The Righteousness Fix | Hacker News Reader

The Righteousness Fix

orionmagazine.org

160 pointsjohnwdefeo180 comments

The tendency to link the 'addiction' tag to every undesirable human behavior is a common trend, but it's worth remembering what actual physical addiction to a substance is: a biochemical response to the introduction of a foreign substance into the body, that results in withdrawal symptoms when said foreign substance is removed. If there are no withdrawal symptoms, there is really no addiction involved.

What the author of this piece calls 'addiction to righteousness' can also be described as 'obsession with outrage porn' or 'wanting to get triggered'. It's an easy fix for the addict to obtain - anyone suffering this malady can just scroll Twitter or Reddit etc. until they find something that does the trick. Then they can add their voice to the chorus of condemnation or commiseration and get the biochemical stimulus they were craving, most likely a dopamine reward. Note that the story they're reacting too doesn't even need to be true, and I always assume at least 50% of the 'anonymous personal testimonials' on social media are just fabricated stories put out for the upvotes (upvote addiction being rather similar).

One way out of that trap is to 'buffer' all the social media information you get, i.e. assume everything is untrustworthy, and if only it's something you think you're really interested in, something worth spending time on, only then move it to the 'active' folder, and do some work to verify the information is actually reliable.

Warning: outrage addicts might suffer some withdrawal from the dopamine release effect if they do this. Long-term mental health will likely improve, however.

Also: Consider delaying discussing, liking or re-sharing an article until you've read it.

> The tendency to link the 'addiction' tag to every undesirable human behavior is a common trend, but it's worth remembering what actual physical addiction to a substance is: a biochemical response to the introduction of a foreign substance into the body, that results in withdrawal symptoms when said foreign substance is removed. If there are no withdrawal symptoms, there is really no addiction involved.

"addiction" is not equivalent to "dependence", nor does one imply the other. pain management patients are typically dependent on opioids; they would have severe withdrawal if they abruptly stopped their regimen. but they don't necessarily have the compulsive/obsessive behavior of addicts. there are also drugs people get addicted to that don't have much or any associated withdrawal symptoms. people don't get withdrawal from gambling, but they can surely be as addicted as opioid users.

I've seen several comments like this recently. addiction seems an odd thing to gatekeep. the only "requirements" for addiction are impairment of control related to particular behaviors/substances, preoccupation with said behavior/substance, and continued use/behavior despite consequences.

Opiate addiction results in a higher concentration of opiate receptors on many cell surfaces. Possible down-regulation of endogenous endorphin production may also occur, as I recall. The result of removing the exogenous opiates is thus a very painful experience as the endorphin/receptor ratio is destabilized. This also seems to play a role in alcohol addiction as alcohol use has opiate-like co-effects[1]

[1] https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh313/185-195.htm

Calling this 'dependency' instead of 'addiction' seems like a semantics game. A lot of other behaviors seem to involve dopamine rewards, but in those case withdrawal does seem to be much less of a physical phenomenon. However I'd definitely argue that addiction is a biochemical phenomenon. Whether or not it is 'compulsive' - well, people have free will and some people just want that little boost, even if it means they get led around by the nose by advertisers and opinion influencers and so on. A bit of self-awareness is a good antidote.

Some author - William Burroughs? said something like, "Heroin is the ultimate capitalist product - the consumer will crawl through a sewer of broken glass just for the opportunity to buy". That's why consumer culture promotes addiction in all spheres of life.

While it does seem like a matter of semantics, in the end, whether something is classified as an addiction or a dependance doesn't seem to be as binary as "has a biological response to removal of said substance".

I'd argue that since we do have dopamine/seretonin driven reward systems, anything that modifies a physiological expression of the neuro-chemical lifecycle from pre-exposure to post-exposure (whether that be density of receptors, abundance of neurotransmitter, some yet unknown neurochemical expression), then that substance can cause addiction.

Video games could do this, just not as dramatically as heroin, but given that modern day life is basically just a hamster wheel of our neurochemical systems, anything has the potential to be addictive as defined above, it all depends on where on the spectrum of addiction said substance lies.

it's not semantics. there's a useful distinction between addiction and dependence. dependence is the tolerance/withdrawal cycle. it doesn't necessarily coincide with the cravings that are characteristic of addiction. someone on pain meds for a broken leg may never think of them again once the treatment ends. it doesn't make sense to consider/treat them as an addict. conversely, a gambling addict is more similar to a heroin addict than a typical PM patient.

> The tendency to link the 'addiction' tag to every undesirable human behavior is a common trend

It’s a subset of a common, but dishonest, technique of using false equivalence to downplay or exaggerate one thing.

In this case, the author points out similarities between drug addiction and some behaviors which are very much not in the same league as drug addiction. They may have a point that both are bad, but that does a disservice to readers who don’t really grasp just how much worse drug addiction is than, say, a pseudo-addiction to arguing with people on the internet.

> If there are no withdrawal symptoms, there is really no addiction involved.

It depends how you define withdrawal symptoms. Some people really do become anxious or angry or moody if they are deprived from their vices, whether drugs or habits. However, the addiction to drugs definitely runs deeper, given that they literally poke at the parts of your brain that inform it that you want more of something.

> It’s a subset of a common, but dishonest, technique of using false equivalence to downplay or exaggerate one thing.

In the first sentence the author identifies as an "sober addict" - so not without authority, they're claiming a subjective equivalence between drugs and internet outrage.

I'm sure everyone's experiences of those things is going to be different.

Not many people these days dispute the idea that you can become addicted to gambling.

https://www.economist.com/international/2022/01/01/are-video...

I’ve been addicted to video games without being physically dependent on them. I’ve been physically dependent on amphetamines without being addicted to them.

The relevant distinction isn’t what happens in your brain (which is not a useful diagnostic criterion), but whether you pursue the behavior to a harmful extent.

Is that distinction really useful though? Doesn't that rope in pretty much any behavior that deviates from your idealistic expectations of yourself?

Is a nail-biter an addict?

"Not your ideal expectation of yourself" is probably not enough, but if it's causing the nail-biter significant harm, then potentially, yes. If you've got someone who's tried unsuccessfully to stop biting their nails, they do it as a stress relief mechanism, it's causing significant bleeding/infection, they're hiding their hands out of embarrassment, they're having problems at work because it's grossing people out, etc, that could probably qualify as a behavioral addiction.

Nitpick. Dopamine doesn't signal a reward, and it isn't a reward in itself. In this context, the important function of dopamine is that it signals a reward prediction error.

Thanks for this, I never quite thought of it that way.

I struggled with ADHD-like symptoms profoundly during the eras of my life when my beliefs didn't match the trajectory the world was on, mainly during the early 2000s and late 2010s. My beliefs have since changed, now that I'm able to set boundaries and not let the outside world influence my inner peace as much as it once did.

But I really think there is something to the connection between negative feedback loops and ADHD/CPTSD/OCD etc. Which suggests to me that our obsession with medication is only looking at half the issue. Why are so many (generally clever, effective) people so consistently feeling like their intentions don't match outcomes? If it's not them, then what's wrong with the world or our role in it? Could we change reality instead of ourselves? Is there a difference? These are the questions I wrestle with now.

These are good questions.

