4 things all good citizens believe implicitly

Beyond what we believe “in this house“

I go for a lot of walks in my neighborhood. And many of my neighbors are politically active, so I see a lot of lawn signs on my walks. And there’s one sign that started popping up a couple of years ago, which has become the most common sign. There are a few variations, but they all have a similar message to the following:

In This House We Believe:
Black Lives Matter
Women’s Rights are Human Rights
No Human Is Illegal
Science Is Real
Love Is Love
Kindness Is Everything

Photo by the author

Who could disagree, right?

But let’s ask a quick question: Are the residents of this house progressive or conservative?

If you guessed “progressive”, you’re probably right. But the thing is, taken at face value, and out of their politicized context, most of those claims will appeal to people of lots of backgrounds - conservatives and liberals alike.

And that’s a problem I have with this sign. It politicizes and tribalizes several statements that would otherwise be pretty agreeable to most. Even the first sentence of the sign is tribal, since the concept of values being tied to “this house” is ultimately a way of pitting some houses and families against other houses and families.

A global citizen’s lawn sign

So this got me to thinking: what would I actually want to see on a lawn sign?

I wanted a set of ideas that, if people really believed them - or at least made decisions as if they believed them - would provide a truly solid basis for communal understanding and collaborative problem solving.

I wanted some ideas that, even if they may run counter to what people were raised to believe, are things that people could nevertheless grasp the intuitiveness of upon reflection.

I wanted something that would be accessible to the masses, but would also not be very easily assailed and dismissed by the more critical activists and truth seekers.

And I wanted something that wasn’t tightly bound to the political moment, but had a message that was essentially timeless.

And here’s what I came up with:

As a thoughtful, global citizen,
I operate under the following assumptions:
1. If it feels good, it is good (and if it feels bad, it is bad).
2. Public claims warrant public evidence.
3. Everyone does their best.
4. Logic builds trust.

Image by the author.

Now, each of these being only a few words in length, the full meaning of what I’m trying to convey with them may not be obvious at first glance. There is subtext to each, which needs to be explained.

And even if you do read through my longer explanations below, you may reject some of these ideas at first. I don’t expect them to be intuitive to everyone right away.

But I do think that if you sit with each idea long enough and honestly enough, that they will all start to make sense.

And so, similar to how the curvature of space time due to gravity might not make sense at first (despite the fact that it explains the movements of the cosmos better than any other theory), I think the results of these claims will make sense in time.

And just as scientists often claim their theories to be simply “models”, rather than “truths” about nature, so, too, are these claims merely models. And so while they are not beliefs that we should hold “true” in the strictest sense, I think they are as true as we need them to be to be useful, and also as true as we can probably expect to find any sort of consensus on in this life.

So with that said, let’s take a closer look at each one.

If it feels good, it is good (and if it feels bad, it is bad)

Perhaps a more thorough way of saying this is that the only way to recognize an event as good (or ethical or moral), or as bad (or unethical, immoral, or evil), is by whether it results in someone feeling good or bad.

No one has, or can possibly have, any knowledge or intuition of what is true or real, other than by what they perceive. And our perceptions take many forms and modalities: as shapes and colors; as sounds, tastes, and smells; and as memories and thoughts.

But among all this variety of experience, the most important perceptions (indeed, the only perceptions that have any fundamental import or meaning at all) are our feelings of happiness, pleasure, delight, pain, sadness, and misery. That is, those feelings that represent when we feel good or bad. Which is to say: our sense of well-being.

None of the sights, sounds, or tastes of the world carry any implicit meaning at all, unless they correspond with or portend some other feeling of happiness or sadness. The only reason we have any inclination to label some things as “good”, and other things as “bad”, is because some things result in us feeling good, while other things result in us feeling bad.

In other words: good and bad feelings are our only insight into good and evil.

And so, any claims we make, or insight we might have, on morality or ethics must ultimately stem from our first-hand knowledge of what makes us feel good or bad.

If all this seems obvious, it’s worth noting some of the ways that people deny and forget it.

Perhaps the most important example is when people claim that human life has no meaning compared to the will of God. Because the problem is, the meaning found in human sensory experience is the only meaning that any human has access to.

And therefore, any attempt to ground meaning in anything besides our own sensory experience will necessarily be further removed from the one fact that everyone knows from the moment they are born: that feeling good is good, and feeling bad is bad.

