RE: At What Point Does Activism Become Assholism?
April 14, 2017 at 1:10 pm
(This post was last modified: April 14, 2017 at 1:17 pm by Neo-Scholastic.)
As driver in Chicago, I find myself incapable of road rage. Sometimes the lane marking are ambigious, intersections confusing, and some areas to congested for polite merging. One road crew can turn a 15 min trip into an hour long delay. I cannot complain when sometimes people cut me off or make some bone-headed U-turn, because sometimes I'm that guy. The car driving on the the shoulder to jump to the front of the line? He left home to be an hour early, but one road crew and an accident on the expressway turned his fifteen minute trip into an hour and a half. In five minutes his $150 Civic Opera tickets will be worthless. While there may be some genuine jerks the fact of the matter, I live in an area where navigating the roads puts everyone in compromising situations with no good solutions. My point is that we live in an imperfect world and even our best efforts warp and twist us in morally suspect way.
I think people become unreasonable when they mistakenly believe Utopia is possible - the world would be so much better is everyone just (fill in the blank). The problem is that many morally laudable goals are mutually exclusive. Open borders are incompatible with a national social safety net. Eliminating environmentally damaging pesticides like DDT allows wide-spread malaria epidemics. Reducing animal fibers and pelts increases the need for petroleum-based non-biodegradable synthetics. Most recycling programs are energy and labor intensive. Land that produces locally grown organic produce reduces the overall food supply.
The pretense of Western society is that we have largely eliminated or are working to eliminate the violence, brutality, inequalities, and ethnic divisions that plagued prior eras. But we haven't. We've just pushed them out of sight both - actually, by exporting it to the third-world, or intellectually by not recognizing the underlying concepts that seem morally obvious but actually move their implicit violence out of our consciousness. A person may feel good about themselves knowing that the cotton shirt he bought at TJ Maxx did not kill a cage-raised mink or traumatize any sheep but only so long as he doesn't think about the Sri Lankin wage-slaves who pieced it together in sweat-shops or the pesticides and ammonia fertilizers needed to grow the cotton at the scale necessary to make producing it economically viable.
So while conservatives may want to go back to the "good'ole days" that never existed or stick with the "devil-you-know" so-called progressives push for a utopia that cannot exist fraught with unknown perils. This is not to say people should give up and not try to improve the human condition. We should. It's just that the TrueBelievers tend to blind themselves of the relationship between intentions and actual outcomes. In the words of the OP, people become "dicks" when they lack the humility to consider how carefully and incrementally changes need to be made so as not to create a worse situation than before or when they do not realize that their moral luxuries are often paid for by far-away and out-of-sight strangers.
So really, can anyone shake their fist in outrage at "that guy" cutting him off when further down the road he'll be blocking an intersection.
I think people become unreasonable when they mistakenly believe Utopia is possible - the world would be so much better is everyone just (fill in the blank). The problem is that many morally laudable goals are mutually exclusive. Open borders are incompatible with a national social safety net. Eliminating environmentally damaging pesticides like DDT allows wide-spread malaria epidemics. Reducing animal fibers and pelts increases the need for petroleum-based non-biodegradable synthetics. Most recycling programs are energy and labor intensive. Land that produces locally grown organic produce reduces the overall food supply.
The pretense of Western society is that we have largely eliminated or are working to eliminate the violence, brutality, inequalities, and ethnic divisions that plagued prior eras. But we haven't. We've just pushed them out of sight both - actually, by exporting it to the third-world, or intellectually by not recognizing the underlying concepts that seem morally obvious but actually move their implicit violence out of our consciousness. A person may feel good about themselves knowing that the cotton shirt he bought at TJ Maxx did not kill a cage-raised mink or traumatize any sheep but only so long as he doesn't think about the Sri Lankin wage-slaves who pieced it together in sweat-shops or the pesticides and ammonia fertilizers needed to grow the cotton at the scale necessary to make producing it economically viable.
So while conservatives may want to go back to the "good'ole days" that never existed or stick with the "devil-you-know" so-called progressives push for a utopia that cannot exist fraught with unknown perils. This is not to say people should give up and not try to improve the human condition. We should. It's just that the TrueBelievers tend to blind themselves of the relationship between intentions and actual outcomes. In the words of the OP, people become "dicks" when they lack the humility to consider how carefully and incrementally changes need to be made so as not to create a worse situation than before or when they do not realize that their moral luxuries are often paid for by far-away and out-of-sight strangers.
So really, can anyone shake their fist in outrage at "that guy" cutting him off when further down the road he'll be blocking an intersection.
