In a typical breakup there has to be a Bad Guy. If there’s a shared friend group, everyone is expected to pick a side, where all the bad is heaped on one side, and good is heaped on the other.
I think this is just one example of Simple Morality. In that framework there are Good and Bad People. Bad People are criminals, homeless, poor people, maybe even very rich people (depending on your crowd). Bad situations and outcomes are a result of Bad People doing Bad Things. It’s their fault, they should have known better, and if they didn’t, too bad.
When a criminal steals or sells drugs, it’s their fault. When a homeless person dies on the street, it’s their fault. When poor people collect welfare, it’s their fault.
This way of thinking is very convenient, as it means the problem is solved. If we just had better individuals, people actually working to be Good, there wouldn’t be problems.
When growing up I had an acquaintance named Nick Bragga. We were in the same speech therapy for years, and he was always nice to me. Early on, Nick was targeted by classmates, differences and perceived incompetencies are favorite targets, and they would make fun of his speech. Nick began protecting himself by “barking”, by trying to scare off other kids so they couldn’t find an opportunity to target him. This protective mechanism was seen in terms of Simple Morality — obviously Nick was a Bad Kid. Within public education, most teachers are burnt out, they want to be part of the story of a Good Kid, they don’t have the energy to take on the thankless and hopeless work of trying to turn around one Bad Kid. So he was isolated. He didn’t have people to help him at home, so he fell behind at school, and gained a reputation for being a bully. Years after we left speech therapy classes, when I ran into him, he would first show me his hard shell, his tough scar tissue, but soon that would fall away. Nick was always nice to me.
I struggle to see Nick as a Bad Kid, because I see where he began. I also struggle to see his persecutors as Bad either, they were children who were undoubtedly dealing with their own confusion and insecurity and didn’t know better. At each time step I can picture how Nick got there, how the prior step within context made sense and was highly defensive and protective in nature — an action made by a victim, not a perpetrator. Neither side may be Bad, but the chain that followed undeniably had terrible outcomes.
If you expand the time scope, Simple Morality disintegrates. When you see a terrible outcome as the product of a chain, rather than as an isolated act, morality becomes much more ambiguous, with many more participants. This new moral world is scary and gray — who or what is at fault then? Everyone? No one?
This new moral world requires a different framework, one which can provide some kind of stability. Simple Morality is a lens, one possible way of interpreting a situation, Coalescing Morality is another. Each lens may be useful in its own context. Relativistic maturity comes in applying each lens where appropriate, which requires a higher level idea of what we’re aiming for.
Applying this lens, Good and Bad people become insensible, instead there are Good and Bad dynamics. Neither Nick nor his persecutors were Bad at the start, but they were locked in a Bad dynamic. Within a Bad dynamic, even rational, well-intentioned, morally upright people can interact and produce terrible consequences.
But how is this possible? The solution was Good People, that should be enough.
Let’s find an example. In urban liberal areas of America where therapy has broadest adoption, the term “triggered” has entered common parlance. The word indicates some kind of trauma-induced response. A past situation (often recurring) was extremely distressing, and created some kind of compulsive response, often oriented towards protection or avoidance of the source of distress. Once the situation disappears, the “overfitted” response remains, and continues to “trigger” this compulsive response in situations that appear similar to the past. These similarities may be superficial, there may be no real threat, but the compulsive response is so deeply internalized that it occurs anyways.
Within this triggered state, there’s an assumption of bounded rationality, where the victim is psychologically hardwired to respond in a specific way. Individual responsibility is a function of choice, and if there’s a limited degree of choice in their response, they deserve some kind of reprieve from responsibility.
Now, what happens if two people trigger each other in a complementary way? What if Bob responds with anger when faced with avoidance, and Cindy responds with avoidance when faced with anger? Vicious cycle. Mutually triggering behavior. Bob and Cindy could be the best, most well-intentioned, morally upright people in the world, and they could still fall into this terrible cycle.
Within context, both people are like Nick, they developed a compulsive response which was defensive and self-protective in nature. However, when you put them together they’re locked into a dynamic which produces an ugly cycle. If either person exhibited their triggered behavior in isolation, more often than not it could be addressed early on, while fairly benign. But once the dynamic begins, it can amplify as the cycle continues, leading to worse and worse behaviors and outcomes. Once an amplifying cycle begins, only self-awareness from its participants or external intervention can break the cycle non-destructively.
