I was just thinking today, provoked by the Cynefin framework, what constitutes chaotic environment.
And like many interesting things, this one I feel also is dependent on the act of observing, i.e. how we look at it makes a difference.
For example, if I am a decent person and I treat other people like individuals, and I respect all their individuality, then in a social, or political, or work/team setting I might end up dealing with something relatively chaotic. I might need to respect people’s ideas of their sexes, I might need to respect people ideas of killing other people with their personal guns, or people having weird submissive tendencies and democratically going for things I don’t believe right. These might in most cases appear as very unpredictable things to me.
If on the other hand I am not as decent and I treat people like cattle, or somehow categorize them in other ways, then I get access to tools that reduce the chaos to a more predictable and controllable state. For example, I can lock down people, I can tell them to only go out between 1-2 pm, etc. Or I can tell them who to vote for, violate them if they don’t vote for who I tell them, get them to change their vote. Or tell them they need to work exactly 8h a day and dangle a paycheck in front of them, etc.
And if I want to treat them even less decently as just a part of the background, just natural habitat, then I can bomb them, stop water or any commerce for the regions that happen to be their habitat, etc. Then I can go in and “rebuild” something that is completely different than the world they inhabited before, but I wouldn’t care as they are merely background for me. i.e. I can operate in a completely predictable from my point of view world.
the cost of being decent is to constantly operate in a state of chaos
So I was thinking, that the cost of being decent is to constantly operate in a state of chaos and to keep choosing only actions that are congruent with your decency.
So not only you put yourself in a more difficult to operate in situation, but you remove certain tools from the available toolset. This might seem limiting, but like many other constraints it can be what pushes towards innovation and coming up with more sophisticated ways of dealing with problems.
This of course doesn’t mean that such actions will be more effective or reach a “better” result than some less decent and more dictatorial action. It is completely possible and probably even likely, to have “better ends” reached faster and more frequently by using lower fidelity and more dull tools. However, I think this then robs us from some possibilities as well. So for example we lose the opportunity to be sensitive and gentle with someone (without looking and being completely fake)
So there is cost that we need to pay in each direction.
Trying to be more decent: cost is that we need to deal with more complicated/complex/chaotic reality.
Trying to be less decent: cost is that we have less access to the more fine/gentle reality that we sometimes need when we want to be human and interact with another human/individual.
And this seems transferable to a personal setting too. For example, in our personal relationships with people who were once close, but somehow violated us in some way, if we want to treat them decently and respect all their humanity, we need to go through some very complex spaces and we need to figure out and navigate difficult psychological phenomena. If we decide to be a bit more “obliterating”, we might just stop talking/relating to them altogether and remove ourselves from the world they inhabit.
And in this second case it is not that we are removing their humanity in some absolute way, and that they can’t remain in full control of their own life and be human in whatever universe they happen to be. On the contrary maybe, by allowing their universe to exist without you in it, you might be allowing them to be exactly what their full potential is unlimited by your presence. But it does mean that we (as an object?) are not going to be present in that universe, we won’t exist. So it’s an inverse bombing – you obliterate a world by subtracting yourself from it – you don’t exist in that world, and that world doesn’t exist in you.
And that might be a less decent action from the perspective of having to allow everything in our own worlds and having to be inclusive of everything (inclusive decency). But is at the same time might be decent from the perspective of allowing everything to exist in its own world and to be the way it is (exclusive/excluding decency).
I guess there isn’t necessarily moral judgement here in these more personal scenarios, only choices.
