{"id":1053,"date":"2017-11-11T13:03:47","date_gmt":"2017-11-11T18:03:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/madstone.net\/?p=1053"},"modified":"2018-02-02T07:43:36","modified_gmt":"2018-02-02T12:43:36","slug":"from-confused-idealist-to-guarded-optimist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?p=1053","title":{"rendered":"Confused idealist to guarded optimist"},"content":{"rendered":"

A friend asked, \u201cWhat\u2019s the one issue you\u2019ve changed your mind on significantly since you were younger?<\/em>\u201d I couldn\u2019t stick with just one issue, so I wrote this up.<\/p>\n

Below are a few of the things I can name as having changed positions on. Nearly all of them have been slow processes, and I\u2019m not at \u2018the end\u2019 of those changes. I\u2019m still uncovering bias that I didn\u2019t know I had.<\/p>\n

At 14 I was still a dedicated, born-again Christian. But I had a growing batch of doubts. By 18 I was a full-on atheist, but I was still convinced that the supernatural existed. It took me another 15 years to scrub that out. If things like telepathy actually do exist, we\u2019ll eventually figure out the mechanism, and it will be comprehensible to scientific inquiry. Same for \u2018spiritual\u2019 experiences. I\u2019m talking about things like overwhelming feelings of connection to the world, other people, and beauty. I now understand such experiences as happening in our brains as we process information about our relationships with other people and with the world around us. Doesn\u2019t make them any less meaningful. I\u2019ve come to see gods and demons as symbols our brains use to understand what\u2019s happening to us. I\u2019ve given up any need to find higher meaning. At our best, humans are our own higher meaning.<\/p>\n

At 20, I thought that \u2018the government\u2019 (which I thought of as being monolithic and \u2018out there\u2019 somewhere, not as something that I was part of) was a bad thing in every case. I was convinced that people, given the right (non-governmental) organizing structures, would do the right thing. I was an idealistic anarchist-libertarian, probably. I no longer believe that. I think that people make rash decisions from greed and rage and fear and incomplete data. I\u2019ve grown to realize that \u2018the government\u2019 is us working together to find a way to live together\u2026 it\u2019s also, sadly, a way for powerful people to keep their power and wealth, which means that \u2018the government\u2019 doesn\u2019t work well for the average person, but there\u2019s no way that I can negotiate agreements with each person I deal with on a given day, so whatever happens, we need some sort of structure that we can use to set expectations and limit bad actors. I think that in every generation, some people are struggling to move our governing structures more toward fairness and others are struggling to keep those structures unfairly supporting them in their power and wealth. I don\u2019t know what governing structure would be best, but I know that plutocracy, fascism, oligarchy, aristocracy, autocracy, and other forms of totalitarianism are not. I\u2019ve seen that unregulated industry will poison the world, that unregulated bankers will rake all the profits into their own pockets, that, essentially, any group that can work in secret will eventually start doing bad things<\/a>. Today I\u2019m leaning toward some sort of utilitarian democratic socialism, something that may take another 500 years to figure out how to do properly, assuming there\u2019s a human race in 500 years.<\/p>\n

I used to think that I was one of the good guys. It took me a long time to recognize and admit that I was hurting people around me. It took me a long time to forgive myself for my mistakes, and realize that it\u2019s not possible to go through life without hurting people. I\u2019m still not good at admitting the harm I\u2019ve done, apologizing, and asking for forgiveness. It was really hard for me to figure out that I\u2019m easily swayed. I\u2019ll do bad things if I\u2019m surrounded by bad people. I\u2019m closer to the guy I want to see myself as when I associate with people who are trying hard to be good people. It\u2019s hard to admit that, because I\u2019d like to be the true good guy, the upstanding guy, bellwether, the one leading the march toward fairness.<\/p>\n

I used to believe that people could be just bad or just good. That\u2019s part of the idealism I was raised to believe in. It took me decades to recognize that people are just people. Some really are bad people, but that doesn\u2019t mean they kick every dog they see. Some really are good, but that doesn\u2019t mean they never make mistakes or do selfish, harmful things.<\/p>\n

I used to believe I was useless. I was always holding myself up against people I saw as icons, and was crushed to realize I\u2019d never live up to those standards, whether they were successful with money, had physical skills, or did wildly creative things. Finding a way to give\u00a0and feel good about the contribution is hard when you\u2019ve been told since you were a kid that if you\u2019re not the shining son, the star athlete, the top earner, the leader, you\u2019re nothing. I\u2019m glad that I can see my value now, and particularly glad that I\u2019m not in (much) danger of overstating my value. I am who I am, doing what I can.<\/p>\n

It seems I\u2019ve gone from being a confused idealist to being a guarded optimist.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve gradually learned to distrust idealism. To recognize that calls for purity are always misguided because humans are not pure. People have gone out in masses and killed other people for thousands of years under the banner of purity, and it\u2019s all a lie. It\u2019s an infinite regress of the No True Scotsman fallacy. But I didn\u2019t end up in despair. That\u2019s my guarded optimism. I keep finding people who struggle against cruelty and greed and rage, both in society and in themselves, who aren\u2019t true believers, aren\u2019t fanatics, and aren\u2019t perfect, but who keep trying. They give me heart. They give me a bit of hope that we can find our way out of the dark and frightening forest of the childhood of humanity (if only we can keep from killing ourselves in the meantime).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A friend asked, \u201cWhat\u2019s the one issue you\u2019ve changed your mind on significantly since you were younger?\u201d I couldn\u2019t stick with just one issue, so I wrote this up. Below are a few of the things I can name as having changed positions on. Nearly all of them have been slow processes, and I\u2019m not … Continue reading “Confused idealist to guarded optimist”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[59,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophizing","category-post"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pgY3e-gZ","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":750,"url":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?p=750","url_meta":{"origin":1053,"position":0},"title":"“I hate that the world has changed”","author":"Jorah","date":"July 27, 2015","format":"aside","excerpt":"(cross-posted from FB) Many of the complaints I see from the conservative side of social media seem to boil down to \"I hate that the world doesn't look like it did when I was a kid.\" For the most part, the good old days were not so good for most\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Social commentary"","block_context":{"text":"Social commentary","link":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?cat=46"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1028,"url":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?p=1028","url_meta":{"origin":1053,"position":1},"title":"Knitter’s Inventory","author":"Jorah","date":"July 28, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"I've been thinking this morning about my \"knitting journey.\" This fall I'll hit my 4-year mark from when I started to learn to knit. I have 54 finished projects in my list on Rav, or about one F.O. per month. More than I expected, really. But I've never been interested\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Knitting"","block_context":{"text":"Knitting","link":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?cat=85"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":771,"url":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?p=771","url_meta":{"origin":1053,"position":2},"title":"My second Toastmasters speech: Heroes","author":"Jorah","date":"August 16, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Below is my second Toastmasters speech, built on the requirement that I had to organize my speech properly; with a clear beginning, middle, and end. This is still in the form of the notes I spoke to during the speech. I'm planning to re-write it to fill in the blanks,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Toastmasters"","block_context":{"text":"Toastmasters","link":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?cat=62"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1225,"url":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?p=1225","url_meta":{"origin":1053,"position":3},"title":"Feeling Overshadowed","author":"Jorah","date":"December 26, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"I responded to the question \u201cHow does one stop feeling bad and overshadowed by everyone else?\u201d \u201cIf you are learning something difficult, try not to compare your progress with that of other students. It doesn't help you, and only fosters a false pride or a false discouragement.\u201d I wrote that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophizing"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophizing","link":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?cat=59"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1053"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1053\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1125,"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1053\/revisions\/1125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}