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Comment by qoez | Hacker News Reader

One perspective is that meditation and stoicism helps silence guilt about being so properous in an unequal society.

Why should one feel guilt about being prosperous in an unequal society? Even if you accept that it's based entirely on luck rather than merits, I don't see why you should feel guilt.

A few examples of things based entirely on luck that no one really argues we should feel guilty about:

Being tall

Having high innate level of intelligence

Athletic

Physical beauty

height isn't fungible

even if acquiring wealth is random, retaining wealth means choosing not to see and positively act on the state of the world

> retaining wealth means choosing not to see and positively act on the state of the world

This is just silly. Just because you retain wealth doesn't mean you aren't positively acting to improve the current state of the world.

every dollar kept is a choice not to effect one dollar of change

Because you're a social animal in a social world, whose social action creates and modifies that world.

Since you are a body, in an environment, with a psychology -- your actions have an effect upon the world.

The invitation to dissociate and mute your social emotions is an invitation to keep everything as-it-is.

This is not an invitation to mute your emotions.

This is questioning why someone should feel a particular emotion.

> is an invitation to keep everything as-it-is.

I don’t need to feel personal guilt about something outside of my control in order to 1) recognize problems in the world, 2) want the factors causing those problems to change, and 3) actively work to change them.

And for many people, feeling guilt - especially for things outside of their control - is absolutely paralyzing and leads to the opposite of action.

I mean I'm more responding to Marcus Aurellius and other formalisations of historical stoicism, than the pretty widely understood idea that "somethings are important, some arent" and "care most about what you can change, and least about what you cant"

These sort of bits of old wisdom also come in their opposites ("you never know when something is important", "your passions can define your life, and create opportunities") etc.

So I'm taking stoicism as a particular prioritising of those "bits of old wisdom" that combine together in relevant historical texts, and add up, in my view, to being quite radically dissociative.

Stoicism doesnt own, "keep calm under fire"

> These sort of bits of old wisdom also come in their opposites ("you never know when something is important", "your passions can define your life, and create opportunities") etc.

But they don't. They're typically not used in such a way, because they're nonsense.

> you never know when something is important

This is just resigning yourself to ignorance and chance. It's an unfalsifiable truism, because you can point to instances where it was true (survivor bias) and say you applied this bit of wisdom, whereas in reality it was just chance.

> your passions can define your life, and create opportunities

Sure, that's one of the possibilities. But it's not wisdom. It's another random truism out of a horoscope that may or may not end up being true.

> Stoicism doesnt own, "keep calm under fire"

A philosophy doesn't need to own anything for it to be valid. One of its principles can be used by other philosophies. What a weird thing to write.

You're agreeing with me. Those are all my views.

So if I'm fortunate and blessed with wealth, I should feel guilty and be vocal about my guilt. So I make my life worse off and that of the people around me. People with heavy burden of guilt are often insufferable. And this will somehow make the world better off?

Notice these people making these arguments never argue for voluntary charitable giving which is actually encouraged by stoic philosophy as is promoting justice.

But the most important thing to some people is the signaling and guilt associated with any gift.

If someone is blessed with wealth, they should only feel guilty if they don't use their blessing to fight for societal change to make things more just, if they achieved their wealth at the expense of others, or if their actions promote inequality.

> I don't see why you should feel guilt.

You should feel guilty because you can do something about other people's suffering, instead of being a greedy hoarder who has far more than he could possibly use in multiple lifetimes while other people starve and live miserable lives due to the system you benefit from.

I think Peter Singer makes the argument very well [1] but many others in the history of philosophy have done just as good a job. Even Rawls is an option.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVl5kMXz1vA&pp=ygUMcGV0ZXIgc...

Almost universally prosperity is gained through privilege, compounded over generations. Privilege being rules/customs/systems that favored your group over others.

To be fair, the traits OP mentioned are heritable, and so to a large extent come from the privilege of having [tall | intelligence | athletic | beautiful] parents. So privilege doesn't explain why you'd feel guilty about one and not about the rest.

If one was aware that the prosperity disparity is predominantly due to circumstance and if one had empathy for other fellow human beings. Then I think it would be a natural response to want to alleviate other's suffering by sharing some of their prosperity. You can call it guilt, or perhaps just empathy. The other heritable attributes can't be easily be shared.

I'm guilty of all your examples. It pains me so.

All those things are somewhat socially determined. Even height has gone up in the last century. Personally I think I'm tall for somebody my age but I see a lot of young men who are a lot taller than me.

