Lately, I’ve been circling an idea that used to be a source of constant irritation for me: the essential fact that most morality is not born from deep, solitary conviction, but from choreography. For years, I bristled at the observed gap; the sense that what I saw was less an authentic truth and more a rehearsed script. It felt like a fundamental compromise. Yet, I’ve come to realize that this very performativity does not cheapen it; it is what renders it structurally sound.
We perform goodness long before we can truly understand good. The child mimics kindness before grasping the complex texture of virtue. The novice practices the ritual before believing in the doctrine beneath it.
This performance plays out constantly: watch people in a difficult meeting, choosing their words with unnatural care, borrowing gestures of humility or authority, adhering to unspoken rules of consensus. See the small, reflexive apology offered when a foot is stepped on, a response inherited from a social script, more theatrical than a deeply felt theological urge toward repentance. It is this daily, public enactment, this borrowing of scripts - that establishes the ethical floor of a community.
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I’ve always been drawn to radical inquiry; this relentless urge to pry open every assumption and interrogate the roots. I still believe it’s a noble impulse, but it carries a terrible cost. Pure questioning is not a sustainable philosophy; it is a solvent. Hear me out.
You cannot build a civilization on acid.
No stable arrangement of humans can survive if everyone is perpetually committed to deconstruction. Someone has to agree to stop questioning long enough to build something. I used to feel profound frustration, bordering on intellectual loneliness, with those who avoided this constant turbulence. Now, I see them choosing a different wisdom: the wisdom of stability. They seek a navigable life. The structures we inherit; religious, cultural, ethical - are engineered precisely for this massive, essential need.
Not everyone needs root access to the human condition.
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This shift led me to view moral systems as the user interface to the machine.
Conceptual Framing: In a technical depiction, the human substrate, a chaotic tangle of fear, desire, ego, and raw tribal calculus - functions as the Backend. Moral systems act as the Abstraction Layer, providing the essential User Interface. This UI surfaces only the prescribed controls required for cooperative functionality.
The backend is messy. Morality is the abstraction layer. It surfaces only the controls - the prescribed responses and simplified choices we need to press to remain humane. This is precisely why performative morality holds its value; many interact with ethics the same way they navigate complex software: through the simplest, visible façade.
And we cannot fault the user for ignoring the dense logic of the source code.
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I scoff(ed) at people living by “What would Jesus do?” or subsisting on aphoristic Stoic snippets. I assumed true virtue had to be self-derived, original, and hard-won. This, I’ve realized, is a romantic fantasy. The truth is, we all borrow our virtues. We all inherit our ethics. We all imitate our way into character.
There is no shame in moral mimicry. The inherited structure often demonstrates greater resilience than the improvised one. Why would you reinvent a protocol that already works under stress, simply for the sake of originality? Coherence is the actual goal. Stability is the prize.
At its core, morality, even when performed, serves one civilizational purpose: it mitigates entropy. The morality does not need to be metaphysically true; it needs only to work. Civilization requires people who hesitate before acting, not enlightened saints.
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I’ve spent the better part of the year submerged in ethics, searching for some primal, unsullied origin of morality. Instead, I found an artefact. Its metaphysics may be foggy, but its ripple effect is concrete.
Fair to say that my perspective finally ensconced when I held it against my own practice as an engineer. I spend hours writing documentation, creating predictable patterns, and building onboarding flows and decision logs for my team. The elegance of the structure is irrelevant. What matters is its ability to reduce chaos, make decisions repeatable, and allow the next person to function without burning the system down.
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This reflection on performance and structure is not intended as a call for intellectual quietism btw (haha). It is not an argument against the necessary impulse to question injustice or inertia either. I still believe that the radical act of inquiry is vital for progress - it just cannot be the only act.