Understanding, Book I, final section

Continuing here https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/e/an-essay-concerning-human-understanding/summary-and-analysis/book-i-innate-ideas 

 The usual argument given in support of the belief that moral principles are innate is that there is universal agreement concerning them.

 They mean parochial universal. "I've never met anyone..." In their experience, it's universal, it's just that they've deliberately, conveniently, avoided looking outside their little village.  

 Regardless, it's an invalid principle. There's universal agreement on all sorts of wrong ideas.
 I imagine a funny scene. Imagine that before every major scientific experiment, voters were polled about the results. How long until you got universal agreement that was falsified by the experiment? Now imagine the next major election, someone brought up how often the voters were wrong to invalidate the vote. "They voted for the wrong guy. Don't put him in."
 Of course what would really happen is [the memory hole]. The idea of voting before experiments would be quietly dropped to avoid the guaranteed embarrassment. 

Everyone knows, it is argued, that it is wrong to lie, to steal,

 They know it so well they let the government steal all the time. If you suggest the government stop stealing, the freak right the fuck out. It's not some mild, offhand position. They also let Locke lie like a rug. 

 To this argument, Locke replies that there is no universal agreement about the rightness or wrongness of any particular action.

 Hey! That's true and relevant!
 Of course it's because some folk will defend liars when they want to tell the same lie. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The lack of agreement is illusory. "The government should be allowed to steal, see, because I should be allowed to steal. If we stop the government stealing, how am I supposed to eat without working?" 

 Distinguishing between cooperation and defection is objectively trivial. The problem is the defectors will lie. "I'm not defecting! You're defecting! You're the deviant!" The issue isn't distinguishing between justice and vice, it's distinguishing between rhetoric and logic. Logic doesn't defend itself, as it is eternal and immutable. Rhetoric faces harsh selection, being ever more persuasive and ever more harmful.

 Will Locke ever bring up the fact that humans lie?
 Or will he praise it with faint damn? It's all just a little whoopsie. No no you can't possibly determine that this liar is lying, limits of knowledge etc etc, you should let him get away with it. Could happen to anyone.

It may appear that such agreement exists if practically everyone believes that it is wrong for a person intentionally to violate his agreements

 The pattern emerges. We should doubt the veracity of the non-contradiction principle. We should doubt the veracity of this agreement principle. These things definitely need to be questioned...

 Hey Locke, how about you attack the innateness of an idea that's actually wrong? At least by accident, because you're not intentionally avoiding it? Oh, I see, he is intentionally avoiding it. Very clever. Probably too clever; wouldn't work if his readers didn't already have the answer key.

 What does it mean for all men to subscribe to the principle of justice so long as they have different notions about what is the just or right thing to do in particular instances? Obviously, it can mean nothing.

 Obviously, it can mean some are lying about it for narcissistic gain. Whoops. Oh? It's not a mistake? Locke meant to forward the false conclusion? Ah, right, of course. 

Justice or any other virtue can mean nothing more than the particular instances that are included in it.

 Just some hippy bullshit from the 1600s. Bailey: "It's all, like, relative, man." Out of nowhere and going nowhere, too.  

 The basis for this belief lies in the fact that human nature is so constituted that everyone has a desire for happiness and an aversion to pain and misery.

 Failure of definition. Happiness is defined as the set of things you desire. Pain and misery are defined as the set of things you have an aversion to. If you don't dislike it, it's not pain. If you don't value it, it's not wealth. 

 Note also this is a shit definition of happiness. Imagine a father jumps on a grenade to save his son. Is he happy about being blown to bits? He's averse to filling his abdominal cavity with shrapnel, but he's more averse to seeing his son's abdominal cavity get filled with shrapnel. Pursuit of wealth is often unpleasant, but journalist-hedonism can't be unpleasant by definition. 
 This idea of happiness is pushed precisely because it leads you astray, away from what you value. 

One learns through his experience that certain kinds of action are normally productive of painful consequences, and it is for this reason that he comes to regard them as wrong.

 One learns not to eat one's vegetables, because it's morally wrong, lmao.
 Not coincidentally, this idea also means you shouldn't run for endurance. Journalist/baby hedonism. Toddlers can't build muscle and shouldn't try. 

