The Moral Imperative

 

Edvard Munch, Melancholy

Seiko, a 45-year-old man living with depression and chronic anxiety, insists his parent are stupid, not evil. And how can it be their fault if they are evil?

Od’s response:

You puzzle over how you could blame your parents for being stupid. “I doubt if stupid people can make themselves less stupid.”

Those raised in a dysfunctional family will go to almost any lengths not to blame their parents. Accepting that your parents are at fault is the essence of the cure.

It is possible for people to be deliberately stupid, and many people choose to be stupid.

Here’s how.

Have you ever watched a movie? You know that what you saw was not really happening. It was just light playing on a screen. Even the story was all made up. You even knew that nothing bad would happen to the hero, because most movies have a happy ending. Yet you got engrossed in the story and kept watching, forgetting where you were and your real life, for an hour or two. You imagined it was all really happening.

This is what narcissists do all the time. They decide what they want to be true, and then simply choose to believe it. They live in a movie they are writing, directing, and starring in.

It follows that a commitment to truth no matter where it leads is the antidote to being raised by narcissists. It is necessary to break through a series of delusions and denials with which you have been raised. Especially about your parents.

So narcissists are not born stupid. They usually choose to be stupid, to turn away from truth, in early adolescence.

Seiko thinks the modern world and all its technology is too complicated for him. He yearns to live in the jungle, or like Canada’s First Nations.

Od:

I understand your concern, but I don’t think you have the real problem pinpointed. It is not with technology, but with society. Our society has its values wrong; most people are to some degree delusional, in denial. Your instincts are right to want to get away from it.

This is also a projection of the fact that the society in which you grew up, your family, had its values wrong. You need to get away from all society to think things through, and you know this by instinct. You need, not nature, but solitude.

The antidote to being raised with false values is a commitment to true values—to the good--wherever it leads.

I think it is unwise to jump quickly into some new “community,” even if one is available. You are vulnerable to being exploited by some new dysfunctional community or individual narcissist who spins you a comfortable new delusion. Without a grounding in reality, you are unable to detect this. This is how cults develop. You need first to establish a solid sense of what is true and false, right and wrong.

In the old Christian monasteries, when you joined, you were required to observe a period of enforced isolation and silence.

Cults do the opposite: they never want you to be alone. They fear independent thought.

Edvard Munch, Anxiety

Seiko persists in denying the existence of God, and, like all atheists, inconsistently also blaming him for all evil. 

Od:

There is no need here to discuss the existence of God. I think this has become a distraction. What is important is to accept the existence of right and wrong. Whether or not God exists, surely you agree that it would be wrong to rape the next woman you meet? That it would be wrong to kill the next person who annoys you?

No?

Then would it be wrong for the next person you meet to kill you? Or to rape you? Perhaps if he is homosexual?

No objections?

Can you agree that the world should be better than it is?

Immediately, then, you are accepting the reality of right and wrong. That is all that matters: right is right and wrong is wrong, and people are capable of doing either.

I think you want to introduce God as a scapegoat. Then perhaps you can blame him, and avoid blaming your parents.

Forget God, then: your parents are fully responsible for their own actions.

But supposing, on the other hand, that God does exist. It does not follow that he is responsible for the actions of your parents, any more than a parent is responsible if he lets his son drive the car, and the son gets into an accident. Nor is the car manufacturer responsible. Humans have moral agency. We know this, because we know we do. We know we make conscious choices. Why that is so is irrelevant. We cannot blame God for our own choices; or those of our parents.

Why did God allow us to make choices? Because he does not see us as objects, mere toys to play with. Martin Buber speaks of an “I-thou” relationship, far more meaningful than an “I-it” relationship. No doubt you can understand that I love my wife in a different and more important sense than I might love a good meal, or a soft couch, or a gadget.

To suppose your parents themselves had no choice in how they raised you, that it was all God’s fault, or the fault of some genetic flaw they were born with, or the fault of their own upbringing, is to reduce them to robots, without moral agency. Is that respectful?

You ask, what purpose does hell serve? The answer is one word: justice.