Rest vs. Stagnation

As I write this, I am at home during the coronavirus pandemic. Over this same pandemic, I have also been recovering from some mental health problems. I feel like this extended time spent mostly in the same place has been good. I probably would have chosen this if there hadn't been a pandemic. At the same time, though my situation is not really the most confined, I sometimes feel some kind of cabin fever. If I sit still, I rest. But I can also feel like I need to move, if I sit still long enough. And sometimes I am a slave to my sitting still, and find I can hardly will to move, though it occurs to me to try to will it.

If civilization lasts long enough, it will become sustainable. There are two endpoints: sustainability, or death. I think it is likely that a sustainable civilization will have to be mostly static. If things change too much, our ability to be physically sustainable to a sufficient degree could be threatened. And as time goes on, the possibilities of discovering new ideas for what a culture can be will be exhausted. I wonder if we have exhausted many or even most of them already, most rapidly in the last 200 or 300 years. So we may find ourselves settling on one final culture, having seen what there is to see, and there may not be much change or novelty left.

"Static" can imply both "restful" and "stagnant". So if this final culture is a restful one, that's one thing, and if it's stagnant, that's another. Ordinarily, rest is a positive thing. And stagnation is a negative thing. So we would want to seek rest, rather than stagnation.

--

There are only two endpoints, when we're talking about position, but when we're talking about rate of change, there is a third. In other words, there are three stable ways of life which can in principle be extended nearly to infinity: death, sustainability, and endless growth. Endless growth is one way to flee stagnation. It requires an endless supply of space to grow into. We could colonize an infinite universe, and never learn to rest.

Could there somehow be endless cultural growth? Perhaps if we're talking about cultural artifacts, such as movies or books, we could be engineered to have new senses and new emotions, so that we could still have new things. If people can be modified without boundary, we may be able to have all kinds of new experiences. (Modifying people without boundary is dangerous, as well.) But would society be different? Or would we all have settled into a pattern where everything was arranged optimally and we lived in experience machines, or their equivalents? A planet could spread its "optimal plus experience machine" culture to some other planet -- maybe they have to adjust to the atmosphere on the new planet, which is different than the ones they've had to deal with before. But most people on the home world will just be keeping things going. Will there be faster than light travel or communication? If not, then each planet will be isolated from the others. There will be a pull toward stasis on each planet, even if space colonization gives some reason for a minority to do something somewhat novel.

But as we get better at colonizing planets, the risk and therefore the novelty will be sanded away. We may get into patterns of "Yet another planet. Might as well stay home and plug into the experience machine instead." And much of the process could be automated, once we get good at it. So society and its people could be faced with the question: stagnation, or rest? A sure and steady and effective program of endless growth is its own kind of stasis. It's a formula. Some people will realize this, if enough of us aren't completely immersed in the experience machine.

--

Can we find rest in an experience machine? Perhaps. A crude kind of experience machine (watching YouTube or Netflix, reading novel after novel) tends to produce stagnation. But we can imagine that a really good experience machine wouldn't. At least, we could provide the experience of rest in an experience machine. But perhaps rest vs. stagnation is not just about experience, but also about objective reality. So if I am lying on the couch all the time, it doesn't matter what my virtual reality headset has going, I'm not moving. If I am not risking something or trusting something as a person, then every action or romance "holodeck program" I experience adds up to zero -- it doesn't cost me anything, doesn't make me confront anything. Everything it accomplishes it erases with the resolution of the plot; or the return to the experience machine to choose another experience is its own final plot point -- "it was all a dream".

Isn't rest vulnerable to the same criticism as stagnation? When you rest, don't you lie down on the couch just as much? What are the dangers of stagnation? One is that you don't grow enough. Another is that you are not open enough. You can never be receptive to the best if you aren't open to it. So you will be unable to experience the best if you are stagnant. If you are stagnant and satisfied with stagnation, that is the worst. "The best" could be some kind of superlative. "Greater bliss, that no man has ever known" is the goal of some. But "the best" could be "getting to live, at all". Depth and reality sand away the fakeness in all who will consent to be sanded, and thus it is possible for them to be really real, and thus continue to exist forever. So we could say that stagnation leads to death, but rest is eternal life. So, many of us have not experienced true rest, and are either satisfied with stagnation or are attempting to run away from it.

Stagnation is when something that needs to move isn't moving, and it becomes (or remains) fake, sick, or even deadly. Rest is when something doesn't need to move.

