We want to be nice to everyone and everything. We don’t want to say no to anything or anyone or make any judgements. Well, the only way to do that is to dissolve all truth and all value and level the whole thing out. The only way to prevent there from being some hard answers and some real differences, the only way to make everything the same, is to cancel the whole project, the whole race, before it can start.

The only way you can avoid some answers being wrong is by making all answers equivalently right. Then everyone will feel good and do well and everything will be better, right? The best way for children to learn is to teach them that all answers, categories, and actions are equivalent, right? That will help them the most, right? That’s being caring and fair and helpful and kind, right?
Bullshit. It’s cruel to tell people lies like that. It will harm them. As individuals and as whole societies. Murdering the truth isn’t a kindness to anyone, even if the truth hurts. Because we aren’t gods. We don’t get to design private worlds for ourselves where we define the nature of everything and control all the outcomes and nothing else and no one else but our own will and preferences exist.

Negative emotion exists for a reason. It exists to tell us when something is going wrong, when there is a misalignment between the world, our nature, our actions, and our identity. And it’s not obvious at first blush which it is. So we have to take the time to figure out if maybe there’s something in us that needs to be corrected and adjusted. And frankly, most of the time this is the case, because most of the time ourselves is the only thing we can actually control and change. Sometimes it’s the world that needs to be or can be adjusted to make us happy, but usually it’s us that uses our emotional feedback to learn how to grow and adapt and learn. We’re such tiny little finite things, we could hardly have all the correct limits of reality be laid out within one of us, and there are billions of us running up against one another. It’s far more likely that us little, temporary things need to learn from the big world and the big transcendent realities. The idea that reality should be expected to conform to the divergent preferences of some little hundred and fifty pound things of limited scope and intelligence, who live a mere moment of time in a tiny space is laughable. We’ve gotten an inflated idea of our own greatness. We think we’re gods, we have no humility or perspective. And what gives you, as a human, any right to assert your truth or its value or goodness over mine, whatever it is? My authority is just as equal as yours. So whatever I say has just as much value and validity, even if it opposes your ideas.