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jazzfishI've been reading the news for at least a year with an escalatingly frantic mental response of "what the fuck is wrong with you people?" to just about every item. I guess I have an answer.
A couple days ago I read an article on tech jackass Marc Andreessen and his claim to not engage in introspection. Now, tech jackasses can do what they want with their unexamined-and-not-worth-living lives, that's no skin off my back (until it is, I guess). But this bit from the article got me thinking:
That, to me, sounds exactly like folks who get their morality from authority: from a book, from a religion, from what other people tell them. There's no questioning and no impulse towards questioning, there's only "this is what I was told so it's right."
I've known for awhile that those are people whose empathy is severely lacking. That's an obvious correlation. It's a lot harder to keep believing that it's okay for awful things to be done to people if you don't really view them as people. I'd never thought to look for a causative link, though. It had literally never occurred to me that empathy is something that can be learned or activated, beyond 'teaching kids how to share and to get along.' Or that it can be actively discouraged in ways more subtle than 'those aren't real people.'
For much of this year I've been sporadically chewing over my own ethical/moral framework. I guess the above is sort of a lead-in to that, but I feel like it deserves its own separate post. Or posts.
A couple days ago I read an article on tech jackass Marc Andreessen and his claim to not engage in introspection. Now, tech jackasses can do what they want with their unexamined-and-not-worth-living lives, that's no skin off my back (until it is, I guess). But this bit from the article got me thinking:
When you examine your own motivations, desires, and inner life, neuroscientists have discovered, you are using the same parts of the brain that allow you to understand the motivations, desires, and inner lives of others. This means in turn that when you wall off access to your own inner life you also impair your capacity to imaginatively inhabit the experience of other people. Zero introspection is not just a personal quirk or a supposed productivity hack. It's a permission slip for zero accountability [emphasis mine].
That, to me, sounds exactly like folks who get their morality from authority: from a book, from a religion, from what other people tell them. There's no questioning and no impulse towards questioning, there's only "this is what I was told so it's right."
I've known for awhile that those are people whose empathy is severely lacking. That's an obvious correlation. It's a lot harder to keep believing that it's okay for awful things to be done to people if you don't really view them as people. I'd never thought to look for a causative link, though. It had literally never occurred to me that empathy is something that can be learned or activated, beyond 'teaching kids how to share and to get along.' Or that it can be actively discouraged in ways more subtle than 'those aren't real people.'
For much of this year I've been sporadically chewing over my own ethical/moral framework. I guess the above is sort of a lead-in to that, but I feel like it deserves its own separate post. Or posts.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-06 02:25 am (UTC)So, 60-40? 2:1? Something like that, would be my guess. It's possible for the money to not break you but it has to be a conscious choice.