Medicalizing (or, providing the veneer of medical explanation in the realm of) ideological differences is weird.

I wonder what the author's thoughts are on "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion" by Jonathan Haidt. It mentions many clear refutes backed up by history to the idea of how bad it is for humans to be "addicted to righteousness".

For example, individuals have not and do not live by themselves in a vacuum as only selfish. We are also very group-ish, and it is the righteousness or norms of those groups that allow for things to get done. People have evolved to agree to social and group norms because those groups always trust each other more, thereby getting more done.

On how efficient secular societies are, Haidt claims: "We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).”

If you support secularization and the ideas of "addictions to righteousness" you have to at the very least be worried about how low birth rates are for people who believe those ideals.

Why is "efficient" defined as consuming natural resources to produce children?

Why is that a measure of societal success?

Who gets to determine that this is a rubric that should even be considered?

Seems simplistic in the extreme. I think enlightenment thinking and the concurrent non-successionist/non-miraculous/cessationist protestant reformation that drove the new world clearly overlap heavily in the venn diagram of ideology. Are modern atheists core positions (epistemologically "different" "new atheism" fizzled quite quickly) not of the same ilk as our historical humanist/agnostic/deist societies?

> Why is that a measure of societal success?

Any judgement about ultimate value is just as arbitrary. It's one of the most basic and most intractable problems in philosophy.

The big assumption here is that increasing birthrates (above replacement level) is somehow the ideal outcome of a society.

What if the ideal outcome is that humans populations shrink to 1/100th their current size and most "work" gets done by machines? Wouldn't that be vastly more efficient?

The 2 high level problems with this line of thought: Who decides what we optimize for ("vastly more efficient") and Is this something that "should" have a single target across a society or across the world, or is this something that individuals or groups should decide for themselves. This line of thought can very easily shift into "worlds super elite aim to commit genocide in order to save the planet".

I do personally wonder (in a sci-fi dystopian novel sense) if the worst case climate change scenario would just end up with 99% of humans dying and the 1% that survive in isolated locations becoming a more sustainable civilization until technology catches back up and allows humans to re-populate the world to today's levels (or just leave to mars).

If there were zero people, no work would be required, and thus no machines either. The environment would just do whatever it wanted. This would be more efficient still.

Efficient at accomplishing which goals?

Why stop at 1/100th? How about eliminating all of humanity? Why would the universe be worse off with no humans in it?

Why not eliminating all life on Earth? What makes life inherently more valuable than a sterile rock floating through space?

Do you think we felt righteous when we invaded Iraq on a lie? Do you think that the Hutus felt righteous when they killed Tutsis in Rwanda in the 90s? Do you think that people felt righteous when they committed heinous torture on people, for petty crimes, in the medieval era?

Do you think the vaccinated feel righteous when they condemn the unvaccinated?

This comment is just noise and doesn't really address anything the parent comment put forth.

Anyone can ask questions.

The purpose wasn't to ask questions but to point out that our society, and societies around the world, have been prone to behavior that we consider wrong or a mistake due to righteousness. This was to directly support the original article and to refute the OP comment that righteousness can only be a good thing.

Maybe the style was a little rhetorical, but I do think the article has a point that we have to be wary of "righteous" behavior so that we can avoid doing something terrible. Of course, there probably are some (even many) useful points, as the original comment suggested. However, we do have to be conscious of the bad points to avoid going down a bad path.

Of course, the last question on the unvaccinated was draw immediacy to our own society which spawned things like r/HermanCainAward which celebrates the death of the unvaccinated, and other attitudes against them.

> The purpose wasn't to ask questions but to point out

That's exactly why I called out your comment. It was loaded with questions, when your goal was to make a point. It's a nice rhetorical device in theory, but blows up in practice. I've taken courses in communications and read several books, and virtually all of them say not to ask questions if your goal is to make a point - especially on contentious issues. Just go directly to making your point/argument.

> and to refute the OP comment that righteousness can only be a good thing.

The OP never made such a claim. His comment is decently nuanced. I'm also familiar with Haidt's work, and OP's comment is inline with his work. Haidt also doesn't claim that righteousness can only be a good thing. Indeed, the book points out problems with righteousness, and I would assume the OP is aware of them.

Not only that, but he pointed out research that looked at communes in the US in the 18th century. The "survival" rate of such communes decades on was starkly different between those that were based on religion and those that weren't. The latter had a very low survival rate.

Religion is often passed down from parents to children, and people historically tend to believe whatever their parents do.

But in modern secular societies, family is less influential, and people get their information from other sources. For example, most people go to public schools, which teach from a secular perspective. They consume secular media and participate in an increasingly secular, globalized internet culture. It is increasingly possible for a person to completely abandon their parents' ideals and integrate themselves into a different community.

For that reason, I would argue that people today are likely to find other ways to spread their ideas other than passing them on to their children. This might be through art, including stuff like spreading memes on the internet. It could be through career, such as publishing research in a journal. Or through politics and activism.

What you say is probably true, but there's a creepy quality to it: spreading your ideas to other people's children.

Spreading your ideas to other adults seems fine. Or spreading your ideas to your own children seems fine, because you are heavily invested and reap the results of the outcome.

And educating on fundamentals like reading, writing, and math seems fine.

But just pushing whatever pet ideas or political philosophies on other people's children seems downright bad.

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 when you’re actually right or can it only happen when you’re wrong but you insist that you are right?

We can't go far as a specie by denying that objective truth exists, and thus that in an argument there's, more often than not, someone who is less wrong.

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.

Usually both sides of arguments both have truth to them and the way to objective truth exists via trying to understand why both sides believe what they do.

Athiesm seems like the objective rational truth.

But why do billions of people believe in an invisible man in the sky?

What is the objective truth that we can learn from that?

I think that this is fundamentally untrue. Middle between truth and lie is a lie.

When you are trying to find truth purely by searching middle of what people say, you are enabling bad actors and punishing honest people.

Nobody is talking about the ‘middle’, or even lies.

Most people are at least partly wrong or mistaken about most things, but there are usually some things they are right about.

There is value to be gained in finding out what another person is right about, even if they are wrong overall or you disagree with them.

Yeah it's the "partially" part that's important.

You could be right that:

Blood keeps you alive, working hard is important, community makes you happier overall.

While being wrong that:

If you're sick it's because your blood is poisoned, you should work as hard as possible no matter what, you should always put community first.

This is an imperfect set of examples. A better set would look like a graph of interconnected beliefs that are hard to disentangle, each node being a statement that is true under certain circumstances but not others.

The idea that there is an absolute truth with no shades in between truth and falsity... that:

1) ignores the graph-theoretical nature of truth

2) is a form of psychological "splitting" (which is described in the article)

3) is basically a fundamentalism

When we decide to label someone's statements as wrong and act against them, we ought [;-)] to be aware of this and take ownership of that stance, not attribute our epistemic decision to absolutes.

> Middle between truth and lie is a lie.

It sounds like you're perhaps assuming the "middle" is a point in rational space. But maybe "middle" is best conceived as a point in possibility space -- it's the position over which someone must travel to ever get beside you in the future.

So allowing the middle to exist as valid (even if it isn't "truth") is perhaps important if the goal is for two groups to align more. Denying the middle position as "non-truth" is only helpful if one's goals have less to do with depolarization.

