What to Do

> You should be wise, brave, honest, temperate, and just, uphold tradition, and serve the public interest

As noted in the essay, this idea of "taking care of the world" is relatively new. PG claims it's because only now we can take care of the world, but I think it's just a naive idea that doesn't stand the test of time. I'm sure its not novel idea, and many others had thought of it and tried to implement some version of it in their society. But because it hasn't become cannon in any group or culture, it's a bad idea in that it doesn't produce human flourishing. Whereas ideas around wisdom, bravery, honesty, etc have replicated throughout cultures and led to everything we cherish

The idea is that you cannot take care of the world if you can't take care of yourself. So at first you must be these things. Ironically the most empathetic people I have met that purport to care most about "the world" are often the most dysfunctional people - substance abuse, medications, no strong family ties, anxiety, neuroticism, etc. These aren't people we should try to emulate.

Only when you have your house in order can you attempt to help others. Start with the people immediately around you. People you know and love and that know and love you. If you've ever dealt with a family member with a serious problem, you'll see how difficult for you to help them. Now imagine helping a friend, then casual acquaintance, then stranger finally a stranger on the other side of the world.

We should have humility as to what kind of impact we can have on the world and look inward to those around us where we can have the most impact. Otherwise you might as well wipe out hundreds of thousands of people and spend trillions of dollars spreading democracy in the middle east.

> "I was in the Air Force a while, and they had what they call 'policing the area,' and I think that’s a pretty good thing to go by. If everyone just takes care of their own area, then we won’t have any problems. Be here. Be present. Wherever you are, be there. And look around you, and see what needs to be changed."

-Willie Nelson

Most especially be aware of others' happiness or misery, along with our own heart's intentions and actions and how they affect both others and ourselves. Our sense of inner peace is dependent on how our karma radiates back into our heart from how we have affected others. This is the most sublime rule of the universe: you reap what you sow, for good or ill.

Cultivate universal compassion and then shine its beneficient light on as many people as you can with real effortful service.

That is the purest heading for our moral compass, and it's always our choice both what we choose to do and how to course correct our ideals, attitudes, and behaviors.

We ALL need to self-reflect and -evolve for the majority of our life, slogging through mistake after failure after falling short of the mark, learning humility and perseverance and mercy for others who need even more grace than we do.

"Love is the astrolabe of God's mysteries." --Rumi

12 year old asking her friend can have a social media account but she can't. TV, food habits, bedtime, etc. Not our problem. Also applies to cleaning up what's around you. The alternative is paralysis and not cleaning up anything.

I've seen images of pro-environment demonstrations that just trash their immediate surroundings while pretending to be concerned about the global state of pollution.

One of the most important, time-tested values is one of responsibility and honor. That means doing the right thing with the power that you do have, both by yourself and by others, even if it hurts you. We each are responsible for the environment (natural and man-made) that we inhabit, and to that extent it is our duty to help others and ourselves.

We have been given many, many resources at our disposal, and we bear the responsibility to use them well. Too often in our society we shirk that responsibility with the excuse "well, its not our problem".

> We have been given many, many resources at our disposal, and we bear the responsibility to use them well.

You should use "I" rather than "we" and I would agree. I've been given the gift of life in my children and I do everything for them. Fortunately I have resources to spare and try to take care of my family and neighbors as well, and I suggest you do the same.

If you as say a father always put your own wellbeing (or some other definition of self-interest) first, then you're going to be a pretty lousy father. But you shouldn't ignore yourself. It's all about striking a balance, and in the end this balance simply aims toward the common good.

It doesn't make sense to say that because sometimes a naive, "greedy" strive toward the common good doesn't work then the principle is false.

You can carve real basis for the common good and other metaphysical principles. One such basis is that, metaphysically, the supreme valuation of the self is on very shaky ground. The self, although very important conceptually, doesn't stand up as an ultimate metaphysical basis, because we are really dynamic results of a whole network of interactions that includes not only whatever happens in our brains, but the whole cosmos -- there's no absolute boundary between yourself and others, and everything is always fundamentally changing. You from today is different from yesterday, and significantly different from many years ago. The common good is much more metaphysically defensible. That's why most metaphysical traditions (religions, usually) almost universally put the common good (sometimes enacted by God) above all else -- it really makes the most sense imo[1]. Again, you shouldn't be naive about it, and in practice and in most cases it makes sense to first take basic care of yourself, "keeping your house", and then go help others, but this is more a guideline, heuristic and reminder (specially important to give for radical altruists, but common sense for most people I think).

But really if yourself is your actual fundamental priority, I think you will act very poorly. Although even in that case there are good strategic reasons to be cooperative (people thinking you are evil or egoistical will already turn around many people and compromise relationships and cooperation opportunities).

