Maybe I'm not one of the good ones, eh? Maybe I'm doing things for my own reasons that are beyond your power to intuit, and you simply have to deal with me based on my effects.

Follow

There are Pure Souls who want to imagine that all intentions are, at some level of abstraction, honorable, and so therefore they believe they can honor and support everyone's goals and wishes all the time. Such Pure Souls are lying to themselves.

First and most obviously, many people want things that are rivalrous (winning the game) or positional (being at the top of the list). And it's pure distortion for Pure Souls to characterize those desires as good-natured"may the best man win" liberality

Second, on the basis of the first point, you have to recognize that the Pure Souls will never be able to form good-faith, committed alliances with other people who pursue rivalrous or positional goals. The Pure Souls can never commit to breaking the other team, body & soul, because the Pure Souls have to believe at some level that the other team's goals are equally valid. And this means that Pure Souls exclude themselves from many forms of sincere and spontaneous human community.

This opens up a third point: the Pure Soul actually has to act out of a state of moral exception in order to preserve their belief in the reconciliation of all human intentions. They actually have to help the vicious prevail and let the weak suffer because opposing the vicious guarantees dissonance for the Pure Soul. By contrast, if the vicious quickly and efficiently prevail against weak, then the Pure Soul can re-interpret this in Girardian terms: the weak become sanctified by vicious violence

The Pure Soul must be understood to be against authentic community and against the weak: the Pure Soul is committed most of all to complacency and its handmaiden, delusion. Delusion whitewashes everyone's intentions. Complacency wraps the moral sensibility in gauze so thick that you can't see through it.

Sign in to participate in the conversation
Mastodon

a Schelling point for those who seek one