I don't know much about Franklin, but this strikes me as a gross oversimplification of Rousseau, to the point where I wonder whether the author has actually read much Rousseau, rather than just other lightweight "thinky pieces" on Rousseau. For example The Social Contract is significantly concerned with how people can and will act in accordance with the general will.
Also the idea that these philosophies are "almost entirely incompatible" reveals the author's complete ignorance of one of the most important influences in Western philosophy, Aristotle, for whom concordance of action and "intention" (arguably not an ancient Greek concept, but close enough for an hn comment) must be united in ethically good action.
But if your goal is not actually to understand anything and merely to sound smart on a causal reading, and perhaps try to get people to "not think so damn much and just do stuff" I guess this piece achieves its goal.
> concordance of action and "intention" .... must be united in ethically good action
Yeah, I had to disagree with how TFA brought "fake it till you make it" into this very discussion.
Yes, one can have "faking" that ultimately ends up creating the thing it promised....but I fear that for each such benign or constructive "fake" there are so many cases of Theranos et al that I could ever remove what you called intention and ethically good action from the calculation.
Alice is a horrible sociopathic monster that fakes being good because of the social utility it provides.
Bob is authentically, genuinely a "good" person (however you define it).
If the two are indistinguishable from an outsider's perspective, and arrived at a similar level of social status and "success" (intentionally vaguely defined), the path they got there may not matter to you. At least, it might not at a glance? If you don't think about it too long? Or deal with them for too long?
Well said, this sort of oversimplified dichotomy is used by people to get out of responsability. "We have to choose between X and Y, so I just choose X because it's better".
No wonder the author is a Facebook exec that want to be ignorant of ultimate intent, instead of reconciling them.
It is an over simplification but Rousseau does paint this picture of humanity's natural goodness corrupted by society, or what the author calls circumstance. This idea is a cornerstone of the Discourse on Inequality and Émile.
Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (1755)
- “Nothing is more gentle than man in his primitive state… he is restrained by natural pity from doing harm to others.”
Émile, or On Education (1762)
- “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.”
Confessions (1782–89)
- “I have displayed myself as I was, vile and despicable when I was so, good, generous, sublime when I was so; I have unveiled my interior being.”
For Rousseau, humans possess innate moral sentiment, society corrupts through things like comparison, and the good life is maintained by being true to one's natural self.
I also think the focus of this little essay is about contrasting two modern identities, the expressive self and the performative and productive self, and isn't steeped in moral psychology. Bringing Aristotle into this is wholly anachronistic and misses the point.
I didn't know this about Ben Franklin until reading it here, but his theory strikes me as the only one (out of the thinkers/theories you referenced) that can be operationalized in a justice system, or by individuals to judge others.
Until "intention" can be measured with a brain scan, it's a good bet that actions come from successfully actualizing intentions more often than not. It is ultimately about actions though, and the assertion with any intention based theory is that intentions better predict future actions than past actions do. If there was a mysterious 3rd thing that predicted future actions better than intentions or previous actions, then we would be interested in that instead of intentions.
I only have a cursory understanding of Franklin (as in, I vaguely paid enough attention in American History class in public high school to get a passing grade), and this still struck me as odd, too.
Character is destiny. The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is who you become. -- Heraclitus
I have no position on the OP, but this comment has more shame than content. The couple fig leaves of quibbling over dubiously relevant points doesn't really clarify whether the OP's point is incorrect. I have no reason to take your opinion as more authoritative than the OP's when you don't even really engage with what the OP says.
Here are the article's main points, as I see them:
1. The "modern American self" is best defined by (the tension between) Franklin and Rousseau.
2. Rousseau believes X and Franklin believes Y.
3. "Modern America" (society? politics? government?) flip flops between these two, though they are "almost entirely incompatible".
4. The author claims one of them scales, and says he likes it.
I engage directly with claims 2 and 3.
I think 1 is another completely absurd simplification. I do not address it, or claim 4. I don't see how that constitutes lack of engagement or quibbling. Perhaps I could have written an essay refuting OP with many citations, but I don't think that level of work is required to constitute legitimate engagement.
I guess you're probably right that my comment is more shame than content, maybe 60/40 shame to content, I should have dialed that down a bit. Fwiw I think it's fine to be simple-minded and ignorant, I am both of those things about many topics, but then your writing and argumentation should reflect your lack of knowledge and certainty. OP's article is, otoh, full of hot air.