A Simple Morality lens has a very narrow timeframe. At the end of an ugly cycle usually either or both people look really Bad. They may be spiteful, vindictive, negligent, you name it. These behaviors are undeniably Bad. And without context, it’s easy to look at these ugly actions and see them as fundamental to the people.
But that’s because the lens only focuses on the end outcome, and not the chain that produced it. Coalescing Morality interprets everyone as both a perpetrator and victim, and more often than not it’s accidental or unintended, the result of dark cosmic serendipity, of complementary destructive behavior, which in isolation may only be marginally negative in nature, but in combination is terrible. Even in situations when the behavior is malicious and intentional, more often than not the perpetrator picked up the behavior as a victim, also as a kind of “trigger”.
One such example of seemingly malicious behavior could be distrust. The tragic thing about distrust is that it produces self-confirming outcomes. It starts a cycle all on its own. Let’s picture two strangers, Alice and Matt, meeting for the first time. They’re dealing with a symmetric uncertainty: can I trust this person who I just met? Let’s imagine Alice had been hurt by malicious people in the past, and as a result maps that past experience onto the present. Her past and the uncertainty of the present could trigger behaviors that indicate distrust — Alice is cagey, antagonistic, or abrasive to Matt. If Matt has a benign or even good past experience with people, he may see this behavior as an indication of Alice also not being trustworthy, inviting some kind of symmetric response. And if Matt has similarly poor past experiences with people as Alice, some kind of symmetric response is a near certainty. Tragically, Alice will continually be met with evidence that yes, people are untrustworthy, reinforcing her trigger.
This is just one example. Nick did bully others in a way that was basically malicious. That being said, when life has trapped you and mistreated you so totally, where would you gain a reference point for healthy behaviors? From a Coalescing Morality perspective, Nick becoming malicious was the most likely path. It’s not determined, Nick is not irredeemable, but his cycle has a kind of gravitational pull which makes maliciousness the path of least resistance.
Zooming out, this means distrust operates as a kind of moral infection, with self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating outcomes. Distrust is its own cause and effect. There’s a chain of malicious actions which inflict pain and internalize distrust within the victim. And if the victim keeps seeing distrust in the world, eventually they may become a perpetrator themself.
Simple Morality affirms this belief — the Badness is fundamental to people, they’re essentially irredeemable. Within a vicious cycle there is tremendous temptation to apply Simple Morality and heap all the blame on the other person. Once this all-or-nothing framing is adopted, the stakes are raised, and disengagement becomes increasingly difficult. The cycle builds.
A Coalescing Morality lens interprets things differently. By putting the burden of responsibility on the dynamic or interaction between people rather than the people themselves, it lowers the stakes with its willingness to see the validity of each perspective. Each side is narrowly legitimate within the context of the situation and their personal history, even if they may be globally misinformed.
In contrast to seeing Badness as fundamental to specific people, they are a product of their chains. Break one chain and establish a new one and they can make a new path. People are always redeemable, and as such, they should never be forsaken. This is preventative. It means that at the earliest, easiest stages people can intervene and break negative cycles. If only someone had intervened in Nick’s life, if only someone didn’t see him as a Bad Kid, just a kid who was trapped and needed help.
There is another benefit of Coalescing Morality. There are bad dynamics, but there are also good ones. There are benevolent cycles where goodness creates goodness. Goodwill begets goodwill. Creating sites for these positive cycles to accrue and amplify is a cure to negative cycles. That’s a place to start.
Once you begin seeing Coalescing Causality, you see it everywhere. And when you see it, it means no one is irredeemable, especially you. There is no point where humans deserve to be forsaken and scapegoated. None. This does not eliminate individual responsibility and exempt bad behavior. It tempers it with compassion, so that we can look in the mirror without wincing or recoiling for the bad we see. Compassion is preventative. It lets us look in the mirror and reflect on the coalescing origin of our behaviors, to understand its root. In becoming aware we gain agency, and in gaining agency, we can take responsibility for our life. Rather than robbing us of responsibility, compassion enables an ever expanding scope of agency and responsibility. It opens up a path to moral excellence, where the whole world is right and redeemable, starting with yourself.