Anyhow, these are just some loosely held ideas. Maybe they're wrong :)

> Usually both sides of arguments both have truth to them and the way to objective truth exists via trying to understand why both sides believe what they do.

This is literally about two people arguing. It is actually very possible that one of them is right and other is wrong. Arguments are not just about abstract things.

> Denying the middle position as "non-truth" is only helpful if one's goals have less to do with depolarization.

Sure. Because "depolarization" while ignoring where it ends can end up in even worst place.

Plus, the "truth is in the middle" thing motivates actors on all sides to make up extreme lies. I don't mean just not caring about facts, but intentionally making them wrong. Because the more extremely I push, the more likely you will end up tilted toward my position.

Thanks for replying :)

> Plus, the "truth is in the middle" thing motivates actors on all sides to make up extreme lies.

No, this is not what the research points to. Rather, having people confidently (and NOT weakly) holding middle positions strengthens groups' abilities to reach consensus. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdfExtended/S0960-9822(...

And yes, I understand that this research is intentionally on topics of ambiguous morality, but that is because that served the protocol design: they didn't want to complicate the protocol with there being a "right" answer someone could look up. And increasingly in our public discourse, factual and moral disagreements are starting to share the same human qualities/challenges anyhow. Conversation about facts are increasingly like conversations about morality, and will be increasingly so as we become more networked.

> Arguments are not just about abstract things.

Believe me, I get that. I'm not overlooking that. But it doesn't matter to the divide that exists, and the steps required to repair it. And for me, the main value in even noticing a difference in perception is to repair it. Noting it for any of reason is just for posterity, and is pretty pointless imho.

Example: Someone you care to engage with believes their experience of the Mandela Effect[1] means they're hopping between dimensions. For the sake of stakes, pretend this is breaking apart this person's marriage. Pretend that giving up on them isn't something you want to do. There is a very clear factual truth here: the Mandela Effect makes no sense as anything more than human forgetfulness. But it's entirely possible that no amount of "bringing the truth" will change their mind, especially when they can easily hop on the internet and be validated by others who (for their own reasons) believe the same thing.

The more likely way to bring them to your reality is to be in closer relationship to their view. To ask questions about it. To make them feel like you're trying to understand and see what they do. Even if you believe 100% that they are wrong, you need to enter a mindset and perspective where they might be right.

That's all I mean. It's basically practicing humility about things you think you already know, because knowing something factual misses the whole process and serves no one. And honestly, my experience of building reflexes for acting this way, is that you actually do learn some things you thought you already knew. Maybe not about hopping dimensions, but about the underlying drives and motivations that animate the curious conclusions at the surface.

[1]: https://www.alternatememories.com/news/tv/mandela-effect-fea...

> maybe "middle" is best conceived as a point in possibility space -- it's the position over which someone must travel to ever get beside you in the future.

Physical motion is continuous, but change of ideas is not physical movement. The ex-Trotskyites that became the original neoconservatives did not move through a continuous path of intermediary ideologies on their left->right journey.

> Denying the middle position as "non-truth" is only helpful if one's goals have less to do with depolarization.

Why would depolarization be a goal independent of the specific consensus position achieved?

It's not wrong to say that athiesm has truth and religion has truth.

Truth (and science) are iterative.

The world is infinitely complex and unless one is omniscient the only thing one can know for certain is that one is less wrong at the moment.

To think one has known an irrefutable truth is fanaticism and righteousness.

Lobotomy's won the Nobel prize when science roundly believed they were beneficial and I'm sure in the moment those experts thought they knew an irrefutable truth.

> Athiesm seems like the objective rational truth.

> But why do billions of people believe in an invisible man in the sky?

There's no equivalency or even logical basis of comparison between these two statements. You could've said, "Oranges exist... But why do we have apples?" or "Some areas of the ocean have boats. But why do other areas not have boats?" and it would make about as much sense.

> What is the objective truth that we can learn from that?

That atheists exist but not everyone is an atheist? What would we by trying to learn from this sort of search for understanding?

"Why both sides believe what they do" is an enormously open-ended, completely ambiguous realm of thought. To drill down the logic behind this sort of question; "because the universe happened."

I'm pretty sure we understand why anti-vax people exist... The roads that lead there aren't that numerous. We also understand why they think we're wrong and they're right and vice versa. There's no "lack of understanding".

The real question is, "how do we break them free from irrational thought?" Is it even possible (en masse) when so many powerful entities depend on these people to stay irrational?

Could the likes of Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax even exist if everyone suddenly switched over to Vulkan-like logical thinking?

> There's no equivalency or even logical basis of comparison between these two statements

They're polar opposites. If one is true the other is false.

However there's truth to both of them.

Actually, no: If the atheists are right then the theists are 100% wrong. There's no middle ground there or "truth to both sides."

If the theists are right... Which theists? Are we talking about polytheists? Single god but multiple instances of it (aka Ahura Mazda in Zoroastrianism)? Monotheism?

If any one of those are right then all the others are wrong. There's not really any ground that exists between these beliefs.

Religion provides community, it provides a spiritual outlet, it provides ritual, it provides comfort in the face of death.

There's many benefits and truths about religion that don't require an invisible man in the sky to exist.

That was acutually my original point.

TRUTH can be found in both atheism and theism.

I think you're confused. The truth you're talking about exists outside of both of those contexts (theism VS atheism).

Religion is just a collection of beliefs that may or may not involve "an invisible man in the sky". Theism VS atheism are mostly orthogonal to the point you're trying to make.

People are driven and indeed may have a need for a sense of a higher power.

Having a shared sense of purpose is very powerful for people.

You don't get that from an atheistic Church which is basically just a club where the only shared purpose is disliking something.

I suspect you’re making more implicit assumptions than you realize.

Also your snarky, facile dismissal of religion makes the idea of constructive engagement with you seem unlikely.

I think you missed the point.

Please tell me where there was snark or dismissal of religion?

Talk about missing the point.

Do you believe “invisible man in the sky” is an accurate representation of of the beliefs of billions of people?

I read that as snarky. Maybe I am too cynical.

At least from my perspective, it's the standard reddit atheist dismissal/thought terminating cliche.

Certainly does correlate with a disdain of religion in my experience.

'invisible man in the sky'

It's useful because it's an abstract term that can apply to the majority of religions.

No need to label God or Allah or Shiva or Jehova or Zeus or whatever.

Saying 'higher power' or 'cosmic force' is not descriptive as there's also include things people don't worship like astronomy.

Almost all monotheistic organized religions have worshipped an invisible man in the sky and most poly theistic as well.

Paul Graham's essay What You Can't Say contains a great piece of advice:

One way to do this is to ratchet the debate up one level of abstraction. If you argue against censorship in general, you can avoid being accused of whatever heresy is contained in the book or film that someone is trying to censor. You can attack labels with meta-labels: labels that refer to the use of labels to prevent discussion.

The downside is sometimes people doesn't understand what you meant.

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

> Downside is sometimes people doesn't understand what you meant.

But the explicit purpose is to conceal what you actually mean to avoid criticism. So, you need to be more specific about “people”: one downside is that the intended audience sometimes doesn't understand what you mean (another is that the audience you are trying to bypass sometimes does.)

