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The case against the Twitter apology and our culture of performed remorse
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Re: The case against the Twitter apology and our culture of performed remorse
#52Insincerity should be the expected outcome from bullying people via socioeconomic pressure into making public apologies. Forcing someone to make a public statement via explicit or implicit threat of loss of income or ostracization is playground politics for adults.
If you make your money based on how popular you are, you are going to lose money, one way or another, if you start pissing off lots of people.
Bullying and playground politics just isn't the right way to think about this.
Kyrie, e.g., put the economic pressure on himself. Nike sells shoes. They don't want to pay him anymore because he can't sell shoes nearly as well now, and might impact their ability to sell shoes long-term. Regarding the Nets and NBA, Kyrie's many million dollar contract isn't exactly for playing basketball. It's for his ability to get lots and lots of people to want to watch basketball. When he pissed off a lot of people he doesn't do that very well, and his value as a basketball player drops.
Re: The case against the Twitter apology and our culture of performed remorse
#53Whoever figures out a secular distillation of the concept of grace is going to be very, very successful in community-building. The lack of it is painfully apparent, and it offers something to both the accused and the accusers. Now, whether people actually want that from others in these cases, or are merely enjoying the use of power a little too much, is another discussion.
I genuinely don't think it's compatible with contemporary western morality that holds that actions are either valid expressions of self-actualization and so require no apology, or are transgressions for which no forgiveness is possible.
The idea that regardless of a person's "right" to make a certain choice, an action can be so harmful that it cannot be corrected, but also that it can be forgiven is too far from how we think and live now.
Re: The case against the Twitter apology and our culture of performed remorse
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
ya hehe I had to be it's what reputations are made of, to some extent I feel bad for those who get f*** by it by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths and so everyone likes us
Note to down voters: this is a (relevant) direct quote from SBF's interview in Vox. [0] [0] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-frie...
Thanks! I had read it as poetry.
Re: The case against the Twitter apology and our culture of performed remorse
#55Forgiveness as a kind of mourning makes sense, but is counter-intuitive. I think we've come to regard "forgiveness" as inevitably ending with reconsiliation. But perhaps, more often, it shouldnt. That is, forgiveness is how I see the other when I see them not as an enemy or friend, but as a tragic part of nature. I have moved on. Our ability to forgive has, perhaps, been distorted by the perception that it's an act o…
That is, forgiveness is how I see the other when I see them not as an enemy or friend, but as a tragic part of nature.
To me, that's more a part of the reconciliation process than of forgiveness. It doesn't require forgiveness to abandon the other and move on. I rather think that forgiveness is the first step to restore the mutual relationship, it's a willful act to salvage what was broken. I guess in my mind, reconciliation is a prerequisite for forgiveness, but whereas reconciliation is about the self, forgiveness is about the other -- or at least the relationship with the other.
Re: The case against the Twitter apology and our culture of performed remorse
#56Re: The case against the Twitter apology and our culture of performed remorse
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
People may be slow to forgive as they may think it gives something to the other, a type of concession, an admission of something, something on one side of an equation. But forgiveness mainly gives something to oneself not the other. It frees oneself from that hold over oneself. Apologies, if they are expected, are expected within the frame of a transaction. But forgiveness which doesn't seek something from the other…
> The person who is forgiven doesn't need to know they are forgiven. Even if they are told, the feeling of freedom and the actual forgiveness comes before that. I was with you until this last bit. My experience is that people will beg for forgiveness. Even if you forgive them, you’ll then find it’s reconciliation they were after. They will then ignore your forgiveness, or rather continue asking for it until you provi…
It seems like you may fundamentally agree with the person you are replying to. The person who is forgiven may feel they need to know they are forgiven, but that doesn't mean they actually do. Your example of someone who really wants reconciliation, and has confused it with forgiveness, seems like a good case of someone not actually needing to know they are forgiven, because it's not what they really want or care about anyway.
