A Core Ethic

Posted on | January 14, 2010 | Comments Off on A Core Ethic

“What if everything you knew about yourself, and your temperament, and your motivations, and your core ethic, turned out to be wrong?”

This was something I was wondering last night as I went to bed.

I have always considered myself fundamentally good and kind, albeit entirely human — occasionally given to nefarious thoughts and behavior. But my behavior and thoughts of late have caused me to reconsider this. What if, in fact, I have a core of hostility and cynicism, that is densely overlaid with a sort of gentle humanity acquired late?

The answer is probably somewhere in the middle, as it so often is. Perhaps there is no core ethic. Perhaps there are in fact competing ethics that battle moment to moment to rise out of the subconscious into our conscious motivations and behaviors. This would easily complement my “spiritual dialectic” theory of mind:

The concept of the rational actor is a fiction; human beings are instead products of a dense tapestry of traumas and triumphs that create a mind laden with contradictions endlessly vying for action and attention – a psychological and spiritual dialectic.

We are neither good nor bad (forget for a moment that these are perhaps human inventions anyway) but are instead loaded with a multitude of experiences, the most powerful of which took place in infancy before we even had memories, that lead us to react on the fly based on some arcane pattern recognition. Monkey see, monkey do (or here, monkey see, monkey act like a dick). It’s only through maturation and emotional-spiritual growth that we’re able to gradually take control of these devices and choose a path of goodness or nefariousness. Here’s the rest of that self-quote:

In a world with no god and no meaning, we are living on a blank white canvas and so have the opportunity to create the meaning we choose for humanity. This is perhaps the greatest gift we as humans have, and simultaneously our greatest vulnerability.

What’s really scary is when you start to consider the possibility that you are, in fact, a totally selfish dick, but that maybe this doesn’t actually bother you, at all. At that point I think you transcend dickishness into sociopathy, or at least double-dickishness.

Or is this not at all a question of ethics but the final showdown with my own humanness? Isn’t some dickishness completely necessary, to maintain a sense of honesty? If we are always good and nice, never considering negativity or actions that may harm others, we aren’t human, we are robots.

I want to be a human. I don’t want to be a robot.