 On the other hand, actions that normally tend to produce happiness are approved.

 What a φαγγωτ. Back to the bathhouse, Locke.

 Hence it comes that, at any rate, we desire to be rid of the present evil, which we are apt to think nothing absent can equal
Men’s daily complaints are a loud proof of this: the pain that any one actually feels is still of all other the worst; and it is with anguish they cry out,—‘Any rather than this: nothing can be so intolerable as what I now suffer.’
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10615/10615-h/10615-h.htm#chap1.02

 Problem: they're mostly lying. Then, as now, when Christian men complained, it was a compliment. Masochism. "Thanks for whipping me, master!"
 You can tell because of how little they will work to avoid the pain. Even if you browbeat or outmanoeuvre them into forgoing the pain, they will immediately adopt another.

It is this approval that, according to Locke, constitutes the real meaning of the term "good" when it is used with a moral connotation.

 Postmodernism, 1600s edition. Reality as socially constructed.
 This works rhetorically because, in fact, it is what peasants mean by [good]. It means daddy or the local lord or the pope approved of it. It means to have high social status.

To be sure, the meanings of such terms as "good" and "bad" and "right" and "wrong" are not determined solely by the immediate consequences that follow particular actions. It is necessary to take into consideration their long-range consequences in relation to life as a whole. 

 Locke was aware of the tension between long-term and short-term.
 Again, a very skillful liar. He refutes his own argument, to form a motte and bailey. What, did he accidentally say all that stuff about 'present' evil? Of course not. It's a hypnotist trick: say it first to anchor you to it, then "modify" it so it means the opposite of what he said - after most readers have stopped listening. Any critic pointing out the hypnotists trick, the bailey, is pointed to the "amendment" he puts up later, the motte. 

 In short, if you're not a liar, you put the tension between short and long term up front. The keystone of the arch goes on top.

 Locke reveals he's not incompetent when he accidentally alights on these extremely relevant points. He could have fixed all these errors, but he chose not to. The "errors" were intentional.

One's belief in moral rules or principles is an expression of his feelings of approval or disapproval. For this reason, it is not proper to speak of them as true or false since this would imply agreement or disagreement with some external standard that exists prior to, and independent of, experience.

 More postmodernism.
 Locke pretending he's unaware of the law of non-contradiction.
 If I find some action rewarding, then it is objectively true that I find it rewarding. It's true even if I don't know I'll find it rewarding. I can't change my mind and experience it differently. 

 I think this is a Satanic anti-truth vaccination strategy, done via clever phrasing. If you take Locke at his word, you become a hippy postmodernist or postmodernist hippy. If you're skeptical, you try to disprove the idea that morality is rooted in emotion. Locke distracts you from the question of whether emotions are, in some sense, objective. 

 Problem (for Lockeans) emotions are, in the relevant sense, objective. If I have an experience, that experience becomes like an "external" standard, and the reasons I experience it that way exist prior to, and independent of, the experience. 

 That is, when I see a blue cube, it is objectively and irrefutably true that I experience the blue as blue. Blue is blue, regardless of whether I'm experiencing it or not. The things someone like me approves of are approved of by individuals like me, even if none of us exist. 

 Basically what I'm saying is you shouldn't be surprised when the plain, simple, immediate postmodernist reading of Locke is what Lockeans believe in. It looks like a duck because it's a fucking duck, cue midwit meme. Woke Democrats is exactly what Locke intended. 

some external standard that exists prior to, and independent of, experience. There is, Locke believes, no sound basis for believing that any such standard exists. 

 Your experiences are independent of mine, and mine are independent of yours. Whoops.
 Sogol. Locke knew where he wanted to end up, and didn't look for any reason the train shouldn't end up there. 

  Here we find that at least a great many of what have been recognized as important moral beliefs have been violated in a wholesale manner and without any feelings of remorse or disapproval on the part of the society in which the actions occurred. This could scarcely be expected if the rules in question had been innate.

 Second problem: innately knowing the rules and innately caring about them are distinct properties. 

