Displacement

I read a bit further in The Spirit Level, which I still haven't got round to finishing, even though it's interesting (perhaps because it seemed like the first chapter gave the whole book away), and came across an explanation of displacement: how people come to take out feelings engendered in one situation on another situation.

I've been discussing this in person recently, since I don't do this at all, and I find it hard to understand or recognise it. When someone acts a certain way towards me, I assume it's deliberate.

Apparently, displacement happens more when people feel helpless, or powerless to change their situation, when the system is very hierarchical and when the loss is particularly great. So, for example, people who feel deprived of social status by an encounter with someone might attempt to prove their status through exerting power over another person who is lower down the hierarchy, or over whom they have power.
I'm not sure if this happens especially when there's injustice, or whether the nasty encounter necessarily involves injustice in order to feel like a loss of status.

It is this strange phenomenon that causes sexually abused people to abuse others; both children who grow up to be abusers and prisoners who repeat the offence on other prisoners. Most people agree that this involves a messed-up attitude to the world and might be a reason, but is insufficient excuse for repeating the crime. Certainly I'd say that one ought to have learnt how nasty it is, and avoid it even more. However, it's exactly the same process as occurs when someone's feeling a bit moody and snaps at a family member. The only difference is that people accept the first as normal! In principle they're the same, and we should tolerate them to the same extent.

So this post is an introspective one. Do I not displace aggression because I feel superior? Do I not care about status and therefore not feel the need to prove it? Do I not see the hierarchy that others do? I think that the second and third questions are similar: I don't see hierarchies that others think exist, and therefore don't care about them. I'm secure: I don't have insecurities about myself; I have good self-knowledge and am not deluded. But I know that I do feel aggression (anger) about many injustices. It's just that it's the injustice that makes me angry; I hate injustice, and wouldn't perpetrate another one because that wouldn't satisfy me: I would want to give punishment to the criminal, not just get even with the world in general.

Now we're talking about treating people like individuals, and giving justice to individuals, or alternatively, treating the rest of the world as an entity with shared karma, we're touching on previously adumbrated philosophical positions (although with different language). Philosophers have considered the world a great karma-sharing place in which we're all tied through membership, bonds of empathy or other mystic union. I don't like that idea, and here I think I can demonstrate one way in which I find it unpleasant: because although the union is intended to be a justification for not hurting others, because we're bound together in some way, it also justifies injustice, because we're all linked, so karma will cycle round to the right person, or because it's all the same.
Breaking down the rigid barriers that in my mind separate individuals might justify empathy, but it also makes people treat other humans as less than individual; they treat the world as one entity, rather than truly recognising people as different. If they recognise their membership of this entity, that might be good (although I'd say wrong), but if they don't it leads to horror.

This scale, of individualism to collectivism, has been known and used before, but as far as I know only in terms of moral or political belief. The definition of the scale as a way of gauging how a person actually feels about (or views) the world and others had not occurred to me before. It certainly seems a good way to categorise a rather different mindset from the moral or political meanings of the words. I've met a lot of people who rely on moral intuition, feelings and empathy for moral insight. The extent to which a person relies on empathy should, I suppose, directly correlate with their place on the individualism scale. Obviously I'd equate individualism with rationality, and collectivism with emotion.
I'd even venture to suggest that the optimism of collectivists (about human nature) is so hard to argue with precisely because it isn't rational. They want to promote empathy, and believe that if only people would accept rational arguments for how empathy can justify morality, we would all be moral.
However, as we all know, you can't engender a feeling (empathy) with rational argument, so they're on a hiding to nothing. I would place myself on the other end of the scale, hoping to use rational arguments to engender rational acquiescence with the idea and consequences of treating others truly as individuals. Obviously I equally well can't remove empathy, if it's there, but I don't need to. The rational agreement with my arguments would be enough to cause moral actions. Of course making it subconscious by somehow making people 'feel' others' individuality, in the way that I 'feel' injustice, especially when the perpetrator feels righteous about it, would make moral action more reliable, but it's not necessary.

That would be the end of it, except that it's interesting to consider further the additional dichotomy between feeling others' pain, and feeling injustice. Many people equate the two: someone feeling pain is an injustice. The most popular argument underlying morality at the moment is to base it on avoiding pain. Obviously I disagree, and have made this clear many times in discussions. The question is always then "On what would you base morality?" as if that were sufficient support for pain as the basis of morality.
When I answer "Justice" I get laughed at. "But we define justice depending on morality, so you haven't really answered anything." I'm told. Yes, that's true in one way: if justice depends on what you say morality is, then I've created circular definitions. But in another way, I've merely repeated their own logic: if we are to base morality on something, why not giving each individual what he deserves, rather than avoiding pain to all?
Of course my definition needs further clarification, in that I haven't defined what each person deserves, but I don't regard complexity as a reason to discard a solution. The normal (Gaussian) distribution seems like a complex formula to most people, but that doesn't stop it being a good description of population spreads.

So perhaps I query the whole basis of much moral philosophy because of a simple character trait: the compartmentalisation of my life so that I treat people as they've treated me, rather than as I have recently been treated overall. Or perhaps it's the other way around: I've strengthened the trait because of my philosophy. Whichever it is, it's a shame that philosophers don't consider my point of view, but merely dismiss it because of current fashion. That doesn't seem like rational thought and enquiry to me... but then philosophy isn't, currently, rational enquiry, being based on empathy, feelings and intuition, so why should I expect philosophers to act according to my philosophical ideal?

Well, since philosophy touts itself as the thought underlying everything, it seems reasonable to expect it to rely on thought, not feeling. That's my short answer. And that's why individualism trumps collectivism, and doing justice is more important than avoiding hurt.