PG is referring to the long-recognized practice of political dog-whistles here.

At some point a dog whistle is just a whistle though. Every free speech advocate that defends some odious speech is not endorsing that speech.

>> PG is referring to the long-recognized practice of political dog-whistles here.

Serious question: what exactly do you mean by "political dog-whistle"?

No similar term is contained in the Paul Graham piece that was linked and I am genuinely curious what it is you are implying by this.

I have heard this term "political dog-whistle" thrown around over the past few years and for me it has somewhat poor metaphorical quality -- but that's just me.

Can you help me understand this term in the way you seem to understand it?

It is the idea that certain beliefs are outside the Overton Window [1] of acceptable political discourse, but you want to signal your endorsement of that belief to your supporters without saying it outright, to preserve plausible deniability.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

Only the dog can hear the dog whistle.

The act of using coded words, phrases or even emoji to say specific things to a specific group while seeming innocuous to the general public. It can be used for members of a group to acknowledge who each other are, or to rename issues so that they seem different to the general public, or to bring up events to push an agenda. [0]

[0] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dog-whistle

I have a very difficult time finding this to be applicable to the PG piece.

That's one interpretation, but I don't think a particularly charitable one.

My own read on that would be this: the explicit purpose is to discuss something that has emotional/tribal baggage associated with it (which makes it hard for people to think rationally) by distilling out the actual meat of the issue without the baggage.

I think its important to be critical of things, but I see a tendency for people to constantly be looking for the enemy in conversations online. Everyone has their weapons raised. Everything has to be labeled and sorted into it's own little box (the terms "disingenuous" and "bad faith" seem to have exploded in use for example). That's what I see in your reference to dog whistles. Do you think pg is advocating dog whistling?

But the explicit purpose is to conceal what you actually mean to avoid criticism.

Criticism is OK, lynching is not. Attacking the censorship makes obvious that there is a problem with free speech. If you just defend the specific topic, you get sucked into the mess.

Saying that righteousness is an addiction is actually more efficient than attacking one of the addicts' many self-righteous causes. Have you tried to reason with an addict about their use?

Of course we believe we are right otherwise we would believe something that we think is wrong. Self righteous people want you to know that they are right and you are wrong.

But I think what the article is really getting at is that we are putting people into groups of good and bad based on what they think. We have started to dehumanize people who don't agree with us.

Is it OK to punch a Nazi?

People get addicted to controversy and seeing someone else who is "wrong and proud". And when this happens, they start to make up their own controversy and become more radical in order to feed their addiction.

You can believe that you're "good" and define certain things as "bad" without being "self-righteous". Heck, you can pretty much be wrong about what's good and bad and still not be self-righteous.

The problem arises when your opinion becomes rigid and you stop accepting any debate, then when you broaden your opinion so that it becomes more radical, because you want to be "right" and see others be "wrong" so bad. And this can turn even the most reasonable opinion into something extreme, e.g. "black people deserve to live" turning into "white people don't deserve to live [because they endanger black people]"

Humans have a strong bias for doubling down on our current beliefs and rejecting conflicting evidence.

It is crucial that we are just as harsh judging our current beliefs and subjecting them to scrutiny, as we are judging and scrutinizing beliefs with which we disagree.

Social Media rewards polarized, highly motivated points of view. This isn't a "both sides" thing, it's a human nature thing.

These highly polarized posts never change anyone's minds. They only make people more motivated. It can be good to be more motivated, but the cost is driving a wedge between people who are differently motivated.

So how can tech solve this?

I have no idea, but people can help by having conversations with a few points in mind:

1. You can't change their mind. If your goal is to change someone's mind, you've set yourself up for failure. Facts don't change minds, yelling certainly does not.

2. You must listen. Try to hear principles that you share. Ask questions about what motivates them.

3. Speaking from shared principles and sharing personal stories can help build common ground.

The problem? These things DON'T SCALE. I don't think this works except on a 1x1 or small group level.

I really don't know how tech can address this.

I think it has to be a change to the culture.

Many of us have been shocked at the sudden rejection of Classical Liberalism. Preference for free exchange of ideas, objectivity, debate, judging arguments without regard to who is making the argument.

I think those of us who were engaged in that intellectual world, never realized that most people are not invested in these values. So now that everyone has the capability to broadcast their ideas to the entire world, and consume ideas from anywhere in the world, the marketplace of ideas reflect the tribalism that was already there, but not as evident because "The Elite" controlled the discourse in the past.

Trump of course understood all of this intuitively. He almost exclusively debates people, not ideas, and many people responded positively and enthusiastically to that style of discourse.

I agree. Kids are growing up with this stuff. I can only hope that helps them build mental defenses; but I don't expect it to happen automatically. I think it will take a lot of effort from a lot of people.

I'd expect the opposite. Growing up indoctrinated doesn't make you indoctrination resistant.

It's not that I reject those values per se in their intended, theoretical sense. I don't find them a sufficiently nuanced tool when applied to the world, and so reject any framework that depends wholly on them.

For example:

* None of us are making objective judgements about an argument without considering how the speaker affects us. If you believe you're above this, your evaluations are similarly tainted, just as someone who is openly prejudiced against the speaker would be.

* What does "free exchange of ideas" look like in an unequal society? Where are these ideas being exchanged? They got free buses to the venue, childcare, guaranteed time off work to attend? If not then to what extent is this exchange of ideas open to all?

* Debate isn't a value in its own right. The usefulness or correctness of an idea is fairly unrelated to the rhetorical skills of the person presenting it.

I don't really want to debate any of these specifically so won't engage further on them. I raise them just to point out that rejections of classical liberalism aren't necessarily based on rejecting its values specifically, but more its views about the right role of those values in the world.

Yes, your comment is exactly part of the problem I am talking about.

You write long sentences and use sophisticated vocabulary, but what you are saying is that the truth or value of a belief or an idea depends on the person speaking or writing it. Not on the quality of the belief or idea itself. This is sophisticated tribalism.

"I don't really want to debate any of these specifically so won't engage further on them."

Of course. Because truth or challenging your own preconceptions are not important to you. Just reinforcing your alliance to your self perceived tribe.

You said you were shocked by people rejecting classical liberalism. I offered some of the reasons I've rejected classical liberalism.

I don't think it's possible to evaluate an idea purely on its own merits, without considering the people forming, executing, and effected by it. I don't think it would be meaningful if you could.

That may be irreconcilable with your worldview! That doesn't give you a view into my mind or soul and tell me what is or isn't important to me. It's possibly that I don't value what you consider to be The Truth.

Honestly the idea that there even is anything resembling a single objective truth on complex issues is a lot of my fucking problem with liberalism right there.

I'm not trying to say that some people's ideas should matter more than others. I am saying that that is already true in the structure of the world and that we have a responsibility to acknowledge and account for that.

This way of thinking is literally killing people.

In the US, among both working class Republicans and working class black communities, many people decided not to get a Covid vaccine because they do not trust the group of people telling them to get it.

The identity of the people telling them to get the vaccine is completely irrelevant. The reason to get the vaccine is the results of the clinical trials demonstrating that it was safe and effective.

