Mentions
What's Wrong With Society?
Part 5A. Assume Positions!
Societal Role-play drives corrosive effects and drive the cycle of retaliation
Think of society like we’re all in a play acting different parts of the story. We see the play unfolding. Because our ethics and moral grounding is shattered and shallow, we have no inherited identity. We make our own identity, and we step into different roles. Often; we see others playing their roles and we react to them by stepping into a counter role. These roles give a sense of order to the chaos and a sense of meaning to our lives.
Here are some stock characters that arise in this context, according to Alasdair MacIntyre
1. The Manager
2. The Bureaucrat
3. The Therapist
4. The Aesthete
5. The Scientist
6. The Conservative Moralist
Which role are you playing?
Something is wrong and we know it. But we lack what’s needed to truly discover what’s missing and how to live it out.
- Post
“[we have] notable characters in the cultural dramas of modernity: that of the therapist, who has in the last twenty years become bemused by biochemical discoveries; that of the corporate manager, who is now mouthing formulas that she or he learned in a course in business ethics, while still trying to justify her or his pretensions to expertise; and that of the aesthete, who is presently emerging from a devotion to conceptual art. So the conservative moralist has become one more stock character in the scripted conversations of the ruling elites of advanced modernity. But those elites never have the last word.”
- Post
“That conservatism is in too many ways a mirror image of the liberalism that it professedly opposes. Its commitment to a way of life structured by a free market economy is a commitment to an individualism as corrosive as that of liberalism. And, where liberalism by permissive legal enactments has tried to use the power of the modern state to transform social relationships, conservatism by prohibitive legal enactments now tries to use that same power for its own coercive purposes.”
In a world of empathy-based ethics, the moral sense is ultimately the aesthetic sense. And that means that when the sacred order collapses, morality is simply a matter of taste, not truth.
There are no morals anymore, it's all taste/aesthetics/~vibes~.