Credo

What is a life well lived? 

Are there Principles that exist outside space and time, eternal Principles of infinite worth, immovable bedrock Principles that can never be disrupted or unseated though the universe itself should cease to exist? If so, then I want to construct my life on those Principles.

Is there Truth -- statements that hold true in every corner of the cosmos, for every particle of matter, for every being on the spectrum of life and sentience, and for all time? If so, then that Truth is what I want to light my path.

What does it mean for this to be 'better' than that? Is there some unfailing Yardstick that can always tell me what is the better of two things, two choices, two paths? If so, then I want that Yardstick always by my side.

But how do I know? Ancient wisdom, modern learning, religions with their doctrines and deities, philosophies with their axioms and postulates, all make claims about what is the Best Way, what are the most enduring Truths and the most fundamental Principles. Yet these claims often conflict with each other to the extent that, for one to be "True", the others must necessarily be "Not True".

These are the questions that every generation must discover, rediscover, or invent answers to. They are questions that every thinking individual must sooner or later confront.

This is my attempt to grapple with the questions What is Right, What is Best, What is True. In a universe of a complexity far beyond our cognitive capacity to grasp, of a size far beyond our minuscule ability to perceive, knowing that I exist as a tiny speck riding on a small chunk of rock circling one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy, one of 100 billion galaxies that we can see, I do not aspire to much. But I do want to do my best to leave the the cosmos brighter by one photon, better by one Planck length on the great Yardstick, if it exists.

The world is full of Ten Commandmentses, Golden Ruleses, Eight-fold Wayses, and 42 Roadses A Man Must Walk Down. They all have some good and some bad, but they are the contributions of others. The eternal PhD candidate in me wants to contribute some original research, if such a thing is possible, to Life, The Universe and Everything. This collection of ideas, and my blog in general, always a work under construction, is my list so far. There may be nothing original or enlightening about it, but if it helps someone, I'll call that a success and can retire from life feeling like I've done at least one quantum of energy more than nothing.

Everybody is doing the best they can, under the circumstances

This principle says that nobody sees himself as the 'bad' guy. There are not 'good' or 'evil' people.

The key to this principle is understanding the scope of the phrase "under the circumstances". By that, I mean the total constellation of circumstances that have brought the person to his or her current state. This includes the circumstances of  birth and upbringing, genetic endowment, and the millions of good, bad, and indifferent events, both seen and unseen, that, taken together, have contributed to the person's current mental, physical, and social context.

Practical advice in this space:

• Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner.
• Be more likely to blame things on ignorance, unless malice is proven.

There is no 'us and them'; it's all just 'us'

Tribalism is woven deeply into our human nature. It is one of the gifts that evolution has given us because it once conferred an essential survival benefit to be able to quickly distinguish between the harmful and the benign based on external signals.

But the world is much, much more complicated now. 

(I always feel a slight hesitation when using the word 'evolution' in my writing. We attach so much importance to words, and we often load them down with ideological baggage or use them as weapons to misrepresent the truth in our favor, or to injure others. And the word 'evolution', as is so common, has become 'political' in the sense that it has come to mean different things to different people. This presents a terrible quandary to a writer who wants to communicate with an audience that may contain both people who view evolution as the basis of all biology, and people who view it as an evil affront to their worldview. 

Instead, I just want to talk about the common-sense notion that the better adapted one is for living and working in a particular environment, the more success one is likely to have making a living in that environment. For example, basketball is a sport that selects for, attracts, and rewards tallness for reasons related to the nature of the sport. To be sure, there are successful basketball players who are short, but they are the exception, and they must compensate for their lack of height by having some extra agility or ability to jump high.)

I have indulged in this tangent about evolution because I wish to talk about tribalism as a feature of our human nature that's much better adapted for an environment that is physically hostile to our existence. The environment we live in now finds us much less often in situations where we can be eaten by wild animals at any time, are often in imminent danger of starvation, or where being separated from our community means swift and certain physical death. But our brain's reflexes and instincts are still tuned to that kind of existence. And in an exquisite twist of irony, an audience that views evolution as "evil" or a "tool of the devil" will be blind to the reality of the maladaptation precisely because of that maladaptation.

Instead, we now live in a world where the dangers are not as predominantly immediate threats to our physical existence, but are more abstract. People who are fond of religion or politics will often say that the dangers we face now have to do mostly with morality and what is right and wrong. Others may feel that our primary problems have to do with people who wish benefit at our expense by stealing our time or money, or more subtly, by deceiving us into giving them those things with promises of rewards that are never quite fulfilled. Either way, the built-in reflexes that form our default way of dealing with dangers can actually make our problems worse. Put another way, we are mal-adapted to an environment where information and ideas, not teeth and claws, are the primary vectors for harm and danger. The battle today is for our minds or souls, the fruits of our creativity and labor, not for our proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.