Do those groups have good reason to not trust the kinds of people representing "science"? I am sure they do.

But they do not have to trust those people as individuals. They just need to trust the outcomes of the trials.

>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 others — without hesitation or remorse, because they are “bad.” It’s on the news every day: people addicted to righteousness are wreaking havoc, at home and abroad. And as I view this madness, I feel myself swell up with — what? You guessed it — righteous indignation! As usual, addiction becomes a closed system, feeding on itself.

Best paragraph. I was guilty also.

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 reductive. I don’t know what we can do to cure righteousness, and maybe that premise itself is nonsensical.

"Right" is relative to one's particular situation and social surroundings. One thing could be right for a remote-working individual living in a big city, and it could at the same be wrong for country dwellers. Different types of communities function in different ways.

My take away is that all we can hope to do is our best, and recognize that we’re all trying to do our best.

No one is the villain of their own narrative.

I think severely depressed people can sometimes be the villain of their own narrative.

It's fine for people to want to do good. It's not fine when its driven by subconscious emotional motives.

"For the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God." Even if you're an atheist, that principle holds true. Be careful of anger as a response to the evil of others. (I say, having had that exact response just this morning...)

The author is on to something noteworthy for sure. It's a shame he only devotes one paragraph to his "recipe." Boy is that a topic I'd like to read more on.

I strongly recommend the documentary "Weather Underground". They interview key members who introspect a great deal on the actions they had taken. You'll get the full spectrum ("no regrets" to "we were totally wrong"). One of the members put it succinctly:

> When you feel that you have right on your side you can do some horrific things.

> If you think that you have the moral high ground, that's a very dangerous position and you can do some really dreadful things.

For those who don't know, the Weather Underground were a violent revolutionary/militant/terrorist group in the US in the 70's who aimed to (more or less) overthrow the US government.

Well the Catholic church have been teaching that pride is the most deadly (and original) of sins for many years so no news there really.

The hard part is always the conclusion: "as we seek, in fellowship with others, to abandon our control-based mentality"

This assumes it is ever possible for me to accept that "truth" is probably somewhere in between me and others (or God if you would prefer something more absolute). Unfortunately we know from history that peace is impossible because the world is full of people with completely different motivations and ideals. Some of these have a middle ground but many don't.

There's an interesting bible verse that I've never heard quoted in churches: "BE NOT OVERLY RIGHTEOUS, and do not make yourself too wise. Why should you destroy yourself? Be not overly wicked, neither be a fool. Why should you die before your time? It is good that you should take hold of this, and from that withhold not your hand, for the one who fears God shall come out from both of them." (Ecclesiastes 7:16-18).

Kipling has this

    If you can wait and not be tired by waiting
    Or being lied about, don't deal in lies
    Or being hated, don't give way to hating
    And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise.

I would question the author's casual belief that a so-called "righteous" attitude , where one has decided that they have more wisdom on a particular topic than some other particular group of people, necessarily means they therefore lose all their empathy for that group. This is a huge leap and I personally don't believe there is any such necessity:

> 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 :)

I don't see where the author said that thinking one has more wisdom necessarily means one loses empathy.

I think the author's definition of righteousness is the loss of empathy. The author wouldn't seem to have a problem with an empathetic wise person being both empathetic and wise.

It's easy to know what's best for yourself. It's not so easy to know what's best for your children. It's much harder to know what's best for another adult in your tribe. It's practically impossible to know what's best for someone outside your tribe.

So, I would say it is very unwise to claim to know what's best for someone outside your tribe. When you're worrying about them like that, you're assuming you know what's best for them. It's not just about empathy, it's about letting people live their own lives. There's nothing inherently wrong with worrying about them but you can't change them and you shouldn't even want to IMO.

> It's easy to know what's best for yourself. It's not so easy to know what's best for your children. It's much harder to know what's best for another adult in your tribe. It's practically impossible to know what's best for someone outside your tribe.

I think this point is better stated without claims about value, ie “I know what is best”.

The predictions I make about the consequences of me doing something are more accurate than the predictions I make about the consequences of someone else doing something. Furthermore, my accuracy quickly degrades as the social distance increases.

Thats sympathy. Empathy is different from sympathy.

I can be sympathetic without really empathising with someone, and I can have empathy with someone without being sympathetic. Empathy uses more energy.

Ingroups tend to avoid empathy with outgroups because that weakens the separateness between people, and ingroups try to strengthen ingroup sympathy. Pity is a form of sympathy.

Sympathy: "I feel bad for you"

Empathy: "I understand you"

Often an ingroup member will not understand an outgroup member but can sympathize with their troubles or feel pity for them. Sympathy doesn't cost as much as empathy. Empathy challenges one's ingroup cohesion.

As someone who grew up in poverty, had my first heart surgery at 3 and was constantly confronted with dying and then had both parents die while I was young.

I think people greatly overestimate their ability to have/experience empathy.

I think the more divergent someones experience is, the more empathy is not available and the conceit that you can understand a complex issue you haven't experienced is a form of good hearted but self centered foolishness.

Give me sympathy, give me tangible help, give me money perhaps, you should feel bad for me and bad about what's happening and then stop putting sugar in your tea as a tangible effort (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wilberforce) and then treat me with normalcy and respect and consider me as an equal.

There are parallels in the movie industry as well, one film directors quote (who said it and the exact quote I've long forgotten) I like to paraphrase went something like this: "Making creative movies to your vision was easier when the studio execs were old and would just go 'I dont get it but let the young people give it a shot' than when non-creatives started to meddle in movies because they think they have a knack for it".

This video was popular for while and set a lot of discourse around empathy/sympathy and imo it is harmful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZBTYViDPlQ

What does ”I understand you.” mean? That I am able to correctly predict your future behavior?

should have been more specific. I am not a stranger to cult indoctrination. Plus I grew up with these people in the same house. So I actually know where she is coming from and to some extent what it's like to be indoctrinated (I had a bried stint with scientology 30 years ago). It's fully possible to be empathetic for someone's worldview and still know that they are completely wrong. I'm not sure how that's not feasible.

I've lost several people to cults over the years and I sympathize.

People (not yourself obviously) confuse empathy and sympathy with agreement and that's simply not the case of course.

It's tough when you see yourself so strongly in someone else and share experience with them and they are destroying their lives by putting their trust in liars.

This is painful to see even in severe cases when someone is sucked in due to their own self serving biases.

It's frustrating though. Wrong people are still wrong. It's not that hard to "ground propositions" on the issues most people deal with in their practical lives (once you've conceded that physical reality exists.)

Good luck and hang in there.

It's very common to have fellow-feeling with a family member while demonizing an outgroup they align with. So it's just not much evidence for your own sanity on its own. If one egregore is infecting millions of minds, why not two? Or more?

It’s funny how even in response to this article, people feel like they need to list their righteous bona fides.

> her mind being fully indoctrinated by FOX news

As opposed to her mind being liberated and enlightened if she would watch CNN instead.

The news world doesn't exist merely between these two choices.

> where one has decided that they have more wisdom on a particular topic than some other particular group of people, necessarily means they therefore lose all their empathy for that group.

I certainly see a lot of this on Twitter.