I don't agree that the comment is empty, it did remind me of some philosophy classes, and it did entice my curiosity enough to search about Rousseau again. Your comment though, in poethic irony, doesn't bring anything to the table besides complaining about the top comment.
We all talk a lot about the mind over the body and emotions, so you can act stoicly regardless of your internal experience and how your body feels, and it's all fine, but it's important to make a point that your mood is more dependent on your body health than you think at first. How depressed you are can for instance be linked to the last time you went to the loo and how great your turds look (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychiatry/articles/10....)
So take care of your mind, but also take care of your body. Don't be treating your body like crap and expect you can only will yourself into acting better.
Willpower can be used to suppress emotion and act in a particular way. This can be useful but isn’t an effective long term strategy. Willpower is finite and sometimes fickle, in part because of the physical reasons you describe.
For most stimuli, our strongest emotional reactions are to our thoughts about the stimulus, rather than the stimulus itself.
A better application of willpower is to reject and replace the thoughts that lead to those emotions. Over time those thoughts are replaced entirely and the emotional reaction is changed.
A change in mindset must happen, but the proper mindset in which to change one's mindset is elusive. Even if my mindset today is flawed, what specifically should stay and what should go to make myself a better person? It feels like leaping from a safe harbor into the unknown. Can you convince a person to kill themselves and let a near-copy-but-not-quite live their life instead?
That being said, I think some positive change can be produced with diligence and care, even if the methods and details are hazy even to the person enacting them.
I'm married to a medical doctor and talking to her is incredible, they tread the body like it's nothing at all, from excretion to horrible wounds, it's just another day at the office.
She's sometimes telling me how it was bad at work because someone disagreed with the treatment of some 22 year old that got shot in the stomach and I'm like dying inside.
To loop it together, I would say that taking care of the body is the mind over the body. Making conscious decisions to put yourself in the right place. Mind over body, body is inherently over body, mind takes care of body, body takes care of mind.
On the one hand, the body has needs and it communicates over sensations and instinct to the mind. On the other hand, without the mind the body would just be a vegetable.
One and the other, together in harmony. Nothing is above anything. Separation is learned, it's a useful concept, but it's not necessarily natural.
He has got better them over the years, this one is much less teenager trying to sound clever. Which is great, I love to see people grow.
The problem with this is that in my professional dealings with him, he has two modes: empathetic & arrogant dick. At his worse he was fighting in the comments section of workplace, telling employees that they are wrong. At his best he is warm and caring, even funny.
The problem for meta employees, is that most of the time you only really see arrogant dick boz.
> this one is much less teenager trying to sound clever
I read the blog post without knowing who this person is. I genuinely believed the author was a young person, maybe someone in their early 20s, just figuring some stuff out. "Do good things" isn't exactly a deep philosophical or moral insight. I've read the same thing on Cracked for chrissakes.
My best memory of boz is him arguing with an intern on workspace and calling them "privileged", during COVID, when the kid asked whether the company would provide some sort of cash bonus since the free meals weren't available.
"Teenager trying to sound clever" captures every other interaction perfectly.
That sounds pretty fair to me. Having a Meta salary means you can afford to buy food. Having free food on top of a $300,000 income is pretty privileged and complaining about it being taken away even more so.
In philosophy 101 the usual foil for Rousseau vs.. would be Hobbes, but that framing with a realist/pessimist would not be popular with the intended audience, where the goal is to lionize the nationalist, the inventors/owners, the 1%.
> Despite his own moral lapses, Franklin saw himself as uniquely qualified to instruct Americans in morality. He tried to influence American moral life through the construction of a printing network based on a chain of partnerships from the Carolinas to New England. He thereby invented the first newspaper chain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin#Newspaperman
To be clear Franklin's obviously a complicated historical figure, a pretty awesome guy overall, and I do like American pragmatism generally. But it matters a lot which part of the guy you'd like to hold up for admiration, and elevating a preachy hypocrite that was an early innovator in monopolies and methods of controlling the masses does seem pretty tactical and self-serving here.
I know ultimately I am not good nor bad, I am not an absolute. I am an agentic blob of meat, and with every decision I can choose any of the paths at my disposal, rewriting my story as I go. There is something I live by, though. My whole life I have observed in others the ideals that I came to admire or to hate, and I try to adhere to the ones I admire as often as I can, as I am pretty sure I would hate myself otherwise.