 Romans 3: humans are, in fact, evil, and prefer to violate the rules whenever possible. That's [happiness]. Adam didn't eat the apple because of a snake or due to [misogyny]. Personnel is policy: Adam ate the apple because he was told not to. His personnel policy was a rule-violating policy. Notice how genesis tells you what Eve was thinking, but not Adam? Eve: "Here have this." Adam: *bites* No intermediate step, allegedly. Either he was Eve's slave, or he had something to hide. I think the 'snake' was just Adam's dong, being used as a puppet from behind a bush or something.
 The snake and the girl were merely convenient excuses...shame Jehovah didn't buy them.

 First problem: narcissism. Innate morals aren't necessary context-insensitive. As a stupid example, imagine the rule: [don't let anyone die of exposure]. This "innate" rule would and should look very different in a Swedish winter as contrasted with a tropical paradise. Further, it's hardly impossible to socialize an innate rule away. Locke tells us neither that this society did believe in the rule, nor that they should have believed in it.
 That some societies have different rules tells us nothing about innateness.

 Ideas that are innate remain constant in spite of changing circumstances, but this is not true of the rules pertaining to human conduct.

 Even if the rules remain innate (they don't, the brain is plastic) the connection between the rules and behaviour doesn't need to remain constant. 

  What has been recognized as right at one time and under a given set of circumstances will be regarded as wrong at other times and under different conditions.

 Trying to confuse peasants with appearances. "The details change, therefore the underlying essence must have changed."
 If today you're hungry and you eat apples, and tomorrow you're on the moon and eat dried jerky, then the nature of hunger must have changed, see. Perfectly sogical.
 Liars always try to steer away from details; the more relevant, the harder they steer. The more details you offer, the easier it is to find the false note, the contradiction.

 

 Next we see both Locke and his opponents were fucked in the head.

 In the third chapter of Book I, Locke concludes the discussion about innate ideas with an attempt to show that the idea of God is not innate. This is in many respects the most important part of his argument, for it was on the basis of a belief in innate ideas that so many of Locke's contemporaries had sought to prove the existence of God. There was a sense, too, in which the belief in God was regarded as the foundation for the principles of morality.

 Just because one (bad, dumb) proof of God is sunk, it doesn't mean God is disproven.
 Allegedly this is a book on epistemology. Epistemology: you're allowed to believe in anything which isn't disproven. You can believe in things without proof if you want, you merely have to acknowledge the reliability implications of a lack of proof. 

 More importantly, any real theologian recognizes [God] as a metaphor for existence in a wide scope, and they have done so as long as their are written records to attest to their beliefs.
 Yeah I think believing that stuff exists can be called [[innate]]. Disproving some particular conception of God merely means the idea needs repairing. If any particular conception of [God] is disproven, then it is immediately replaced by some other conception of existence in a wide scope.

 Once again with the [[hate crime]] dynamic. Locke has already established that morality is rooted in subjective experiences, why does he also need to talk about divine whatever?
 The idea of [[hate]] crime exists to promote non-[[hate]] crime. Opposing godly morality exists to promote godly immorality. 

 Since the rules governing human conduct were regarded as laws, it was inconceivable that they could have come into existence without a lawgiver

 No, the Greeks conceived of this problem already. Euthypro, just for a start. They elaborated more solutions than Locke could explain in his whole lifetime.

 Put simply, if a lawgiver can bring himself into existence, then a law could also bring itself into existence. If autocreation is allowed, then autocreation is a solution.

 and the lawgiver must be more than human, for the law was the standard by which human conduct was judged.

 Equivocation. We're talking politics and sociology. The ones judging humans are other humans. This isn't the laws that condemn you to various afterlives.

 Of all the ideas that had been believed to be innate, the idea of God was considered to be the most important.

 Locke tells on himself when he agrees that it's important.

 Many paragraphs ago: "Just because it's innate, doesn't mean it's true." Yeah. So who cares? God can be innate if he wants to be. We're concerned with truth and falsehood, not random irrelevant side-properties. (Just as sheriffs should be concerned with innocence or guilt, cooperation or defection, not [[hate]] or [[love]] or whatever.)

 When he agrees that the innateness is important, he denounces his own argument. "Sure I said all these things, but I didn't mean it." Very [fuck you dad].

