Amoralist at Last

It has only taken me 73 years, but I think I have finally quashed guilt. (Does that mean I’m not a Jew any longer? šŸ˜Š ) And as a result (and this has been the sign), the heaviness of being has lifted. Life still contains endless hardships and pains … in my privileged and lucky case, of a relatively mild and mundane sort (so far) … but, as the Buddha predicted, the suffering has been ameliorated. Also the strained relationships with others.

            To be specially noted is that the cause of this relief has not been the discarding of concern for others. The burden has been precisely concern for myself. So I am left with countless desires to help others “for their own sake” … as well as, certainly, desires for my personal welfare, and also desires for many things that are neither one nor the other, such as to ponder the Big Bang. But my overarching (or undergirding) sense of fundamental worthlessness is now dissolving.

            What precipitated this blessed transformation is a subject for another time,[1] but most assuredly it traces back to my discovery of amoralism 16 years ago. The missing ingredient since then had been the inculcation of this intellectual realization into my soul. Being able to walk the talk. Now that I am taking more than baby steps, in this essay I only want to describe the blessedness thereof.

Moralism is an obnoxious intruder, who interferes with clear thinking. The cause of suffering is muddy thinking. Moralism just gets in the way. It’s a huge distraction. Here is an example of how this plays out in real life.

I have been experiencing arthritic symptoms in one joint after another on and off for several months. My regular doctor could find nothing, but he did send me to a specialist to relieve some of the swelling. (Had to drain my knee: ouch!) But something weird has been going on. Then my right hand flared up. It was not crippling as the knee had been, but I worried it might become so, even chronically.

What I suddenly recognized was that my chief concern was whether I was somehow guilty for my distresses. They felt to me like some kind of punishment – this was the phenomenology. For example, I was not following the “doctor’s orders” to the letter (warm compresses, etc.). I was, in a sense, guilty of this remissness. But that is not what I felt guilty for. I know, after years of introspection and conceptual analysis, that what I felt guilty for was my very existence or personality: again, some kind of fundamental worthlessness. That, it seems to me, is the essence of moral guilt, as opposed to simply practical “guilt” (not to mention, legal guilt) as being the agent who was not in fact following the doctor’s prescriptions.

In other words, I am pretty sure that my chief anxiety was not about the arthritis (or whatever it was) but about my moral (or in this case prudential) responsibility for it. And so if I quashed (or suppressed) the moralist aspect of it, I might see much more clearly what was really going on … and what was to be done. 

And so it has come to pass. What is really going on is that I have got some kind of syndrome, it is somewhat uncomfortable, there are various things I might do to address it, but I may not feel like doing all of them, and I also have others things I want to attend to, and so on. Guilt has nothing to do with it. In this way I am relieved of a great deal of, maybe even the worst of, the problem, namely, the suffering, right there. Generalizing from this experience, I want to exult: I have no more problems! What I mean is: There is no Problem of life  … there are only problems in life. And the former is so much more onerous than the latter, that its removal is as if life has become carefree.

Moreover, this attitude has instrumental value in addressing the substantive problems. Thus in the present example, by removing the distraction of guilt and being able to focus on the details of what I was going through, it took me literally five minutes to find the exact explanation by Googling. Eureka: It’s Lyme disease! I am a hiker. I live in Connecticut to boot (where Lyme originated). So I suggested this to my doctor, who ordered a blood test. Bingo! Positive. Two weeks of antibiotics. And I’m a new man.

Now I am like a kid with a new toy: All I want to do is play with it. As I get the hang of living my amoralism, I have become ever more aware of how pervasive moralism is in my psyche.[2] Although I have been exploring this phenomenon and writing about it for years, now I am at last at the delightful stage of dispelling each instance of moralism in the very act of discovering it and thereby being relieved of its oppressiveness. It’s like using the eraser function instead of the marker function in my photo software: I am doing the equivalent to my spasms of guilt with my mental software.[3]


[2] This is analogous to my original amoralist “anti-epiphany,” when I, a supposed atheist, had discovered my remnant and pervasive theism upon grasping the real nature of atheism (which, I suddenly realized, must involve becoming amoral, whereas I had thought it possible to be a secular moralist).

[3] Or to extend Ronnie de Sousa’s metaphor of double counting into a conceit, I am crossing out the superfluous and illicit line of moralism in my ethical ledger. This is also what makes it easier to think amorally, and hence is more practically effective: The mind does not have to juggle two sets of figures in calculating its sums.

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