--

It looks like we're headed to some kind of stasis -- on our current trajectory, maybe toward total immersion in the experience machine, and if feasible, space colonization. Will that stasis be rest, or stagnation? Or perhaps a deletion of what it means to be human, a destruction of personhood through the end of meaningful choices, risks, and trustings? That's yet another possibility -- maybe conscious stagnation, for all its downside, has the upside of being a choice, which we could reject. But we could become apersonal, atrophying whatever it is that makes us who we are, so that we are experiencing machines, in symbiosis with the experience machine.

In order to really rest as a civilization and as individuals, we have to take care of all the outstanding issues. We need to have achieved perfection -- in other words, become actually good. What are the actual issues remaining?

--

Yet, you can feel rest as rest, when you're resting. It's like how you can see the meaning and validity in the objects you directly perceive. Rest really is restful. But if we stay in repose long enough, we find ourselves in a new moment, where if we are sensitive, we will realize that we are beginning to stagnate. Stagnation is really stagnant -- we experience that directly, and find ourselves either enslaved to it, or running away from it, working away from it.

A stagnant pond is not flowing. So if we are really restful, there will be some kind of motion within us, or flowing into us from an outside source, and flowing out of us, away from us. A pond can sit perfectly still, and yet not be stagnant, because the water moves. A pond is not at rest when the flow within it is turbulent, but when the flow is laminar, it can be.

Reading List Preview: Population Ethics

Finished review of reading list here.

One interesting topic is population ethics. Ethics can talk about the question of "how to make a given existing population most well-off?" Maybe you have 100 people in your population who are very happy. Now consider, should one of you have a baby, and extend the group's size to 101? Will that new baby live a good life? If it's good enough, then you will probably say, "sure, why not?" It seems prima facie good to have one more person exist, if its life will go well. That's population ethics, asking the question of whether there should be more (or the same amount of, or fewer) people, morally speaking.

Intuitively, I tend to want to say "if we have 10 billion people on Earth, that's plenty, let's just stop there and be content with that number of people, and make things sustainable and actually good for everyone". Actually, I'd be content if there were only 1 billion people, if we got to that level of population through a well-managed demographic transition (as opposed to war, plague, famine, etc.) Maybe, whatever population level there is is fine with me. But I wouldn't be as fine with the people who do live not living lives full of true well-being.

Both intuitions, of expansion and contentment, make sense to me. And they go against each other.

So I want to do some readings about population ethics. Here is a reading list from the EA Forum. I may read through it all and write up my thoughts.

Since these are philosophy papers, I think I'll try to repeat the technique mentioned here: read twice, the first time a "light read", the second time more seriously.

I've read part of the first, Population Axiology, paper. Here are some questions and thoughts, going into this:

1. Is there a rational way to decide how large a population should be? If not, then we are in a situation where we have to decide without a right answer.

2. Questions of moral philosophies affecting population-ethical views:

a. Hedonism lends itself to having more and more. Preferentialism can lend itself to that but also can lend itself to saying "everybody got what they wanted, so we don't need any more." With preferentialism, there's a question of "what should people prefer?" The answer to that might answer the question "should we want more and more, or should we be content?" Or we could say that there's no good or bad preferences. Then we wonder what random preferences humans might have, and how they might tilt toward more or fewer people.

b. What about fiducialism? Is fiducialism a "more and more" thing ("adventure", as in the Fiducialism booklet), or inherently about connecting with what is ("mission", or "receptivity to reality")? "Mission" is itself about the reality of people. This lends itself to saying "connect with the reality of existing people". But then, couldn't it lend itself to saying "there ought to be more people", to whose reality one could connect? So that's a hole in fiducialism to try to fill.

c. What do people mean to us? Are they to be seen economically, or in some other way? And given the answers to those questions, how strict should we be in making ourselves live according to economic thinking?

There's some ambiguity as to whether we regard people as wealth or as something else. If people are merely wealth, then we can be content to have less than maximal wealth. But if it's altruistic for the sake of other people to bring them into existence, then we are morally compelled to create them. (Or is there another way to look at people, other than "wealth" and "beings (or prospective beings) to whom one has moral responsibility"?)

It may be more humane to look at people in a non-economic way. Even if in some economic sense (utilitarian, for instance), they would be better off if we were in the economic mode, to really see people as people requires us to leave that mode, and thus to sacrifice some of our do-gooding. This could shift our intuitions away from "maximize the number of superhappy people", make it less obviously a good thing to pursue.

