#philosophy stuff

The way this is phrased, and even the way it’s framed as a search for the “correct” answer is already very Bird. I’m going to keep on using Sartre’s Loyalist vs Idealist example because it’s such a good one, but philosophers and moralists have been debating “objectively correct” morality for… a long time now.

Obviously, we can’t spend all our time caring about causes that don’t affect us. Not only will it make us laughing-stock it is also a foolish idea. A person’s priority, in my opinion, ought to be bettering their life and helping alleviate the problems that plague them and the people around them. Of course, it is every person’s right to choose what to care about, and to find what works for them, but in my opinion starting with what’s around will show maximum results and well, it just feels more right.

I think we have a Bird primary with a Badger-flavored system.

When I have to make an opinion, I first try to see if it’s something I can avoid. Seriously, having an opinion is so difficult. Socialising is easier than forming an opinion.

Oh ouch. I think it’s very possible that your bird might be a little bit… burnt. Or exploded. Specifically the frozen Chidi-style Exploded Bird, because how can you do *anything* if you don’t know *for sure* it’s objectively right.

I don’t have to make many moral decisions in my daily life, most of us don’t. I try to avoid passing judgements on topics I don’t know about or ones that appear too morally grey.

Primaries aren’t just about moral decisions. They’re also about things that you, you know. Want. The things that get you out of bed in the morning.

As a kid, I used to make snap judgments all the time and incessantly defend them in the face of opposition, but now it just feels foolhardy to do.

That’s definitely your stubborn Lion secondary combining with an Idealist primary. Immature Glory Hound Lion or Black-and-White Bird.

Not to mention having to change my opinion after realising that I made a mistake (which happens often) is really fucking embarrassing, even if it’s something I’m doing in private.

I mean, no one LIKES being wrong. But the choice of the word “embarrassing” is skewing me more Bird. I’d expect a Lion to say something like making a mistake is “miserable” or “stressful” or “disorientating.”

And not changing my opinion when confronted with new information makes me feel pathetic.

Yeah. Bird.

 There’s also the reality of ever pervasive fake news and showing + wording things in a light favourable to the people funding the news. I have zero trust in any of the media outlets I have around me (paranoia ftw!).

We have an Exploded Bird. No wonder you don’t like having opinions on things. You’ve cut off your ability to take in new information.

The same goes for what other people tell me, including my family. While I want to believe them (my family), they’re dead wrong about something I believe in with all my heart. So, what’s to say that they couldn’t be wrong about other things too?

Nobody can be right all the time. It sucks.

I love my family, and I’ll love them even if they disown me once I come out (I’m bisexual and they’re queerphobic).

I think it must be really, really brutal to have a loud lion secondary and also have to stay in the closet for an extended period of time.

As long as their mistreatment will be limited to throwing me out of the family, I won’t stop caring about them. They’re my family. They would have to become pretty terrible people for me to cut off ties with them.

So you’ve basically given me a set-up where you don’t feel able to have an opinion on anything, apart from a sort of generalized Badger worldview, and then you hit me with something as intensely loyalist as this? Is there a really Burnt Badger (or even really burnt Snake) underneath the Bird? Or is this a Loyalist talking point/model that you’ve picked up somewhere? Or is your Badger system just like, super intense? (also, is it just me, but have you kicked yourself out of your own system?)

This attitude was the one I used to have with my friends. Until I realised that friendship doesn’t work out for me for some reason. I’m simply grateful for company now. I only show people the degree of care that I feel they will reciprocate. I don’t want to be taken advantage of by people whom I choose to become close to.

This is sounding intensely Burnt Badger? Like you want a community, but communities don’t feel safe.

A lot of Shonen anime at an impressionable age has left me with high standards for friendships.

… or maybe you’ve got Prince Charming Syndrome, only with friendships.

If one of my family did or said something that I disagreed with and which granted them public condemnation, would I stand by them or condemn them? I would do both. I wouldn’t pretend to agree with what they said (doing that would make me feel horrible) but I would stand by them.

Lion secondary. Some kind of Loyalist *something* primary.

I will never lie about my opinions. I don’t care what punishment I get. I’ll either make it really obvious that I don’t agree with the majority opinion, make myself scarce or just outright argue about it.

… because you’re a Lion secondary.

I can’t lie without feeling guilty. It’s a hassle really, but what can one do? I’ve settled on becoming more authentic and truthful. I don’t want to hurt people with my actions or words. Apparently, I need to show my anger (per my therapist) but how can I do that without crossing any lines? Without making people feel bad?

