The Responsibility of the Weak

Patching Weakness as a Moral Loophole

Introduction

With great power comes great responsibility, Noblesse Oblige, Luke 12:48. In other words, people who have more and can do more have a moral obligation to do more.

Flipped around, it means that people who can do less have less responsibility. In other words, morally, being weak is great: you need to do less!

This sucks.

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Morals are good at social reality, not ground reality. If we have to pick between a priest-wizard and a scientist to get your rocket to the moon, we already know who's our guy. Conversely, if we have to persuade an entire group, you would bet more on the preacher than on the nerd.

Concretely, this means that the incentives here are not to actually be weak but to socially appear weak. Even more ironically, the incentives are to be strong and appear weak.

Because we are taught from childhood not to commit thought crimes, the best way to sell a lie is to believe in it. As a result, the incentives are to be powerful and make yourself believe you are weak.

How fucked up.

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This brings us to the main question of this post.

It is clear what the responsibilities of the strong are and that we should fault them for doing their part. But what are the responsibilities of the weak?

If we never fault the weak, then everyone is incentivised to pretend they're weak. So what should we do?

Anecdotes

I dislike psychoanalysis.

It is too easy to be mistaken about what is happening in other people's minds. It is too easy to be self-serving, believing we have the best intentions, while everyone we dislike is an asshole.

This is why I tend to veer away from psychoanalysis.

But there are exceptions.

Too many times, I heard rich and smart people tell me they can not do anything because the world is set in its ways and politicians are corrupt.

The first few times, I thought they were just stupid. I was a typical smartass teenager who thought everyone was stupid.

But by now, I have had this conversation more than a hundred times with people of all ages and from many cultures.

Anyone would start to notice the pattern: a comfortable, smart, rich person enjoying material pleasures, creating fake-ass problems to make it seem like their life is full already, building sand castles of justifications for why they can not do anything to help others, that even if they could, they should wait for the right time, and so on, and so forth.

At some point, if you want to guess what they will say next, your best bet is to imagine someone who wanted to profit from their wealth without any social obligation whatsoever. What kind of bullshit would they need to come up with to feel at peace with being a lazy selfish asshole? It's just hard not to psychoanalyse when you get there.

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There is a specific intonation that people use when they do that bullshit. When I hear that intonation, I usually stop listening to what is being said, aside from a few keywords. I already know what's coming.

I am not being metaphorical. In that situation, people use a literal intonation (with some body language).

At first, I interpreted this intonation as people mocking me. Like, the "Haha, I am bullshitting you!"-intonation.

But sometimes, I teach people to recognise when they use the bullshit intonation, and it helps them. They pause, and see whether they actually can't do the thing they were going to say they can't do or if they were instead going off broken social programming.

From this, I conclude that people giga-brain themselves without realising it.

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I try to be compassionate and understand how it feels to be stuck in this pattern.

I try to assume some weird type of good faith from most people, which basically amounts to, "People are not psychopathic masterminds explicitly planning the crazy lies they tell just to fuck over everyone else in the stupidest way possible".

But it's hard. Because even though I know people are not aware of what is happening, I nevertheless see them trying to fuck me over.

Like, when I call someone on their bullshit, and they start making up excuses on the fly. When they try to stubbornly substantiate arguments that they have just conjured to get themselves out of a dead-end. Or when they gather other weak people to defend their opinions, attempting to somehow peer-pressure me into accepting falsehoods.

Elements

We should not be smug when we are too weak to uphold some obligation. We should acknowledge its cost.

On many occasions, I have seen people be smug about the fact that they were too weak.

For instance, some work needs to be done in a group. One person can not do it, and they get smug about it. "Haha, I can't do it! It means it's one of you suckers who has to do it!" This is literally bragging about incompetence.

Another example is toxic relationships, in which one party is materially dependent on the other and resents that dependence. The relationship can be teenager-parent or romantic. In both cases, the dependent party might gloat at the provider's obligations.

A related behaviour is when a weak person, who is protected by our norms by virtue of being weak, taunts someone stronger than them into breaking those norms. This can be a protester doing their utmost to trigger a cop, a tourist inappropriately touching a human statue street performer, or a physically weaker person screaming at someone stronger than them to get them to snap.

Those behaviours are despicable.

We built our morals around the idea that we could finally cover for the weak rather than leave them for dead. All of us constantly put effort and resources into ensuring it. And those despicable behaviours shit on this.

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Weakness is usually not absolute. It usually has a budget.

A person is usually not intrinsically weak. We all have different things we can and can not do.

I personally tend to think about weakness as "under a budget". Right now, if you asked me to be a public defender for someone, I could not do it: I do not have the credentials. But this is not absolute. I could study law for years and pass the Bar. Or I could try to go for some illegal scheme.

I think about most practical weaknesses this way: they are almost always fixable, but the question is, "At what cost?".

When a colleague can not do something at work, they always have the option to learn how to do it. If learning to do the thing takes less than a day, I am much less inclined to give them a free pass: I will fault them for not knowing how to do something they could have cheaply learned and knew would be useful.

Basically, whenever someone tells me, "Oh, sorry, I can't do X" as an excuse to not do X, I think "Sure, but how much would it take for you to be able to do X, and how long in advance did you predict you would need to do X?". I will directly ask them when it makes sense.

If the cost to become able to do X is unreasonable, I'm happy not to fault the person for being weak. For instance, I will not fault someone for not taking years to learn a skill that would have only saved hours for people close to them. And obviously, I would not fault someone for some untreatable weakness where the cost to deal with it is essentially infinite, such as a disability.

But I am much more severe when the cost is just convenience, time or energy, and they've never put in what's needed to learn how to do X. Or even worse, if they decided to not learn how to do X in order to get out of obligations.

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Weakness is not a get-out-of-jail card.

I often ask people how much it would take them to be able to do X. Sometimes, the answers are reasonable. Other times, they assure me it is impossible, that the cost is too high and that it would take at least years to learn how to do X!

Then, I ask if they tried. And they usually did not. Even worse, they spent much more time coming up with nice-sounding excuses than trying.

Almost always, when I cared to investigate when they had not tried, it happened that they could do X somehow.

Nowadays, when someone tells me they can't do X but hasn't tried anything, whatever they say feels like bullshit, and I care very little for their words.

Conversely, I am much kinder whenever they have tried anything seriously, regardless of how badly it failed or how little it succeeded.

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In uncivil times and places, the incentives are to project strength and dominate others. We built norms to quash this.

In civil times and places, the incentives are to project weakness and taunt others. We now need to build norms to quash this.

Conclusion

Caring for the weak is extremely important. This is one of the core tenets of civilisation.

We are all weak at various points: when we are children, sick, or too old. We're all just temporarily abled. We are all weak in at least some areas; no one can do everything by themselves.

This means we all sometimes share the moral responsibilities of the weak.

Here are the moral responsibilities of the weak:

• Don't be smug about being weak. Acknowledge the cost.

• When someone stronger helps you, don't be an asshole about it. Be thankful.

• Before saying "I can't do X" as an excuse to not do X, evaluate how much it would take for you to do it and give it an honest attempt.