There is a tribe called Jhurk where all sorts of lies are told. Easy ones – “no you don’t look fat in that,” malicious ones – “no I didn’t steal your sheep, a wolf ate it,” and even beneficial ones – “no, invading war chief, I have no one else for you to capture in my home.”
One day a man named Goolag, who recently caught his wife with the local voodoo master when she’d sworn she was only going out to pick berries, comes up with a rule.
“Lying is bad!” he proclaims. “I hate liars!”
Nobody likes being lied to. Everyone agrees with Goolag, and they start putting up anti-lying flags. Soon their religions pick up moral tales about how their deities refused to lie. Young Jhurkian men signal how moral and hip they are to Jhurkian women by saying “I don’t date liars.”
Demonstrating how much you are against Lying becomes a quick and easy way to get moral points with the group. Everyone cheers with Goolag when he screams FUCK LYING.
Because everyone generally agrees that “being a liar” is a terrible thing, accusations of lying become especially powerful. Because accusations of lying are so powerful, they become broader – and the people of Jhurk are either “Liars” or “Not-Liars.”
Once someone in Jhurk receives the ‘Liar’ label, nobody cares to investigate further. The lie might have been harmless, horrible, or even occasionally beneficial – but under all the excitement about decrying lying, it’s packaged into one single, binary switch – Liar or Not-Liar. This isn’t a deliberate decision on the part of the Jhurkians, but more a result from a learned sense of outrage.
One woman, Zokk (whose husband was recently shunned for lying about a surprise party) tries to defend Liars. But all of Jhurk knows that Liars Are Bad – and they bring up Goolag’s wife, that dirty whore, and Gneb, who lied about the money in the tribe treasury, and Ved the traitor, who lied about being allied with Jhurk when really he was just selling tribe secrets to the rival tribe across the river.
“Why would you defend Lying when Liars do all these things?” they say. “You are a Liar-apologist!” and thus both Zokk and her husband are shunned.
—
“Lying is bad” was turned into a moral law in exactly the same way moral laws in religion operate. In religion, a set of “correct behaviors” are agreed upon, and adherents are ‘good’ and the rebellious are ‘bad.’ This can feel very deep and true, like how religion decries homosexuality so hard that people start to genuinely feel disgust and horror reactions about it.
Identifying a general sin is a very efficient way of dealing with social problems, but also very mindless and inaccurate. Jhurk’s lying problem was certainly eradicated, but eradicated religiously – in a strong, oversimplified, and demonizing sense.
New moral laws are usually the most exciting to signal (No dating site profile is cool for saying “I only date people who are against slavery”). And because they’re so exciting, they’re also the most virulent and religious.
I was reading about this commune back in the 1970s where they operated by the new and exciting moral law of Tolerate Everyone (as in allow anybody to live on this commune). This was a revolutionary concept to them and they took it very seriously. There was a strong social pressure to Tolerate Everyone, and anyone who did did not Tolerate Everyone was shunned by the group.
And over time the excitement wore off and they realized this wasn’t sustainable. The commune became a magnet for the drug addicted, the severely mentally ill, people who wouldn’t work, and dangerous criminals. Maybe something like Tolerate Everyone Except Those Who Are A Detriment To Your Community would have been better.
Of course Tolerating Everyone is a good idea and they were right to identify it as desirable – but it’s not desirable not as a law. The world is complex and nuanced and every situation has to be taken individually. This takes much more gentle thought and mental effort, but it might have saved that commune, and Zokk’s husband.
—
I think the terms “racism” and “sexism” are being used almost exclusively as religious law today.
Ideas having to do with race and sex are vast and complicated. Some come out of fear of culture, others out of mindless fear, others out of statistics. Some are more extreme than others. Some are justified, others entirely invalid. All of them have personal causes.
And in using the easy, simplistic, blanket term of ‘racism’ or ‘sexism’ to address any issue that even smells a bit like race or gender hostility, we are guilty of exactly the same trap that the religious fall into – except they’ve usually had a couple centuries to chill the fuck out while we’re still excited about it.
We say “if you’re racist don’t message me” on our dating profiles because it’s an easy and safe and exciting thing to signal. We use “sexist” as an immediate weapon word against situations that are in the line of fire but they might not be that terrible, we don’t know, we don’t have all the facts yet.
I’m not saying that discrimination against people based on race or gender isn’t terrible. It is – sort of like how maliciously lying to your neighbors is also terrible.
But I distrust the transformation of bad things into a label that can be used as a wide, inaccurate scythe that mows down the worst offenders, the mild offenders, and anybody innocently standing at the edges of the problem, all in the same sweep. It stifles discourse, it reduces empathy, it turns neighbors into opponents, and it mirrors the thinking of the mindless, traditionally religious.
The religious aren’t religious because they’re stupid, they’re religious because it’s enticing. Beware the enticing moral claim!