3. What might population ethics look like given the God of MSLN?

a. God had some reason for creating people in the first place (unless there is no reason). Does this mean that in absence of a defeater, he will never stop creating people?

b. Would God value having more and more for its own sake? Is God a slave to maximization?

Interesting question: what is maximization? Is it some "thing" that demands that we do certain things? Or, as a reification, is it merely whatever it cashes out to? In other words, is it that maximization says "I demand that everyone have the best life possible", or is maximization simply our response to the reality of a set of existing people and what kinds of lives they could have?

c. Are people created new, or is there a fixed supply of people created once and for all at the beginning of time, which God then brings into consciousness during their time in history?

Possible answer: We are called to enter God's rest, and presumably God seeks rest, too. New people have to work out their salvation, which is not restful for God. So it seems like there is some finite limit to population, so that there can be a time of permanent rest afterward.

If so, maybe if we increase population above baseline, what we're doing is accelerating the end of the world.

Or, if God can handle our turmoil forever, he can create people forever. If he thinks there aren't enough people, he can always create more. Ultimately, it's his decision how many people there are, because he pays the biggest price for human experience and ultimately has power over the way things are. So if we create more people, he may cause fewer to be created elsewhere.

Seeing Potential

People can seem like they don't have potential, or aren't real people. But then you see them in the context where they are most truly themselves (e.g., singing a song they wrote). And then you see how they are deep and worth paying attention to.

It's as though the role society wants everyone to inhabit is that of the "typical" person. No dreams, no depth. But people can escape that role by doing what they love.

A parallel to Gell-Mann Amnesia. People are spun to us according to society's narrative (they spin themselves by adopting the roles we elicit.) We sometimes see people's reality, then when the moment is past, we forget.

Video Poem: A fly's freedom

I was inspired to write this when I was catching a fly to release outside. My usual technique is to isolate the fly in the room I am in (easy when I'm in my bedroom using my laptop), and then open the curtains on the window, or the window itself so that fresh air comes in. The fly's deepest longing (if I judge by behavior), is to be outside. It will fly to that window even though it is closed, and spend its time there.

The fly doesn't understand how the human world works, and is just trying to do what it knows best. It's actually doing the wrong thing sometimes by staying near the window. If there's a door open somewhere else in the house, it should just find the door and fly out the house. But it doesn't know any better, and just thinks (or acts like it thinks): the appearance of freedom shows where you get freedom.

Sometimes this leads to the death of flies. I used to kill flies when I saw them on the window, rather than catch them and release them. So in that version of the human environment, the desire for freedom, seeking it the best way the flies knew how, led to death. They should have increased their intelligence and flown nearby the front door, so that they could slip out whenever the humans opened it.

But because I am actually a good person with respect to the fly's desire for life and freedom, the environment that I create makes it so that when the fly, unjustified though it may be in assuming this, thinks (or "thinks"), "I will go toward freedom -- it's right there, I can see it -- I can smell the fresh air -- somehow that's the way out", it's actually a trustworthy move for the fly to make, in ways that it does not understand.

I approach the fly with a small glass cup and put the cup over the area on the window or screen that the fly is on. The fly thinks the cup is prison, and it is. It takes off -- some flies more untrusting than others -- flies around inside the cup. Eventually, it lands on the inner surface of the cup long enough for me to quickly pick up the cup and put my hand over the opening. Now the fly is very much a prisoner, and is taken far away from the promise of freedom, through the rest of the house to the door.

I open the door and keep the fly inside its transport, and then step outside and close the door, so that if I release the fly it doesn't go straight back into the ultimately unwelcoming human environment. Then I take it down to the most favorable part of the back yard, near the compost heap, which I assume is where a fly would most like to be, and where I assume it is best to be a fly -- although flies are perfectly capable of getting around, to seek their own best environments. Then I let the fly go. Sometimes it takes a moment to grasp that it is free, or I help it out of the glass cup. And then it flies away.

Because the fly looks for freedom so predictably, I was able to capture and imprison it, and give it true freedom.

An MSLN view: we might have different intuitions about life depending on whether we find ourselves in the presence of a beneficent super-human environment (whatever is beyond human agency and/or our ability to sufficiently mentally grasp), or a negative one. The MSLN assumption is that we should adjust our priors in the direction that there is a being who would be inclined to help us, and might do so. And so if that is true, we should go toward freedom, like a fly trying to escape the spacious prison of a house.

