31–40 of 201 posts
> Viewing ourselves as “good,” in fact we become grievously toxic, literally intoxicated. In this poisonous state of mind we are able to write off others — often literally billions of others — without hesitation or remorse, because they are “bad.”
my covid-denying, chain-smoking, cancer-surviving 85 year old aunt in Florida would totally consider know-it-all, liberal (and probably "antifa"!) me to be "righteous" but I sure am worried that she's going to get covid, I worry for her health, what's happened to her mind being fully indoctrinated by FOX news. She's not written off. My other cousin who pushes ivermectin propaganda on FB, OK maybe I'm a little less empathetic there :)
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One could argue any sort of idea is itself inherently a virus; once your mind understands it, it "clicks" into your head, and now you think about, and use it all the time -- spreading it to others.
It's a function of modern language/living, I believe.
We should all go back to clicking and clacking at one another in various tones and pitches.
click clack click click
clack clack clack
click clack click click
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> It goes hand in hand with wars for religious conversion, which also weren't a thing before Christ. This isn’t close to true. Look at the timeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_war > The moment memes switched over from religion to politics as primary content seems to have been the French Revolution, I can't think of a time before that when people killed each other over political ideals. Uh. What?
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False. Christianity got proselytism from its immediate parent, Second Temple era Judaism, which was also a proselytizing religion (or, at least, had proselytizing subsets.)
Later, including modern, Judaism is mostly non-proselytizing, sure, but that's not how it always was.
Something that "most" humans are prone to doesn't seem the same as addiction to me. It may produce some similar neural markers, but the number of humans subject to tolerance/dependency feedback loops that become pathological to the point of requiring medical intervention is surely small enough to not encompass "most" humans. If anything, this seems to be saying that self-righteousness is not an addiction at all, but a normal part of being a person that almost everyone experiences. If that is the case, I don't think individual virtue and discipline is up to the task of defeating where self-righteousness becomes prone to failure modes. Instead, we need systems and institutions that remain robust in the face of individual self-righteousness. Accept that a whole lot of people are going to be this way and find a way to make governments, companies, and communities that work anyway. If some collective effort relies upon the participants going against their own nature to work, it might work for some time, but it's doomed to not work for very long.
So many people are receiving this article very positively but am I the only one here who’s struggling to understand it? Why do the comments here make it seem as if it is impossible to be right but come off as merely being “self-righteous” because one is being engaged by someone else who is wrong and proud? Where do we draw the definition of when someone is being self-righteous? Is it possible to be self-righteous whe…
We must aim to be collectively less wrong. But that won't happen without rightly self-righteous people fighting the bad ideas. Doesn't mean they have to lack compassion for the mistaken though.
>But in the case of righteousness, such a belief is almost always mistaken. Most of us, whether we be timid or bold, liberal, conservative, or (especially) some version of radical, are prone to imbibing heady infusions of the stuff. Viewing ourselves as “good,” in fact we become grievously toxic, literally intoxicated. In this poisonous state of mind we are able to write off others — often literally billions of other…
I had the same reaction. I’m an endlessly skeptical and often cynical person. Whenever I see someone confidently believe they are “right”, I instinctively trust them less. This article made me realize this is just my own flavor of righteousness. That’s not to say righteousness is inherently bad. The only reason people make decisions is because they believe they’re right. I enjoyed this article but perhaps it’s overly…
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> It goes hand in hand with wars for religious conversion, which also weren't a thing before Christ. This isn’t close to true. Look at the timeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_war > The moment memes switched over from religion to politics as primary content seems to have been the French Revolution, I can't think of a time before that when people killed each other over political ideals. Uh. What?