Racism is real.

Racism isn’t simple, it’s complex and is founded in much deeper levels of human instinct and psychology than mere considerations about skin color.

Some of the psychological bases of racism are inescapable, and some are even important.

Racism is therefore an expression of a proclivity that is present in all humans.

Therefore racism is universal.

Racism is less common than some people think.

White people are not especially racist, as a group, historically or at present.

Not all structural inequities or unequal outcomes among people groups are the result of either deliberate or unintentional injustice.

Some are.

Sorting out which is which requires more than a mere consideration of outcomes.

Other factors besides race may be determinate of some outcomes, but those factors may cluster by race, especially if that race has a shared culture.

This is also true of positive outcomes.

The default state of humankind is poverty and distress, not wealth and comfort.

Therefore, it may be more important to ask, what are the shared factors that create good outcomes, wealth and peace, than asking what causes poverty.

Both are important questions.

Politics is organized around certain shared narratives that help you explain and navigate the world, that appeal to us in a large degree because of our personality and circumstances, both of which affect which explanations and which strategies most accurately map onto the world and the challenges that we face.

Because circumstances and personalities vary across the population, all of us will be right some of the time, and all of us will be wrong some of the time.

Because the world is complex, it is even more likely that at any given time all of us will be both partly right and partly wrong.

Any great crisis or disaster or large negative result will be leveraged by differing groups to promote their perspective and strategy.

It is likely that there is a particular group whose perspective and strategy is most appropriate and correct, but in isolation from other strategies and perspectives it will be less correct and helpful than it could be.

The simplest route to direct action is to have a clear mandate to our use a single strategy without interference.

This kind of efficient dictatorship can be vested in a single person, or in a single group that achieves dominance.

This allows that strategy to achieve maximum effectiveness of its strengths and insights, but will also maximize its inherent flaws, excesses, and omissions.

A system where differing strategies have to compete and negotiate and make allowances for one another will yield a less efficient system for direct action, and may even tend toward paralysis, but will have the efficiency advantage of either anticipating or actively avoiding or blunting the greatest flaws, excesses, and omissions of any given strategy.

Such a system is largely dependent on individual wisdom and collective goodwill, an effort toward education and responsibility at the personal level combined with filial loyalty and affection and communal identity and trust at the societal level.

Unequal outcomes threaten communal identity and trust.

Therefore it is in the interest of such a collaborative society to seek to mitigate unequal outcomes as much as is reasonable.

Unequal outcomes are a natural function of voluntary human behavior. Wealth, mating success, city and town sizes, casualty losses, all follow a general trend called a paredo distribution.

Preventing certain unequal behaviors from yielding their natural results, mitigating their outcomes, is one way to reduce inequality.

Preventing unequal outcomes by restraining the positive forces that create great good may also prevent good and cause general harm.

Preventing unequal outcomes from receiving their appropriate outcomes is what people instinctively mean by injustice.

Therefore injustice does not consist in the absence of unequal outcomes but in the existence of appropriate outcomes.

Humans desire appropriate outcomes but wish to relieve suffering, and in a collaborative society its in everyone’s interest to reduce divergent outcomes as much as possible.

Denying people the natural results of their actions may reduce inequality, but it may also promote injustice.

Removing negative consequences or negative stigmas for certain actions may relieve inequality of outcomes in the sort term, but may increase them (and the burden of mitigating them) in the long term, as they become less unfavorable to the population and their consequences become less known and less feared.

This intervention can cause a disconnection and alienation between how we wish the world worked, a world where everyone gets what they want and there is no real danger to be avoided, no inequality of outcomes, and how the world actually does work, which is often quite merciless.

In the long run, the kindness of removing immediate painful consequences and associated negative stigmas and emotions for certain behaviors may result in worse pain and consequences that will not be easily understood and will likely be blamed on others (if we proceeded in life based on a belief that everyone has a right to expect equal outcomes and equal access to success and acclaim).

It is the desire of many humans to escape or relieve pain, not only their own, but that of others.

It is the desire of many humans to confront and provoke or endure pain, not only their own, but that of others.

Both groups may seek these ends for the good of themselves and of others.

They may also seek it in excess and in ways that are actually harmful for themselves and others.

So both the pursuit of pain and the avoidance of pain can result in good or bad outcomes.

As well, the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pleasure can result in good or bad outcomes.

Therefore it is neither pain nor pleasure that is fundamentally good or bad to experience, they are simply differing channels for valuable information about ourselves, our actions, and their consequences.

Emotions are a higher level extension of the nervous system. They are the mind/body reaction to complex positive and negative stimuli (not only physical but social, intellectual, etc).

Emotional pain, then, is much like physical pain. The desire to remove it may be helpful in the short term, or if serious surgery must be done, but removal of pain and its negative associations as a faculty is a long term danger to the organism.

Therefore, safety and comfort, positivity, freedom from pain or its associated negative emotions, is ultimately neither possible nor necessarily desirable.

The fundamental power that both positive and negative physical and emotional reactions grant, then, is discrimination, the ability to tell the difference between what is good and what is harmful, what is pleasant and what is painful, what will promote growth and what will promote disease.