"See we’re always doing that. We're always finding a way to be one up. And by the most incredibly subtle means. So you see when you see me and you say I realize I’m always doing that tell me how do I not do that. I say why do you want to know? I’ll be better that way...yeah but why do you want to be better. You see the reason you want to be better is the reason why you aren’t."

-Alan Watts circa 1965

Prophetic words.

I don't like this idea that feelings of righteous indignation need to be moderated like some kind of proverbial addictive substance.

If you believe things, you will feel righteousness when they are (or are perceived to be) challenged.

The better question is: why do we believe what we believe? And why have these beliefs done so much harm?

Righteous indignation can lead to dismissing data conflicting with your current beliefs, and wishing harm on those who disagree with your beliefs.

That is why humility and tolerance are important.

Yes — belief can be a nasty thing. But it also drives progress. We "believe" that living entities deserve to be treated with some level of decency, etc. Sure it's possible to hedge our bets with humility and tolerance, but it comes at the cost of the potential upsides.

Our beliefs have led to some horrific outcomes over the past several hundred years. What interests me personally isn't how to believe less in order to avoid risk, it's how to believe in such a way that the resulting actions will improve our lives.

There seems to be a few speculative discussions around what the author identifies as a toxic addiction to righteousness and the spread of Christianity. When considering that this phenomenon touches the whole of humanity I can't help but wonder if Christianity has been an enabler, or has in fact acted as a massive check and moderating force against some of these darker impulses that are embedded deep inside of each of us.

Having read and enjoyed the article, it seems to me that the topic is very closely related to what a practicing Christian would call the sin of pride. There are some nuances to the definition and it's worth a refresher on the details of the teaching. A good primer can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PvcynQD-ag

Also, Jesus himself has some quite direct words on this topic: https://www.bible.com/bible/compare/LUK.18.10-14

Does the author want us to just be spineless bags of jelly, waiting for death? He cuts down the idea of "fixing ourselves" and says righteousness is a dangerous addiction. Of course you can't "fix yourself", there is no point to any of this, but you have to believe something while you are here, you have to have some righteousness or you will be run over.

Righteousness caused 1000 years of war in Europe - our religion is right, no, our religion is right.

This was ended by the Peace of Westphalia, when nations decided that there is no right religion, and that everybody loses if they fight righteousness wars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty

But then a different kind of righteousness appeared, we are the righteousness people (nazi), or we are the righteousness kind of leadership (communism vs capitalism).

I do not think the author was being quite so black-and-white, all-or-none about it.

Terms can be tricky with this subject. My interpretation is this:

* "righteousness" is the goal/ideal

* "self-righteousness" is the trap that is so easy to fall into (the addiction)

The problem is that this distinction is rarely made, IOW the word "righteous" gets all the negative connotation of "self-righteous" and confuses people who really pay attention to words.

The big challenge: How to get 2 opposing, self-righteous groups to a place they can talk and learn the fallacies each holds of the other.

That's too hard. Let's just build an app where they can yell to each other about how bad the other group is. Billion dollar idea.

Check Twitter

I'm not sure that's the right question. It assumes both parties only hold the views they do out of ignorance or "fallacies" whatever that means here.

That's not necessarily the case at all, often groups oppose each other out of a clear-eyed understanding of the incompatibility of their values. More understanding won't resolve that conflict.

This is the best and most accurate comment here.

Sometimes, idiots are actually idiots.

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt makes this nicely clear. He claims that liberals mostly value fairness and harm avoidance. More conservatives in addition also value authority, ingroup and purity. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind). To me this rings intuitively true and strongly validates your point. To me ingroup, authority and purity are at best suspect if not actively negative, so there seem to be natural limits to how much over can get on the same page without deep, small group discussion of every topic.

Edit: typo "find" -> "rings"

The labels applied to liberals here are ones with positive connotations, and the labels applied to conservatives have negative ones. One could choose other labels that make for a different obvious outcome.

Most political debates are more about straw-person demonization of the other side rather than understanding each others' underlying rationales, issues, or values. Understanding might not always lead to some great compromise, but it would still be helpful if the debate were elevated to the real issues instead of meaningless attack soundbites. Almost everyone in the media on both sides of any debate does understand the real issues, but chooses to pump ratings with soundbite attacks instead, to all of our detriment.

And to put some balance on your critique of conservatism:

Small-c conservatism has a positive purpose in the government of a nation - it's the impulse to not change things; to value stability. Whatever we're doing now, however stupid it may seem on the surface, is what got us this far. There's no guarantee the latest radical new idea which sounds great on its surface won't cause an unforeseen long-term fallout that wrecks society. The world isn't a science lab or a startup: the lives and happiness of millions are at stake with every decision. There's a liberal impulse to fix everything that looks wrong with bold new ideas, and a balancing conservative impulse to avoid making sweeping changes to the machinery of society without a lot of time and care.

The extremes of both impulses, unchecked, are not healthy. A government which is extremely conservative never rights the wrongs of the past or improves the lives of its citizens, or even reacts to obvious changes in the natural world or other competing societies. It's locked in stasis, and thus is doomed to decline. On the other end of things, a great example of the potential horror of government being too liberally-bold with new ideas would be China's Great Leap Forward, which I would humbly summarize as an attempt to swiftly enact radical changes to a society, which sadly and unintentionally caused a famine which killed millions.

> The labels applied to liberals here are ones with positive connotations, and the labels applied to conservatives have negative ones. One could choose other labels that make for a different obvious outcome.

I thought the exact same thing. I don't think people even realize when they're being rightous.

Connotations aren't universal. I think "pure" or even "authority" could be argued to have positive connotations in certain contexts and to certain people.

fairness and caring for others have zero negative connotations.

those are universally respected and well received attributes across time, culture, and space.

purity and authority have many negative connotations. I don't even need to say them.

I feel like it's disingenuous of you to claim otherwise.

> fairness and caring for others have zero negative connotations

Nobody has ever accused another of letting sentimentality or "heartstring stuff" interfere with long-term/greater good? A whole lot of "law and order" or "pure reason" types from time immemorial stand as counterexamples.

> purity and authority have many negative connotations

Also many positive ones. You think evangelicals don't prize purity above some of these other values? You think all the "strong leader" rhetoric doesn't play on people placing authority pretty high in the moral pecking order? Are people evil for being amenable to those manipulations? Who's demonizing now?

What you perceive as positive or negative connotations reflects your beliefs. Don't attack others for what you put there.

You just said it: Sentimentality is different than 'caring for others'.

if you use a different adjective to describe an adjective, maybe the first adjective is the correct one.

The pop science study that these labels are from is pseudoscientific anyway so this conversation is pointless.

That's true, but besides the point I was trying to emphasize. We all have inherently different values, what they are and how we label then isn't as important. My point might have been clearer if I hadn't used myself as an example.

It's important though to be aware of your own values, as they might lead to biased thinking and problems you so we'll illustrated. While O myself have a tendency to just want to do a "major rewrite" of everything, I ineluctably know that that rarely works and that I want it due to my values but that that won't get me where I want.

ALL people value fairness and harm avoidance. They just define 'what' or 'to what level' is fair or harmful, differently than you.

It shows the bubble one lives in to think otherwise.

It's very telling that you apply more favorable labels to one group and labels associated with negative outcomes to another.

