Greed for Virtue, Good Seeds, and the World we Have Now

People want to be good. But because of vanity and because of politics, sometimes it is easier to appear as good. And, if the person can convince others, I don’t know, maybe she can convince herself. This is a question as old as mankind – only the means of showing virtue changed. Now it’s all very fast, people want to show all their value in one picture or small text on social media.

There is a way of showing virtue that I, personally, after living four decades, came to consider as not honorable at all, to say the least, and it is used by the mainstream academic world, among other people. It consists in showing you care so much for the ones you consider more vulnerable, that you don’t even consider important to defend the rights of anybody else.

You are claiming that nobody cares so much as you, because you are the one that cares so much for the oppressed, that you even view the rights of the groups you don’t consider oppressed as some kind of “luxury”, you will not let it stop you in your virtuous quest.

You are trying to make yourself a hero without much hard work of finding real positive solutions, you just subtract groups of people from the list of people deserving of consideration. Just by doing that, you can be seen by a big group of people, who are led by momentary emotions more than reason, as virtuous.

But this is an unreal, unidimensional vision of the World. Life is not like that. The World is not neatly divided in two easily identifiable groups of oppressed and oppressors. There are different kinds of conflict, different types of pain, of struggling.

This black and white vision those people have, surely will lead them into very strange positions. Because there are different types of oppression, and those people start to make a simplistic mental scale, from biggest oppressor to most oppressed. And this leads to contradiction.

Like when you care for homosexuals, but there is one thing you care more about, that is, the ethnicities you consider most oppressed. What if an authoritarian group, like Hamas, rules a region inhabited by people that are “oppressed” in your scale – the Palestinians – and fights against a people who are “not oppressed” in your scale – the Israelis – but at same time they tyrannize the homosexuals among them?

You have to stand with Hamas, or at least turn a blind eye to their deeds, otherwise you would be “aligned” with the “not oppressed” people, and breaking your priority that is "race". Then you end up supporting a hell in the life of the homosexual Palestinian, which appears as twice oppressed in your list. Doesn’t seem the least bit smart. That’s why having a set of values as priority is always more coherent than dividing people in different groups of rights.

And why do people fall in these strange mental situations? Because they are trying to solve the problems of the World by basically focusing on all that is negative. Thinking it is alright to break all rules if it is in the name of the right people, as if taking chances with “tearing down the wall” having nothing to put in its place was more righteous than admitting that the present society is not made only of bad things, and there are positives aspects to work with.

If we believe it is wrong that people have their rights neglected and abused, then we should try to everyday get a little closer to a World where everybody is respected. And we should do so by acting in a way that is more and more alike the way people should act towards people, and not “doing wrong in the opposite direction of the tide to make things right”.

Because whenever you do wrong, you can’t control the consequences of it, and you can’t exempt yourself of the bad consequences when they happen. And if you don’t believe there is right and wrong, then why are you fighting for anything at all?

I know that working with patience and acknowledging the rights of everybody may not give the feeling of vindication that some people desire. I mean, when we read about, or see in movies, some monster injustices of the past, like the horror of slavery, we may be filled with emotion and a strong feeling that there should be some drastic accounting, some vindication.

But the thing is that it is not possible to go back in time and undo those things, nor is it fair to take revenge on the people who are here in the present and you think they somehow represent those perpetrators because of their ethnics, but they didn’t do any of those things.

The academic people say that we have a system now that is result of that situation of old, that there are vestiges everywhere. And by saying that they justify "revolt by any means".

But here it is important to make a distinction. Of course the past reflects in the present, but the present and the past being connected doesn’t mean they are morally equivalent. So you can raise awareness for the situations you think are still not fair, but you can’t walk around wanting to punish the normal everyday people as if what they do as they go on living their lives was morally equivalent to having slaves or something, because it is not.

