The last task for the apocalypse cult
That we value interrupted, meditative boredom and that many modern activities (work, watching sports, many forms of exercise, social media) support it in the absence of natural boredom, I called passivism. That there is value in restructuring our lives to support the study of and interaction with classic works of art, I called aestheticism. It turns out I had just discovered my soul.
What is a soul? As best I can understand, it’s an amorphous measure of an individual’s existence that can either be satisfied or harmed to different extents in different contexts. This is wildly controversial on its surface, but nearly no one would disagree with what it entails in practice. Certain things help your soul, like meditation, labor, or love. Certain things hurt your soul, like self-deceit or hurting others.
Here we get to the reason why I think a value theory of the soul hasn’t (?) been proposed: it leads to obvious and painful moral reassessments as well as difficult, condescending political discussions. For example, is slavery good to the slaves? They get to do labor and feel no sense of self-deceit, unlike many of today’s capitalist workers! If I read it right, this question is dangerously serious. My answer after some thinking was that humiliation can be immeasurably soul-destroying. Phew.
What about jail, then? Shouldn’t people in modern jails be some of the most fulfilled people on Earth? After all, they get to spend all day in the company of their fellow man, spend much time in meditative silence, see the sun every day, live under a concrete and supportive structure that requires nothing of them in terms of self-deceit or willful ignorance, and many of them have work programs to earn their commissary. WTF, is this guy arguing for mass imprisonment as valuable for the collective human soul?
No. My hunch is that most prisoners do not experience it as a temporary act of retribution, but experience some sense of permanent loss, relative to the literal loss incurred by ending up in prison. In short, I think our intuitive sense that you lose a part of your soul in prison is roughly correct.1 Arguments will be made that this is purely an economic loss. Ignoring the potential costs to our souls of a system that places every person in a shifting hierarchy of value, I think experiencing a downward step-change in the significance of your life is quite bad for one’s soul.
Is experiencing an upward step change in the significance of one’s life therefore good for one’s soul?
I aim to leave nothing implicit that should be explicit. Why is freedom not good for one’s soul? Basically, I don’t think freedom is a valuable distinction apart from optionality, which is obviously neutral, and agency, which I think is negative.
So, do animals have souls? By our definition, probably. We are free to consider them having tiny souls or having big souls like us (we have big souls). In this scenario, factory farming is either much more gratifying to the soul or much less depending on your view of time spent in nature. Also, wild animal suffering seems like a much less worthy cause issue than under utilitarianism because they would be suffering (nice), foraging (nice), or otherwise scampering (nice).
What about workers under modern capitalism in developed countries? I suspect there’s a sublimated sense of disillusionment or self-deceit that drives many people in these economies. Also, there’s some sense in which dealing with bureaucracies and systems demanding your energy and continued investment is soul-sucking. I personally think these concerns are underrated, at least among rationalists. The good parts are that many, many people are mission-driven laborers with a lot of downtime, and that this worldview massively raises global equality and undermines well-being studies.
For example, a laborer in a foreign country, regardless of their measured happiness, may be earning an honest living with access to nature and plenty of contact with others. On the other hand, a depressive working a soulless job in a modern economy may be suffering valiantly and meditatively in nominally good conditions.
Hence the condescending part. Insofar as I haven’t seen anyone else discussing this strain of utilitarianism (have no doubt, this is that), I would like to dub it apocalypse studies. We may very soon have the capability, and maybe even the moral necessity, to tally the value of every soul that has ever lived. No one else is going to do it for us, and, if they do, it will almost certainly be too late.
Perhaps the way forward is to make up this loss through the development of classics education programs or to dull the loss by reducing the psychological losses incurred by prisoners.