Aella you are a fantastic writer and thinker, outside the box. 2 things…don’t sell yourself short, u are more of a spiritual teacher, at least one that is starting to emerge, than many I’ve seen and read and heard who posited themselves as such, but didn’t resonate with me on a subtle, etheric plane of higher consciousness.
Tangent:
> This can feel very deep and true, like how religion decries homosexuality so hard that people start to genuinely feel disgust and horror reactions about it.
I’m feel visceral disgust at the thought of (male) homosexual sex, and felt horrified that time I watched some gay porn (as an experiment). I was raised by liberal parents, in a liberal home.
(Obviously, in case this needs to be said, adults should be able to do whatever they want in the their own bedrooms, and I happily advocate for consenting gay men having sex together. I also prefer not to watch.)
I don’t think that religion is responsible for people’s feeling of disgust and horror in this domain, any more than religion is responsible for people’s responses about incest.
While I enjoy your blog, your writing and your performances, this post reeks of rationalized privilege. As a fellow young person, discovering myself, i understand that it’s incredibly important to manifest insights about the world within the purview of our private realities in an honest way, but using allegory (which is a very Christian thing to do) to discuss loaded moral concepts may come across as dubious and unethical outside of that bubble of our private, inner dimensions. A lot of your ideas on existentialism as an experience are wonderful and engaging, but I will have to disagree with this post respectfully and urge you to broaden your cultural lens outside the paradigm of self-romanticizing “tourist” via the realms of consciousness. Vulnerability is interesting and sacred in a time such as ours but it should not come at the cost of upholding hegemonic ideas of power and humanity. Think about this more deeply, outside of Reddit.
Oh wow! You are not only adorable, but also smart and eloquent and – sit venia verbo – wise. A totally astonishing combination.
Sorry for not adding any substantial to your blog post; but I have nothing to add besides agreement. It appears always a kind of sad to me, how eagerly people limit themselves. Limit the way they think, the people they meet, the experience they make. Personally, I would totally like to meet someone which has opinions that contract mines. A lot of people would agree to that statement; however I experienced that as a lie. People really dislike contradiction (especially on dating sites). Anyway, I think we have to accept mankind as it is.
But most important: You are hot like a shitload of deuterium compressed to a ridiculous small sphere *.*
Pretty much what I thought with the various people reposting, “if you support Trump, unfollow me,” etc. etc.
I couldn’t even say the same thing about those that supported Brexit because they were literally all my mates. And when I say ‘literally’ I mean that I’m one of 2 people in my social circle that voted remain.
Nothing changed. I still like them, and we’re all still as problematic as ever.
I’m going to assume you’re mainly thinking about the melting pot that is America. We all want to be united. But America is stupid: We divide ourselves on what to be united on, like political figures and celebrity/corporate campaigns. America lacks culture except taking everything and attempting to be “the best” or “the greatest” at it. And unless there’s money to burn, nothing will ever get made or done.
Humans are always seeking successful strategies to promote their culture or family groups. Strategies like “sexism” or “racism” could be beneficial for a group of people, but may not be advantageous once you reach high points of human saturation. Distilling & transferring strong beliefs from parent to child is the strongest method of mind control. But I can see objectively how this kind of mind control is beneficial in smaller groups up to small countries of people. Successful brainwashing could bring nearly everyone in line for communal thinking and focus, which allows them to reach common goals. The older folks in America were successfully brainwashed to a common culture: Give your service to your God, your country, your work, and your family, and you’ll do all right.
Historically man has regularly been religious and superstitious. America has been predominantly Christian up to now. It’s an aberration to the older generations and indoctrinated in the USA that Islam, Hinduism, Bhuddism, Atheism, etc. be anything more than private beliefs that belong to distant minorities. It’s hard for them to fathom why their old American faith feels like it’s dying. It feels like it’s us (old America) vs them (new America). They could handle the inane rivalries between the Methodists and the Presbyterians and the Baptists and so on, but once America became a place of diversity within its larger cities (the big money-powered machines of humankind), the old culture that shaped American communities has shifted, dwindled, even died. The children and middle-aged are left with a picture of a tolerant America fighting for civil and human rights at home and around the world. The older and/or more rural and/or poorly educated humans, with positions of power and old world mentalities, feel they used to have something special and want to return to those glorious & prosperous days.
Without taking any sides, I’ll just state we don’t have a common American culture, or at least a consensus on what unites us together. America today is a culture of reactive outrage. We’re divided, and we using divisive language like racism and sexism and thugs and animals as weapons to fight the enemy within. Is it going to take another war to bring America to a consensus again? Maybe a deadly epidemic that isn’t a hoax? Climate change sure wasn’t enough to change enough minds, so we’ll have to wait for Florida to sink before anyone will take that seriously. Currently, the most we can do together as Americans is agree that ISIS is BAD!, but they’re so far away that it’s ridiculous for the common American to be afraid of them. It’s gonna take something uniquely awful to unite us, and that’s the scariest part. We probably won’t see the obvious coming, even if it’s on TV, in our face, or eating away at our liver.