So lately, I’ve picked up on some ways in which what we could call ‘bourgeois ethics’ have been ingrained into my instincts and fears. Say, regarding things like stealing and lying. Now in acknowledging that instincts impeding me from doing these things are the product of culture/indoctrination, and more specifically my middle-class background, I’m not saying those instincts are ‘wrong’ any more than they are objectively ‘right.’ But allowing yourself enough latitude to disrupt your conditioning is a way to find out what is subjectively ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ for you. A way to make yourself anew.
What does this subversion look like, though? It doesn’t mean pretending we can go about our lives and simply avoid doing things that reflect our upbringing. It’s just not feasible to excuse ourselves from essential activities once we start to question where they fit into our shifting moral paradigm. And if we’re really invested in seeing where these shifts take us, in carving out a deeper moral sense of self, then we also can’t continue doing whatever we previously considered ‘good’ while doubting its ‘goodness.’ Declaring a moratorium on something is never a retreat into neutrality. That’s not to say that morality is inescapably binary, but rather that in choosing not to do one thing, we are, in effect, choosing to do something else, even if we process our decision a different way. Choosing not to lie (until we know how we ‘feel about lying’) is basically choosing to tell the truth, insofar as one is indeed telling anything.
More to the point, I think that making moral decisions out of sheer inertia is enough to perpetuate the instincts that guide those decisions. In other words, our history of passively living by the morals we’ve always known functions as a bulwark preventing active, critical examination of those very same moral instincts. Beliefs do not arise in a void, nor does behavior: both are built upon pre-existing, patterned responses to stimuli. The way I’m starting to see it, once we begin to doubt a moral instinct (or at least, to see it as a thing capable of being doubted), the only way we can fully explore this instinct and see what effects obeying it or not obeying it has on our bodies and minds is through subverting it — even if that means doing the exact opposite of what we’ve been taught, of what we’ve long held to be moral.
To stake your moral claim on the world you’ve got to live a little. If you already suspect property is theft (and corporate profits a thing far more malevolent) and that maybe we should stop worshipping the exchange of labor for purchased goods, put that shirt in your messenger bag and go about your business. If you think it’s your right to fuck whom you want when the both of you want it and the only moral consequence is delicious pleasure, then follow your libido not your fears and let the repressed say what they want. Do what you shouldn’t by society and what you should by other people. And remember:
‘Decadence can be a marvelous weapon against the cops in your head.’
(Addendum: One tricky part of all this is the way in which we of middle-class America (or maybe to some extent, any of us from the West) conceive of individuation in terms of economic ‘self-sufficiency.’ Like, ‘We’ve got jobs now, Dad doesn’t have to pay for everything, hey look I bought myself this microwave’ kind of thing. The thing is, there are many ways to ‘get things for free’ and many ways to ‘provide for yourself.’ Sometimes, they’re one and the same, even in this world where the market constrains all our thought and everything is but a commodity. And sometimes they even benefit other people.)
