UNSTANDARDS: Rethinking Group Morality

Towards Moral Autonomy

Just about everywhere you turn someone is telling you how to behave, what you should think, what constitutes the right way to speak or act, and what values you ought to adopt as your own. In prior eras, much of this was the domain of religion, or more broadly, of “tradition”. In many contexts we have outgrown religious reverence and devotion, yet it seems that we have not outgrown some innate desire to proselytize and evangelize—to propagandize for our beliefs. Even the humanist, the atheist, the feminist, the capitalist, and the Marxist—all appear to have a strong inclination towards zealotry, which is another way of saying that they are adherents of dogma. Participation in old school religion may be at an all time low, but we live in an age where pseudo-religious zeal would appear to be on the rise. 

Recently, I was sitting in the bleachers before a soccer game, when an announcer came on the loudspeaker and proceeded to read a laundry list of gameside rules to the assembled fans, pronouncing in a manner not unlike that of the  disappointed parent to their children, a long list do’s-and-don'ts—explaining what fans were permitted to chant, what cheers and taunts would be tolerated, and what was to be censored upon threat of removal from the stadium. Another recent example came in the form of an email announcing events at a local venue, at a company I helped to create called Meow Wolf, known for its posturing as an edgy, “psychedelic” brand. Ironically however, the email advertising upcoming events at Meow Wolf was fifty percent a lengthy inventory of rules and stipulations governing how attendees must behave, a catalog of remonstration, couched in the language of “safety”. Presently, I work in tech, and similarly see almost every software project or command-line tool bundled with its own set of commandments and political declarations. These declarations of upstandingness are not only out-of-place, but when projected from centers of power (corporations, government, and organized religion) can contribute to real world problems. “Socially conscious” dogmatism catalyzes concrete harm: acting as a contributing cause in a process of social isolation, depression, anxiety, polarization, the erosion of creativity, innovation, and discourse. We see elaborate moralistic campaigns in the workplace, in advertising, in schools, in purportedly neutral sources, such as the ideologically captured Wikipedia. There is a large-scale moral crusade underway in the form of gate-keeping and sequestration of information by giant tech companies in close collusion with the government to filter and censor information at every source be it search, social media, libraries, or artificial intelligence. 

Are there good reasons, that is to say, legitimate and pro-social reasons behind some of this urge to scold, remonstrate, and suppress both speech and information? Certainly. Some of the desire to control access to ideas and information stems from unambiguously positive aims. However, it is just as certain that there are other motives for this widespread performance of moral-grandstanding and censorship. As the old saying goes, "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions".

These inundations of overbearing admonishment and sermonizing are always delivered on variations of a theme. We are instructed to bow at the altar of “safety” at the altar of “fairness” in all its forms. We are told that the only way to ensure the public good—whatever that is—is through the suppression of “harmful content”, “misinformation”, and the censorship of speech. These commandments of the prevailing religious mood come in many forms: they are presented to us as “missions statements”, “Codes of Conduct”, “community guidelines”, “terms of service”, and more. Each decree comes festooned as “common sense” or “decency”. This is a form of argumentum ad populum or, “the Bandwagon Fallacy”, a logical fallacy wherein it is put forth that simply because a large number of people believe something, that it must be true and incontrovertible. This tactic is often backed up with a suite of other fallacies, including appeals to authority, appeals to credentialing, or appeals to accomplishment. Credentialed experts, we are told, are to be trusted over and above our own reason and senses. 

Each decree of external morality comes weaponized with one of the many modes of modern excommunication, banishment, dismissal, or exile. In the digital realm, this often takes the form of direct and outright censorship, or suppression of reach, "shadowbanning", muting, blocking, or algorithmic deprioritization. In the physical world, these tools of cancellation more often come in the form of innuendo, reputation destruction, character assassination, and other forms of social rejection and ostracization. The consequences of such outcomes are disastrous to public discourse and mental health.

People are eager to instruct you how to vote, how to speak, what account of history you must take as authoritative, and what interpretation of data is allowed to be labeled scientific. People are eager to instruct us even what meanings we may be permitted to assign to words. There is a direct attempt to control the process of thought through semantic shifting and narrowing. 

Some portion of this instinct to control and to moralize comes from sincere beliefs about what constitutes a good life, that is, a life that is morally coherent. Though this instinct to control and suppress may grow from a genuine desire to help, it often has the opposite effect. In our thirst for safety and justice, we must be cautious not to create a regressive culture of central control and oppression. To trade freedom for safety assures us that we will wind up with neither. 

