I’m Not OK, You’re Not OK – and That’s OK

I considered that for the title of my most recent book (which instead became Ethical Health: Managing Our Moral Impulses), but I found by Googling that it was already “taken.” Now I think it’s a good fit for what I want to write in this little essay (which essentially amplifies a theme from the book), to wit: Despite my aspiring to be an amoralist (and in truth, an amoralist saint), I have come to realize that I will probably always be a moralist at heart. This is a demoralizing thought (ha ha). But it is also key to further progress in the kind of demoralization (in the sense of becoming amoral) to which I aspire, since the main painfulness of realizing I am a moralist is the moralist judgment of this (my being a moralist) as bad. So the realization challenges me to make the meta-leap to a more profound amoralism, by which I stop making moral judgments not only about actions and people but also about doing that, that is, about making moral judgments (and about the people, including me, who make them). 

In fact there are all sorts of judgments that I (and I assume “we”) make that have this moralist flavor. I have called this the Spread. Potentially any judgment could have it, whether it be a moral judgment, an aesthetic judgment, a judgment that something is genuinely funny (or lame), a judgment that someone is smart (or stupid), rational (or irrational), sane (or insane), even a judgment that something is true (or false). I am unclear on whether all judgments (or assertions or beliefs) are themselves moralist (in an extended sense, with judgments commonly considered to fall into the category of moral being only the paradigmatic case) or whether what is going on is better interpreted as our (sometimes at least) getting moralistic about things that are not inherently moralist, such as whether something is beautiful or logical. But that is just a matter of words or conceptual bookkeeping. The more important point is just that we are capable of being, and I would say usually are, judgmental about just about everything. 

And the further points I want to emphasize in this essay are that (1) this is a well-nigh incorrigible (in the double sense of something we would like to change but cannot change) feature of us (or most or a lot of us), so we’re not OK; nevertheless (2) we’re OK (now in the amoral sense of not being bad because nothing and nobody is bad, which strictly speaking means that nothing and nobody is good either, so here I’m using “OK” only to stress that we’re not bad); and (3) we can take steps to manage this undesired feature of ourselves. 

Here is an example of not being OK. If someone accuses you of x, your mind will begin polishing up the mirror and then lie in wait for an opportunity, however long it takes or far in the future, to hold up the mirror to the accuser and pounce with the demonstration that they are guilty of x (gotcha!). And it’s usually also a distorting mirror, which magnifies the sin of the other so that it exceeds yours. The mirror may also be a deflecting device, which you hold up to the original accusation of your being or doing x, so that it doesn’t even touch you but instead reflects back on the accuser. For there is a double standard in every conceivable accusation, if not always regarding the same x, at least in the general sense that there must be something the accuser has done that at least matches in sinfulness what they have accused you of. (That is why politicians and journalists and defense attorneys in search of dirt will always find some. We are all sinners in the eyes of angry God indeed. But it is most delicious when the other’s dirt is the exact same dirt they have throw at you.) 

Many if not all of us are all filled with this kind of vengefulness and resentment, as well as a hundred other morally undesirable traits, such as envy and egoism … but also gratitude and all that other good stuff.  These are not going to go away. They are like visual illusions, which persist, and do so even if you realize they are illusions. So we are not OK, and not only in the moral sense of harboring these character flaws and performing wrong actions etc., but also – and what concerns me more as an amoralist – in the nonmoral sense of doing things and having traits that do not serve our best interests by our own considered lights; for there are certainly strong nonmoral reasons for shunning jealousy and anger and revenge and selfishness and dishonesty and so forth. 

Nevertheless, it’s OK in the amoral sense that we are not OK in the moral or the amoral sense because, respectively, (1) the moral sense is bunkum and (2) we can do things to ameliorate our incorrigible traits, as well as, to whatever degree, compensate for our regretted actions.

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