> You can’t always change how you feel, but you can always decide what to do next.
Unfortunately, in my experience, how I feel does affect what I decide to do (or not do) next. But I certainly like to think I have agency, so there is that..
> how I feel does affect what I decide to do (or not do) next.
Not being affected by your feeling is a skill, that you can train. First you need to start noticing when you are in a state that affects your decisions poorly. This requires some free time thinking and reflecting on how you behaved in such situation after the dust settles. Then you can start trying to calm yourself in such situations. You need to override your impulses and that needs to be trained, you may not succeed first several times, but please keep trying.
With an extremely important caveat. Learning how to control impulses in the heat of the moment is important, but they need to be unpacked and properly processed as soon as possible.
If you do this poorly you can train yourself to be a stone cold robot who doesn't appear to react to anything emotionally. You might think you've succeeded but all you've done is lose touch with your own emotions.
Meditation is also extremely useful for this. In breath-based meditation, you focus your mind on your breathing and try to eliminate thoughts. Obviously your mind gets bored and you begin to think of other things. Once you recognize that you're losing focus, you simply return to your breath. Over and over. Over time, you gain the ability to view your thoughts and emotions as easily disposable. It takes time but you can actually recognize that you're being affected by emotion, able to let go of thoughts, and be more present in the moment.
As someone with autism, I often feel the urge to do certain things, but I know they aren't fitting, morally right, or socially acceptable, so I refrain. I deeply resonated with the author's discussion of Benjamin Franklin, because this is exactly how I live. Virtue is a habit, not an essence: I don't feel like being social, I don't feel like being moral, I don't feel like fitting in—but I still do it. Because in the end, the reward is a life where I have a steady job, meaningful friendships, and a fulfilling life.
As someone neurotypical I take it for granted that my feelings most often align with what’s best to fit in with society. A few times it doesn’t and I end up giving in to my feelings and do the morally wrong thing
Thats the rub though, it is only the thing we like to believe, not the objective truth.
The libet experiment, and others like it, show us that free will is only a useful fiction, but we must live as though it is not. Which goes a long way towards explaining the seeming contradiction described here.
We must believe the things that it is useful to believe, rather than the things which are true.
"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom".
-- Viktor Frankl (maybe)
Rousseau was famous for saying that man is born free and is everywhere in chains. He advocated for self rule and formulation of laws by the people. Yet after 100s of years of democracy (thousands really) the corrupting influence of social norms has not really been remedied.
Inequalities still exist,corruption still happens and social institutions that were once liberating become oppressive over time.
His ideal of self governance has not been realised as most nation states have adopted a representative democracy. People don't really make the rules. They just handover the power to someone else who makes them on their behalf.
It's certainly right that Franklin believed in practicing virtue. He famously kept a log of his good and bad actions.
Yet there is another great philosopher that has had tremendous impact on American society whom the author has not mentioned. Emerson believed in transcending societal definition of virtue and vice and follow one's own inclinations. His ideas of self reliance resonated with American people and brought about a change in their thinking when they started to believe in themselves rather than looking to Europe for intellectual guidance.
I find it difficult to accept either Franklin's or Rousseau's view as they were more politically motivated—Rousseau wanted his social contract,Franklin worshiped Socrates but when it came to governence he kicked him aside to chose democracy,an idea that was popular at the time due to thinkers like Locke.
Emerson gave people true agency over their lives and inspired them to think critically and not sheepishly believe a thing to be good or bad. He was more revolutionary than Franklin (Self reliance was released around the time of civil war) and gave people courage to question institutional authority and he eventually became more impactful than Rousseau's collectivism.
For example: I took ritalin on and off but with long enough phases, that I do have behavour patterns were i act like i was on ritalin (cleaning stuff etc.)
I also thought about people who drunk a lot more alcohol when they were younger: they learned how to be a certain way because they were able to act like this by drinking alcohol.
I took MDMA a lot later in life and when i was, i definitly had like a 'MDMA dance echo' in my brain after.
Bottom line, life is tough. Too much noise, variables and chances to screw up. (And a hundred other "things" not written.) Perfectionism and social competition have been warping life since the beginning. Cruelty is usually the default option when the pressures on.
I can't speak for others, but for me, it's effort and seeking forgiveness that counts. Even then, life is still tough. Not breaking the accepted, compassionate laws and keeping my mouth shut when needed goes a long way.
