You Can't Do What's Good if You Don't Know What Is

While freedom and responsibility are complementary, like all complementarities one must be prior, in this case, responsibility. A human feels a sense of responsibility, obligation, duty; and for the same reason, we come equipped with a sense of guilt, which you might say is the interior "enforcer" of responsibility. If we fail to do the right thing, we are persecuted by guilt. Sociopathy is the exception that proves the rule.

All of this -- responsibility, goodness, choice, conscience -- can go off the rails at various points in the process. Some people -- existentialists, for example -- collapse responsibility into freedom, thereby reducing the question to one of pure action: we are what we choose. There is no right or wrong; or rather, it is wrong to lack the courage to choose. The deed is all.

We call these folks existentialists because they (speaking of complementarities) put existence prior to essence, thereby turning reality upside down and inside out, precisely: we are nothing until we choose (ultimately making ourselves our own gods), whereas in reality we are given freedom in order to actualize our essential nature. Davila says it better; note how each is a refudiation of existentialism:

--Freedom is not indispensable because man knows what he wants and who he is, but in order for him to know who he is and what he wants.

--Freedom is not an end, but a means. Whoever sees it as an end in itself does not know what to do with it when he gets it.

--Upon finding himself perfectly free, the individual discovers that he has not been unburdened of everything, but despoiled of everything.

--Total liberation is the process that constructs the perfect prison.

--Today what is called “intellectual liberation” is a change of prisons.

--Whoever is liberated from everything that oppresses him soon discovers that he is also liberated from what protects him.

This post at a crossroads. At this point it could go in various directions.... Choose one already!

Okay. Another hinge point where things can go wrong is with a "corrupt superego," which perversely punishes us for doing the right thing. Here it seems that if we only internalize a bogus ideology, it permits us to harm others with impunity. The corrupted superego gives us the green light to attack and even murder in good conscience. (Or to undermine good institutions such as marriage, the Boy Scouts, universities, etc.)

While I'm all for the death penalty, I fully understand why John Paul II would come out against it (even though the magisterium itself doesn't forbid it). After all, Catholicism is a world religion, and in most parts of the world, for most of history, the death penalty is little more than a pretext for human sacrifice, which is in turn the apex (or nadir) of a corrupted superego given illicit sanction to murder. The USA sentencing an evil mass murderer to death is nothing like Iran sentencing homosexuals to death. One is justice, the other an immature and primitive form of psychic projection and annihilation.

Likewise other violent ideologies from Fascism to Antifa (but I repeat myself). What better way to hide a corrupt superego than to pretend to fight it. Satan is getting more subtle! Or at least more convoluted.

Note that the corruption of language -- e.g., "Antifa," "social justice," "transphobia" -- is central to the project of the corrupt superego, which makes sense, since the Logos ramifies into both truth and goodness, and in order to do good, one must know the truth, or What is the Case.

Which brings us to the queen of the virtues, prudence. "Justice, courage, and moderation," writes Pieper, "exist only on the basis of prudence." No one talks about it -- I wonder why? -- but prudence "is the presupposition of all moral goodness." Prudence first, goodness second. Look at Jimmy Carter. Let's stipulate that he's a "good guy." How did that work out with Iran? How did his and Obama's niceness accord with prudence?

Some Christians seem to think that niceness is enough. This is profoundly un-Christian. Yes, innocent as doves. But prudent as serpents.

[T]he realization of the good presupposes knowledge of reality; someone who does not know the state of affairs is not able, in the concrete, to do what is good. Mere "good intentions" -- wanting to be just, for example -- is not sufficient (Pieper).