The movement for justice and safety—the culture of community standards, of codes of conduct—is a culture that hinges upon the purveyance of orthodoxy. It is a didactic culture, one that talks down to us, it is prescriptive, it assumes us incapable of engaging in acts of conscience or drawing our own conclusions about facts. 

Hidden in the guise of “safety” is another message. In the negative space between these affectations of morality and community values, are encoded messages, they entreat us: Do not trust your own instincts. Do not do what comes naturally. Do not cultivate your own moral sense. Do not trust your own eyes and ears. Do not cultivate your own conscience and moral center. Conform. In thought and deed—conform. Follow these commandments—or else. 

This culture of conformity and zealotry has an unfortunate tendency to attract and elevate mediocrity, appealing to the same sort of “base” that old-time religion once exploited, though its devotees are largely unaware of this parallel. With ready-made roles for the performance of moral-grandstanding, the bureaucrat, the Slacktivist,  the content moderator, and the many other forms of post-religion dogma pushers are having a heyday. This paradigm of group identity constructs a moral caste system that elevates the busy-body and the grievance peddler, the petty tyrant, the germaphobe, the keyboard warrior, and the control freak. What formerly was the domain of the priest or cleric is now the domain of mid-level Human Resource managers and Peer Review referees. There is an important nuance here that must be drawn into the open: that what needs criticism is the rigid enforcement, the abusive tactics, the psyops, and the chilling effect that the prevailing moral mood dictates, not the underlying values themselves. 

 The dogma creates exactly the opposite of its intent: a society that is increasingly closed-minded, judgemental, and intolerant. A society that lionizes inferiority and all that is normative. In our eagerness for fairness and safety, we erect walls around the wild, open world. We lie to ourselves about who and what we are, seering only what we want to see and sublimating the rest. In tiny iterations we transform paradise incrementally into prison—we create a panoptic schema, a padded cell, a human zoo. 

Don’t get me wrong, safety and fairness are both significant and high values—but they are not the only values. They must take their place in a wide range of outcomes. Shared values allow diverse communities to cohere around common goals and principles, but there is always room for individual interpretation, application, and revision. The goal should be pluralistic social contracts that embrace core freedoms as a common denominator that diverse worldviews agree to abide by but with the knowledge out in the open that all such contracts are subject to the force majeure of individual will and circumstance. Codes of conduct can help convey communal expectations, but should not be mistaken for moral truth. They are practical tools, not ethical absolutes. Even as we discard dogma, we will inevitably seek shared values organically if only because we cannot coexist without them. Another nuance that must be drawn out is that even strict dogmatists often likely have beneficent motives rooted in legitimate concerns. They just take it too far. They fail to see their own shadow, believing the boogie man is something outside themselves, they perpetuate the cycle of sin and disconnection, crime and punishment.  

Farbeit from me to add to the chorus of preaching that is presently underway. Instead, allow me to offer a replacement for this barrage of “Codes of Conduct” and “Community Standards”. I present an antigravity for these externalizations of morality: an invitation to be yourself. To cultivate and become responsible for your own character and moral charter. 

We can see with our own eyes. We can listen to our intuition. We can cultivate a radical responsibility for our actions and how they may be judged. 

You are free. If it is in your power, it is yours to choose. No action or thought is off the table. If it is in you, it is permitted. It is for you to decide what kind of being you are to become. This is a universe without prior restraint. Fear is information, not something to avoid. Future harm and future pain—these things are inevitable. Interestingly, we do not need permission or advanced degrees to be scientists or philosophers, healers or builders. These pursuits are our birthright, if we are capable of pursuing them. When we stop trying to merely avoid suffering, as if by magic, we suffer less. When we stop pretending that we are not ourselves guilty of the very things we despise in others—we create the possibility of understanding a deeper truth. 

To put a finer point on this idea of the freedom to act, I am arguing that we have the freedom to transgress, to act against the will of others. This is the fundamental difference between the morality peddlers and truth tellers, the truth is that you have such tremendous freedom, even the freedom to engage in violence and the freedom to face the consequences of your actions. I seek to emancipate our vision from the paradigm of the forbidden idea and the forbidden action. I would like to see a world of mature agents, not only children in the thrall of a mythos of disempowerment. 

There are an infinite number of futures waiting to be created when we take back our authority simply by acknowledging its existence. I am not arguing for violence or transgression against a prevailing social or moral order as an end in itself. I am underlining the inherent reality that the option to transgress is always already in front of us. I am bringing the dark into the light. The abstractions we take as reality are specters of the human psyche, projected onto the world through a process of reductive imagination. Destruction and creation are the same activity: we reconfigure reality, to greater or lesser ends. 