You’ve probably heard this from your therapist, but sometimes people are just going to find you unpleasant. It’s inevitable, and it’s ultimately not that big of a deal. In the end, everybody is responsible for their *own* emotional well-being.

What if I was wrong for no reason?

… and there’s that exploded Bird primary coming back.

If something has hurt me, I do my level best to never do it to other people. Basically, ‘not hurting others’ is a pretty big rule in my book. It’s one I’ll bend sometimes, but not without reason. After all, a rule that doesn’t have exceptions is either something really obvious (‘no murder’) or something incredibly vague (‘always do good things’).

bird bird bird bird bird

As a kid, I was really power/fame-hungry. Now, I just want to feel secure, without second-guessing myself and my actions. Massive priority shift. Kid me didn’t really think about stuff beyond wanting to be the most powerful person on Earth. I wish I could go back to that.

… do you really though? :) But it is interesting that young you sounds so much like a Glory Hound Lion. I wonder if your Badger-flavored system used to be a lot more Lion-flavored, or if this is maybe a side effect of having a really loud Lion secondary.

I wish I could do things that have a tangible effect on the state of affairs. I wish I could hand-wave the world’s problems away. I wish, at the very least, I had a book telling me what to do, and I how to do it.

THE BOOK FANTASY. You are like the fifth person who has written in with “I wish I had a book that told me what to do.” It’s always in exactly those words too. This seems to be a VERY common Bird primary fantasy.

Although on second thought, I would probably read the book and cherry-pick advice that makes sense to me. And that’s if I even believed the book in the first-place.

… and then the Exploded element of your Bird kicks in.

……..So, I suppose that’s about it. It feels like it’s all over the place, and at more than one place I’ve tmi’d while at the same time not giving enough information. Sigh. I hope though, that it’s enough to sort me with. I would be grateful if you would do so. Either way, thank you for taking the time to read this.

Now that I think about it — I don’t remember adjusting my beliefs as in any way traumatic back then. The shift from a belief in the Christian God to Mother Goddess to my very own brand of agnostic paganism was smooth, natural.

Now that I think about it… I would describe myself as a mythic relativist (which is a term I just made up.) Systems of belief are metaphors, and they’re metaphors trying to describe and say something large and beautiful about what it means to be human, and what it means to live a good life. And since we are all human, they are all attempting to describe the same central, indescribable thing in different ways.

I feel this very deeply, but it took me a long while to be able to articulate it.

I constantly reevaluate, and I adapt.

You stop reevaluating and adapting, might as well be dead.

Still, there are some basics I’ve kept with me that just make too much sense to me to give up, and some that perhaps I keep because I just really like them and I’m kind of attached to them.

… somebody’s thinking with Pathos :)

- I’m a constructivist at heart, so that makes it much easier to tweak the content of my beliefs while staying true to the principle that we (socially) construct our reality, and (my take on this): that I choose what kind of world I want to live in, and according to that I make choices which are the most likely to create that world.

- At uni I attended a seminar about the development of moral judgment and action. What I remember most clearly about it is how much it bugged me that the other students didn’t seem to understand that morality always depends on the perspective. Even though I had definite moral convictions that I was ready to fight for, at the same time it seemed obvious to me that theoretically there could be a justification for every kind of moral guideline; it depended on your principles and the world you wanted to live in.

A human after my own heart.

I wanted to understand these different perspectives, not talk about empty categories like “right and wrong” or “good and evil” that meant nothing to me. I still feel that way.

Absolutely. I don’t use alignments when I DM Dungeons & Dragons. I mean, I can list evil *things* but that’s not the same thing as defining *being evil.* I want to know WHY these people did these evil things.

It just seems so impractical and complicated to base a conversation on those broad categories that don’t have any definition people can agree on instead of referring either to defined principles (in order to explain what good/ bad is *for you*) or consequences of certain actions, and whether you want them/ accept them/ don’t want them.

Oh that’s a fun discussion. Asking a highschooler to define “evil.”

(and then they have to figure out what moral systems Jigsaw, Pinhead, the Joker, and Bane all subscribe to.)

- Between “the Revolutionary” and “the Grail Knight”, I would love to be the former, but I’m clearly the latter. I’m someone who questions, not someone who knows.

Take my archetypes with a grain of salt, they are supposed to describe characters. (Who are different from people - but still useful, because they are attempts to describe us.) I actually want to write more about the differences I see between the way fictional secondaries are written and the way real-life secondaries work.

And just “knowing”... is dangerous. That’s how Exploded Lions happen. 