Some people use episodes of violence against minorities to try to push the idea that “nothing changed” since the old times of terrible oppression. Those episodes exist and must be denounced, justice and acknowledgment must be pursued, but no, we are not living in the old times.

With all the flaws our society still have, we have people going to jail for murdering people of color, we have women successfully denouncing harassers, even sometimes big companies having to respond for wrong deeds and so on. We are far from perfection, but those are verifiable facts. We have a society where you can speak against someone who is higher than you in a social hierarchy. By the way, what we have is those matters is far more than what they have in China or Iran.

So even if there is a connection of the past with the level of opportunity someone has today, you can denounce when you believe the opportunity is not enough, but not talk about people driving a car to their work as if that was morally equivalent to having slaves, or supporting slavery.

Moral is about thinking of the consequences of your acts, and the consequence of living a stable honest life in the present is not the strengthening of the bad aspects of our society in the future, it is simply the continuity of a world where more things can be brought to discussion, where things still can get better. You can’t punish that.

The vindication you can have over the cruelties of the past, is to build a society where everybody can thrive and prosper, and where violence against minorities is punished. You can’t label people who did nothing as “oppressors”. Especially If you know nothing about them, or how they deal with their communities, or what values they have in their families.

By neglecting the problems of people who you don’t consider “priority” because you don’t see them as the most vulnerable, you are punishing individual growth, therefore standing against one of the main ways that mankind has to walk towards freedom.

Because the quest of humankind for freedom, for a better condition, is not made only of flags and political ideologies. It is also made of individuals, families, and their ethical and moral values. Cultural changes a lot of times happen in an organic way, from people to people. Mankind is not totally guided by politics.

Individual growth can spread to more and more people. Not as fast as slogans, but it does. This is not any baseless abstraction, we all know that the people that immediately surround us can have more weight in determining if we are going to grow or not than politicians. The respect or disrespect in workplaces, for instance, that is not always correctable by law. The self-esteem that people get from their families, and so on. Whole cultures on how to behave towards the other.

And the main form of spreading values still is first family, then community. Of course sometimes a person diverges and veers to a different direction than that of his family, for better or worse, but still, in general, family remains the main instrument of continuity that humans have.

Politics can help, and is so many times necessary, but there is this other, not less important, to say the least, form of making a better World, that is simply living up to high values. After all, you can always have good laws in theory and nobody abiding them. No political change can, all by itself, make a better World.

If in the past you had too much tyranny, the way to make things different is people growing and showing it is possible to be in a better position and still don’t forget to care for others. You can’t be so negative as to think that absolutely everybody that prosper will be a selfish person who will only take and not give, and not care at all for the vulnerable.

Why must we believe that nobody who grows in the workplaces is to be trusted to make a better World but people who grow in political parties are?

Think. If we are supposed to believe that students that come from well-to-do families can have empathy for the oppressed, why is it so hard to believe that people who achieve some individual growth in non-academical areas can have empathy too, and care for the vulnerable, just having a different approach, less ideological? Why does academia have to be the only place where people who were not born in vulnerability must be believed when they say care for others? Because they have a “unified speech”? Other people also share consistent values, older and more battle-tested.

Of course, for people who always want to quantitatively grow their influence over other, this other aspect of human evolution is not so interesting, so they dismiss it as unrealistic, even naïve. Their way of evolution – their “revolution” – has a promise of changing things fast. But if you throw away the consistency of values that slowly grow with mankind, anything that goes fast can change things for worst – fast. As many examples around the World show.

And I am in no ways a specialist in that, nor am I thinking I solved the matter, but it occurs to me – and I want to share it because I believe it’s worth the thought – that this may be one of the reasons for Antisemitism.

The Jews have important historical characters and inspiring religious figures, but still, after so many times in History refusing to be assimilated by what was around, they built a worldview where traditional values, individual worth and immediate relationships cannot be nullified by waves of “isms”. Still, they are criticized for an "ideology" - Zionism - that only says they need to  have a home in their ancestral homeland. A right they legally acquired in the UN 80 years ago.