Anti-skills

Skills and anti-skills are both learned. A skill is something that helps you to enact your will in the world. Magic, technology, taking charge. An anti-skill is a lesson learned which is about something outside of you taking charge of your life, or is you not enacting your will. Prayer, waiting, making space, can all be skills that aspire to be anti-skills. But true anti-skills are not part of the order of Law, doing what you have to to survive. They happen to you apart from instrumental or even, sometimes, epistemic rationality, are orthogonal to human goals, even, sometimes, human perspectives. Coming to see things properly is less often a skill, is more often an anti-skill. When you see things properly, you are not more powerful than reality. It is affecting you.

We like to be born with the right anti-skills, because acquiring them is often beyond our ability, no matter how hard we try. Some anti-skills may never be learned through our own strivings.

Skills and anti-skills work together, and both are components of wisdom, spiritual and practical maturity.

Law

Law is what you have to do to survive. Knowing the facts can be Law, doing the right thing can be Law, being cynical can be Law.

Once we understand Law, understand what is needed to survive, we feel like we have the right to enforce Law, to push it on other people and fit ourselves into it. We can lean hard on it.

Self-Defeating Victory

The concept of victory is rooted in the way we talk about experiences arising from literal, physical warfare. Victory is clear and flows naturally from battle. Battle involves killing people and driving them away from their position. It involves a mustering and expending of force. When the force is spent and all the opponents have been driven out or killed, then you have a new piece of land for your territory and you can feel expansive on the inside, invincible and triumphant.

This concept can be applied metaphorically in ways that don't describe literal, physical warfare. For instance, in political or ideological warfare, or in spiritual warfare. One example is in the political slogan "Love Trumps Hate". Another is in the idea of conquering sin in order to become holy.

The idea of "Love trumping Hate" produces a strange mental image of Love having slaughtered Hate, or having it at its heel, gloating over it, expansive, invincible, and triumphant. There's something odd about that kind of Love. Love itself is at angles to the practice of trumping, probably both obliquely and acutely at the same time, in different ways. Whereas Nationalism (for instance) is closely aligned with trumping.

Perhaps the way that "Love Trumps Hate" can actually serve Love is for it to rouse people to action. And then, in the process of action, people who were aimed at trumping Hate will end up truly loving, and in the process trump Hate -- but at this point will be uninterested in trumping Hate, caught up rather in Loving itself.

This is a process of self-transformation, whereby a person is led from one motivation to another which they do not have or do not fully have at the outset of the process. In Eastern thinking, the goal is to deny the self. People generally like selfless people and like themselves when they are more selfless, and so they start down the path. But the end state is nirvana -- non-existence. Surely this does not make sense to most people as a desirable aim. But I can see how, having progressed long enough down the path of becoming more selfless, someone might come to welcome non-existence, as the ultimate selflessness. Someone starting down the path may think "I love selflessness and someday will love it enough to die for it."

The aforementioned ideas may help in understanding or making practical the concept of overcoming sin in order to become holy. The person who seeks holiness is ambitious -- but ambition is at angles to holiness. Perhaps we might think that the ambition to be holy is the problem and try substituting the ambition to love -- but ambition and love are at-angles.

It's relatively easy to picture Self-Control trumping Sin -- slaughtering Sin or having it at its heel, gloating over it, expansive, invincible, and triumphant. Or perhaps Self-Control would shut down its own gloating, would have a cold and tight grip on Sin's neck. But some sins are immune to Self-Control, or involve a kind of Self-Control, and we have a horror or disgust of them, or a fear of them. The desire for holiness connects to the ambition for holiness which connects to the ambition for self-control which connects to an amplification of all the sins that self-control does not address. Whenever you make yourself more trustworthy, people trust you more, and you are then able to betray them in the ways that you are not trustworthy. (As with Fr. Clérissac). So through self-control you can make yourself into an attractive image that ultimately will betray. All this helps explain why holiness is not a popular aim.

Corruptions of Love turn people off from making Love an aim as much as corruptions of Holiness do, but there's nothing inherent in desiring the end of Hate (or Sin) which means that you have to go down the path to the corruptions. The process of self-transformation can mean that you start out wanting Love or Holiness and in the process get caught up in the Power it takes to move yourself or the world toward them, or the Victory that's promised at the end of the process. But the genuine desire for Love or Holiness is hard to fault, will correct you sometimes in itself, and involves occasions on which the Victory in you is frustrated. If you love Victory first, you will seek the easier victories and will abandon the path of Love or Holiness, but if you truly desire the two of them, you will endure far more defeats and madnesses than you ever would have imagined or signed up for, and ... you will overcome.

