75# - The limits of a moral compass
And why "fair" is just an illusion
I just realized that creating a fairer world is a futile quest.
Because “fair” doesn’t exist. Fair is just a thought, and for this reason it has ever-shifting meaning depending on the moment, the time and the person thinking it.
No thought is real and unchangeable. No thought can be “achieved”, and this holds true for “fair” as well.
Recently I watched a documentary on the corruption scandals behind FIFA, the world football (soccer) organization. One thing that struck me was how so many parties involved genuinely believed they did nothing wrong. And this makes sense. Right or wrong are also made up concepts. What’s right for me today may be wrong for you, or even me, tomorrow.
Let me immediately clarify that I’m not talking about a world without rules or consequences. I’m not saying they should not charge those people for breaking the law. I’m simply stating how our experience comes from our thoughts, therefore it is fluid and subjective and in our own realities we will do things that seem obvious and justified, but that doesn’t mean they are “objectively right”. Simply because “objectively right” is not a thing.
For the same reason, there’s no point in wondering “how could they have possibly thought that was OK?”. Exactly because they did think it was OK, therefore they’re experience was one of innocence (or justified negative action for the greater good).
What we think is what we see. And no one’s reality is righter than someone else’s.
Therefore, it could be dangerous to fight for a fairer world. Because at some level we’re saying that our own thought-created reality is better than someone else’s and should become the rule in the world. We think we’re making progress, but we’re only fighting one movie with another.
A moral compass, by definition, stems from our thoughts. Our values are the consequence of all the thoughts we created, inherited and acquired more or less consciously. They are made of thought, therefore susceptible to constant change.
That’s why the idea of people relying on their moral compass to navigate life can’t work. One: why would we navigate life using something as unreliable, made-up and subjective as our thinking? Two: anytime we judge someone’s moral compass, or we label it as wrong, we’re saying my thoughts are better than yours, and we try to impose our “better” view of the world. As I said, this can be dangerous.
The good news, is that not relying on our moral compass doesn’t mean we accept to live in a world where everything goes, and where violence is as welcome as kindness. The alternative to using our thoughts to decide how to live is not a world of chaos. There’s another option!
We can follow a deeper compass, the one of our knowing. We all recognize that voice in us that guide us step by step. This voice not only differs from the one of our thoughts, it often ends up going in the opposite direction. How many times we found ourselves in a reality that was suggesting we acted a certain way, even justifying a certain action, but deep beneath that there was something telling us to hold on and take a breath? How many times logic was telling us to wait but deep down there was something suggesting that it was time to go for it? How many times, again, we found ourselves in situations where “I’m the kind of person who would do this” (our moral compass) and yet something in us knew it was time for a different course of action?
The most striking difference between a moral compass and our knowing is that the first is personal, it’s all about us, and the second is impersonal. We just know what to do without having to think too much about us, our potential benefits or consequences.
Another way of distinguishing a thought-generated decision and our knowing is that in the first case you can draw a list of pros and cons. With the knowing there’s nothing else to add. It’s a Yes or a No, just because. We can change what we think but we can’t help what we know.
[a quick note here: as you may have guessed, I’m not using “knowing” referring to our wealth of knowledge: the stuff we learned or the information we gathered; the knowing I’m pointing to is that feeling of deeper guidance we perceive the moment we are quiet enough to listen to ourselves]
Unfortunately, nobody told us. And even if we’re born with direct access to this knowing, we progressively forget. We cover it up with layers and layers of thinking. We dim the light of our intuition and our deeper intelligence in the name of logic, thoughts and willpower. But that all-powerful guiding force within us went nowhere. It’s still there, we just have to get reacquainted to it. And the more we listen for it, the more we hear it and the easier life becomes. That’s when we see how reliable and responsive this deeper compass really is. At each step we can trust what’s emerging in real time from us, without the need to open the file with all our pre-made assumptions on who we are, what our moral code is, and all the shoulds and the shouldn’ts. Because we are who we are, not who we think. And after years spent helping people unleash this force within them, I can tell you that what we’ll create by following that deeper compass is something we won’t regret and that will delight us beyond imagination.
At the core, we’re taught to be afraid of who we are. That’s why we need a moral code. A list of shoulds. And a set of tools to distinguish good and evil.
And if all we had was our thinking, this might not be a bad idea at all. But we’re more than our thoughts. We’re life itself. And when we trust it, there’s no need for a playbook on how to live. We can stop living a paint-by-number life, and we can finally approach the blank canvas inspired and free, ready to create our own masterpiece instead.
Love and wonder,
Nico
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A word before you go…
Part of the impact in my work is pointing out the obvious. With the caveat that it’s only obvious AFTER you see it. Most people, right around a life-changing insight, tell me “wow, I never thought about that”. This is not because of some incredibly powerful and hidden knowledge I have and that I share with them, but simply because when we look in a direction we haven’t looked before, we tend to see new things. And seeing new things for ourselves is like water to a plant: that’s how we thrive as humans. My job is simply to point, and over the years I’m developing my craft as a “pointer” and a “tour guide”.
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