They’ve built their communities in America and a prosper country in Israel not so much through political ideology as through families, communities, and personal relationships. This is not wanted in this Political Word.

People don’t lose power when they refuse to go with the “right” modern ideology, they lose power when they think modern ideology is their only savior. And I believe this is something important for the whole World to think about.

Nowadays we live in a World where anyone can be targeted for having said the “wrong thing”, and nobody will be defended by the big groups of “rebels” unless it is someone who they agree with. That is, everybody quiet, and only one group of “official rebels” speaking. Yes, official. Your University is not in an alley.

That is, not so much for new ideas, individual creativity.

On the other hand, to be fair, a big part of the World of capitalism also don’t seem to be really aware of what is at stake. Free commerce is one of the things that make up a free Society. But there are other values, freedom of speech, of opportunity, equal respect for everybody, and the need to defend the rights of people you disagree with when they are neglected.

If someone with a lot of money and political influence starts to play against these values, the laws of supply and demand, all by themselves, without higher moral values, won’t save us from going into a strange new kind of authoritarian world.

One instance of a thing that doesn’t seem to give people an instantaneous self-label of “defender of the most oppressed” and at the same time doesn’t represent a big issue to the huge quantity commerce, but definitely affects human life and free society is the rights of people on internet.

What can a person do if she is suddenly cut off from the big social medias? A lot of people are talking about the need to take certain kind of content from internet, dangerous content. I agree there is dangerous content, especially when it appeals to children and teenagers, and there is a need to deal with some of these things through law.

But there is another side to this coin. Why so little – or nothing at all – is spoken about the right that people should have to defend themselves if they believe they were “cut off” by wrong reasons – or no reason at all? Where is the right of someone to be in internet?

If they cut you off, you get into a maze of artificial intelligence conversations – never a real person – and without strong laws, hiring a common lawyer to fight that giant would be a desperating waste. Where is the political concern for that? People seem to like it when it happens with someone they don’t like, but they don’t see how this can affect the individual freedom, the right to be in the “arena”.

We don’t know how these guys – the bosses of big tech companies – think. To be very honest, I feel like they might live in a different planet. Does it make any sense? Anyway, maybe their whole ideology is that if people are using something, it’s because that’s what they want. Maybe they would say that, if people’s desires, coupled with an algorithm that seeks to increase interaction, lead everybody in a certain direction, it’s not their fault at all.

But we must think about the consequences of it. If the algorithm works to increase profit at any cost, it may decide that cutting off people with new ideas helps the machine to run smoother. It could happen automatically, by an algorithm that have a whole galaxy of data and a “will” to increase a few determinate variables – time of consumption, money.

Not to mention the possibility of it being used deliberately for political gain. There is a lot of money in politics.

But where would be the constitutional base for what I am saying?  Well, if you walk on a restaurant, can people refuse to serve you with no reason? Can a posting service refuse to send your letter? Can a bank refuse to take your money?

There is a reason for the universality of these laws. There is no peace without it.

I am not saying these things to bring up any kind of despair. On the contrary. My whole point is that despair is the greatest enemy of humanity. When people think that there is nothing in the civilization to work with, that nothing that exists currently is worth defending, they can make the awful bet of wanting to see it all fall hoping that “maybe” something better takes its place. History, wisdom and logics shows us how insane that is.

You can respect people who fought for Civil Rights in the past, and some of the people who fight for them now, and at same time acknowledge that we live in a different moment in History, and unfortunately some of the historically legitimate causes started being used for a larger and less clear political agenda. And that there are new issues to think about.

Offering simplistic solutions for problems that happen far away, where the consequences don’t affect you, screaming about wars that happen in the other side of the world while not giving a damn for the rights of individuals that stand right next to you is not only hypocrisy, but also helps to kill good seeds.

There has always been good seeds, and the good people of the past, not only the bad, made the World we have today.