Did you do too much or not enough?
Setting boundaries, giving in, and cooperation
We lost the war because we didn’t give it our all. We shouldn’t have fought at all and just given in. So many lives would have been saved.
Would she have left if I did more for her? Or maybe I did too much and she left because I didn’t do enough of something else.
Did I commit to her stupidly or are all my problems a result of me overcommitting to her?
I think I don’t spend enough time at work. I always feel behind. She thinks I spend too much time at work.
A kid who can’t swim is thrown into the pool. He starts flailing. Is he flailing too much or not enough? Or maybe he’s taking the wrong action altogether?
The same can be applied to morality:
Christianity answers the question not by focusing on desire per se, but on loss. The idea is you can and should just turn the other cheek. You not only do you turn the other cheek, you take the instrument created for your own destruction and you carry that too. You become the instrument of evil against yourself. Instead of achieving happiness or nirvana by letting go of desire, you instead reach heaven by emulating a guy who took all the crimes upon himself rather than organizing and retaliating against his enemies
So he allows himself to (in a sense) represent an object of desire to emulate or destroy. He simultaneously gives you a positive thing to desire while making it the least desirable thing you could ever want. It goes beyond asceticism. It’s not self-flagellation, but allowing others to hurt you.
He answers the age-old question: how much effort should you put into defending yourself? At what point do you put your foot down? Large countries can accomplish more and get more for their citizens than small ones. But what if you keep giving in and nobody ever comes to your aid? This is the real thing to optimize for.
If the goal you’re solving for is the most important one, you can never work too hard on it. You can always work harder in its direction. Now that Christianity is on the decline, we need to ask ourselves, is it for lack of effort on the part of Christians, a misunderstanding of the faith, or is the religion on its last legs?
Finding the golden mean is pretty hard.