[FRIAM] Talent and Moral Luck - Steelman attempt

[Steve Smith]

> nst> Sorry.  You missed my point.  It was—YPTE—introspective.  I was
> noticing that I could not believe that a world without women was
> dreary without being a sexist. 
>
>  
>
> nst> Probably not that interesting a thought if one is under 50, or
> 60, or 70, or perhaps even 80 
>
and I submit to all that the main point of the storyline is the
sorry/not-sorry (unintended/unexpected/yet-predictable) consequences of
using violence (one of the most egregious types of levers). 

The "dreariness" of a world without women would seem to be eclipsed by
the personal grief of *virtually* every male on the planet losing his
wife/mother/daughters/sisters/female-friends overnight (in the personal)
and the abrupt if delayed (by a remaining lifespan) existential grief of
the end of a spectacular (if clearly flawed, as demonstrated by the
central theme) species.   Maybe a (very few?) fully psychotic
misogynists found it a pleasing condition (in which case I "blame the
Mother" ;^) )

Unlike most post-apocalyptic storytelling, the misery is not (overtly)
miserable health crises (nuclear holocaust) or marauding bands (though
they did feature) or competition for exhausting resources, or retreating
from an angry/disappointed "mother earth", but rather a simple but
profound "absence" and incontrovertable "end of humanity", leaving the
men of the world to contemplate (or not) how they treated women before
they all went away.

<blatant Moralizing>

  If Marcus' nihilist view that "it is all levers" is more true than
not, it explains why this grand experiment of "civilization" seems to be
collapsing into a cesspool of it's own making, under it's own weight. 
Or it's own hubris.  Or under the self-perpetuating seduction of
vengeance and retribution: (don't click if you hate poetry)  The People
of the Other Village - Thomas Lux
<https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48485/the-people-of-the-other-village>

My parents taught me (mostly by example) that punishment of children was
at best a necessary last resort, resulting from and reflecting upon a
failure of good parenting leading up to the need for acute correction. 
They were at least a *little* more direct/vocal about the same principle
in public life, that our criminal justice system *only* existed, with
it's myriad attempts at exacting justice without revenge and finding
clever forms of "punitive retribution" to at least appear like "natural
consequences" (not a term in parenting vocabulary at that time quite
yet, but practiced by my parents and a few others I knew).  

Our current "Lord of the Flies" scene in DC (and across the country) may
require all kinds of exacted punishment to re-align elements of society
to where we can live together in relative peace, but to not acknowledge
that the mere entertainment of the likes of Donald Trump as a national
leader represents an abject failure of our culture to "make sense".  
The calls for removal/impeachment/censure/disbarment are all reasonable
triage actions to minimize continued damage, even if they are in many
ways "too little too late".   But I am saddened as I hear a great deal
of the rhetoric on the topic armatured around *retribution* and
*vengeance*...

Self-Righteously yours,

- Steve


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