Morality is internal

I was about to ask and write about this question: What happens to a person who never learned morality from a religion or from parents, who never fell in with a group or cohort or gang with their convictions and moods, who grew up with no guidance? I was about to say that was me. At temple and Sunday school, I never listened to lessons or felt anything but a fearful pressure of alienation and overwhelm. My parents neither said nor explicitly showed anything about “good,” decency or kindness. And I had no childhood friends or teenage friends whose closeness imbued me with their philosophy of life. I grew up tabula rasa.

 

Except that I didn’t. At 15, there was a mysterious (psycho-genetic?) pull to have meaning, and I fell – half by chance, half by inevitability – into a gang of consciousness: Ayn Rand’s faux noble and vraie narcissistic emotionalized attitude of Objectivist philosophy. I say inevitable because no other literature would have worked, would have felt right and acceptable. Books on generosity and compassion and service and love and brotherhood would have made me feel ill. After all – temple and Sunday school. Books on spirituality and the great beyond – Alan Watts or Deepak Chopra, for example – made me enraged. Rand’s solipsistic rebels masquerading as individualists articulated my own life of Negative, brought to the surface and gave words and direction to my need for identity and revenge.

 

Was there a need for a personal moral system? Yes, but only to make me feel I was good and right. I, the alone and less-than was now alone and more-than, and it was good.

 

I believe each of us has a need for good-and-evil meanings because we already have a unique internal morality that is not yet judgment – a feeling and sensation continent within – that is its own literature, if we cared to write it down in several dozens of pages. It is what it is because we were loved or we were not. Mine was close enough to Rand’s to be co-opted and converted by her. Eventually, more of my true self emerged to be very different, extremely different from hers. I’ll suggest that no one’s moral system is found outside of oneself. It is only our feeling chemistry that we come to live as good or bad. Believing that we believe a book or Commandment or lesson, or our own thoughts, will only suffocate our true self and lead to some form of violence to break free of the suffocation.