High and Low Horses

 I have not blogged in a LONG TIME and I'm so rusty. 

Politics these days, amirite?

My little brother pissed me off a few weeks ago in the throes of a political kerfuffle (not reasoned enough to be an argument by either definition). He accused me of posing - I don't remember exactly what he called it, but it was something like "virtue signaling." And very, very rapidly, I was trapped. I could not even attempt to do the right thing without knowing that I was doing exactly what he had just sneered at.

I suppose I could go back and carefully analyze the rhetoric of the conversation and delicately unravel exactly what was happening. I am capable of that kind of analysis, but this is a blog, not a school paper, and I'm more interested in the abstractions at play. I'm always more interested in the abstractions.

Let's imagine that you have a stick figure in a two-dimensional world. I'd draw it and upload it for you, but somebody stole my reMarkable.

Stick figure is named "Bob." Bob does a good thing. Bob picks up a scribble off the line he's using as a sidewalk and throws it in the outline of a trashcan. You're watching Bob do this. Does Bob know that you're watching? Is Bob picking up scribble litter because it's the right thing to do, or because he knows you're watching? It's even harder to tell when the stick figure is stationary, because you don't see him pick the trash up, you only see him probably throwing it away. His hand is over the trashcan, and the litter is falling from it.

Is Bob a poseur, or a concerned citizen of stick-land? There is no way to judge from what someone is doing whether they're doing it because it's the right thing to do, or because it looks like the right thing to do. And all of the theories about panopticism and discipline by scrutiny basically don't care, as long as the scrutinized does not transgress.

I'm not certain what the implication of posing is - that I'm too afraid of social pressure to do the thing I really want to do, which I also know is wrong? Or that just seems wrong? That I'm only pretending to think the right way, and so don't deserve any moral credit (is moral credit really the currency we're working with, here?)? I suspect that what is really functioning here is an inability to credit those who think differently with the common human desire to just do the right thing. Smart/good/correct people MUST think like me, because I am smart/good/correct. So anyone who does not appear to think like me but still has the appearance of being smart/good/correct, must therefore be pretending one or all of those things. 

Bob is probably malicious, but most certainly is misguided. After all, picking up litter is pointless. Everyone knows that even if you throw things in the trash it still ends up in the environment and microplastics are colonizing our brainstems. Bob just wants to impress somebody. He's machiavellian. Poor Bob. Even if he just wants to tidy up his space a little, somebody finds that offensive.

Honestly, what I really want to talk about is the absolute impossibility of actually doing the right thing, because every action is based on some kind of myth we spin for ourselves about cause and effect. I am so tired of feeling like I can't win, no matter what I want or try. Meanwhile, the apartment is a disaster.