The primary complaint to be made against discrimination is not that it exists, for it both must and should exist for creatures such as us who have advanced capabilities that allow us to observe and choose how to react to the world, and who are able by process of thought and imagination to eliminate negative outcomes and promote positive outcomes without having to actually risk ourselves by pursuing them individually in every case, and who are able to take courses of action with very far reaching consequences.

The primary complaint to be made against discrimination is that it is not accurate, that its assignment of values to its objects are wrong.

Therefore the goal of any forward looking society is not to end discrimination as such, but to fix the proper values to the proper objects.

And in fact this is something all people agree on, regardless of rhetoric. Whatever side of things they argue, what they really mean is, end negative discrimination against the things I approve of and engage in negative discrimination against the things I do not.

The fixation of values to their objects is heavily determined by prevailing cultural values and beliefs.

These beliefs are more instinctive and personal and less inevitable and universal that we like to believe, and so conflict is inevitable, brining us back to the problem of differing perspectives on an assumed shared object.

If a people can agree about what the good is, what it means to flourish as a human, and if they can agree that there is an objective, shared object which we all share access to, then our disputes can possibly be resolved productively through study and discussion.

Most people share an instinctive structure that provides them with similar fundamental ideas of what is good and what success is and what is bad and what should be avoided, even if the details of what form they take and the details of strategies for getting them vary.

The pain of a negative outcome can be a gift, because it teaches us about the world and about ourselves and any truths about one or the other we might have missed, any mistakes we might have made.

This is a gift we are often loathe to accept, because it challenges our settled ideas about the world, our strategies, and our identities.

Because some of the negative outcomes we experience are the result of human action, it is very easy to conflate the negative aspects of those actions and results with the person themselves.

There are three levels at which both good and health and evil and disease can live: bad results, bad actions, and bad identity (or character), and good results, good actions, and good character.

All of ethics is largely concerned with the relationship between these levels, and attempts to formulate understanding and action and value in terms of them.

Much of ethics makes the mistake of attempting to reduce moral value to only one or the other of these dimensions, thus resulting in the many theories of ethical understanding (which focus largely on either consequences or principles or character).

Ethics exists and entangles across all these levels organically, just as humans exist and entangle simultaneously across many levels: chemical, psychological, social, historical, and intellectual levels.

Because of this entanglement, it is not easy to separate the categories of good and bad outcomes and our reactions to them from our thoughts and feelings about either principles or people.

So it is the easiest thing in the world to leap from one level to another if we do not keep our heads, assigning bad outcomes to the operation of bad principles and bad people, because that sort of elevation is part of how the system works to protect us and inform our choices and future identity.

When things go well, we naturally assume that it is because of the rightness of our strategies and principles, and that their action within us is both caused by and constitutes our own righteousness and excellence.

This assumption is often preserved even when our outcomes are not so good.

Because our strategies proceed from our character, if there is any divergence between our results and our assessment of our own personal value, it is an extremely painful conflict.

A conviction of our own lack of sin (if I may use the term, meaning deformity of character, resulting in unhealthy action and diseased results), coupled with a painful experience of poor outcomes is a distressing quandary, because it defies our understanding of ourselves and the world and how it should work.

The danger we fall into continually is one of oversimplification. Because although all levels of good and evil are connected, all levels are not identical with one another.

Bad experiences may produce bad principles and bad character through negative education, and bad character will usually produce bad principles and outcomes.

Bad outcomes may also drive us to good principles and good character, if we understand them well enough.

And good outcomes may drive us to bad principles and bad character if we do not understand them well enough.

So, too, good character will usually produce good principles and good outcomes.

We affect, and we are affected.

Although this relationship is very strong, it is not uncomplex.

Some divergence among outcomes is not dependent on unequal actions but are the result of chance, circumstances, and and other structures and obstacles beyond our individual determination or prediction or action.

Even good people who do the right thing sometimes fail, and even misguided people who do the wrong thing sometimes succeed.

It is in the interest of society to especially mitigate and or prevent these kinds of outcomes.

Not all differences in outcome are due to these kinds of forces.

If all differences in outcomes are the result of chance, then there’s nothing to be learned to improve the likelihood of either individual or collective human success, and all results are essentially determinate, the result of forces beyond our control.

This is obviously false.

Both choice and chance circumstance play strong roles in our outcomes.

We cannot completely control either (collectively, on behalf of others).

We have far more control over our individual choices than over any other aspect of reality or human experience and outcomes.

Therefore the foundational investment of any attempt to improve collective inequality of outcomes should be in improving individual choices.

Secondarily, mitigating the effect of circumstances that resist the effect of positive individual choices should be our next priority.

Principles are the bridge between character and consequences.

These principles can often be codified as laws.

However, it is not clear in what way it is possible or within our power to legislate matters of character, of the power to make good individual choices (or to what degree and in what ways we can and should directly discourage bad character).

It is within the scope of the law to punish, prevent, and stigmatize bad choices, both for the protection of the individual from the consequences of their actions and for the protection of those around them.

