I agree with this post of your pretty much, except that I believe we don't do as much conscious calculating as you and Steve and X seem to think. I think a lot of what we do, or don't do, has to do with internalized norms, or conscience, or, if one is operating with religious or ideological precepts as guiding principles, with those, internalized.
There is also a concept/phrase I've mentioned in discussion before that is relevant to this discussion -- "the normative value of the actual."
Which says: if it simply is, it comes to feel normal.
That's why so many parents are horrified at the examples provided by the various media, and their children's school mates, for behavior and attitude. Whatever life the parents provide for their children, and example, and counsel, they offer, if their children are witness to an "actuality" of coarseness and cruelty and dishonesty and materialism and false consciousness, parents know that to some discomfiting degree their children will see those qualities as "normal," and thus be likelier to feel them as acceptable modes of being. |