[1] If you don't buy this metaphysical formulation, there's an (I believe) ultimately equivalent formulation that may be easier to accept: the fact that you "Could exist/could have been born as another person". If in some metaphysical sense you could have been born as that poor person that needs assistance, doesn't it make sense to help her, which logically implies that if you were in their shoes you would be helped?

This might be unfair, but I'd summarise what you said as "living a charitable life, but only for people within 50km of your house", and I think it's fairly obvious that "living a charitable life, mostly for people within 50km of your house, but also you give $50 a month to an international charity and you try to generate a bit less carbon dioxide" is better for the world, better for you because you don't have to harden your heart, and wouldn't harm most people's ability to look after themselves.

I agree that it's possible to be too neurotic about this and do what Sam Bankman-Fried did. It's also possible to be a little better than average at caring for the world without much cost to yourself. I don't understand why anyone would have a problem with the latter.

This is something I think a lot of "do-gooders" miss. We're only in a position to do better because we took care of ourselves. It's a prerequisite. The flip side of that is taking do good (for the planet, for society e.g.) to an extreme where that becomes the only focus while letting everything else go south. We can take care of the planet only if we have the economical means to do so. We can help others only because we have enough to be able to do so. Environmentalism taken to the extreme says we should dismantle our economy because because it destroys the planet, however in the process of dismantling our economy we are taking away all the tools we have as well. If we're all poor the environment is going to do worse. People will go back to burning wood to keep themselves warm instead of e.g. using solar or nuclear power. We can have freedom only by having a culture and environment where that doesn't equate to chaos. Taken to an extreme "freedom" is chaos.

The other way of putting this is the well known saying: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

It's as if you wish us to say, "I've figured everything out, let me show you the way." I don't find that particularly reassuring, and it's not exactly the kind of humility that I think you want to convey.

If your bar to helping others is ending all suffering within yourself, then I'm afraid we're all going to be living a very lonely existence if we followed your lead.

Now, I think your larger point is that folks in crisis should tend to that crisis, which I think anyone who has taken a plane ride would understand. Apply the mask on yourself first. But to extend that analogy, you can have a broken hand, or even a broken heart and still be able to help your neighbor.

The stakes for quietism are high.

> the road to hell is paved with good intentions... including—or especially yours

    > I've seen images of pro-environment demonstrations that just trash their immediate surroundings while pretending to be concerned about the global state of pollution.

No, tradition is ways of living that have stood the test of time. They might not be perfect, but the idea that you can just reinvent all that stuff and do it better than tradition is the kind of thing that the Greek word "hubris" was invented for.

Also, upholding tradition doesn't mean being blindly enslaved to it. Part of the reason traditions got that way is that people adapted them when things changed.

The definition you quote is basically the late Stoic definition of virtue. While very decent, it's notably pre-Christian.

Hubris is about not knowing your place with regard to those above you (the Greek pantheon) and the inevitability of the reckoning when the gods decide to put you forcefully and often brutally back in (their opinion of) your place. Implying that someone wanting to do what they think is right is both naive and deserves divine retribution is a nasty take indeed.

This "do what you're told", "don't make waves", and "let others handle government/systems/things outside of your zone" sounds an awful lot like the walrus and the carpenter to me.

I get my hair cut every month because my family instilled the tradition of grooming. But for the kind of people I've encountered who want to "uphold tradition", I'm "corrupting" tradition because I don't get a "traditional" man's haircut (aka a typical cut from their window of reference).

Humans uphold tradition by default, we don't really need a reminder to do it and we certainly don't need a reminder to uphold someone else's idea of tradition.

>> You should be wise, brave, honest, temperate, and just, uphold tradition, and serve the public interest

I completely agree.

Being "wise, brave, honest, temperate, and just, uphold tradition, and serve the public interest" is something related to you, something that you can change about you, something that you can choose to be without producing harm.

"Taking care of the world" is not about you and your actions anymore. It's about the others. It's the path of resentful ideologues, revolutionaries and murderers.

Robespierre, Lenin, Mao, Marx, Kim Ir-Sen, Pol Pot tried to "take care of the world."

Should they tried to "be wise, brave, honest, temperate, and just, uphold tradition, and serve the public interest" and leave the world be, the world would have been in a much better place.

But I am only motivated to help individuals. I don't plan to change societies, I don't plan to help social groups, invade countries, dictate some policies, doctrines, because that is what someone can mean "by taking care of the world".

I began to have a profound mistrust and dislike for activists, ideologues, social warriors, fighters for "a good cause" and revolutionaries. Their actions are usually finalized through loss of freedoms and blood baths.

> If your bar to helping others is ending all suffering within yourself, then I'm afraid we're all going to be living a very lonely existence if we followed your lead.