This kind of overcoming might be a transformed version of Victory. So then when the pursuit of Love has defeated you first, then you can conquer (but maybe no longer "trump") Hate, and likewise with Holiness and Sin. We shy away from being defeated by our values, but we don't have to.

Rootedness and Respect

How should we treat young people (or anyone)? Answers: respect, make society "rooted". (Long post.)

Introduction

Rootedness: Here's Simone Weil's definition, from The Need for Roots (p.43, Beacon Press, 1952 ed.):

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active, and natural participation in the life of the community, which preserves in living shape certain treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future. This participation is a natural one, in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession, and social surroundings. Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw well-nigh the whole of his moral, intellectual, and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.

She goes on to identify military conquest and money as things that bring the opposite of rootedness, uprootedness. People who have been uprooted can pass their uprootedness on to their children through their culture. Weil puts a high value on work and finding meaning in work. She suggests that one thing that would make work more rooted is if workers could see the things they work on being used. She also suggests that schools for peasants teach them science based around the lifecycle of plants and agriculture.

I don't know much about American Indian philosophy. Two Partially Examined Life podcast episodes (Part 1 and Part 2 of "Relating to American Indian Philosophy") taught me pretty much all I know about their philosophy. The thing that sticks out to me from that is relationality. American Indian philosophy contains the idea that everything is related to everything else. This sounds a lot like Weil's rootedness, worked into how we think about everything we see.

I had always been impressed by what I saw, from afar, as American Indian respectfulness. Not just respectfulness, but a lack of flippancy.

Rootedness breaks down when people don't take us seriously. When we are malicious, lazy, forceful, or merciless, we don't take people seriously. These are some ways to be disrespectful of other people. When we don't respect people, we betray them, destroying trust. This makes it hard for any kind of group to function. Background trust is destroyed, which makes it so that new relationships can't form.

The more damaged people are, the harder it is for them to endure social environments that aren't to their preferences. We think of preferences as based in ego, but they're also based in survival. People are individualists largely because they can't trust other people.

In a rooted society, there is a place for everyone. When we are given a place, we are given a relationality to other people, and in that, we are given respect.

The idea of boundaries connects.

In the West, we don't come from a rooted background. The West is pretty used to its own uprootedness. So we have to teach ourselves how to give each other a place, how to relate all the people to each other. But what's good about this problem, unlike many other problems, is that just about anyone can help with it. No matter where you fall on any given spectrum, there's probably someone who's sort of similar to you somewhere. Maybe, if nothing else, similar in their loneliness. People have called our society "atomized", but anyone can help make it more "composite".

How Can I Respect?

Which is worse, lack of love, or lack of respect? Which leads to more abuse? Probably lack of respect.

We sometimes view respect as optional, as something that needs to be earned. There are two kinds of respect: ego respect and survival respect. People fight to defend themselves, which is a fight to get respect. Egoistic self-defense asks for ego respect, and usually gets survival respect. Survival self-defense asks for survival respect. People who don't get survival respect get abused. People think it's their duty to oppose egoistic self-defense, but by breaking down other people's ability to defend themselves at all, they can destroy their ability to protect themselves from abuse.

Some signs of lack of respect for others:

You can see another's inferiority instead of them. Viewing a person in terms of their attributes, rather than as a person.

(When you think you're an "awesome guitar player" or "a really conscientious worker" or the like, you might not be respecting yourself -- by seeing yourself according to positive stereotypes.)

Making allowances for other people's inferiority.

Warning sign: feel a feeling of affection that you can't "unfeel", which is an emotional fact to you.

Warning: you think someone is cute.

Warning: you think someone is annoying.

Warning: seeing people as being in need of your help.

Warning: being magnanimous toward someone.

Warning: seeing someone as insufficient (weak, sick, immature, wrong, etc.)

Warning: being, or seeking to be, on another level than someone. (For instance, understanding them better than they understand themselves.)

Sign: seeing someone as useful.

Warning: seeing someone as helpful.

Warning: you think someone is beautiful.

Warning: you view someone as working through a process, rather than actually saying what they mean.

Warning: you form predictions of what other people will do or become.

Any time an attribute of someone impresses you strongly, it tempts you to see that instead of them.

Warning: when you don't understand someone.

Sign: you devalue respect.

Warning: you think ego is invalid.

Warning: you're a fake person, overall, or in some area of your life.

Warning: you're a lazy person, overall, or in some area of your life.

Warning: you're a cynical person, overall, or in some area of your life.

Warning: you have superior taste, overall, or in some area of your life.

Sign: you think someone else's desire to be better than they are is invalid.