Sorry, I didn't apply the labels. This is taken from the book. The book also claims that everyone values fairness and harm avoidance. The difference is that conservatives have additional things they value.

I don't think this model reflects my personal values in their entirety either, but that's not the point. The point is that there are inherent differences in what different people value and that always will be a source of conflict.

Perhaps it's not explicit in the context provided, but Haidt was talking about priorities. Most people believe in all things on the list. The question is which way they'll decide when they encounter a conflict between two (or more) of these values. Which one do they preserve, and which do they suspend? It's the literal definition of a moral dilemma, and people have been pondering these questions for thousands of years. The only "bubble" is the one where someone has never encountered this idea before, and jumps from suspension of a value (in the face of a higher moral imperative) to its absolute negation.

What's the science behind claiming that conservatives prefer authority over fairness or caring for others?

Sounds like unscientific terms used to demonize an large group by choosing favorable characteristics for one group and unfavorable characteristics for another.

Conservatives do it also by characterizing liberals as emotional and irrational and bleeding heart and impractical and incompetent furry avocado toast eaters.

I don't know how accurate these labels are for large groups of tens of millions of people.

Sounds like the kind of thing people want to hear to feel a moral superiority over a group that they differ from, exactly what the article describes.

It's like saying all Arabs have terroristic tendencies.

I would love to see Book sales of that specific book broken down by political region.

> What's the science behind claiming that conservatives prefer authority over fairness or caring for others?

https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/novemb...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-...

That's just a quick sample. I could spam this discussion with links until the cows come home, but I won't. It's pretty well-known stuff really, and it shouldn't even be surprising. Wouldn't it be weird if such differences in priorities didn't exist, or ran contrary to the obvious and deep antipathy between adherents of those two quasi-religions? Maybe some people are uncomfortable with such results placing them in a category inconsistent with their self-image, but that dissonance is best handled via introspection instead of aggression.

Here's the actual study from the NYU article that you claim makes this 'well established' science.

> Two hundred and twenty-five NYU students participated in a mass-testing session for course credit

>Two hundred and seventy-two participants filled out our survey on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

Here's the study for the scientific American article that you claim makes this 'well established' science:

>Haas put 58 people with diverse political views in a brain scanner

You're clearly being manipulated by the media and don't even have the will power to look at the citations in the pop science article to see if the article is valid?

A liberal supreme Court Justice just said that there's 100,000 children in hospitals from Covid.

This cavalier arrogant ignorance towards science that has taken root in the Democratic party, who are highly susceptible to CNN and Media influence, is scary.

Drop them all into the desert and wait for them to walk back to civilisation. Shared hardship forms good bonds.

That's not the big challenge. The big challenge is to get people to stop worrying about others' fallacies and start worrying about their own. People need to learn introspection first and foremost. It's always "how are they wrong" and never "how am I wrong".

For what purpose?

Their issues stem from emotional disturbance, not some high-minded difference in ideals.

Self-righteousness that seeks to subjugate others is a disease.

Only someone with deep emotional problems would choose to vehemently proselytize some notion vs. simply going for a picnic and enjoying the sun.

We humans only differ meaningfully on our inputs, so you and I could have ended up there, too.

And also lower their egos enough so they can learn truths from the other!

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.

> AS A SOBER ADDICT...

I wish we would drop this terminology and self-consciousness. While I understand the term is intended as a self-reminder that it's easy to slip back into addictive patterns of behavior, the perpetual self-description of "addict" surely cannot be healthy for the person or society.

The addict-for-life mentality is similar to the seed of cancel culture. Once you do $BAD_THING, you're a ${BAD_THING}er your whole life. There's no forgetting, no ultimate forgiveness, only eternal sorrow and penance.

This is a common outsider's view of the sober-for-life perspective I think. It's not about sin or penance or precluding forgiveness. It's just an individual's personal acknowledgement that the same pains, proclivities and weaknesses that led them into addiction are still present in them.

It may not even be true necessarily, but it's still a useful view for a lot of people with addiction in their past. It's just lower risk to assume you're permanently vulnerable and so never use the drug again.

I think there is a lot of similar language/perspectives etc in the recovery world -- as a prominent example, many years ago I was dismayed when a friend of mine joined AA to discover that one of the steps was admitting to being powerless over your addiction -- I was certain at the time that this was exactly the opposite of what a healthy approach would be, to wit, repeating the mantra that you can and do have control, and fostering that belief.

However in the many years since I have had more exposure to AA and other recovery programs and I've discovered that while there are other programs (such as SMART recovery) that take drastically different approaches, in practice AA is really the only program with a significant success rate.

I known people that entered a recovery program, "got better", and moved on with their lives successfully and I know people that first got started with AA 25+ years ago and still attend meetings at least weekly today. Not to gatekeep addiction but I think the people from this first group are not "real" addicts in some sense, and for those people you are probably right and continuous self-labeling would be harmful.

But for the people from that second group, I think it's true -- there's literally no hope that they will ever live a happy health life outside of a program that keeps their focus on their addiction/recovery every day. Any significant loss of focus will result in an immediate and precipitous downward spiral. For these people "sober addict" isn't something that's damaging their self perception, it's something that's improving it, because they're comparing it to the only other option they have which is "active addict".

Addicts aren't bad people trying to get good, they're sick people trying to get well.

That's all good and right but how is it actionable? Do we stop judging stuff as being undesirable and just accept everything?

I thought about this subject quite a bit and there's really no way around conflicts. You just have to have them and try to win them. The party that is the furthest away from reality will lose eventually. Warning: the _realistic_ party will win, not the right party, the good party, the moral party, etc. You also need to accept this.

Or you can put on the pacifist hat and basically accept you're going to lose every time. History is full of conflicts and only conflicts changed the world. Be them military, artistic, ideological, philosophical or whatever. If you can't survive the contact with the opposing side think what reality will do to you.

If the author thought we had a cultural crisis of righteousness when he wrote this (circa the George W. Bush presidency), would be interesting to check in with him now.

I find for me, looking at feelings wheel, "valued" is the emotion I feel regarding addiction. If an activity makes me feel valued, I come back and back and back. This is true also if the activity makes me feel inferior sometimes ( such as losing a game ). Addictive activities also have an infuriating component ( whereby I want to control more than I can control ). They also have a thankful component (relief after winning a hard game).

Just a small nitpick, but it's important to my theological ears: TA conflates "righteousness" and "self-righteousness", which are two different things.

Not that anyone is righteous on their own -- no one is. But that doesn't mean righteousness isn't a real concept that can be understood apart from self-righteousness.

In fact, Martin Luther's discovery that no one is righteous on their own, and the notion of an alien or imputed righteousness granted by God to those who repent and trust in Jesus (as St Paul explains it in the book of Romans) was a key moment in the lead-up to the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s.

Funny - as I read, I wanted to disagree with the author (and I guess I do to some extent) but I can’t find fault with his conclusion.

I think the world could be a better place if we all could adopt a small sense of humility and assume the good intentions of others.

This really touched me, thanks for posting.

Nice, but I wish this article were longer and the author would have elaborated his thoughts more.

This post has amazing timing.

I just spent hours yesterday involved in the vaccination discussion thread, which is rare for me.