There are a lot of causes I find worthy to fight for, but I haven’t committed to any one, which so far I’ve attributed to my Burned Secondary (How do I do things?).

Sounds about right.

If I’m honest, though, it feels a bit strange to really, really fight for anything. I’d rather contribute to the cause by keeping an eye on whether we stay aligned to our values on every level of the fight, not by storming sightlessly in front of some army. (I got polemic again, didn’t I? ;))

So after all this Bird talk, why do I think that I’m a Lion?

… that was the Bird segment?

- I trust my intuition. It has never steered me wrong, with one exception: My Primary burned for a time when I first understood the concept of privilege and internalized bias, which was coincidentally at a time when I also went through a lot of changes in my personal life. Like many people unaware of their own privilege, I had thought of myself as “one of the good ones”. I learned that even with the best intentions I could cause great harm without even noticing it. This then also happened to me in a relationship, when I was already confused, hurt and more than a bit burned. It seemed like I couldn’t trust my intuition anymore, but I also couldn’t figure out intellectually what to believe, because I felt mentally overwhelmed by all those new concepts, all of which put my previous convictions into question. Which Primary burned then?

Been there, done that, it’s brutal. It sounds to me like a Lion dramatically changing direction - that’s what I mean when I say that it *hurts* when a Lion changes their mind. Birds see their past selves that thought wrong as almost different people. “I wasn’t aware of my privilege then, now I am, and can take steps doing forward.” But if you’re a lion it’s like… I *should* have been aware, and the fact that I wasn’t says something terrible about my moral/emotional calibration, and THAT has to be put right.

- I felt like everything I had learned about the world and myself didn’t count anymore. My concepts and my strategies didn’t serve me anymore. So I started to rebuild everything from scratch, this time with less pride and more practicality.

Yeah. That’s some Lion recalibration. With a Bird Model, to help.

- Anyway, I trust my intuition. It contains my experiences, instinct and all my accumulated unconscious observations of the situation, and it’s very reliable. Usually I use it as an important source of information which I try to back up with data/ understanding, but when push came to shove and the apparent facts would contradict what my intuition told me, I would be unable to set my gut feeling aside. I wouldn’t follow it blindly, of course. But I would never just go against it either. If the voices of my unconscious and conscious mind don’t align, I keep poking at the issue until they do. If I absolutely cannot come to a satisfying conclusion, I go with my gut. Since I know it usually knows what it’s doing, I’ll find out the reasons for my feelings later. (Weird, says my inner bird who is busy compiling these examples.)

I’LL FIND THE REASON FOR MY FEELINGS LATER. What a perfect way of articulating what is perhaps the central experience of being a Lion primary.

- Probably I’m just both, you know. Some interesting lion/bird-chimaera. I like it.

I read you as a pretty clear Lion Primary, Bird primary model. But as always, the decision is very personal.

- I have a weird way of processing information: I read/ hear it, work to understand it, work to connect it to existing knowledge in my mind, then my beliefs, my existing knowledge and my feelings about it all wind around each other, grow into each other, some dissolve together, becoming a swamp which then nourishes the plants of new ideas and connections that grow from it.

You grok it. And that’s not weird.

I often can’t remember where certain knowledge came from. I can’t take it out of a memory shelf and tell you about it. I usually remember that I’ve read a certain book and whether I liked it / it influenced me, but I won’t exactly remember what was in it, even if it was important to me. Because all that information is already processed/ digested/ transformed into something new. It’s much easier to access my memory swamp intuitively than consciously.

and you seriously had like… any doubt that you were a Lion.

In intellectual discussions I tend to get stuck because I just can’t remember enough of the details (for my satisfaction), just my conclusions about the topic and how I feel about it.

I’m inclined to think that not accessing the details is either a secondary thing, or an entirely unrelated processing thing.

What do you make of all this? I’m very curious!

:)

[On an unrelated note, I’d like to specify the compliment I made at the beginning of this post. I’m really impressed with your ability to pick up on what people need, not just what they say they want. As a counselor this is a skill I try to hone, so I know how difficult it is to not get too distracted by the story people tell and miss the more subtle cues. You have a powerful combination of perceptiveness, insight and so much kindness, which you use to effectively support people who have questions, are in distress or confused. You don’t generalize. You don’t judge. You see the people who talk to you.  I love that you’re a teacher, because I can see you’re using the influence that gives you in a way that contributes to making the world a better place. Fellow Idealist, I’d like to give you a High Five for that, if I may. :)))]