Posted on by Abe Austin

Fickle Popularity

I may not be very old, but I have already witnessed the way society can swing from one trend to another. I see the masses scramble onto today’s favored platform, only to be embarrassed when it becomes tomorrow’s laughingstock.

I believe that a key component of this is that too often we choose our stance more off of who else is standing there, and not by the merits of the platform itself. The fact is, there are values to be respected in most every position. Conservatism and liberalism, inclusivity and solidarity, faith and skepticism, individualism and collectivism, a solid case can be made for each of these, and it is my personal belief that the correct position comes by taking the good parts of each.

But balance is not the typical position of society. Typically, people go all in on one or another, believing that they do so because of their commitment to its underlying ideals, but more so because of the attractiveness of the community that is built upon it.

Whenever a platform becomes too popular, it starts to attract “all kinds.” Some of the meanest and least understanding jump onto it, and they bring out all the worst extremes of that particular ideal. The rest of society can see the growing ugliness in that position, and so they take up the opposition. In order to escape the depravity of the old platform’s worst tenets, people fully commit to its opposite, until it becomes the popular thing to do. As the masses invest in that side, then they also start to attract even the uglier parts of society to their platform and the cycle repeats, over and over again.

Playing this game is exhausting. Great effort is made, but any short-term progress is eventually undone by an over-correction in the other direction. It’s a pity, because I don’t think it has to be that way. I see the potential for mankind to balance one another out, to elevate the most powerful ideals in each platform, but to circumscribe them by the bounds of all the others. By this I believe we could continually progress towards greater and greater virtue, rather than rising only to fall as has been our historical pattern. I believe this unified progression is a vision of heaven, the society that we shall have when our Lord reigns supreme.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Taken to the Extreme

Two Ways of Life)

Many of my generation and culture have expressed that we were raised with strict—and sometimes severe—consequences for any time that we slipped from the moral standards we were expected to live by. Quite a few of us developed a strong sense of perfectionism as a result, inflicting upon ourselves an impossible standard that has tied more than a few of us into painful knots. Too many of us have had constant feelings of being guilty and unworthy. Suffice it to say that there were some flaws in the way we were given our belief systems.

But on the other hand, I have also seen several of my same generation that were raised under an anything-goes sort of mentality. Moral misdeeds were only winked at, and consequences obscured, resulting in some incredibly reckless, selfish, and narcissistic tendencies. Either morality was relative, or it didn’t even exist, and many avoidable wounds were suffered by that denial of objective truth. From my observation, this philosophy wasn’t really any better than the extreme legalism.

The Inevitable Extreme)

Either way, one can easily come to feel that they were dealt the harder hand. I have seen many of my peers throw the baby out with the bath water, renouncing all moral law because they were hurt under an inappropriate application of it. They lack the nuance to see that there was good in the theory, if not the execution.

And, frankly, these flaws and nuances are inevitable. Whatever principles people choose to live and raise their society by, there will always be those that take the principles to an inappropriate extreme. If you decide to instill a strong sense of moral obedience, sooner or later you will have individuals that enact cruel punishments for any perceived deviance. If you decide to instill a carefree, life-loving mantra, sooner or later you will have individuals that pursue carnal indulgence without any regard for the people harmed along the way. Humanity is made up of all sorts. It has the best of people within it, but also the worst, and it is the worst who will always find a way to pervert the well-meaning conventional wisdom.

Lessons Learned)

Having explained this, let me point out two essential takeaways related to the matter:

  1. In any philosophy that you choose to live by, it is worth considering what potential evil might sprout from it down the line. Life philosophies are not so much a destination as a direction, and it is important for us to follow the logical conclusion of that direction to its furthest extremes. In the wrong minds, what are the worst interpretations that others might take from your teachings? If you identify what those perverse extremes are, then you can call them out ahead of time, setting in place the bounds that will let you and others know when things have been taken too far.
  2. Any principle, even one that is true and good, becomes corrupt when pursued at the expense of all other true principles. Going back to the idea of life philosophy as a direction, we might also consider it as a vector: a line stretching across a graph. It may run from one inappropriate extreme to another, but in between it might run through some very worthy territory as well.
    Additional principles can be thought of as more vectors, other lines that stretch across the graph, and at certain points intersect with our first. Those intersection points help us greatly in that they represent the natural bounds that each principle sets upon the other. For example, if we are mature enough to hold both the principle of moral obedience and grace for sin at the same time, then each will keep us from running too far with the other. Together they plot for us when to forgive and when to call for repentance. They will even show us how to do both at the same time!