Morality as safety.
The universe is far, far too vast and complex for the human mind to hold it in our consciousness. “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”
But of course this is terrifying. Bad things happen and we don’t know why, we don’t know how to guarantee our own or our loved ones safety. We don’t like not understanding, and so we create models for understanding that our human brains can handle but that are of course very, very simplified. Often this takes the form of religion, but not always, sometimes it takes the form of philosophical, moral, or political righteousness.
Righteousness as a means to process and manage the chaos of the universe as we experience it.
Here the idea is that you will be safe from bad things happening, or at lease not liable or accountable for them happening, if you are righteous enough. And so if you adhere strictly to the morals, then all is well.
I absorbed this thought pattern in childhood from my, at the time, very religious parents, and it worked for me… until I got Hashitomots. When I was a kid and I would be concerned with bad things in the world my parents would tell me “yes, but don’t worry, that won’t happen to you.” the connotation being that I am righteous and good and so am safe from the bad things in the world. I believed this, until this certain bad thing happened to me. Being told that I had a chronic illness was not supposed to happen, I did all the right things. I took care of myself, I was a good person…. I was righteous. I remember the moment very well, sitting on the couch of my house in Greta NSW, hearing those words on the phone broke my understanding of the world. This wasn’t supposed to happen to me. Not me, I am righteous.
Ever since then has been a slow and steady process of unlearning that thought pattern and learning how to process and handle the inherent volatility of the universe from the human perspective. It’s tough, it’s very scary. I can not keep my self or my loved ones safe. I can influence our safety a lot, but I have no real control.
No matter how righteous we are, we are not safe. Not in this world at least. ...It’s a though one.
When bad things happen to others, or when we have disagreements with other, or even when bad things happen to use, we can attribute those bad things to moral failings in others. We can blame the degradation of our relationships on others. It isn’t our fault as we held to your morals, it was their fault as they were immoral.
While this line of thought brings a lot of comfort, and a provides a frame work for making sense of the universe and life, it separates us from others. Of course morality exist and we should pursue it, but when we turn to it for safety, we limit our ability to grow and connect.
This thought process kills curiosity and genuine connection. When we disagree with someone, it’s not that we might be missing something, it’s not that they might face different logistics in the world and thus have different strategies that work for them… it’s that they are in a state of moral failing. And when someone disagree with us, we assume that they are finding us to be in a state of moral failing.
This thought process also prevents accountability and growth. Taking accountability for our actions requires us to admit that we may have been in error in some fashion. But then we might have to admit that we have or had some sort of moral failing. And we can’t do that, because then we are subject to the volatility of the universe, we lose our safety.
When we think like this we lose our curiosity, there is only sorting into moral buckets.
Often these moral buckets form and then ossify, and so things that do not look, sound, or feel to us like our already defined buckets of morality get dismissed.
Because of our sorting everything into moral buckets, others are unable to feel genuine connection to us or to trust us. We will only assist others when we find them to be in the ‘right’, to be in a state of righteousness. Otherwise, we dismissed them as being in error and needing moral or philosophical correction. This means that they can not ask us for assistance or understanding with issues that do not fit into our predefined moral buckets.
In this way, we chose our righteousness, our safety, over knowing and helping others.
