I didn't want the month to pass by without making an attempt to express gratitude. Yet I didn't want to post something random about gratitude either, merely for the superficial sake of the season. I started questioning my dogmatic thinking regarding the idea of gratitude about a decade ago. My religion at the time seemed to be brainwashing me with the idea that gratitude is always good and that the more gratitude the better. But something started to not ring true to me on that point. What happens when you take gratitude to the extreme? It becomes the vice of obsequiousness, or the excessive servile debasement of your own dignity.
Humans are conscious beings that can experience joy and suffering. These experiences are so real and powerful that they deserve to be treated as sacred. To casually abuse a conscious entity violates the dignity of its existence and makes a mockery of its ability to suffer. We have a moral instinct that tells us that maximizing the suffering of conscious entities for no reason is evil, and that the opposite is good.
The natural world provides a pretty low baseline for the status quo on quality of life. The natural world is full of the freezing cold and the blistering hot. It is full of the thirst and hunger. It is full of the necessity to brutally kill in order to survive. Animals seem to have evolved their emotions to operate around their expected baselines. If your status quo is immense suffering, there is the possibility of getting emotionally used to it. Anything that exceeds your minimalistic expectations becomes gratitude - a positive emotion that thanks the universe for providing you with more than your expectations.
Worshiping the supposed virtue of gratitude hides a hidden assumption that you deserve nothing. You should expect nothing. Your baseline should be absolute zero. This allows you to feel an influx of positive emotion for every experience that exceeds your baseline. There is something both perverse and noble about this assumption. There is a strange intermingling of axiomatic pessimism and debasement of the self that merge into an optimistic outlook and positive worldview. There is something noble about debasing yourself and admitting that you deserve nothing from this universe. Something heroic calls out - the hero that is able to accept a universe where everything is against him, yet upon awakening, realizes that the universe is much better than it might have been.
Yet, when this is taken to certain extremes, it speaks of moral weakness. When a victim is being abused by a loved one, a "grateful" outlook might imagine a universe where abuse is occurring 100% of the time. After shifting the baseline, the victim might find "gratitude" within their soul that the abuse occurs less than 100% of the time, and therefore find enough positive emotion to do nothing and allow the abuse to continue. This is a failure to be heroic in that the victim fails to understand that they are worthy of a certain baseline of dignity from others. Other people do not have the right to walk all over you. It is your moral duty to protect yourself from the abuse of others so that you can minimize the damage you incur and maximize your ability to be a positive force in the world despite that.
Nature is rough. It has taken humanity hundreds of thousands of years to evolve enough wisdom to conquer most of the harsher aspects of nature. As technology advances, our collective baseline for what can be expected from nature increases. We now expect to have a warm home and flowing water. By allowing our baseline to shift, we have lost the ability to gain positive emotion from the most basic aspects of life. Perhaps the natural baseline is a type of evil that we have conquered with technology. Yet we are in danger of forgetting the long history of human suffering that lead us to this point in time. If we forget to be grateful for the fact that we have a stable and peaceful technological society, we are in danger of losing it. All those that flirt with thoughts of civil war seem to be dangerously ungrateful for all the progress we have made as evolved monkeys. In this modern age, the vice of ingratitude seems to be much more harmful than the vice of obsequiousness.
A return to gratitude may be in order. #givethanks