 The universality of a belief of this kind was often interpreted to mean that the idea had been implanted in human minds by the Creator himself and for the reason that it was absolutely essential for human welfare.

 Hey Lockeans, don't argue with idiots. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.
 Again, [God] means existence broadly. Worshipping the grandeur of the cosmos is a human universal? Sounds plausible, and also not important or profound. You can't prove anything you want to prove with this fact.

What he did not accept was the belief that the idea of God was innate.

 Brother, your OCD is untreated, please do something about the obsession.

  He believed that he could show conclusively that it is not innate, and if there were no good reasons for believing the idea of God was innate, there would be less reason for thinking that any other idea was innate. 

 Reminder that Locke knew many ideas were innate, whether [[God]] is one of them or not, and he's just lying about it. 

 Locke wanted to show that these meanings are acquired through experience rather than being impressed on the mind by some other force.

Hey! That's true! What's a truth doing here? Did it get lost? Did Locke screw up? Maybe he thought words really were innate.

 A small child will know that it is impossible for one object to be identical with another object, but the child will not know the meaning of the words "impossible" or "identical" until his experience has taught him what they mean.

 "Locke again admits he knows of several innate ideas." This is pure contempt. Locke thought that even if he lied this transparently, nobody would call him on it. He basically wasn't wrong.

 If the idea had been innate, it would have remained with them in spite of any evidence either for or against the belief.

 I mean, even if innate ideas worked like this, they could just be lying. Or the anthropologists could be mistaken.
 Imagine the primitive Jedi tribe. "No we don't believe in gods of any kind, we only believe in a conscious, intentional force which pervades all matter and energy through all of time, which can be harnessed by sitting around in contemplation. (If you have the right bloodline.)" Total atheists. 

 It gets real hard to imagine Locke is doing anything other than an anti-Christian polemic. He simply has an epic dedication to the smokescreen. 

 Let me remind you of my narrative on the Enlightenment: a bunch of Sophists mistakenly believed Christianity was sacred, and intentionally tried to destroy it so as to make the world more profane. 

 It should be noted in this connection that Locke believed in the existence of God and did not question the importance of this belief

 It should be noted that Locke claimed to believe in Jesus, and asserted that Jesus was in fact holy. All the actual behaviour points to a staunch atheist, denying the divinity of the heavens. 

  There are plenty of false ideas that have been held universally, and there are plenty of true ones that have not been accepted by all people.

 "Yeah, uh, like 90% of what I've been saying is a waste of time." Locke knew or should have known. Of course, only wasting time logically; for the purpose of Sophist rhetoric, it was all very important.

 Having shown that the idea of God is not innate, it seems reasonable to conclude that no other idea is innate, for, according to the popular conception, everything in the universe is dependent on God.

 Oh good. Assuming peasant prejudices are true, we have a knock-down killshot argument.
 Wait didn't someone say something about the masses having no inclination or ability to ratiocinate...who was it...

 Locke concludes his discussion of this topic by showing that the idea of substance is not innate.

 "Locke proves his proofs are unreliable."
 Hearing is innate. Vision is innate. Distance measurement is innate. Something is innate which allows the baby to learn words (nobody knows how that works, but it must). 

 So yes, this is about Locke proving narcissist Communism. Nothing is innate; everyone is fundamentally identical. Sogol. He knew where he wanted to end up, it was merely a question of how to pretend to get their legitimately.

 So yes, [human] is a Communist shibboleth. In sociology it is never necessary to specify [human] anything, unless you need to show off how much of a theocratic narcissist you are. 

 His argument on this point follows from the fact that the nature of substance is not given through either sensation or reflection, and consequently we can have no knowledge of it at all.

 Straight lie. Locke did not believe this. 

 Locke does not deny the existence of either of these kinds of substance

 Given how often the lady doth protest too much, I expect Locke denied the existence of both kinds. Everything is socially constructed.

 The sensations that we do have may very well be the sensations of something, but to use Locke's words, it is "a something we know not what."

 A common cry for tyrannical dogmatics. "I don't have the last word on anything - but you know even less, so listen slavishly to me."
 Also, tediously retreading Greek Skeptics like the truck stop retreads a stripped truck tire.