Readit News
Also the idea that these philosophies are "almost entirely incompatible" reveals the author's complete ignorance of one of the most important influences in Western philosophy, Aristotle, for whom concordance of action and "intention" (arguably not an ancient Greek concept, but close enough for an hn comment) must be united in ethically good action.
But if your goal is not actually to understand anything and merely to sound smart on a causal reading, and perhaps try to get people to "not think so damn much and just do stuff" I guess this piece achieves its goal.
Yeah, I had to disagree with how TFA brought "fake it till you make it" into this very discussion.
Yes, one can have "faking" that ultimately ends up creating the thing it promised....but I fear that for each such benign or constructive "fake" there are so many cases of Theranos et al that I could ever remove what you called intention and ethically good action from the calculation.
Alice is a horrible sociopathic monster that fakes being good because of the social utility it provides.
Bob is authentically, genuinely a "good" person (however you define it).
If the two are indistinguishable from an outsider's perspective, and arrived at a similar level of social status and "success" (intentionally vaguely defined), the path they got there may not matter to you. At least, it might not at a glance? If you don't think about it too long? Or deal with them for too long?
...
Yeah, I think I did hurt my back with that reach.
No wonder the author is a Facebook exec that want to be ignorant of ultimate intent, instead of reconciling them.
Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (1755) - “Nothing is more gentle than man in his primitive state… he is restrained by natural pity from doing harm to others.”
Émile, or On Education (1762) - “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.”
Confessions (1782–89) - “I have displayed myself as I was, vile and despicable when I was so, good, generous, sublime when I was so; I have unveiled my interior being.”
For Rousseau, humans possess innate moral sentiment, society corrupts through things like comparison, and the good life is maintained by being true to one's natural self.
I also think the focus of this little essay is about contrasting two modern identities, the expressive self and the performative and productive self, and isn't steeped in moral psychology. Bringing Aristotle into this is wholly anachronistic and misses the point.
The irony here (given who the author works for) is not lost on me.
Deleted Comment
Until "intention" can be measured with a brain scan, it's a good bet that actions come from successfully actualizing intentions more often than not. It is ultimately about actions though, and the assertion with any intention based theory is that intentions better predict future actions than past actions do. If there was a mysterious 3rd thing that predicted future actions better than intentions or previous actions, then we would be interested in that instead of intentions.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
*edited for nuance
1. The "modern American self" is best defined by (the tension between) Franklin and Rousseau. 2. Rousseau believes X and Franklin believes Y. 3. "Modern America" (society? politics? government?) flip flops between these two, though they are "almost entirely incompatible". 4. The author claims one of them scales, and says he likes it.
I engage directly with claims 2 and 3.
I think 1 is another completely absurd simplification. I do not address it, or claim 4. I don't see how that constitutes lack of engagement or quibbling. Perhaps I could have written an essay refuting OP with many citations, but I don't think that level of work is required to constitute legitimate engagement.
I guess you're probably right that my comment is more shame than content, maybe 60/40 shame to content, I should have dialed that down a bit. Fwiw I think it's fine to be simple-minded and ignorant, I am both of those things about many topics, but then your writing and argumentation should reflect your lack of knowledge and certainty. OP's article is, otoh, full of hot air.
So take care of your mind, but also take care of your body. Don't be treating your body like crap and expect you can only will yourself into acting better.
For most stimuli, our strongest emotional reactions are to our thoughts about the stimulus, rather than the stimulus itself.
A better application of willpower is to reject and replace the thoughts that lead to those emotions. Over time those thoughts are replaced entirely and the emotional reaction is changed.
Humanity has produced a great deal of knowledge on how to live well. Modern society is just too distracted to learn about it.
That being said, I think some positive change can be produced with diligence and care, even if the methods and details are hazy even to the person enacting them.
I do not want to know how they turned this into a double blind study.
She's sometimes telling me how it was bad at work because someone disagreed with the treatment of some 22 year old that got shot in the stomach and I'm like dying inside.
That really hit home. Thanks for the link.
One and the other, together in harmony. Nothing is above anything. Separation is learned, it's a useful concept, but it's not necessarily natural.
- Benjamin Franklin
He has got better them over the years, this one is much less teenager trying to sound clever. Which is great, I love to see people grow.
The problem with this is that in my professional dealings with him, he has two modes: empathetic & arrogant dick. At his worse he was fighting in the comments section of workplace, telling employees that they are wrong. At his best he is warm and caring, even funny.
