I really enjoyed this. I'd like to see you your thoughts on motivators. Especially in political economy where so many people seem to think and write about it seemingly without awareness of the centrality of people's varying Will to Power and/or Accumulation, to how things unfold in reality. Associated with this the use of, and susceptibility to, being manipulated.
It depends on what you mean by "Passive Deception".
Here, I am understanding it as "Lack of Active Honesty" (ie: "Not making any reliable effort to ensure enough consistency to make honesty meaningful").
In that case, if you frame your own intentions as "I will do something" rather than a mere "I am right now feeling a drive to do that thing", then yeah, I would think of this framing of intentions as passive self-deception.
You'll naturally recognise the self-deception, as over time, you will see that you having intentions is not enough to cause things to happen, and you'll start to trust those intentions less. If you really believed in those intentions, you'll start to trust your own judgment less.
In my point of view, the former (not trusting intentions) is good, but the latter (not trusting your own judgment) is bad.
Yes, agreed. Especially on what we should be skeptical of (intentions not judgement)
I’ll also just add why I thought it was useful to think of poorly understood intentions as “passive self-deception”:
1. The “self-deception” part aligns with your idea of the self as something composed of actions and thoughts over time. Although the intentions are true to part of us, they’re a form of deception to other parts of us.
2. It provides an example of passive deception, unlike the three (active) categories you listed. I believe this is useful to acknowledge because it hints to your point of believing all people are mostly trying to be good. If all forms of deception were active, I’d find it harder to support that.
3. It ties together the passive/active intro into the forms of deception. Just making the link explicit helped me.
I really enjoyed this. I'd like to see you your thoughts on motivators. Especially in political economy where so many people seem to think and write about it seemingly without awareness of the centrality of people's varying Will to Power and/or Accumulation, to how things unfold in reality. Associated with this the use of, and susceptibility to, being manipulated.
Would it be fair to say you think of intentions as “passive self-deception”?
I understand this was just a rant but thinking this way helped me tie these thoughts together
It depends on what you mean by "Passive Deception".
Here, I am understanding it as "Lack of Active Honesty" (ie: "Not making any reliable effort to ensure enough consistency to make honesty meaningful").
In that case, if you frame your own intentions as "I will do something" rather than a mere "I am right now feeling a drive to do that thing", then yeah, I would think of this framing of intentions as passive self-deception.
You'll naturally recognise the self-deception, as over time, you will see that you having intentions is not enough to cause things to happen, and you'll start to trust those intentions less. If you really believed in those intentions, you'll start to trust your own judgment less.
In my point of view, the former (not trusting intentions) is good, but the latter (not trusting your own judgment) is bad.
Yes, agreed. Especially on what we should be skeptical of (intentions not judgement)
I’ll also just add why I thought it was useful to think of poorly understood intentions as “passive self-deception”:
1. The “self-deception” part aligns with your idea of the self as something composed of actions and thoughts over time. Although the intentions are true to part of us, they’re a form of deception to other parts of us.
2. It provides an example of passive deception, unlike the three (active) categories you listed. I believe this is useful to acknowledge because it hints to your point of believing all people are mostly trying to be good. If all forms of deception were active, I’d find it harder to support that.
3. It ties together the passive/active intro into the forms of deception. Just making the link explicit helped me.