Sign: you enjoy someone, you don't trust them, but you don't fear them.

Sign: you assume a position of dominance over someone else and you're okay with that.

Sign: you disassemble, soothe away, manage, other people's confrontations of you.

--

Lack of respect is a form of lack of trust. People who are not trusted have a harder time trusting themselves, and people who don't trust themselves can't behave as consistently. When people are respected, they behave in a way that's more objectively respect-worthy. Seeing the facts can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

--

If you like intellectual things, you can think of respect as being something like "apophatic anthropology". Or at least, that sort of indicates the right way. Apophatic theology involves seeing God as being wholly other than what we can say of him. But people who practice apophatic theology (I think) usually still think of God in the way he's described in scriptures or in their personal experience. On some level, he still has attributes, even though they try to deny them (I think) in order to gain respect for him. Apophatic theology is a formula, and so is the usual "God is love, God is powerful, God is ..." theology. The reality of God is beyond this. The answer's so far away -- but so close. God is just a person. Similarly with people.

If you like psychology, one idea that points the way to respect is "mentalizing". Mentalizing is the intuitive grasp of another person as a person, a mind with thoughts and feelings. In contrast, people can figure each other out in a "teleological" way. They put together a deliberate or semi-deliberate mental model of other people, just the same as they might figure out how an engine works. Teleological thinkers can be good at predicting other people, a lot of the time.

The analogy isn't perfect, because people can be capable of mentalizing and still disrespect people.

--

It's possible to be more mature than other people, or more skilled. This is a state which should fill you with something like sorrow, rather than triumph -- a quiet sorrow. And not a sorrow that the other person is so unfortunate, but rather that you are unfortunate. What you want is to be able to see the attribute or fact of someone's skills, be able to take that into account, while on the deepest level see them as equals and/or sufficient, or best of all, fail to see or trust the categories of "inferior", "superior", "sufficient", "insufficient", or even "equal" -- just you and them.

If you like intellectual things, you might want to read I and Thou by Martin Buber, who talks about these kinds of things in a philosophical way. He says there's such a thing as "I-You" relationships, where your pre-rational orientation toward others is that they are people. He contrasts that with the "I-It" orientation, where you see people as objects. He says that when you say "I" in "I-You" it's different than saying "I" in "I-It". It would seem from that that you have to heal your relationship to others and yourself simultaneously, that it's impossible to fix one without fixing the other, because they are actually one thing.

You can be hard on someone while respecting them -- probably the basic first step to full respect is to be hard on yourself and others -- valuing and practicing respect in an obvious way. But being hard on people isn't necessarily respectful. You can be merciless, which is a way of not seeing a person as a person.

Someone said that hope is a sense both of desire and likelihood, as though the two are a bit hard to distinguish. So we recognize that when people abuse each other, they do so out of a love of evil and a sense of power at the same time. So we try to break other people's sense of power, so that they don't do evil. Some people are capable of doing good while having a sense that there are no consequences, but not everyone is on that level. People whom you wouldn't think, need consequences -- people who wouldn't think they were the kind of people to need consequences. Enforcement makes us better people, better than we realize. This is relevant to the problem of young people disrespecting otheres.

People who genuinely do respect people are the ones in the position to break the power of other people -- something they do without any pleasure or deadness -- and to "put the fear of God" in other people -- something they do without malice, and, somehow, without being forceful or merciless, without writing people off.

If I give practical steps, people who are inclined to "work a program" will do everything but still miss the point. Sometimes the only thing that seems to teach people in a deeper way has to rewrite who they are on a flesh level. You have to be broken by life in order to start changing your mind. It's awful to really grow on a deeper level -- at least, it is for a lot of people. The Bible talks about "fools", who need correction and hate correction. What might work to avoid foolishness is to get the full value of being broken, rather than turning away from its lessons when you get back to health. That's hard, though, because life tells us to have power and power tells us to disrespect. You can try to get the most out of your pain, though.

One of the best ways to respect someone is to listen to them. One of the best ways to listen is to be silent. When you talk to people, be weaker than their words.

Maybe art can help. I wrote a short story as part of How Can We Love?, one of my books, which is about respect and disrespect, called "My Son". It's about how messed up a person can be by someone who doesn't respect them, and it's vivid. A narrative like that might help -- or it might be just more words.

One practice that could help would be focused contemplation. Spend two hours doing something relaxing and thinking about the different people in your life and whether you respect them. When you interact with people, ask God what lesson you need to learn.

