Belief and Behavior

Sorry that Uncle Ken had to ask me the same question three times before I answered it. I meant to answer it the first time, but I got lost in my own rhetoric. I think the key to this is what Old Dog said about belief and behavior. I agree that what you do is more important than what you believe, but belief often motivates people to do things, often but not always. Sometimes people believe one thing and do the opposite, then they feel guilty. Some people seem to enjoy guilt, but I never did, so I rationalized my way out of it. I suppose that the hippies did something similar, the same only different.

What I think the hippies did was embrace moral relativism, although they may not have known that was what it was called, any more than I knew what I was doing was called moral objectivism. The reason I think so is Uncle Ken's assertion that there is no such thing as good guys and bad guys. That sounds like a relativist position to me. If there are no good guys or bad guys, then it doesn't matter what we do because good and evil have no intrinsic existence, they only exist in the eye of the beholder. This sounds like something that would be said by the people who don't believe in objective reality, although Uncle Ken does believe in objective reality, but not free will. I'm cool with that because there is no law that says you have believe everything a school of thought teaches just because you believe in one of its principles.

Although the hippies and I displayed similar behaviors in the 60s (about drugs and sex, but not political activism), we employed different belief systems to justify those behaviors. The hippies said, "There ain't no good guys, there ain't no bad guys." while I said "I know that I'm a good guy, but I'm not so sure about the rest of you guys." I rationalized that sex and drugs were not bad things, while the hippies claimed that there are no bad things. Then there were the hoodlums, who did sex and drugs because they believed them to be bad things. If that's not the definition of a bad guy, then I don't know what is.

If the Native American Indians were happier before the White Man came to their land, then why were they so eager to establish trade and military alliances with those nasty White men? They may have been happy without horses, guns, and metal tools, but that's only because they didn't know those things existed. As soon as they became aware of their existence, they just had to have them before some rival tribe got them. The White Man, being an honest businessman, threw in the smallpox for no extra charge.