Article Image

News Link • General Opinion

The Dispersion of Our Moral Energies

• https://freemansperspective.com, Paul

Examine any workplace and you'll find a long stream of moral judgments: "He didn't treat me right," "She's arrogant," "That's a man you can respect," and so on.

This moral obsession of ours is a good thing; it's the bedrock that allows us to enjoy a civilized existence. That said, we've allowed our moral energies to be wasted, and that's something we need to fix.

But before continuing, consider this, please:

Any assemblage of people that is insufficiently safe and cooperative internally (morally), must force everyone to behave well. As a practical matter, this guarantees that it will choke itself to death.

So, morality is indespensible as a practical matter. If we fail to cultivate it, we plant the seeds of our own ruin. Such ruin is unavoidable, even if it takes many years to be clearly seen.

Dispersion
The leading issue with morality in our era is not that it is suppressed (though that happens too), but that it's so widely dispersed as to have little or no effect. Here's the problem in a nutshell:

Humans have limited amounts of energy, and that includes energy for moral concerns. If that energy is widely dispersed, little or none can be focused on the moral concerns that really matter.

The internal energies of a "normie" couple, for example, are almost fully directed away from serious moral issues. This couple will devote their emotional and moral strength toward whatever terror is in their newsfeed, perhaps to a pet or a sports team, and definitely toward hating one political party or another. They may also spend time complaining about all the little moral failures they saw that day. After all that, they're simply too tired for weightier matters; it's far easier to spit out a slogan and roll into bed.