The problem for meta employees, is that most of the time you only really see arrogant dick boz.
I read the blog post without knowing who this person is. I genuinely believed the author was a young person, maybe someone in their early 20s, just figuring some stuff out. "Do good things" isn't exactly a deep philosophical or moral insight. I've read the same thing on Cracked for chrissakes.
"Teenager trying to sound clever" captures every other interaction perfectly.
On the other hand, it's very much freshman-who-misunderstood-philosophy-101-and-integrated-it-into-his-worldview-anyway...
> Despite his own moral lapses, Franklin saw himself as uniquely qualified to instruct Americans in morality. He tried to influence American moral life through the construction of a printing network based on a chain of partnerships from the Carolinas to New England. He thereby invented the first newspaper chain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin#Newspaperman
To be clear Franklin's obviously a complicated historical figure, a pretty awesome guy overall, and I do like American pragmatism generally. But it matters a lot which part of the guy you'd like to hold up for admiration, and elevating a preachy hypocrite that was an early innovator in monopolies and methods of controlling the masses does seem pretty tactical and self-serving here.
https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/meta-smartwatch-leaked-a...
That abomination should have been killed from the start.
the lack of attention to user experience in any of the RL based products
The utterly stupid "blockchain compatibility" policy, which was too late, to fucking stupid and poorly executed.
The inability to run any project in RL that delivered any kind of value
(horizon's many many many iterations is an affront to any kind of good governance)
Unfortunately, in my experience, how I feel does affect what I decide to do (or not do) next. But I certainly like to think I have agency, so there is that..
Not being affected by your feeling is a skill, that you can train. First you need to start noticing when you are in a state that affects your decisions poorly. This requires some free time thinking and reflecting on how you behaved in such situation after the dust settles. Then you can start trying to calm yourself in such situations. You need to override your impulses and that needs to be trained, you may not succeed first several times, but please keep trying.
If you do this poorly you can train yourself to be a stone cold robot who doesn't appear to react to anything emotionally. You might think you've succeeded but all you've done is lose touch with your own emotions.
It's not hard; you just have to commit to it :)
Thats the rub though, it is only the thing we like to believe, not the objective truth.
The libet experiment, and others like it, show us that free will is only a useful fiction, but we must live as though it is not. Which goes a long way towards explaining the seeming contradiction described here.
We must believe the things that it is useful to believe, rather than the things which are true.
This implies you can choose how to live though
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determined:_A_Science_of_Life_...
Note: not necessarily endorsing this, but it seemed very relevant :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PLMwddpZ_3n...
Inequalities still exist,corruption still happens and social institutions that were once liberating become oppressive over time.
His ideal of self governance has not been realised as most nation states have adopted a representative democracy. People don't really make the rules. They just handover the power to someone else who makes them on their behalf.
It's certainly right that Franklin believed in practicing virtue. He famously kept a log of his good and bad actions.
Yet there is another great philosopher that has had tremendous impact on American society whom the author has not mentioned. Emerson believed in transcending societal definition of virtue and vice and follow one's own inclinations. His ideas of self reliance resonated with American people and brought about a change in their thinking when they started to believe in themselves rather than looking to Europe for intellectual guidance.
I find it difficult to accept either Franklin's or Rousseau's view as they were more politically motivated—Rousseau wanted his social contract,Franklin worshiped Socrates but when it came to governence he kicked him aside to chose democracy,an idea that was popular at the time due to thinkers like Locke.
Emerson gave people true agency over their lives and inspired them to think critically and not sheepishly believe a thing to be good or bad. He was more revolutionary than Franklin (Self reliance was released around the time of civil war) and gave people courage to question institutional authority and he eventually became more impactful than Rousseau's collectivism.
The more you do it, the more automatic it is.
For example: I took ritalin on and off but with long enough phases, that I do have behavour patterns were i act like i was on ritalin (cleaning stuff etc.)
I also thought about people who drunk a lot more alcohol when they were younger: they learned how to be a certain way because they were able to act like this by drinking alcohol.
I took MDMA a lot later in life and when i was, i definitly had like a 'MDMA dance echo' in my brain after.
I can't speak for others, but for me, it's effort and seeking forgiveness that counts. Even then, life is still tough. Not breaking the accepted, compassionate laws and keeping my mouth shut when needed goes a long way.