The "Good" "Fight"

The Hijacking of Your Better Instincts

Introduction

In the last piece, I talked about what people really want in some detail. Essentially, I believe it’s a human instinct to struggle - more precisely, to take risks and suffer costs in pursuit of a goal they consider worthy of pursuing. The decision on what is worthy and what is enough of the struggle depend on the individual.

As we know, however, individuals are naturally influenced by their social milieu, the information they have at hand, and their peers, which leads to what I think is the most dangerous trends of the age - the creation of "good fights” that are neither “good” nor a “fight”.

Fighting the Good Fight

These are all the same picture - people who think they're fighting the good fight.

The way I see it, fighting the good fight is something inherent in our being. We want to go out there and fight for something - be it as small as taking good care of our pets to as large as trying to address the problems of the whole world, we want to fight for, and win at something.

This instinct to improve is a normal and natural drive - the problem is that it is so strong it is irresistible, and the challenge one takes on can be so large that you are easily waylaid. This leads to two types of errors - good fights that are not good, and good fights that are not fights¹.

No Fight Left In Him

Simply put, this is the goal of convincing someone that something is a struggle, when it isn’t, or should be expected. Holding up empty battles where the outcome was never in doubt might make good politics, but it is far from whetting the appetite of the hunter within.

One thing I’ve always considered an empty fight is casino gambling. Gambling at a casino involves taking part in known games with known odds and doing one’s best to comprehend the odds at any certain moment. The most extreme example of this is the slots - slots are always set so that the house wins. Betting on the roulette or card games with a strategy is more of a proper risky endeavor, even if it is more a test of the strength of one’s nerves and the size of one’s wallet.

Slacktivism is something else I consider a fake fight. The slacktivist is someone who restricts their activist “activities” in support of their cause to social media and empty words. Feeling a part of a movement while being apart from it, the slacktivist feels all the good of contributing to the movement without actually helping the movement. By failing to put their money where their mouth is, they deceive themselves into believing they’re fighting the good fight.

A type of fake fight I have more experience with is the video game. As I said in the previous post, people pay to willingly subject themselves to challenges for the sake of mastery, story, or simple fun or to kill time. What it does not constitute (at least on its own) is a talent or skill with much use in the real world², or a real fight with stakes and drama³.

By far, I feel that this is the less sinister, if more common form of error when it comes to good fights, since all that happens is some wasted or misdirected effort (usually). What you need to watch out for are the fights that pretend to be good, but aren’t.

The Road to Hell…

…is a flight of stairs with good intentions.

Let’s get this out of the way first - everyone is the hero of their own story and wants to believe they’re fighting the good fight. The fact is, though, individuals thinking about whether something is good or not requires effort, and most people don’t have effort to spare. So, logically, most people simply follow the paths that others lay down, allowing others to figure right from wrong on their behalf.

There is an obvious strategy - if you can get people to remember a simple and easily comprehensible message, you can reach and likely convince a large number of people who want to do good without due diligence, like the slacktivists from the previous section, but skipping research instead of ground work. Whether or not what you’re telling people is true doesn’t matter, because, well, they didn’t really want to know.

If you ask me, most of today’s politics are like this. By convincing people of a simple narrative of good and evil or right and wrong, you can pretty quickly get them to believe that you’re doing right and anyone who opposes you is outright evil. Racism, sexism⁴, pollution, tolerance, open borders, stances on foreign nations - these are things people rally around, accuse one another of, and cause yawning gaps between people that probably have more in common with each other than the champions of these causes.

This is something I have a pretty good grasp of, as I used to believe fully in the ideas of global warming⁵. My social studies teacher had shown us An Inconvenient Truth in my last year of high school, and being an intelligent woman⁶, I was pretty quickly convinced - to the point that I answered later that I felt “ashamed to exist”, when she asked me how the documentary made me felt. An Inconvenient Truth has already come under a lot of fire as a documentary, but essentially the central point is that human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide are causing the world to heat up, and therefore we should reduce our carbon dioxide emissions.

Thinking about it logically, I reasoned that emitting carbon dioxide was inevitable if we wished to live. Travel, transport, using goods that go through a factory that uses fossil fuel sourced electricity, even breathing - all, by nature, emitted carbon dioxide and contributed to the potential Apocalypse coming for us. To me, the answer seemed obvious.

I resolved to do good by having no children⁷.

I went on to my first year of college after that, and was given a semester-long assignment to write four papers about the energy situation in the Philippines. Among the energy sources, I was assigned natural gas⁸ - according to the climate change dogma, a polluting hydrocarbon that deserved to disappear. By all rights, I probably should have excorciated the natural gas industry right then and there.

Thankfully, I consider honesty and good scholarship a better fight than saving the world.

There’s too much to get into here, but I discovered quickly that not only were the green “renewables” unable to supply the demands of modern life, but also that hydrocarbons were an essential energy source. They are incredibly dense in energy, allowing land to be used for other purposes, much easier to transport wherever needed than electricity, and can adjust to meet demand when required⁹.

