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I think of this as a variant of Postel's law (for TCP/IP): Be conservative in what you do, Be liberal in what you accept from others. Most major belie
by athenot 8y ago
I think of this as a variant of Postel's law (for TCP/IP):
Be conservative in what you do,
Be liberal in what you accept from others.
Most major belief systems have the same concept of defining "winning at being human" as putting up with more crap and simultaneously taking the effort to overdeliver. As a society, this pulls us upward.
On a continuum, there are 3 states:
- A negative state, where we take/expect more than we deliver. At best, we require others to do us good before we ourselves do good, at worse we are unconcerned about other's good. It's also, at an individual level, the path of least resistance.
- A neutral state, where we attempt to balance what we expect and what we deliver. In that state is the Golden Rule (do to others what you want them to do to you) and eye-for-an-eye (don't return more tort than the tort caused to you). Very loosely, this is where justice lives.
- A positive state, where we attempt to give more than what we expect. This is the domain of mercy, stoicism and "turn the other cheek". It requires a personal cost/sacrifice in order to expect less yet still deliver what is good. This is also the domain of love.
- swsieber 8y agoI like that comparison. I stumbled upon another continuum some years ago, and I think it makes a good companion. In this one, both ends are bad, and the middle is good. It's especially useful for dealing with any type of devotion to cause (or a person): Optimism ---- Improver ---- Pessimism Though people tend to go from Optimism -> Pessimism (-> Improver). The problem with optimists is that they will "defend the indefensible. He is the jingo of the universe; he will say, “My cosmos, right or wrong.” He will be less inclined to the reform of things; more inclined to a sort of front-bench official answer to all attacks, soothing everyone with assurances. He will not wash the world, but whitewash the world." The problem with pessimists is "not that he chastises gods and men, but that he does not love what he chastises . . . [In being the so-called ‘candid friend,’ the pessimist is not really candid.] He is keeping something back—in his own gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things. He has a secret desire to hurt, not merely to help. . . . He is using the ugly knowledge which was allowed him [in order] to strengthen the army, to discourage people from joining it." An example of the "Improver" is (are) women: "Some stupid people started the idea that because women obviously back up their own people through everything, therefore women are blind and do not see anything. They can hardly have known any women. The same women who are ready to defend their men through thick and thin . . . are almost morbidly lucid about the thinness of [their] excuses or the thickness of [their] head[s]. . . . Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind." [0] Quotes from G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy(Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1959), pp. 69–71. [1] Arrangement of quotes taken from https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/bruce-c-hafen_love-is-not-blind-thoughts-college-students-faith-ambiguity/ https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/bruce-c-hafen_love-is-not-bli...
- slothtrop 8y agoI don't think stoicism belongs in what you've described as a positive state. It's about our attitude towards the world and experiences as they unfold. I don't think you can extrapolate giving more to the world from that. In fact expectations are irrelevant in that framework.
- darkerside 8y agoDon't conflate "positive" in this domain with any typical connotations of the word. Stoicism is certainly "positive" in the sense of what one gives to the world, in relationship to what one expects to receive, because a Stoic has no expectations to receive anything from the world.