It is the role of religion, both formal and informal, to explicate and elaborate the foundational value structures of a culture.

Religion engages in both the positive and negative tasks of encouraging and discouraging certain characters, extolling certain principles as representative of or conducive to good or bad character and promissory of certain good or bad results.

Religion does this through many means, addressing the holistic plurality of human nature, means of interaction and education and enforcement that touch the physical, aesthetic, social, economic, and intellectual aspects of our being.

Music, plays, stories, essays, traditions, art, social organizations, charity, all of these are expressions organized around the guiding narrative of the religion, played out in the many facets of human life and being.

The greatest religions reach the deepest into all these areas.

Because this is a natural function of human nature, religion is essentially built-in to human experience.

Therefore religion cannot be removed, but whatever you replace it with will eventually become constitutive of it in time.

This explains why religions themselves vary across time and place, but religion as such is a fixed feature of all human society.

Whether this means we were made for religion or religion was made for us is unclear.

What is clear is that it is inescapable for creatures such as ourselves.

The thing that we don’t believe we possess but cannot escape is often a very dangerous possession.

This is also true for greed, for prejudice, for anger, for jealousy, for arrogance, for callousness, for all the great diseases that plague humankind.

Like discrimination, their danger is not in their existence but in their application; all have some necessary power or virtue at their core that is part of what preserves our species, that at certain times and in certain ways is needed.

A disease can only exist as a corruption of something that has a proper health and function. Apart from that it has no existence and the term has no meaning.

Flaws are always very easy to see in others and very hard to find in ourselves.

Recognizing the pathology of our own treasured identity is the hardest but most valuable task a person can set themselves.

As an aside, it is extremely difficult for any one person to be and know and see and do everything at once. That is why human variation exists, why there isn’t just one perfect one of us, because the psychic and metaphysical burden of containing everything at once, essentially, the burden of being God, the totality of all knowledge, perspectives, goodness, and justice, is too much for any one human to bear alone. We each can carry just part of it. And we mutilate the world and the human heart when we seek to be God because we can only do so by making the world less than it is.

In navigating the complexity of the entanglement of moral value, it is important to keep many different, seemingly conflicting, truths in mind.

Because the interaction of moral and informational narratives is so complex and the results, while often consistent, are complex and require testing and interpretation, in any matter of great moral moment it is dreadfully necessary to pause, to restrain our endorsement of our own reactions, resist the tyranny our emotions demand, and listen to one another.

This may feel like a betrayal, because it resists the dictatorship of purpose we instinctively feel is both necessary and universal.

Unfortunately, it is in these cases that restraint is most necessary, because the potential consequences, the scope and scale of the moral narrative and question, are so great. And any solution we seek has a vast potential for error in either aim or perspective or detail or scope.

These are the circumstances we will least be willing to listen or compromise, because such compromises touch directly upon the integrity of our collective and personal moral narrative and identity. It is a battle overt he soul of our nation, and over our own souls.

Unfortunately, those who have a different perspective or instinct than us will also perceive it so, and if they sense the threat that their own perspective is about to be silenced and eradicated by the urgency of the claims of the others, deligitinizing their claims, they will push back.

This pushback is likely to get excessive and ugly.

Frustration and demands by the inciting side are also likely to get more unreasonable, misdirected, and ugly, as both seek to claim the whole world for their viewpoint and claim a mandate for their response.

Pushback by both sides against one another is likely to take the worse, most imbalanced and excessive, weaponized form, and so will further deligitimize those perspectives in the eyes of their detractors.

Therefore, the instinct of many people will be to embrace the most deligitimizing version of their own viewpoint as that which it is most necessary to promote and support.

This fact will only be obvious to people of the opposing viewpoint.

Therefore we must confront the danger that our own best arguments and efforts to solve a problem, especially if they are in conflict with the prevailing views of another large segment of society, are in fact quite likely to be counterproductive and may be making the problem we purportedly seek to solve worse.

This making the problem worse, causing increased opposition from and conflict with the other side, will only appear to confirm the need for our strategy and reassure our judgements. Being opposed by the bad guys is part of what confirms to us that we’re in the right.

It is in our interest to desire conflict, then, not accord.

This conflict makes the need for us and for our zeal even more apparent. It makes us more necessary and important.

This is why extremism always seems more honest and true to the cause than moderation. People don’t like the waffle, the politics, the compromises, the changing of minds, the contradictions, the double speak. They want action.

It is very tempting to pursue oppositional strategies even when they don’t seem to work, because they don’t work well, and so reinforce the idea of the resistance and opposition of the other. If there was no battle there would be no need for the warriors, so it is in our psychological interest to pursue oppositional, extremist policies and in our practical interest as representatives fighting for them, in part because they will go wrong.

That does not mean that we are aware of it when we do so. But we might be, on an emotional level, when we measure how much we enjoy the fight and enjoy opposing the enemy, consider how much we hate them and desire to see them defeated (regardless of what they might actually need to contribute to make our world better).

Racism is one of a host of many terribly complicated moral/emotional matters.

It is at least possible that the values promoted by different groups will not actually bring racism to an end but might actually contribute to its development.

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