Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2017-01-09T21:50:22Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com January 9. http://ranprieur.com/#947397640db5fcaecdc6fa350cb5794af4e62c9d 2017-01-09T21:50:22Z January 9. This weekend I wrote a long email explaining why I don't believe in evil, and I want to post some of it here. We can start by looking at stuff we call "evil" and looking for deeper causes. I once had a guy tell me that religion is the root cause of evil, so I asked him "What's the root cause of religion?" He said "I'm not interested in that."

According to Christianity, God is perfectly good, and the root of evil is Satan. How did Satan become evil? He decided God was doing things the wrong way. So why did God banish Satan, instead of explaining why his way of doing things was better? I think this story comes from prehistoric tribal behavior, where people who violate the rules of the tribe are banished because the tribe doesn't have the resources to reform them. And sometimes the banished people are right, which is related to why some people think maybe Satan had the right idea.

So at the heart of Western culture we've got this story that takes the practical behavior of tribes, and recasts it as something mythic and moral and simple and absolute.

When children violate the rules of their culture, they are shamed, but again, this is economy disguised as morality. We don't have the resources to explain to children why the rules are this way, and sometimes the rules are wrong and the kids are right. And this habit, generating the illusion of morality out of our own lack of time and energy to actually work things out, carries over into the adult world. I once saw a guy at an anti-war march, standing on the curb facing the protesters, with a sign that just said "SHAME". Because he didn't explain himself better, I couldn't even tell which side he was on.

My point is that good vs evil is a way of putting off understanding. Everybody, from their own perspective, is doing something that makes sense, and when we think we see evil, it's because we haven't fully made sense of the other person's perspective. Even when someone says "I knew it was wrong but I did it anyway," they're talking about an inability to work things out inside themselves.

I'm not a moral relativist -- I'm an amoral taoist: I believe in an objective standard for correct and incorrect action, but we can never reach it; we can only approach it by looking more broadly and deeply into cause and effect. And to call something evil is to stall this process and imagine that we're already finished.

I also think there are mental states that are loosely correlated with what we call evil. One is compulsiveness, and another is "ego", which is hard to define but it could be another form of compulsiveness based around identity.

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January 7. http://ranprieur.com/#39930af6863009e4cc9b9d05e1104e3b783adf6d 2017-01-07T19:30:52Z January 7. Instead of bashing Derrick Jensen I should have bashed my younger self. It's like I grew up in a bad (intellectual) neighborhood and I got out, and the nice thing to do is try to get other people out and not to condemn the people who still live there. The neighborhood is right at the intersection of complaining and trying to inspire people, and it's part of a larger neighborhood where people get fixated on stories that feel true instead of continuing to engage with reality as it unfolds into more challenging complexity.

I used to see the world as some kind of holy war, like things were in perfect balance, and then one time things got out of balance, and as soon as we get it back into balance we win the game. Now I'm seeing reality as an eternal journey through a magical forest, and we're just in a really weird part right now. I was watching one of those commercials for the latest pharmaceutical that cures one condition while causing others ("side effect" is a marketing term) and I thought, this is like some kind of trickster beast trying to lead us into deeper trouble. It's not even tragic -- it's funny: "Do not take Farxalus if you're allergic to Farxalus."

By the way, the show we were watching was Emerald City, which is surprisingly not bad. It's loosely based on The Wizard Of Oz but it's more like a trashy steampunk Game Of Thrones. One dude looks so much like Jon Snow that I started calling him Jon Frost, and the Witch of the West looks exactly like Tom Brady in drag.

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January 5. http://ranprieur.com/#2efe0ecc0083f66ad388606f1f41cd4d05752e46 2017-01-05T17:10:03Z January 5. I'm not feeling smart this week, maybe because the winter weather makes it hard to exercise. So today I'll post some stuff I've written over email. Marcus sends this documentary, The Inner Tracker, in which 21 hours of introspective dialogue among animal trackers was edited down to two hours. It's partly about people wondering if their own negative attitude toward modern society is actually part of the programming of modern society, which led me to write this:

Everyone wants to make the world better, and everyone wants simple inspiring stories, but there is no overlap between those two things. Donald Trump and Derrick Jensen are doing the same thing, serving as the focus and central myth maker for a bunch of people who are looking for that overlap.

I've also been emailing with Anne about how I envy the 1960's, and I always hoped I'd get to live through something similar when the cycle came around again, but instead here I am with a grey beard and it's like the right wing mirror image of the sixties. Here's how I explained it the other day:

What excites me about that time is the mass breaking of barriers in a cultural climate of friendly universalism. Now we've got a breaking of barriers with a climate of hostile tribalism. But if these are the anti-60's, then maybe I can look forward to the anti-80's.

If Trump repeals expanded Medicaid, I just might be homeless in the anti-80's, which would still be better than working at Walmart. But I want to say a little more about tribalism. I define it as finding meaning in belonging to a group which finds meaning in opposition to other groups, and I'm against it. I think it's an obsolete holdover from our prehuman primate ancestors. But it remains part of our nature, and the best we can do is channel it into friendly sports rivalries.

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January 3, 2017. http://ranprieur.com/#85840862fa54f1b4a38434c24ed65d97b3059608 2017-01-03T15:50:33Z January 3, 2017. They say 2016 was a bad year, but from now on I expect every year to be worse than the year before, at least by 20th century values where "better" means increasing wealth, security, and rational management. The best we can hope for is that life will start feeling better in ways that are hard to quantify.

I no longer believe in evil, just mistakes, and one of the core mistakes of the modern world is losing touch with the unquantifiable. According to Terence McKenna, young Decartes was visited by an "angel" who told him that the key to conquering nature is number and measure. 400 years later, number and measure have conquered the human soul, to the point where we think we must be crazy to be unhappy when we're surrounded by so many good numbers.

The Hindu trinity is Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer. Western culture would say the Destroyer is the bad guy, but really it's all about balance, and what we have right now is an excess of preservation, and probably an excess of creation. I no longer believe in a hard crash, but it's getting to the point where, even if stuff doesn't go away, we just don't have room to care about it.

I don't do new year's resolutions because a resolution loses strength with every failure. Instead I call them points of emphasis, and my point of emphasis for 2017 is micro-scale toughness. It's hard to explain what toughness is. It's like, when the wind blows, a tough person instinctively turns toward the wind instead of away from it. I can do that with big things, but it takes practice to do it with little things.

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