Facebook is a great way to see which commonly held beliefs, especially beliefs that are strongly tied to in-group signaling, are important to people. The image on the left has made the rounds on Facebook.
Jesus saved your soul from sin.
Soldiers fight for freedom, possibly by fighting communists or terrorists.
One thing these statements have in common is they involve sacrifice for vague concepts. I put the vague concepts in red.
Freedom
Anyone who has spent time in the United States, knows that America and freedom are synonymous. When I was young I used to often hear people talk about these other countries, where the government reads your mail and dissident citizens are imprisoned or killed without a trial. So maybe that’s the sort of thing that is meant by freedom? But the President of the United States currently claims the right to have American citizens assassinated without judicial process*, and I do not get the impression that many people care.
In general, I think freedom needs to be qualified (freedom for whom to do what). For example, if people are given the freedom to own land, then they lose the right to roam freely across the land.
And then there is the issue that some people are harmed when they are given more choices. Sister Y discusses interesting examples of this:
Given the right to die, people who are a burden on their caretakers might choose to die rather than be a burden, even if what they really wanted was to live without having to explicitly choose to live. Therefore, the freedom to die harms the person.
…
Given the right to survive (on a respirator, say), people who wish to die will suddenly bear responsibility for choosing death, and may choose to go on suffering in life instead, even though they’d prefer to die, all things considered. Therefore, the suffering person is harmed by the choice to remain alive.
So, not only is freedom vague, but it is not without tradeoffs.
Terrorism
As Glenn Greenwald put it, “Terrorism is simultaneously the single most meaningless and most manipulated word in the American political lexicon.” Like communist before it, as commonly used, the word terrorist basically just means “people (possibly imaginary) that powerful folks want you to be afraid of.”
Soul and sin
I don’t think I need to convince people that soul is a vague term. As for sin, most human actions involve harm/benefit tradeoffs, much of which is difficult to anticipate. There are some cases that are not very fuzzy, but in general life just is not black and white.
Vagueness
The image above was pointed out to me while I was reading Eliezer Yudkowsky’s excellent article on the importance of being specific (link). From his article:
Cognitive behavioral therapy… talks about using requests for specific details to interrupt thoughts looping around vague but affectively laden centers, like “I am a good husband”, “I am a bad husband”, or “my roommate is a slob”. How are you a good husband? How are you a bad husband? Which specific feature of your roommate are you objecting to? Taboo the emotionally valent word at the center, like “slob”, and replace it with something that’s specific enough to be testable, or concrete enough to be acted upon.
“I am a good husband” or “my roommate is a slob” is very similar to “I love freedom” or “we need to fight the terrorists.”
Investors aren’t going to fund your startup if you are too vague, but humans will fight in your war if you are equally vague.
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*Attorney General Eric Holder distinguishes between due process and judicial process: ” The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.” ‘Due process’ just became vague.
My favorite thing about this photo is that it is truly ingenious to convince people to die for something. dying is the ultimate sacrifice. if you can convince people to die for something, then more and more people will recognize those things (like freedom and the soul) as legitimate. they will not question the tradeoffs because a soldier died for you to have freedom or jesus died for you to have a soul (that comes with rules). so against these greater tradeoffs (soldier’s death or jesus’ death), the other tradeoffs you mention pale in comparison and are easily pushed out of our minds.
this clears the way to fully accept whatever version of freedom or soul you are being sold. as rousseau noted back in the 1700s, small powerful groups of people can get masses of people to do their bidding if they are clever enough. in rousseau’s example, he posits that men with large amounts of land convinced those with very little bits of land to protect ownership of land in general (when it was a new concept). he calls this “the big lie” because what the ultimately were protecting was disparity. people lost the right to roam and share land. people lost the peaceful existence they had prior to ownership. that said, i think most people would still take that tradeoff.
it is quite interesting how god’s rules only benefit some (the group in power). yet, that ruling class (whose god’s rules magically benefit) are able to convince others to follow. it is fascinating.