Justified

The biggest difficulty that any of us faces with respect to negative emotions is that we ‘know’ that those feelings are justified. We are ‘right’ to feel negative, because it’s obvious that we really are being threatened or wronged. Because of this, we do nothing to curb the negativity … Indeed, we go out of our way to obtain redress: to remove the cause. And yet, this perception that we are justified is not a truth.

Each of us builds a mental model of how the world ‘ought’ to work, including concepts such as fairness and justice. Much of this model operates and influences us below (or more properly, beyond) the sphere of our ‘conscious’ attention. Sigmund Freud called this model the ‘super-ego’, and noted that we’re always [consciously or unconsciously] judging our perception of the world – including what we see of our ‘inner’ urges – against this model. It causes a reaction when something runs counter to what we have absorbed as ‘right’, and we experience this reaction as negative emotion. The sense of justification, behind that negativity, comes directly from the model.

We absorb our mental model from what we experience around us: from an amalgam of what we note of our inner desires or urges and the restrictions that society places upon the gratification of those urges. And we can also pick up ‘vibes’ from how society treats the urges of other people: even if they are doing things of which we hadn’t even dreamed. Because we recognise ourselves in others: we see a like process of ‘mind’. But this model is not ‘absolute’: it is only the residue of our own experience – albeit shared with others in the same social setting.

There are many tales of people who have found themselves in ‘terrible circumstances’: forced to make ‘difficult decisions’ in order to survive, or perhaps just shaking off social restraints, to allow gratification of their darker desires. We may see those people as heroes or monsters, and we may empathise with them to a greater or lesser degree, but they are just reacting in accordance with their inner models. Freud himself observed Austrian high society under increasing pressure, because the economic forces that had sustained that social model were changing.

Much of the current political friction in the world can be traced back to social models that have become ‘bankrupt’ in some way: often by contact with a different model, giving people new experiences that call the old social model into question. You could call it xenophobia – fear of the ‘not-we’ – fear of one’s own social certainties being undermined by others who do not share them. So, for example, various governments attempt to block the ‘liberal West’, and at the same time the ‘liberal West’ also acts in a decidedly non-liberal way. And everyone feels ‘justified’. But it’s like Canute, trying to force back the tide.

Of course, governments only reflect the people who grant them power. Many civil wars attest to the fact that the tools of fear do not make a state invincible; only the trust of a majority of the people can do that. And so it comes back to shared social conditioning: shared mental models. Our nations and ‘states’ are only collectives of individuals. Their borders, too, only reflect natural boundaries between those models.

I hope, by now, you can see that everything you hold to be ‘right’ and ‘proper’ – to be ‘justified’ – is only the result of arbitrary conditioning. It is merely the residue of your own social experience. So maybe you can also reflect on the thought that when someone or some event ‘offends’ your sense of propriety, the source of that offence lies entirely within you. You might also reflect on the thought that probably the ‘offender’ feels equally justified – or did so in the moment of their supposed ‘transgression’, even if they repent it later.

We have social ‘norms’ because they help people to live together without constant stress of wondering how they ‘should’ behave, so that they aren’t rejected and ostracised. In a world where travel was arduous, different societies could easily maintain barriers against other moral models. Any travellers who ‘offended’ could easily be ostracised, imprisoned or killed. And everyone in such a community felt entirely justified in doing whatever was ‘needed’: whatever was ‘right’. Nowadays, travel – especially internet travel – is easy. We often meet with ideals that we find ‘unjustified’, and it’s increasingly difficult to block them out.

In the ‘liberal West’, we’re beginning to see that the willing acceptance of diversity is a direct necessity in the more ‘connected’ world. But that ‘willing’ acceptance is really hard to come to. We know we ‘ought’ to embrace diversity, but we still have boundaries from our social conditioning. And we try to assert those boundaries as communal ‘truth’. We try to find others with similar boundaries, so that we can avoid accepting diversity.

Is it ‘justified’ to say that a trans person should be ostracised? Or the same for a woman seeking an end to an unwanted pregnancy? Or a person whose religious faith demands either total immersion or total exclusion? There are so many ways in which diversity of social conditioning makes itself apparent. If we are to deal with that, without a constant threat of wars to defend what’s right, and without ostracising, imprisoning or executing those whose views we don’t share, we need to realise that there is no objective ‘justification’ for any part of anyone’s moral ‘compass’.

We can’t expect everyone to accept diversity ‘in toto’, especially not all at once. For many people, it would feel like abandoning all the certainty of what makes a society – a community – ‘work’ for its members. They would fear not knowing how they, themselves should act, in order to be acceptable to others. Is a penchant for theft or violence ‘acceptable diversity’?

Any society that embraces diversity must still set rules for acceptable behaviour. But those rules must derive from a diverse society. They must truly reflect ‘the good of all’, and not just some historical social structure. And one of those rules must be that diversity is here to stay. Anyone who seeks to join such a society must be helped to see that just as their diversity is accepted, so must they accept the diversity of others.

At the moment, the ‘liberal West’ is merely ‘flirting’ with diversity. It still tolerates the expression of anti-diversity points of view – even to the extent of allowing them into law. It perhaps needs a great deal more education about what ‘willing diversity’ means, and about how each of us can become more conscious of our own moral model – our ‘super-ego’.

Or it can decide to return to the ‘good old days’, before global communication, and ostracise, imprison or simply kill anyone who expresses a different moral model than that of the majority. It would have to ban or censor the internet. It would have to abandon its claim to be liberal. But it could at least hang on to its feeling of being justified. (Just like every other dictatorial state.)

How does this affect ‘my dear reader’? As I said, nation states are only the collective expression of their members, so what your nation chooses is influenced by what you choose. Do you prefer to cling to feelings of being justified, and to expressing the negative emotions that those feelings support? Or are you willing to consider that things are actually more ‘fuzzy’? That you might not ‘know’ as much as you feel you do? That maybe the concept of diversity needs some active consideration?