Seeing dogma, and de jure authority, for the smoke screen that it is—some might argue this approach could lead to chaos or anarchy without external moral law to dictate behavior. However, we already live in a world where we are essentially free to make our own choices, even if we don't fully realize it. Even if the universe is deterministic and free will is an illusion, smoke and mirrors of the human experience, we still must act as if it exists—we have no choice but to choose. In practice, this means we would learn to cultivate and develop our personal judgement and intuition when making decisions, rather than primarily looking to extant edicts and codes, crafted by others. Of course, we would still take guidance from laws, social norms, ethics, etc., but ultimately filter those through our own inner sense of right and wrong. In most circumstances if we bother to slow down and engage our senses from an unperturbed place, we will find that our conscience is sufficient to tell us what is both right and wrong. This requires cultivating self-awareness, orienting oneself towards an ongoing pursuit of truth, and taking full accountability for the impacts of our choices.

Laws and rules only have power because we choose to follow them—even obedience is an act of free will. Understanding this, we can take more conscious responsibility for our actions rather than copping to external authority. This is not to say we would actually abolish all moral codes, standards, and laws. Such guidelines serve an important purpose in organizing society. However, we can begin to understand them for what they actually are: flexible and changeable agreements to coordinate shared values, rather than immutable commandments. We have a choice in whether and how to apply them. We have a choice in when and how we conform. We have a choice to recreate society according to our own will and visions. What is too frequently lost is that this is not simply a possible idea, but something that society needs and cannot exist without. The world depends on us to innovate as well as conform.

“I mistrust all systematizers… The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”  —Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

The antigravity for the dogmatist must conform to what comes to us naturally, instinctively. Nothing great can be built against instinct. If it is in you, it cannot be evil—though others may judge our choices as antisocial or harmful and may take action against us (as is their right), we remain free to create our lives by our values. It is essential for the individual to create culture, not only to be a vessel for cultural values handed down. We stand together, and we also stand alone. The individual is the basic unit of the collective. The individual steers the group, as the group steers the individual. Culture is an organic interplay between the environment and individuals, acting and reacting to movement and energy in the world. Culture is a dance, like that of a large flock of birds forming a murmuration, undulating and swaying both in sync and separately. 

Towards Moral Autonomy

Rather dealing in laws and edicts, here are some meditations to draw attention to your own experience. You are the player character. You are the hero. You are the authority of last resort. You are the backstop for the world.

1. Your desires and needs are ok.
   What comes naturally to us cannot be evil.

2. Cultivate your instinct, intuition, perception of emotion, and senses.
   Prioritize becoming more sensitive, more aware.

3. Use your own judgement.
   You decide what's right—there is no external morality with higher authority than an honest conscience.

4. Take full responsibility for yourself and the impacts of your actions.
   You are free to do and think what you want but the world will treat you according to your actions—so choose wisely.

5. Notice that the universe is concrete, not abstract.
   It’s easy to get lost in ideas but reality is tangible. The real exists in discrete actualities, none of which conform to our symbolic reductions.

6. Embrace uncertainty.
   Our agency and control is limited, even arguably nonexistent. Our knowledge is imperfect. Certainty is hyperbole.

7. Engage in continual re-evaluation.
   What worked yesterday will not work today. The universe is like a multidimensional river, and all things are in flux. Be process-oriented. Means above ends.

With no code of conduct or community standards, no divine right of kings, no tastemaker, academic board, religion, or government to dictate your thoughts and actions—what would arise? 

What if instead of moralizing with codes of conduct, organizations and communities invited people to be more responsible, aware, and accountable? What if instead of rules and decrees we encouraged people to cultivate and trust their own instincts? To advocate for their own awareness and power? By asking for competence and intelligence, and asking for self-governance… might we empower moral autonomy in place of obedience? This creates a world where people are encouraged to be fully present and conscious, not a world of dull compliance. 

Freedom is the acceptance of responsibility. When you obey an order, it is your will that carries it out, not that of some commanding authority. When you follow any law, it is your will that chooses to enforce both its letter and intent. Does moral autonomy guarantee a perfect society? Of course not—it simply clarifies the underlying reality that we ourselves are the purveyors of both morality and power, we are free to choose the ends and the means to which we devote our lives. Moral autonomy is an antivenom to the poison of dogmatism—repression, fear, tribalism—cultivating conscience and front-lining the individual ethic is essential for a principled and pluralistic world where we all of us can thrive.