Being careful not to believe false things can help you be more "epistemically empathetic", and this can help you take other people's beliefs seriously. If you hold yourself to know reality as it is, if that's something that has power over you, to which you submit, then you are more the kind of person who will try to find the reality of persons in themselves. We can never know reality in itself, in a way that we can put into words, and so it is with people. Trying in one domain helps in another.

One "bottom line" is: let other people have power over you. A form of trust. Trust people. People who don't listen may do so out of the survival distrust, or out of ego distrust, or out of inertial distrust, the distrust left over from survival distrust that is no longer necessary. But trust as much as you can. In religious terms, not trusting when you can is saying that creation is not good for a reason other than the Fall.

A corollary to that is: when you can't trust someone, stay away from them.

A Reading from The Need for Roots

The Need for Roots by Simone Weil, p. 134 - 136:

It is true that men are capable of dividing their minds into compartments, in each of which an idea lives a sort of life of its own, undisturbed by other ideas. They don't care for either critical or synthetic effort, and won't submit to making either unless obliged.

But in situations of fear, anguish, when the flesh draws back before the prospect of death, or too great a degree of suffering or danger, in the mind of every man, even if he is completely uneducated, a manufacturer of arguments suddenly stands forth, who elaborates proofs to demonstrate why it is legitimate and right to avoid that particular death, suffering, or danger. Such proofs can either be good or bad, depending on the particular case. At all events, at the time, the body's disturbed condition gives them an intensity of persuasive force that no orator has ever succeeded in acquiring.

There are people to whom things do not happen in this way. This is either because their natures protect them from fear, that their flesh, blood, and bowels remain unaffected by the presence of death or suffering; or else because their minds have attained such a degree of unity that this manufacturer of arguments has no opportunity of getting to work in them. With others, again, he is able to get to work, and makes his arguments felt, but they are scorned nevertheless. That in itself presupposes either an already high degree of inward unity, or else powerful outward incentives.

Hitler's profound remark on the subject of propaganda, namely that brute force is unable to prevail over ideas if it is alone, but that it easily manages to do so by taking unto itself a few ideas of no matter how base a nature, provides also the key to the inner life. The tumults of the flesh, however violent they may be, cannot prevail over a thought in the mind, if they act alone. But their victory is an easy one if they communicate their persuasive force to some other thought, however inferior it may be. That is the important point. No thought is of too inferior a quality for the role of ally of the flesh. But the flesh needs thought of some kind as an ally.

All of this to say: maybe there's something here to help us in developing respect. Respect is an attitude we have toward other people, most importantly a pre-rational one. It could be a passion of ours, some fleshly desire, which requires some kind of rational form for us to fully trust. It's not just pre-rational, but also an explicit belief. It could be that the passion of love for someone causes us to want to form the pre-rational attitude of respect. I think that's true a lot of the time. But warring with love is its appetitive side, the extent to which love is a form of enjoyment, or feeds enjoyment, or enjoyment is taken for love. Enjoyment is a passion that asks for disrespect to be formed. Likewise we have the passion of power, which casts about for a an idea or pre-rational attitude to justify it. So we might want to learn to be afraid, not of enjoyable things, but of our enjoyment of them, to enjoy things in holy fear, to only enjoy things because we have to in order to experience reality. And likewise to feel utterly undeserving of our power, like it ought to be taken away from us at any moment.

People can be very strong in their beliefs, as with those whose "natures protect them from fear, [...] their flesh, blood, and bowels [...] unaffected by the presence of death or suffering", whose "minds have attained such a degree of unity that this manufacturer of arguments has no opportunity of getting to work in them." In Weil's context, this helps people resist evil, but the faculties and dispositions for resisting evil can also be those of not listening to other people. People can be spiritually and psychologically muscle-bound. This is parallel to those who seem strong and combative who are actually acting out of trauma and thin resources. In both cases there is a tendency to lunge out. A very put-together person -- a secure, mature person -- can fail to pay attention to other people out of their mind's "degree of unity" -- and this is somewhat frightening, because one's own security and maturity are so persuasively trust-producing to oneself, that one won't think to question oneself. What is trustworthy is trust-producing, but not all trust is itself the most trustworthy, and people who get out of the habit of distrusting themselves are in danger of disconnection with reality. I suppose the positive way to put it is, keep trusting the process of better and better trustworthiness, keep trying to trust more, and in the process you will trust yourself less sometimes.

