A World Without Sacred Cows and Self-Righteousness

If you debate about a topic dear to your heart, sooner or later, you reach an impasse. Today, the debate between liberals and conservatives has reached that point. Trump’s victory destabilized many liberals’ worldviews, as it violated their sacred principles. “Tolerance” is a virtuous word among them, but there is always a line where they become intolerant if someone crosses it. Intolerance itself isn’t the problem; rather, it’s the assumption that this line is universally accepted. It is not debatable. It is self-evident. Different deconstructive philosophers have given this phenomenon different names. Richard Rorty called it “final vocabulary.” Jacques Lacan called it “master signifier” and “quilting points.” Jacques Derrida called it “transcendental signified.” We can call it “sacred cow.” According to Lacan, who we are as a subject is constructed on this sacred cow, so when it is challenged or contradicted, our sense of self destabilizes.

Let’s say you witness a genocide and cannot fathom the morality of it being subjective or relative. You are convinced that it has to be universal. To demonstrate how this phenomenon works, I’ll deconstruct this sacred cow. In this example, the master signifier is something like “humanity.” You assume its value and significance are sacred, self-evident, and unquestionable. This has a cascading effect on every decision you make. From this foundational assumption, you conclude various actions and ideas as right and wrong. You eventually write the whole narrative about the world. Thus, if someone challenges your foundational assumption of “humanity,” your entire worldview destabilizes.

So I ask: “Who said humanity is more important than other life forms on this earth?” Confronted by this challenge, you realize you have never asked such a question. Even if you have asked and answered this question, I can keep deconstructing the next assumption like a child who keeps asking “why?” forever. In other words, you realize for the first time that it is indeed only an assumption. But the threat of destabilization is so unsettling that you struggle to process the question rationally. In my experience, this is the point at which most people will say something like, “That’s just an absurd question. I’m not even going to honor that with response.”

It’s not that you don’t want to honor it. The truth is that you don’t have an answer for it because you assumed that everyone accepts it as a self-evident truth. But let’s question it further. There’s truly no objective way to determine which life forms are more important on Earth. The results of natural selection do not imply that they are more valuable or important. The survivors simply were better at adapting to changes. There is no deeper meaning beyond it. Just because humans are more intelligent than the rest of the species, it does not mean that we are more valuable. It simply means that in the current environment, intelligence is helpful in surviving, and this can change. The earth does not care if “humanity” survives.

If we observed one ant colony committing genocide against another, it would simply be a scientific curiosity, not a moral dilemma. Ultimately, morality is just self-serving codes designed for the human species to thrive. Other species being driven to extinction by us would welcome humans committing genocides.

Such an argument sounds utterly absurd to many people, but we at least need to accept that logic does not give us a universal answer. If we pursue logic in this fashion, it tells us that nothing is sacred, self-evident, or universal, and more importantly, it tells us that we are in denial of it. To put it another way, our sense of self, built on these assumptions, is but a piece of fiction, even though we try to desperately hold on to it.

When you call someone “intolerant,” you mean they’re unwilling to consider that their sacred cow might be wrong, but when someone challenges your sacred cow, you, too, become intolerant, but you justify it by saying he crossed the line, assuming that the line is universal, that the universality is on your side.

Frustrated, you might ask: “If so, nothing matters. Why bother doing anything? We won’t get anything done or agree on anything because everything is relative and subjective.” Ironically, this reaction, too, is based on the assumption of universality. You are thinking: If we cannot rely on logic to arrive at the correct answer, we cannot agree on anything. For some, it might not be logic that they rely on; it might be Jesus or the Bible. Whatever it might be, the assumption is that we humans cannot agree on anything unless a third party, something nonhuman like science, logic, or God, can tell us what’s right and wrong. 

But this is what democracy is for. If science, logic, or God could tell us the right answers, we wouldn’t need democracy. In other words, we are already operating without this third-party arbiter, yet you still want to believe that universal principles are driving our decisions. Ultimately, this reliance on the third-party arbiter is what religion is, even if you do not consider yourself religious, because no such thing exists, yet you still insist on it existing.

Once you can break free of your religion, you’ll be able to see that everyone has not only the right but also a moral obligation to make assumptions. We generally perceive “assumptions” as something bad and strive to avoid them, but our society or our lives cannot function without them. So, by all means, continue making assumptions. Here, we come full circle. The only difference is that now, we have a certain type of humility because nothing is sacred, immutable, or universal. We can be wrong about anything, so we cease to be self-righteous. We become eager to change our minds and curious to learn different perspectives. As long as you aren’t preoccupied with being perpetually right or having the final word, you won’t be apathetic, impartial, or neutral. You will still take a firm subjective position on every issue, and democracy will determine the path forward for us. There is no need for you to make sure you are absolutely and permanently right in your decision. Collectively, the wisdom of the crowd will take care of that, even if you are wrong. Whether you like it or not, that is the best we can do.