But God is not the only false stand-in for well-being. We also tend to mistakenly glorify ideas, like love, kindness, pride, justice, and fairness, as well as things like tolerance, intelligence, sapience, or aptitude.

To be sure, justice and fairness and kindness are more closely tied to well-being than “God’s will”, but they are still ultimately just heuristics for well-being. Although they may play an important role in facilitating well-being, they do not actually represent any value for their own sake, because they are not senses that people actually feel. They are strategies for helping people feel good, but they are not the feelings themselves.

Now all that said, it’s worth spending a little more time on the subject of justice. Because although one person’s good feelings are, indeed, good, in and of themselves, another person’s bad feelings are undoubtedly bad in their own right.

Humans live in a complex universe, in which a single action can simultaneously result in one person feeling good, and another person feeling bad. And an action that results in someone feeling bad in the short term might lead to them feeling good in the long term, or vice versa.

But the fundamental claim here - that well-being is the only way to distinguish good and evil - isn’t intended to offer insight on how to mitigate between individuals whose well-being may be at odds with each others’. Nor does it offer advice on how to prioritize short term pleasure or pain versus long-term pain or pleasure. Those are important questions. Indeed, they are critical questions. But they are beyond the scope and mandate of this claim, and they also nevertheless rest on this claim as a foundation.

The important thing to remember, then, is this: that, regardless of how we might answer these other questions, the more fundamental truth to remember is that the happiness, pleasure, and pain of sentient creatures is literally the only way to measure or recognize an event as good or bad.

If all citizens can agree to that, then we are off to a good start.

And if we can’t, then we are in a sorry state indeed.

Public claims warrant public evidence

The last section touched on the idea that all we know is what we perceive.

And indeed, whatever any individual person perceives does constitute a truth about reality for that person.

But the problem is, at some level, we are all a little bit alone behind our eyes, and are not able to share our perceptions — which is to say, each other’s realities — with each other directly.

And so this poses a question: how are we to decide on what to consider real and true for a community, when all of its constituents are quite literally all experiencing slightly different realities inside their heads?

And I think the answer is: you have to do it democratically.

And the way you do it democratically, is by referencing evidence that is available to the public.

For example, if you’re playing a board game, and another player’s die rolls off the table and under the couch, you’ll probably ask them to re-roll, rather than just letting them announce (from under the couch) how the die landed. You don’t even necessarily need every player to actually look at the die. You just need it to have landed in a public space, so that they all had the opportunity to see how it landed.

But, outside of board games, we often don’t hold truth claims to this same standard of public evidence.

One place where we do try to hold to this standard, is with the scientific method. But one place where we don’t keep to this standard, is with certain religious claims - specifically, those that depend on some sore of prophetic source of truth.

A prophet-based claim is one in which believers are expected to accept certain claims as true solely on trust in an authority figure, and not based on any evidence that they themselves can observe. The role of the prophet is the same as that of the game player with the die under the couch. They make public claims based on what they alone can see, or purport to see, and expect everyone else to believe them.

All anyone truly knows in this life is what they perceive. And what a prophet-based religion is ultimately asking us to do, is to subordinate everyone’s individually perceived truths in favor of someone else’s that has been dictated from on high.

This is not a democratic way to establish truth. And so it is not a way to build a democratic society, and it’s not a good way to live in a community.

Although private perceptions may indeed reveal private truths, public claims nevertheless deserve publicly observable evidence. So don’t believe people who claim to be prophets, and don’t try to be a prophet for everyone else.

Everyone does their best

The more we know about a person, the more we can understand and predict their behavior.

But there’s always a lot we don’t know, and so people often surprise and disappoint us. We know ourselves best, but we don’t even know ourselves completely, and so we surprise and disappoint ourselves as well.

There’s always a gap in our knowledge.

And we tend to see this gap as representing actual possibilities: things that, in the absence of knowledge to the contrary, we believe someone really could do in the future - which, in retrospect, we see as things that they literally could have done - even if in reality, they were never going to happen (although we may never have enough knowledge to understand why).

But so, rather than representing real possible actions, what this gap in knowledge really represents is a space for us to project our biases. And so, when evaluating someone we don’t care for, we emphasize all the ways that they could have done better, while downplaying all the ways they could have performed even worse. And when evaluating ourselves or those we care about, we do the opposite, and emphasize all the ways we could have done worse, and minimize all the ways we could have done better.

But amid all this speculation, we forget the one most basic truth that we should always remember: that the only thing that ever matters to anyone is whether they feel good or bad.

