actually, the opposite can be said of some individuals, doing the wrong thing
can sometimes feel really, really good.
Especially, if we gain rewards for our words or actions, a result that
we believe would never have occurred if what we’d done or said were really all
that bad.
As we are social creatures the rewards are usually
interpersonal in nature. Suddenly we belong to a group in a way we’d always
pined for; we mean something special to someone we believe to be a person of
worth, it gains us attention when don’t know how to do so since it was always
automatic, a given taken for granted, but now we’ve lost the sources we’d
relied upon.
So considering the
significance of such magnificent rewards, some of which we may feel we can’t
live without, is a little give here or there, a slight loosening of a boundary on
this side or that really bad? How can it
be if our behavior, despite having previously been convinced of its wrongness
and if observed in another person still judged wrong, results in something we
have convinced ourselves is necessary to our very survival?
Yet as a race, we weren’t always this way. At one time we understood that at its extreme
there were times that in order to do the right thing we had to give up what we
wanted most in life. And we did so as
doing the right thing was what we couldn’t live without. We didn’t just believe that doing the right
thing would make us happy; it truly did make us happy.
Yet that is clearly not the way today. We seem to have no qualms doing the wrong
thing, even if it hurts someone else, wounds them beyond repair, as long as we
can point to a justification repeated so often as to be delivered and accepted
just as easy as you please.
Is there a way to undo this?
Somehow turn back the clocks to a time when right was right and wrong
was wrong, when we continuously attempted to see through others eyes, take
their perspective before doing anything that might affect them, this an
integral part of our moral code?
For morality is meaningless in a world of one. It is in the arena of human interaction where
we can understand why it was accepted that the moral life and the pleasing life
must go hand in hand. For when the
pleasing life with all its desires and ego syntonic rationalizations slips the
grasp of the moral life, it will repress the separation. And on its own, while there still may remain
vestiges of its moral counterpart it develops its own definition of
morality. Without its true twin to
provide the way the version it comes up with is bound to be skewed and anything
but moral.
I’ll
continue this topic next post as there’s much to say and from what is shown on
the news day after day, with all manner of violence, dehumanization and untold
harm that we perpetrate against each other, we seem to have lost our moral
sense of True North. There appears to be
a growing tolerance in terms of what it takes to horrify us. Where along the way did what previously was considered
entirely unacceptable without exception and enough to make us shudder in
disbelief at the cruelty we were witnessing, become something we now respond to
with little more than a halfhearted, “Isn’t that sad?”
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