• PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
    2·
    11 hours ago

    Thats a real narcissistic take.

    Society can’t function if people don’t check in to see if you’re following the expectations of society. You can bend or break some expectations, but if people don’t even check, then society collapses.

    • felsiq@lemmy.zip
      2·
      8 hours ago

      I’m not sure if I agree with this, imo morals and common sense are what people should follow and if society’s expectations can’t justify themselves using either then it’s the expectations that need to be adjusted. Living by expectations is too close to allowing outside shame to dictate your life for me personally, religions have weaponized that shit against us for too long already. In the not-too-distant past (and present, some places), following the expectations of society would mean LGBTQ+ people spending their lives closeted and unhappy and for what? Who benefits when people are afraid to step off the beaten path?

      IMO the only social expectations that matter are the ones that can be backed up by moral or logical points, like not littering and treating other people like human beings with feelings, and if they need external justification to matter then clearly it’s not the expectations that are the relevant part. We have a lot of bullshit expectations we live with simply because we’re used to them, and breaking these expectations shouldn’t be occasional exceptions - it should just be what we do if we feel like it.

      Someone was telling me about how she polices her daughter’s clothing recently and “has to” stop her from wearing stripes and polka dots together, and like… I get bonding with your kid by teaching them things, in this case fashion, and I’m not saying that’s a bad thing to do. But also, like, let lil girl rock her weird little shit if she wants to, what’s the harm? The social expectations are just stifling her experimentation with style, and they’re doing literally no good to anybody. Modern society crushes and commercializes your individuality anyway, it doesn’t need help.

      Anyway sorry for hitting you with a huge rant outta nowhere but being authentic to yourself is a core belief of mine (where it’s not toxic to do so, anyway) and I’ve wasted literally years of my life trying to figure out what’s actually me and what’s just social expectations I was unconsciously shaped by, so this shit activates my sleeper agent mode lmao

      • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
        1·
        6 hours ago

        What do you think that morals are, if not societal expectations? Lots of cultures disagree about what is moral and what isn’t, and people from those cultures have adopted those morals by being raised in those cultures.
        If people in those cultures stop caring if others within their own culture perceive their actions as moral, then society devolves into chaos. Maybe sociopathy would have been a better word than narcissism (although I am not a psychologist); a society of primarily sociopaths cannot survive.

        • felsiq@lemmy.zip
          1·
          5 hours ago

          I’m not sure I’d agree that morals are societal expectations, cuz imo you could still have a moral system in a vacuum and it’s relatively common to have a set of morals that disagrees (sometimes strongly) with what your own culture dictates as norms.

          Like in my eyes my actions don’t need to be perceived to be subject to my own morality, and my culture’s perception of my actions also don’t affect their morality. As an extreme example, a citizen of nazi germany might have been perceived as immoral in their own culture for sabotaging nazis by assisting holocaust victims in hiding or escapes, but I don’t think most people would argue that makes that person immoral (probably the opposite). Obviously I’m not saying that’s your position in this, I know you already mentioned exceptions and that would def be one, just trying to show that a person’s morals can exist outside their culture’s perception of them.

          IMO your morals are shaped by your culture the same way you’re shaped by your environment, but I definitely wouldn’t conflate them with societal expectations - I see them as a Venn diagram, where some expectations are based on morals but others are unrelated and aspects of a moral code can be independent of social expectations. Like I mentioned before, there’s social expectations around the way we dress that clearly have no moral basis, and examples of people morally dissenting from their culture’s norms are all thru history.

          I definitely agree with your last point that a society where people don’t care about being moral can’t survive - but I’d argue like above that it’s not the outside perception (and resulting shame factor) that enforces morality but an individual sense of right and wrong that most people have and at least attempt to live by. There’s always gonna be people who simply don’t have or attempt to follow their own morals or sense of empathy ofc, but imo that’s what laws are for and trying to enforce norms with shame as well is unlikely to work on people who don’t have those things. Like you can’t shame a sociopath (also not a psychologist so using the colloquial meaning) into doing or not doing things - it’s just not a productive way to convince them to act pro-socially. IMO we should just enforce reasonable laws, stick to the tolerance contract, and ignore societal expectations as irrelevant- let people dress as they want and get up to whatever weird harmless shit all this pointless shame is repressing.