So, despite our gap in knowledge, we do in fact always know the fundamental motivation behind every action: that everyone is always simply either trying to pursue some hope of joy in life, or trying to avoid some fear of pain and suffering.

Now that said, we often make sub-optimal decisions, that may harm ourselves or others, due to our lack of knowledge and opportunities (including opportunities for knowledge). And some people are just different or neurodivergent, sometimes in ways that are frightfully antagonistic to our own well-being. And we can respond to such people in whatever way we need to to protect our own claims to happiness.

But the fact is, that everyone is always ultimately just pursuing the same things we all are. And so although we may indeed judge people’s actions as incompetent or harmful or scary to us, there is absolutely no excuse for judging the people themselves as rotten or evil.

Everyone is always just doing their best with what they have, and what they are.

And it’s important that we never ever forget this.

Logic builds trust

When we say something is “logical” or “rational”, or that it “makes sense”, what we are really saying is that it follows a pattern that we can learn to predict.

Which is ultimately to say: You can recognize a system or decision as logical by the extent to which it is predictable.

And when a system is predictable, it allows people to put their trust in it - including at a large, or even global scale.

Large scale trust facilitates large scale collaboration, cooperation, and communication - which in a world of 8 billion people is critical.

Illogical systems, by contrast, sow distrust, which thwarts collaboration. Gaps in logic provide opportunities for exploitation, corruption, cronyism, and caprice. They are opportunities for people with relatively more power in a system to bend the outcomes of the system - which, in an unpredictable system, will not necessarily be auditable or detectable by independent (which is to say, democratic) review.

You can never have justice or fairness in an illogical, unpredictable system. A trustworthy system, therefore, requires an unwavering deference to logic.

So logic is a necessary ingredient of a trustworthy system.

But it does not guarantee a trustworthy system. In addition to logic, you need good assumptions, good motives, good execution (which is to say, you’re not just claiming to be logical, but you actually are logical, without errors or inconsistencies), and a commitment to continually improve and maintain all 3 ingredients.

These are all tall orders, and the latter 3, in particular, can only be borne out in practice, in the real world.

But the first condition - good assumptions - is born on paper, in the mind, and in conversation - like the conversation I’m hoping to start in this article.

The four assumptions of a good citizen that I’ve proposed here, I think, could be the foundation for a great, fruitful, ongoing conversation that humanity has struggled so hard to have with each other since the dawn of time.

But it all starts with a conversation. And with an honest, introspective appraisal on what we all think we know. And with a commitment to communicate with each other in a way that we can actually understand. Which is to say, to communicate logically.

A framework for our golden rules

The four assertions I’ve presented here have been carefully chosen to provide a minimal, but also broadly adoptable, applicable, and relevant framework for facilitating fruitful collaboration and trust as a society.

But it’s worth pointing out that this framework doesn’t actually offer any specific directives for action. It doesn’t say, for example, that we should “treat other people how we’d want to be treated”, or that we should never tell a lie.

The goal of these claims isn’t to dictate rules for everyone to follow blindly, but rather, to provide a framework by which we can collectively figure out and agree on what to do. If we agree that good feelings are good, and bad feelings are bad, then it follows logically, that we ought to treat others the way we want to be treated ourselves.

As a recap, here are our claims again, with annotations for their subtext:

1. If it feels good, it is good (and if it feels bad, it is bad). So don’t make up arbitrary rules about what’s “moral” or “natural” or important.
2. Public claims warrant public evidence. So think for yourself, and don’t believe people claiming to have special, prophetic knowledge.
3. Everyone does their best. So don’t judge people as good or evil, or as “deserving” success or punishment - including yourself.
4. Logic builds trust. Logic is predictable, and therefore auditable and reliable; and trust and collaboration are impossible without something to rely on.

All together, these claims provide a framework for deciding what to value, what to believe, how to treat each other, and how to build trust with each other.

And that’s what I think this world needs. We need to find a few things that we mostly agree on, so that we can have some basis for understanding and trusting each other’s public claims and assertions.

This is basically the same idea as that behind the U.S. Constitution, as well as the constitutions, mission statements, and creeds of any other government, organization, or religion around the world.

But I don’t think any other constitution or creed has done a good enough job of capturing the most fundamentally intuitive claims that are needed in order to facilitate a truly global community.

And that’s what I’ve tried to do here. And I think anyone who affirms and spreads the ideas behind these claims will be leading the way to a better society, and a better future for everyone.