Cause for a bit of self-reflection.

This is the natural consequence of killing God, as Nietzsche observed. Without an objective basis, there's no objective truth about what's valuable, right, or good. But we desperately want to be right, so we ignore what God says is right and invent our own version.

"For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness." - The apostle Paul's letter to Rome. (ESV Bible, Romans 10:4)

The good news: "Jesus Christ has already accomplished the purpose for which the law was given. As a result, all who believe in him are made right with God." (NLT Bible, Romans 10:5)

Seriously look at this guy. He opposes the self-righteous religious people, powerfully helps people in need, has zero pride, was so humble he was willing to die for a crime he didn't even commit. Not even good guy Greg would go that far. Bible says what I have to do to be right is just point to Jesus and agree that he's a better man than I'll ever be.

Of course, belief in "God" also requires the belief in the supernatural and random acts of magic. In other words, the opposite of science and rationality. Belief in "God"/Jesus Christ (as a supernatural being) is not "objective", in itself, since there isn't any empirical evidence (funny how the claims of witnessing supernatural events have steadily declined as the ability to easily capture and widely share information has increased).

Yes but hopefully you can still appreciate much of the wisdom of Jesus' teachings even if you disagree about the theology.

But was there ever an objective basis? No two believers could ever agree on what God wants, even back when Jesus was alive. Because God is nothing but an invention of man, what God thinks is merely a reflection of what each individual person thinks.

Even if you go off a text like the Bible, there is no objective interpretation of what it means.

>has zero pride, was so humble

Jesus literally claimed to be the son of God. That's about as arrogant as you can get.

> That's about as arrogant as you can get.

Unless he actually was.

But was there ever an objective basis?

People certainly behave in ways that reflects there is an objective basis to be reached - they argue about correctness of perspectives, attempt to reduce complex formulas to the simple, have entire reasoning + discovery systems (science) designed to reach the truth, etc.

I have yet to meet someone who truly dogfoods their own supposed beliefs on a "relative morality". You'll often find those people claiming all truth is relative, but are equally willing to argue ad-infinitum on whether they think you're right or wrong on a certain topic.

>Jesus literally claimed to be the son of God. That's about as arrogant as you can get.

If it were in fact true, then it would only be stating a fact, one that the people listening might need to know.

I'm not religious, but I think that your comment fails the test of charitability.

I actually believe Jesus came to show us that we are all one with God. When people said he was blaspheming, his response was not "I'm a one-of-a-kind god/man combo"... instead, he said: "“Is it not written in your Law, I said, you are gods’? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be broken—"

For some reason, churches don't seem to talk about this.

I am, and so are you.

Also:

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"

https://biblehub.com/matthew/7-3.htm

Avoiding self righteousness was very central to Jesus teachings.

Let me fix that for you:

Seriously, look at this character. Within the context of the stories told about him, he opposed... <snip>

Please don't take HN threads into generic religious arguments. They lead to religious flamewars, which are particularly bad threads for HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't take HN threads into generic religious arguments. They lead to religious flamewars

Or they don't, as demonstrated by the results of this thread. Further, where was your commentary on this large thread then? Is there some sort of distinction between "spiritual" and "religious" that HN commenters are not aware of?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29700445

Your selective enforcement of a non-existent rule in the guidelines regarding religious discussions makes me question if you just don't personally like the content above. Of course any conversation about "righteousness" will likely delve straight into morality, philosophy, religion, etc.

Maybe you ought to take the HN guidelines into account and "Assume good faith" on behalf of the parent commenter who was contributing directly in line with the topic of the posted article

>> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

> Or they don't, as demonstrated by the results of this thread

In the general case, they certainly do, and we have to moderate for the general case.

Not trying to wade into theological debates, but I feel compelled to defend Nietzsche from this common misrepresentation of his work: he did not, in fact, think that the "death of god" was a bad thing because it actually removed an "objective basis" for peoples value systems - to him there had never been such a basis. He did see a potential danger that those who had previously been inured to religious value systems would fall into nihilism upon losing them, but he also saw it as the opportunity it was to seek out new and better value systems, perhaps even grounded in reality rather than mysticism.

Competition is great, differences of opinion are great. Differences of values are great! All of this keeps the marketplace of ideas healthy!

The problems comes in when people start to develop a righteousness about their ideas and demonize the 'other' and try to force their ideas upon the 'other' because they believe they know better.

That's why I think states rights in America are so great, because they allow places with different values to express those values.

When the federal government begins to force values upon the country en masse problems begin.

> When the federal government begins to force values upon the country en masse problems begin.

What is your opinion about the US Civil War? I'm curious about this because it is in part an abrogation of states' rights over a question of utmost moral importance. Are there some values that are so valuable that we should make them universal by any means necessary, including a war?

Slavery is one of those things that violates the fundamental principles of the declaration of Independence: all men are created equal, life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

So of course it should have been abolished and shame on the states that fought a war to preserve it.

Even in the most limited federal government has fundamental requirements.

> Even in the most limited federal government has fundamental requirements.

I guess my question is more related to how you can tell the difference between a "valuable value" like "slavery is bad" and a less-valuable value, like "going to church is a public good and should be compulsory."[0] While one can use the Declaration as a discriminator, that it's starting a civil war of its own might give us pause (and it has some problematic language of its own[1]).

[0] See, e.g., the constitution of the state of Massachusetts: https://archive.org/details/addressofconvent00unse/page/n19/...

It contains this clause which permits the people to actually force church attendance! (Earlier it specifies Protestant ministry rather than Catholic.)

"the people of this Commonwealth have also a right to, and do, invest their legislature with authority to enjoin upon all the subjects an attendance upon the instructions of the public teachers aforesaid at stated times and seasons, if there be any on whose instructions they can conscientiously and conveniently attend."

[1] For example, "[King George] [...] has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."

It's a huge grey area and legal scholars have been working on it for centuries if not millenia.

Hardcore libertarians think the only reason the government should exist is to protect property rights.

At the other extreme are collectivists who think the government should exist to manage most everything to create the maximum equality.

Where the line is drawn the job of government.

The Declaration of Ind. And bill of rights are a good litmus test for the fundamental things people view govt to be responsible for.

Both conservatives and liberals are needed to keep the balance from going too far one other direction.

Which is why I hate this demonization of the other political party.

Both groups are needed to keep things in balance.

"Any Self-Righteous Anonymous groups out there?" - Yes, a close reading of the christian bible will tell you that's the indented function of the church. Unfortunately there's a propensity for the opposite.

In early church history, there's an interesting period of basically pious showboating.

> Well, I used limit myself to living in the desert and taking a vow of silence back when I first got into Christianity and still was attached to the flesh, but now I abstain from sex, sleep on gravel and wear a shirt made of hedgehog bristles too.

Eventually it become obvious this wasn't piety at all, but pride. The first Nicene council even bans men who have performed self-castration from entering the clergy.

Right on, but as the OP suggests it's easy to be self-righteous against 2nd century pious showboating as well!

The only solution (again see the article) is humility. The old saying 'There but for the grace of God go I' is apt in this case. Seeing ourselves in every 'bad actor' of any kind from the dude who cuts us off at the lights to genocidal dictators is the only way to avoid it.

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