Re: The case against the Twitter apology and our culture of performed remorse
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
In other words, we tell lies, to people who pretend to believe them. Everyone lies and we know it, our companies have mottos and everyone knows they’re fluff, and we teach kids to “thrive in ambiguity”, which is a beautiful phrase I’ve found on a job offer and which I have found symptomatic of our economy. I still wonder what it was like to live in ex-RDA. Did people tell lies that others pretended to believe?
ya hehe I had to be it's what reputations are made of, to some extent I feel bad for those who get f*** by it by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths and so everyone likes us
I gotta say that removing the context from this sort of changes its meaning in a misleading way for those seeing it for the first time. It makes perfect sense in this context as well but some people have interpreted this as a sort of nihilism, but it’s actually an endorsement of pure utilitarianism, more or less.
Which doesn’t make it better, my big take away from all the FTX stuff is that SBF and friends were just uh, not that smart, just dipshits losing other peoples money and thinking everything in life was as easy as impressing brainless VCs. (With some actual on purpose fraud mixed in as well, who knows)
Re: The case against the Twitter apology and our culture of performed remorse
#59Forgiveness as a kind of mourning makes sense, but is counter-intuitive. I think we've come to regard "forgiveness" as inevitably ending with reconsiliation. But perhaps, more often, it shouldnt. That is, forgiveness is how I see the other when I see them not as an enemy or friend, but as a tragic part of nature. I have moved on. Our ability to forgive has, perhaps, been distorted by the perception that it's an act o…
> That is, forgiveness is how I see the other when I see them not as an enemy or friend, but as a tragic part of nature. I have moved on. Our ability to forgive has, perhaps, been distorted by the perception that it's an act of kindness. I think, rather, it's the most rutheless form of grief there is.
I don't see how forgiveness is ruthless. It takes great compassion to accept people and situations as they are without harboring bitterness, resentment, or judgment. Forgiveness is also a form of self-love.
The non-attachment that comes with forgiveness isn't the same as being cold or moving on by leaving someone else behind. That's still looking at things from an egoic "I have been wronged" narrative. Forgiveness is about dropping that story entirely.
> I think we've come to regard "forgiveness" as inevitably ending with reconsiliation. But perhaps, more often, it shouldnt.
I think in general reconciliation is a good thing, but it's not a given. And even if you do reconcile with someone, you don't have to restore full trust and involvement with them. You can clear the air and never talk to them ever again, or just on a need-to basis, or whatever. It all depends.
In general, our society's difficulty with forgiveness and the like is just another facet of not liking to confront truth. We struggle with truth in this era because the truth is often painful and demands a lot of change out of us that we feel unable or unwilling to give. The Twitter apology is an answer to the question "How do we pay lip service to the truth without having to actually engage with it?"
Re: The case against the Twitter apology and our culture of performed remorse
#60Forgiveness as a kind of mourning makes sense, but is counter-intuitive. I think we've come to regard "forgiveness" as inevitably ending with reconsiliation. But perhaps, more often, it shouldnt. That is, forgiveness is how I see the other when I see them not as an enemy or friend, but as a tragic part of nature. I have moved on. Our ability to forgive has, perhaps, been distorted by the perception that it's an act o…
> That is, forgiveness is how I see the other when I see them not as an enemy or friend, but as a tragic part of nature. I have moved on. Our ability to forgive has, perhaps, been distorted by the perception that it's an act of kindness. I think, rather, it's the most rutheless form of grief there is. I don't see how forgiveness is ruthless. It takes great compassion to accept people and situations as they are withou…
Well, from the pov of the person being "detached", to be treated as an object is rutheless.
What we are saying, after all, is that the other is "a mere product" of nature; a symptom, not an agent.
This, I think, is the most "anti-Western" notion 'inside' forgiveness, and why it seems so counter-intutive.
The thing we do not want to give up is that people are agents who bare responsibility for their actions, that people are our objects of concern, that people are special.
When we forgive we, ineffect, dehumanise -- at least, for the moment of that forgiveness. We step outside of a world in which they matter. And that seems a more ruthless and radical gesture than just hating them.