To look at that last one, in the solar economy up until 1920 or so, the peak of beauty socially [1] was the debutante from a rich or noble family. As soon as there were cities there were entertainers and courtesans, but in the mass media age the likes of Marie Antoinette just can't compete with professionals.

Standards of athleticism also involve an element of conformity. "Extreme sports" are frequently pioneered by older athletes who have no chance of making the NFL draft but get taken over by the young once a path is visible. (Early winners of the World Series of Poker were outright old, but it became a young man's game when it became mainstream in the 2000s.)

Some societies have a use for people with high intelligence, others don't.

[1] I'm sure there were beautiful peasants to my eye in Heian Japan but the text that survive from that period describe a very specific ideal including perfectly straight and rather coarse black hair that's about as rigid as the look of the kind of woman who, creepily, Instagram wants me to follow today.

A lot of people don’t know that guilt is an emotion and like all emotions needs to be managed. They feel it, assume it’s appropriate and then seek a cause that fits.

Sorry if this sounds dismissive, it’s not meant to be. But I think it is the cold hard reason for a lot of feeling/stress among people who have otherwise nice lives with no explicit moral failings…

> Why should one feel guilt about being prosperous in an unequal society?

I can understand the idea of feeling guilty about wasted potential (wealth, time, strength, beauty, intelligence). That which could be used to help those who need help, not exactly novel: “If you have two coats, give one away”

You shouldn't. First, I reject the framing that one's success today is due to privilege. But even if that were true (and it isn't), so what? What previous generations did has nothing whatsoever to do with me, morally speaking. I'm responsible for my own actions alone; this collective guilt line of thinking some people follow is nonsense.

The guilt isn't due to the simple fact of being prosperous it's more about the prioritization of self-interest over that of a win-win option that helps the broader good.

I don't follow. If you're prosperous due to no reason of your own (eg rich parents, lottery, etc), you didn't prioritize self interest

If it is self made you presumably made it by creating value for others, otherwise why would anyone pay you?

Your idea of wealth creation is is amazingly naive.

"Luck" is the wrong word w.r.t. your examples. It could not have been otherwise, as you are those features. You wouldn't be you if you didn't. There's no ghost in the machine that is the "real you" that is haunting a carcass where these features are like possessions that you own. You don't own them. They are (a part) of who and what you are. They are things you can, in the appropriate manner, share with others.

You didn't earn them, but so what? Why is everyone obsessed with everything having to be earned? A gift also belongs to me, even if I didn't do anything to earn it, and no one is entitled to take it from me as such any more than they can take anything I have earned.

Now, w.r.t. material prosperity, of course there is no reason to feel guilt. If you acquired your wealth morally, then all is well. This is distinct from the general obligation of those in our society with means that exceed their own needs to aid those in a state of poverty. Note that I said poverty, not having less. Having less is not an injustice.

The framing of inequality as injustice in recently years is rather a symptom of envy or confusion rather than an impulse coming from an intelligent sensitivity to injustice.

The problem is that the things you identified as being based on luck have cascading second-order effects. For example, people that are perceived as handsome have better chances in wage negotiations, and the same goes for people with a lighter skin tone. The most strongly connected trait to being financially successful: being born in a rich and educated family.

These things are outside your control, but entirely in control of a society.

Guilty may be the wrong word but you should be aware that you got lucky. Like a lot of "self-made" men who got lucky and then tell others that they could achieve the same if only they worked as hard.

I hate articles "I did X and so can you". No, people often can't do what you did.

I’m not that wealthy but have learnt not to feel guilt about that, or feeling guilt about most things (maybe if I’m actively wrong eg if I had actively hurt people, but now that’s a moral thing not a guilt thing)

Guilt is often unhealthy and leads people to do destructive things that is more damaging.

But I can totally understand why people would feel guilt

I think that the guilt comes from not working to make society more equal and/or doing things that promote inequality.

Inequality is not bad, so we should stop speaking of inequality as if it were. There is nothing to be guilty about for having more that is acquired or received by licit and moral means. Indeed, the obsession with equality is often itself rooted in envy. The envious have an obvious reason to feel guilty, as envy is evil (whether overt, such as when we try to take what others have, or concealed, such as when we deny the good of something or play the game of sour grapes).

However, a society does have an obligation to respond to poverty (poverty in the true sense, not "I can't afford an iPhone"). Those with more than they need (and this is subject to prudential judgement) have more means to contribute toward this end.

They're useful practices in general

Hard core meditators in Hindu traditions were ascetic beggars and still are.

We just don’t see them writing books or posting on YouTube.

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