What this all boils down to is that tribalism is a maladaptive protection mechanism because (1) it prioritizes loyalty to the group over respect for the truth. (2) Tribalism makes us eager to draw a bright line between Us and Them, and thus make us feel no compunction about enacting different standards of justice and fairness based on ingroup or outgroup dynamics. (3) Tribalism makes us interpret information based on a very warped lens that favors our tribe, where "Good" is what benefits "Us" or harms "Them", and "Bad" is the converse. This means that we often uncritically leap to embrace information that seems to constitute a benefit for "Us" and equally uncritically ignore or dismiss information that does not. We cherry pick, exaggerate, and downplay facts because we view our allegiance to the tribe as more important than truth or accuracy of information. And none of this occurs at the conscious level, which makes it 1000 times scarier and more dangerous. In fact, more often than not, we're even absolutely convinced that we are being perfectly objective and fair even while actually engaged in this cherry-picking and other warping of information.

And all that was perfectly fine when dangers were immediate and physical. But now the environment contains things like nuclear weapons, Photoshop, social media, 'Fake News', extremely good computer generated speech, hackers, phishing, extremely powerful shareholders and investors willing to benefit at the expense of others, large powerful governments with strong incentives for self-preservation at the expense of their citizens, all manner of charlatans, scoundrels, televangelists, and drug dealers. And all these people mainly use (mostly misuse) information and statistics as their weapons. They use these tools to manipulate and deceive, whereas they should be used to inform and enlighten. What all this means is that it is much more essential to our well-being to detect threats coming at us in the form of information. But all our deep instincts are tuned for physical types of dangers. 

So, then why is it important to get past "Us and Them"? It's not out of some utopian sense of "oneness with the universe." It's that the nature of threats is fundamentally different from what our genome equips us to perceive and respond to. There are still, and always will be, actors who wish to benefit at our expense, and thus we need to protect ourselves from them. But the key to that defense is in not letting our loyalty to a group or an ideology warp our perception of information. If your religion primes you to see demons in everything, you'll be fighting demons. If your political in-group primes you to see the rival political party as the Great Enemy of Civilization, then all the information that flows to you will pass through a filter that confirms all your biases. And you will not be able to detect whether you are actually being manipulated for someone else's gain at your expense. 

A unified nation is a danger to people who benefit from a nation with two groups of citizens constantly at each other throats. It is those people who are your real enemy, not the "Other Team." But our tribal instincts make it supremely easy for us to be manipulated into hating and fighting against that other team.

One's worldview is not the world

The world is a demanding place. It takes a lot of physical and mental effort to create a space where we feel safe and somewhat in control of our environment, our lives, our family, our tribe, our country, our world. The more we have a sense of being at the mercy of the forces of chaos and destruction, the more we cling to what feels solid and certain. Anyone who has tried to run on loose sand can appreciate the value of solid ground.

This is why we tend to wrap ourselves in a set of ideas and practices that give us the sense of stability we want and need. We adopt a view of the world, or worldview, where we are not just a flicker of light in a swirling maelstrom of chaos and confusion, or a random blip in an indifferent universe. This is the root of all religion and all politics. The desire to be someone and to do something that matters, to leave a lasting mark on the fabric of the cosmos, or to be part of a grand, triumphal story in a universe that makes sense, this is an important part of our endowment as beings of consciousness.

Sometimes these ideologies we wrap around ourselves to stave off nihilism and emptiness are harmful. That is, the benefits they bring to us are outweighed by the costs they impose on the larger world. But we can never hope to perceive this harm as long as we are unaware that the ideological bubble surrounding us is just a view of the world and not the world itself.

Much that is positive and noble in this life comes from having a strong conviction of what is right and proper, just and moral. But it is also a valuable skill to be able to step away from the convictions we hold dear and view them with a dispassionate eye, to make sure they are rooted firmly in sound principles, to assess their total effect in the larger world. Without this grounding in observable reality, it is very easy for the bubble of our worldview to drift and morph insensibly into something terrible and harmful. This can rarely be perceived from inside the bubble, but can often be seen clearly from without.

And this is why we try to cultivate the sense of never being 100% certain about ourselves, our ideas, our principles. When we base our whole identity on our ideology, then a criticism of an idea in our worldview feels like a personal attack every bit as real as an assault on our person. But an unexamined idea can do great harm.

'Good' and 'Evil' are lazy labels

I try to minimize the notions of good and evil in my thinking and writing because they stop thought and prevent us from digging deeper and asking helpful questions like these:

• What makes it good or bad?
• If it is good for me, but bad for you, is it still 'good'?
• If it is good now, but bad later, is it still 'good'?
• It it good or bad mainly because a holy book, deity, or person claiming authority says so?
• Can I point to real consequences for people regardless of what they might believe?

I like the notion of "total cost of ownership". It pushes us to think at different levels. What is the proper time frame: now, this week, this month, this year, this decade, or this century? What is the proper scope: me, my family, my city, my country, the world, the entire cosmos? The bigger circle we can draw around our decision, the better we can evaluate its total cost of ownership.

People tend to get all tied up in knots about whether 'good' and 'evil' are relative or absolute. Much blood and ink have been spilled in the effort to come to grips with this, and now those terms are so burdened with baggage that it's almost impossible to converse reasonably about them. 

I think it's essential in any discussion of these weighty ideas to talk about the context. 

And by the way, most of the world's ills can be attributed to poverty and ignorance.