Logically that does not make any sense. If everyone is able to relieve themselves of their own suffering (no one else can anyway, in an ultimate sense), which includes loneliness, then there would be no more suffering. This is a Buddhist mindset that seems kind of harsh at first, but it's a reality people benefit from once they accept it: you must become your own savior. And once you are in good place, even just mentally, it becomes very natural and easy to help out others.

Problems only start when people reject this idea, and think they have all the answers to all the problems, and start enforcing their beliefs on others using violence - which is a trend we're seeing more & more these days.

I am not convinced that's certain. At best, we can tell that those cultures were outcompeted by others, but the healthy human cells are outcompeted by cancer as well. Additionally, I'd say that throughout most of the human history taking care of the world in the modern sense was not an existential matter because we had much more room for error.

Ancient populations like the Romans had the concept of numens, deus loci, and gods of nature that were responsible for the world, were venerated and people who devoted them to these deities did their part to help the world. Being a good host (i.e. the rapport with the Other) was also always a key duty, so much that it is Zeus/Jupiter who presided to it.

It was always part of the farmer's job to take care of nature and their fields. It was part of the nobility jobs to develop their territories. It is only in modern times, with mechanized agriculture and nation states, that these personal duties got lost. Also, if we widen our attention to include aboriginal people, taking care of the world is quite central to their world view.

Even modern environmentalists thought and acted locally until very recently.

Now "the world" can only mean the entire planet as a a whole. It's a frame of reference that most people have never really had. It's only in modern times (space race) that we started to think of the planet as a place and within those times it's only in very recent times when we have started to think of taking care of this planet.

Same here, just FYI. There's a reason that I couched it in terms of "I have seen..."

I know multimillionaire high-school dropouts, and dirt-poor people with multiple advanced degrees from Ivy-league universities.

But the community of which I'm a member, stresses the importance of getting our own house in order, before looking to others, so people with means can do a lot of good (or harm).

Pretty sure that Zoroastrianism has that kind of thing, as central tenets.

Change them when it makes sense to change them, bearing in mind that the way they are now has stood the test of time.

> letting "the right" group of people tell us which traditions are the right ones

I said no such thing. The people who decide when traditions need to be changed are the ones who are living them.

> Hubris is about not knowing your place with regard to those above you

And in my use of that as a metaphor, the traditions themselves are the things "above you".

> Implying that someone wanting to do what they think is right is both naive and deserves divine retribution

Someone who is giving a "hard pass" to tradition, as the poster I responded to did, is going way beyond "do what they think is right", since they clearly have not actually thought at all about what traditions are and why they exist.

> This "do what you're told", "don't make waves", and "let others handle government/systems/things outside of your zone"

Is nothing like what I said. You're attacking a straw man.

I don't see pg saying that in the article under discussion. so this criticism, however justified it might be in some cases, doesn't seem to me to be relevant here.

> Humans uphold tradition by default

True, but defaults can be overridden. And culture often tries to do that. See below.

> we don't really need a reminder to do it

In our current culture, where our so-called "elites" do indeed believe that they can reinvent society from scratch, and have been busily destroying traditions for decades in the process, I think we can indeed benefit from such a reminder.

OP is mistaking those values which reproduce themselves well with values which are Good. Upholding tradition is a particularly brutal example; its ethical consequences are entirely variable depending on what traditions are being upheld. The one thing that it does succeed in doing is reproducing the same social structure which, among other things, will raise new people to believe in upholding tradition. Those values which lead to their adoption by new people will stick, and those values which don’t are weeded out of the population. OP sees the mixed bag of values that result from this process and cherishes them as the word of god.

Under most circumstances, in most societies, I wouldn’t expect a subscriber of this value system to eliminate slavery.

Edit: I’ll clarify in advance. Our ideas of wisdom, bravery, honesty, temperacy, justice and tradition most clearly, and the public interest are all defined and shaped by our society. We’re quite sensitive to temperance towards alcohol, but not so much towards sugar in our (American) society. It’s brave to fight in a war for your country, until you realize you’re aggressing upon another for resources your people don’t need, at which point the brave thing to do is to refuse to fight and protest the war, but what about the vast majority of soldiers kept from that realization to ensure that they remain good fighters? Bravery becomes a carrot and a stick with which society controls the individual rather than an ethic by which the individual has a virtuous impact upon society. To counter this process I would, to start, suggest an ethic that includes a strong skepticism towards the status quo rather than an interest in upholding tradition.

Who? Not familiar with that... looks it up ... Oh. No. Not that. Actually, about as far from that, as you can get.

Cult, schmult. Been called worse. Whatever creams your Twinkie. Our Fellowship basically has nothing to do with wealth, personal philosophy, or social standing. It's about helping each other out of some bad situations, and it's fairly common to have people from all walks of life, rubbing shoulders.