Everything Is F*cked(78)
32. So far I’ve been ambiguous as to what I mean by “virtues.” This is partly because different philosophers and religions embraced different virtues.
33. Kant, Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 9–20.
34. It’s important to note that Kant’s derivation of the Formula of Humanity was not based on moral intuition, nor on the ancient concept of virtue—these are connections I am making.
35. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 40–42.
36. And here is where all three come together. The Formula of Humanity is the underlying principle of the virtues of honesty, humility, bravery, and so on. These virtues define the highest stages of moral development (Kohlberg’s Stage 6; Kegan’s Stage 5).
37. The key word here is merely. Kant admits that it’s impossible never to use anyone as a means. If you treated everyone unconditionally, you would be forced to treat yourself conditionally, and vice versa. But our actions toward ourselves and others are multilayered. I can treat you as a means and an end at the same time. Maybe we’re working on a project together, and I encourage you to work longer hours both because I think it will help you and because I believe it will help me. Kant says this is fine. It’s only when I’m manipulating you purely for selfish reasons that I veer into being unethical.
38. Kant’s Formula of Humanity perfectly describes the principle of consent in sex and relationships. Not to seek explicit consent, either from the other person or from yourself, is to treat one or both of you merely as a means in the pursuit of pleasure. Explicit consent means actively treating the other person as an end and the sex as a means.
39. In other words, people who treat themselves as means will treat others as means. People who don’t respect themselves won’t respect others. People who use and destroy themselves will use and destroy others.
40. Ideological extremists usually look to some great leader. Spiritual extremists tend to think that the apocalypse is coming and that their savior will descend from heaven and pour them a coffee or something.
41. It is possible that all God Values that do not adhere to the Formula of Humanity end in paradox. If you are willing to treat humanity as a means to gain greater freedom or equality, then you will inevitably destroy freedom and equality. More on this in chapters 7 and 8.
42. By political extremism, I mean any political movement or party that is inherently antidemocratic and willing to subvert democracy in favor of some ideological (or theological) religious agenda. For a discussion of these developments around the world, see F. Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018).
43. Globalization, automation, and income inequality are also popular explanations with a lot of merit.
Chapter 7: Pain Is the Universal Constant
1. The study this section describes is David Levari et al., “Prevalence-Induced Concept Change in Human Judgment,” Science 29 (June 29, 2018): 1465–67.
2. Prevalence-induced concept change measures how our perceptions are altered by the prevalence of an expected experience. I will be using “Blue Dot Effect” in this chapter a bit more widely to describe all shifting of perception based on expectations, not just prevalence-induced expectations.
3. Whenever I see a news story about college kids freaking out over a campus speaker they don’t like and equating offensive speech with trauma, I wonder what Witold Pilecki would have thought.
4. Haidt and Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind, pp. 23–24.
5. Andrew Fergus Wilson, “#whitegenocide, the Alt-right and Conspiracy Theory: How Secrecy and Suspicion Contributed to the Mainstreaming of Hate,” Secrecy and Society, February 16, 2018.
6. Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method (New York: Free Press, 1982), p. 100.
7. Hara Estroff Marano, “A Nation of Wimps,” Psychology Today, November 1, 2004, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200411/nation-wimps.
8. These three false Einstein quotes were gathered from M. Novak, “9 Albert Einstein Quotes That Are Totally Fake,” Gizmodo, March 14, 2014, https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/9-albert-einstein-quotes-that-are-totally-fake-1543806477.
9. P. D. Brickman and D. T. Campbell, “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society,” in M. H. Appley, ed. Adaptation Level Theory: A Symposium (New York: Academic Press, 1971).
10. Recent research has challenged this and found that extremely traumatic events (the death of a child, for instance) can permanently alter our “default level” of happiness. But the “baseline” happiness remains true through the vast majority of our experiences. See B. Headey, “The Set Point Theory of Well-Being Has Serious Flaws: On the Eve of a Scientific Revolution?” Social Indicators Research 97, no. 1 (2010): 7–21.
11. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert refers to this as our “psychological immune system”: no matter what happens to us, our emotions, memories, and beliefs acclimate and alter themselves to keep us at mostly-but-not-completely happy. See D. Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), pp. 174–77.
12. By “we,” I am referring to our perceived experience. Basically, we don’t question our perceptions; we question the world—when, in fact, it’s our perceptions that have altered themselves and the world has remained the same.
13. Throughout this chapter, I don’t use the Blue Dot Effect in the exact scientific way that the researchers studied prevalence-induced concept change. I’m essentially using it as an analogy for and example of a larger psychological phenomenon that takes place: our perceptions adapt to our preset emotional tendencies and expectations, not the other way around.