In trustworthy settings, we tend to trust, and when we trust, we can trust anything, including love -- which motivates us to respect. Or a setting could be useful for the purpose of developing respect. In this case it would be trustworthy in a limited way, for that purpose. A respect-producing environment might be one in which respect is modeled by those in positions of power, influence, or authority. Another respect-producing environment could be one that emphasized people's connection to other people, since respect is relational. Self-respect involves seeing the other as one who will respect you, as much as saying "You" involves saying "I" in the "I-You" way. In order to respect other people, see them as "you"s, you have to be different to yourself.

Another respect-producing environment would be one which emphasized reality, because fake respect is disrespect, and is where disrespect can hide in those who in some sense don't want to disrespect. But overall trustworthiness enables people to enter the general state of trust, out of which respect-producing motions can come. Therefore it could be counterproductive to try to make respect a formula for a group, a "core value". Overall trustworthiness, including respect, is needed for any group to function anyway.

Declaring core values, and that you're going to do things, is of some value, but what's more essential for trust, and respect, is your pre-rational attitudes, all the betrayals that don't happen because they're not in your nature to cause. Telling yourself that you want self-respect, that you want to be respected, doesn't do as much good as seeing other people as those who will respect you, and likewise telling yourself that you want to respect other people doesn't do as much good as just doing it. Talking about things can be a placeholder.

So an organization needs people who understand what is needed intuitively, and can embody what is required for a trustworthy environment.

To get back to the Weil quote one more time: in the last paragraph, she mentions that inferior ideas can be used by the flesh's needs. But perhaps good drives can annex to themselves inferior ideas. Perhaps that's an explanation for "faith", that God gives us a drive to believe, or God as he contacts us is the drive to believe, which attaches itself to inferior ideas. I don't think Weil believed that humans are unable to believe ideas because they are superior, otherwise, how could we think that any were superior to begin with? But it may be that ideas, as much as words, are not really the point, and that wordless, idealess realities are more important. But we still seem to need ideas for some sort of purpose. Words are useful in pointing out wordless realities. If I say "sky", you know what I'm talking about, more or less. I'm not talking about "s-k-y", I'm talking about ... I have to use words to describe the sky, but you get the picture: it's this thing that I can see but can't touch, which I can see above me, blue or grey or pink in the daytime and black or dark grey in the nighttime. Similarly with ideas -- they point to non-cognitive realities. Pointing something out can open a pathway to deliberate action, and can help us notice a phenomenon more often.

Belonging and Wider Rootedness

A person can be a word to us, in their image of personality, pointing to an unspoken reality, or a force or desire within us.

You meet someone who gives you a sense of belonging -- a "one-person rootedness environment". Through them, everything around you is home. You relate to other people through them, because they do, because of the home they bring you all around the very places that weren't home before. You are inclined to worship them and "eat" them -- to disrespect them.

Narrow-scale rootedness could be called "belonging". We seek belonging, and when we get it, we stop caring about society-wide rootedness. The desire to understand the big picture -- truth as a whole, society as a whole, the past and the future (the whole skein) -- can come out of a desire for rootedness, a kind of cognitive rootedness. God is connected to the big picture, and we connect through God through our connection to the big picture. The desire to relate to the truth as a whole, society as a whole, to God, can in fact often enough really just be a desire for belonging, and once we get belonging -- from a friend, lover, family, assembly, or whatever -- we lose interest in God, in society, in the truth as a whole. The most powerful and effective temptations are where a connection with a good thing destroys, mutes, quenches another.

There can be belonging based around uprootedness. Gathering and bonding while mocking the same things, forming gangs or armies. Young men are tempted to do this, naturally do this. We like people who are uprooted like us -- let's be uprooted together, as a song might go.

As a shadow -- or anti-shadow -- version of this, there can be a rootedness in a world beyond this world. This is like the moth flying to the star -- it doesn't feel the same to connect to what you can only see far away, as a point of light, which never warms you. This kind of rootedness helps you not be beguiled by belonging and the preservation of the status quo, which follows from belonging.

It's respectful see the danger in a dangerous person, the evil in an evil person, not only the good in them. So it's respectful to see the evil and danger in yourself, and not only the good in you, while also seeing yourself as Beyond Attributes -- as just a person. I think that's the most hopeful way to approach yourself, both if you're a young person or an older person.

The rootedness of childhood leads to the disrespect of the adolescent. The spiritual nourishment of a (relatively) protected childhood gives you "stores of fat" to fuel your disrespect as you enter the years where childhood order and restraint break down. Perhaps "stores of fat" disconnected from a source of nourishment just are the spiritual-fleshly condition behind disrespect.