🏴‍☠️ TREE 353: Against morality

One.

Let’s say you want to
get in shape
eat healthy
quit looking at porn
control your temper
stop lying
end human trafficking
etc.

You may have a
strong moral reason for
deciding to make a change.
I propose that once you
have made your moral choice –
provided you are a person
of integrity with good ethics –
you put morality to one side
and treat the application
of your choice
to real life
as a purely
practical
matter.

Here’s why:

Morality adds weight.
Imagine day three of your
healthy-living journey when
you succumb to your cravings
and instead of working out, you
eat six doughnuts while bingeing on
Pornhub. Morality
will tell you just how bad you are.
Morality will load you with guilt
for your abject failure to be
the person you know you should be.
Morality will replay the lecture
you got in Year 8 about how you never
try hard enough. That’s a lot
to carry while you are doing
the hard work of changing
your diet or ending
human trafficking
or whatever.

I say it’s too much to carry.

Practicality, doesn’t care
about your badness.
Practicality assesses
the disaster of day three
and asks, What can we do
on day four to
make some
progress?

Morality is a theorist.
Practicality is your friend on the frontline.

Two.

There’s not much worse than a judgey bird clamped on to a repressed man’s head.

Three.

I did not see this one coming.

The March TREE Hangout is happening on Tuesday 15 March at 7:30 PM at the Albion in Conwy. If you’d like to be informed about opportunities to hang out with fellow FOREST friends in North Wales, please reply to this email and let me know.

Tomorrow on Feynmansplaining, a wobbly telescope and hints of what came before the big bang.

Grow slowly
Jeff