Of course, all this shocked me, and I needed to know more. Searching the Internet for further reading on energy, I stumbled on a site I read to this day, Anthony Watts’ Watt’s Up With That. Providing daily news on climate and energy, I quickly became wise to how I had been hoodwinked.

By taking the output of computer models as gospel and glossing over the underlying effects, they easily convinced me by restricting my information to, essentially, Michael Mann’s hockey stick (debunked). Until Watt’s Up With That, I never heard about seasonal or situational factors like the Urban Heat Island effect, the Medieval Warm Period, the El Nino-Southern Oscilation. Definitely no mention of scandals like Climategate or Sri Lanka’s organic farming failure, or the rare earth metal requirement and what it means in terms of mining for solar and wind power.

This, in my opinion, is a far more nefarious form of deception. By feeding people less information and getting them to believe they’re doing good, you waste their time and effort, potentially ruin their relationships (imagine if I had actually told my parents they weren’t getting kids from me), and direct them to a fruitless endeavor, much like a cult does to its members. Thankfully, though, I never got that far.

Finding the Good Fight

Fighting the good fight is a natural human desire - almost a need, and is inevitable. At the same time, however, you have to avoid letting this natural instinct of yours be hijacked for the purposes of others, lest it control you rather than you control it. Based on my experience, I think there are some simple rules you can follow to avoid falling into the same trap I did as a younger man.

Rule #1: Do Your Own Due Diligence

As the legal expression goes - truth is an absolute defense¹⁰. In order to avoid being hoodwinked into doing something you shouldn’t, one should always do their own research and figure out what’s really going on. Rather than just taking suggestions from peers or consulting experts, one should always see the conditions on the ground for themselves. How far should you take this exercise? Rule #2 helps with that.

Rule #2: A Worthy Fight includes Worthy Opponents

Everyone has their own opinion and their own side of the story. As people are wont to do, they will promote and stick up for their side of the argument, meaning that often, you will only hear what they agree with. Since there’s no point fighting a battle against an unworthy opponent, you should keep searching until you find an opposing argument source that makes you doubt the initial argument. This rule makes sure that you don’t fall into the trap of fighting a fight that isn’t one - a worthy opponent makes an argument worth having.

Rule #3: Those bearing Gifts likely run Grifts

Nothing is free in this day and age, especially not second opinions (just ask your doctor!). Therefore, the more people you see holding a particular opinion, the more suspicious you should be, since they are likely to be paid to, benefit from, or belong to an organization or environment that encourages, said opinion. You should be most suspicious of all of experts, government employees and the wealthy - they are likely wealthy, powerful, or influential precisely because of said opinions.

Rule #4: The Good Fight is a Lifestyle

Last of all, you should always be prepared to live in accordance with the principles of your chosen Good Fight. A prime example is the Council of Parties (COP) - a large climate change event where the rich and influential all over the world attempt to reduce carbon emissions… by chartering private jets to go to the meeting, which is an excellent way to increase your carbon emissions. If you are not willing to live in accordance with your principles, you have none.

Rule #5: You know more than you think, but less than you should

The modern world has put more information at our fingertips than ever before, through the Internet, the smartphone, and most recently, ChatGPT.

The modern world is also so complex that many people simply decide they cannot understand it, and therefore let experts and other people make their decisions for them.

Thus, the rule to follow is humility. Accept that in most cases, you likely know more than you think (with all the information floating around, you’re bound to have heard something about anything), but less than you should (you don’t have enough information in any one domain to make a proper decision without research).

The exception is in your fields of study, specialization, or interest, where you can probably rightfully claim some expertise.

Conclusion

If all this sounds difficult, that’s because it is. From the beginning, we were built for a hard life on the African savannah. Then we overcame and took over the whole world, with a toehold in space on the International Space Station.

We can do it.

1. It could be both, but recognizing both types of errors individually should be easy enough.

2. For the people who learned a lot through video games or learned about things they now love through them, that’s not inherent to the game - that’s on you. I still think video games are a good idea.

3. Turning down the difficulty or grinding levels keeps things under your control.

4. As an aside, pianists play the piano, cellists play the cello, priests preach, but people who race are called racers (not racists) and people who have sex aren’t called sexists. I just find it funny.

5. Back when it was called global warming in the 80s onwards, after it was called global cooling (in the 60s and 70s), before it was called climate change (in the 10s) and now the climate crisis. Confusing, isn’t it?

6. The fact that I found her cute didn’t help.

7. Yeah, I went there.

8. For those not in the know, natural gas is also known as CH4 or methane, and distinct from gasoline. As I live in the tropics, we don’t have natural gas heating, so this isn’t common knowledge.

9. As an aside, I learned an incredible amount about the electrical system of my country, and may do a multi-part layman’s guide to electrical utilities later on. Probably behind a paywall.

10. Against libel, at least.