I've been musing a bit on that one post that went around during the recent holiday season, to which someone added their family tradition of Present Practice. My god! Imagine actually telling kids what behavior is expected, instead of expecting them to intuit it and punish them when they get it wrong!!
Separate post because this topic is a little tangential to that, but I think it does a great job of unearthing one of our very well-hidden internal biases, which goes as follows:
Good people don't need to be taught.
A good person (in this case, a good child) shouldn't need to be told to be gracious and grateful when given a gift. A good child should just know that a holiday tradition of gift-giving is a social performance to strengthen family bonds and that personal preference or genuine reactions are secondary to that performance. A good child should just know how to value gifts, how to express thanks, how to praise and compliment. No caretakers in their lives should need to put any effort into instructing or modeling these things.
Good people should just know how to be good. If they were really Ontologically Good, their inherent goodness would simply intuitively guide them to correct behaviors. If they can't do that on their own, in a vacuum, in the absence of cues, that's a sign of their inherent moral lack.
...Which all sounds very reasonable and obvious, and surely a mistake that only fundie christian families would make! Except that people in the social justice sphere also do this all the time. It's not anybody's job to educate you. It's 2024, how do you not know this already? If you were a Good Person, you wouldn't need to be taught. You would simply intuit the correct philosophies and gravitate to them according to your superior internal moral compass.
If you were a Good Person, you would already know that everything you were taught by your family and/or background was wrong. You should have rejected it already. You should have cut off your family, your heritage, everything about your childhood and upbringing that was Bad and Wrong. You should have known it was all a lie.
If you were a Good Person, you should be able to find the correct way yourself. You should be able to seek out the proper educational resources, and distinguish them from bad advice leading you astray, and make sense of them all according to your own internal moral code.
If you were a Good Person, you would have found your way by the proper, dignified, official channels, not by reading a comic or watching anime. You shouldn't need entertainment or art to guide you. You should just know.
And if someone can't do these things on their own, in a vacuum, in the absence of cues, that's a sign of their inherent moral lack.
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