Meaningness/on values
08 Mar 2025 - 08 Jan 2026
- Meaningness is a values-eliminativist
“Values” are artificial and bad. Stop pretending you have them. They are tearing societies apart, mainly to sell advertising. https://t.co/gCHHrkG0v9
— David Chapman (@Meaningness) October 20, 2022- A more systematic argument: Vaster than ideology | Meaningness.
When forced by experience to admit your system of meaning is unfixably flawed, it’s natural to look for a better one. After adopting several in succession, you may realize that the same flaw afflicts all of them: eternalism. Then you might try to reject all ideologies. That seems to be impossible, and also loses what is good and right in each.
- Give him the benefit of the doubt, he is not against value as such, just against dumb models of value, against eternalist theories of value that place it at the solid foundations of the cosmos rather than just some stuff we use in our messy lives and necessarily improvise as we go along.
You committed to a system because much of it is true and good and useful. You don’t need to abandon your system immediately, or even at all.2 You can own it, instead of its owning you. You can continue to use it as a way of thinking, feeling, and acting—instead of its using you.
- I'm not sure I believe in this independent "you" that is capable of constituting itself outside of systems and picking and choosing among them. Perhaps that is the meta-systematic self. I tend to think selves are bundles of ideologies. They are more constitutive of who we are, or who we think we are, then they are tools to be picked up or put down at will.
- Also here
The culture war’s justification for itself is that Americans are profoundly split over fundamental values. This is a lie. Mostly everyone wants the same things; but we can’t get them because the Other Side will block any action to bring them about. Everyone urgently wants the healthcare system fixed, but for exactly that reason Mooglebook AI whips the Other Side into a frenzy of opposition
- Hm OK that is not against values as such, only that they are different. Let's call that conflict-eliminativism (see conflict theory ).
- This exact thought was something I mocked when Scott Alexander said it.
- Maybe it is true on some very abstract dharmic level. All of us are aimed at liberation, all our mundane goals are subservient to that one. Or basic human level – we all want safety, comfort, recognition, things like that.
- He believes in ethics, more or less, so value is implied. Schematic overview: value | Meaningness.
- btw: these 3-column tables are excellent tools for understanding his theories; the texts move me to nitpicking but the tables make it perfectly clear what he is getting at.
- | Pattern of thinking | Disdain; self-aggrandisement | Fearfulness, laziness | Impeccability | | |
- "Impeccability" -- that's a word from The Four Agreements and I'm a little unclear on it. Chapman does not seem to explain it elsewhere. Understanding impeccability in spiritual teaching | Claude
- Hm. Well, he doesn't mean there aren't values like "ice cream tastes better than dogshit". Because that would be stupid, wouldn't it? More like, values are not these fixed transcendential immaterial things that somehow drive our real-world decision-making.