FIX LATER Agora: Contrast to modern Western civilization
Why standards matter
Very few people in the early days of doing business or working with others understand why standards are important. Trusting the average person is a norm and working with the average person is normal.
People of standards can be trusted at their handshake. Their word is their bond, their integrity, their irrevocable promise. Working with anything less than people with such standards is a recipe for constant turmoil. Unfortunately, people change civilization changes.
Modern Western society has become a cacophony of complacency, greed, and naivety that is destroying the very fabric of its success.
As Agorans we reject the everything that has caused Western society to veer dangerously off course into the abyss.
Modern society has become focused on
As Agorans, we dare to dream of a way of doing things that is profoundly different than modern Western society.
Western | Agoran |
|---|---|
Focus on the individual | Focus on the community |
Focus on self-reliance | Focus on interdependence |
Money-driven | Impact/empathy-driven |
Inclusion focus | Excellence focus |
Equality driven | |
Greed | |
Rationalism | Rationalism |
Jealousy and complaints | Love life/Thankfulness |
3 crimes of the complacent:
Downplaying: To close one's eyes to the potential implications of one's actions.
Empty complaining.: Complain without attempting to repair
Ungratefulness: Feast on riches and honor without gratefulness.
to allow this terrible cycle of ruins to riches to rags to continue.
1. Moral Cowardice: To know what is right but do what is safe.
2. Intellectual Dishonesty: To feign ignorance or confusion to win an argument.
3. Virtue Signaling: To broadcast goodness to the public to mask private inaction.
4. Scapegoating: To sacrifice the innocent to absolve the guilty.
5. Projection: To condemn in others what one excuses in oneself.
6. Fatalism: To accept failure as destiny to avoid the pain of trying.
7. Envy: To despise the success one refused to earn.
8. Flattery: To trade false praise for unearned favor.
9. Drifting: To move through life without a self-determined aim.
10. Cynicism: To use distrust as an excuse for disengagement.
11. Confirmation Bias: To seek only the data that flatters one's ego.
12. Rationalization: To invent logic to justify an emotional impulse.
13. Entitlement: To demand the harvest without planting the seed.
14. Hedonism: To pursue fleeting pleasure at the cost of long-term joy.
15. Meddling: To interfere in others' lives to avoid fixing one's own.
16. Tribalism: To hate the outsider more than one loves the truth.
17. Procrastination: To trade a difficult future for an easy present.
18. Gaslighting: To deny reality to control the perception of another.
19. Hubris: To believe oneself exempt from the laws of consequence.
20. Nihilism: To reject meaning to escape responsibility.
21. Hypocrisy: To enforce standards one refuses to obey.
22. Deflection: To change the subject to avoid looking in the mirror.
23. Greed: To hoard resources one cannot possibly use.
24. Sloth: To refuse the exertion required to maintain dignity.
25. Resentment: To relive past slights to justify present bitterness.
26. Gossiping: To trade others' secrets for a temporary social bond.
27. Gatekeeping: To hoard access to maintain artificial superiority.
28. Strawmanning: To fight a weak distortion to avoid facing the strong truth.
29. Blind Loyalty: To follow a leader over a cliff to avoid the burden of thinking.
30. Moral Licensing: To use a past good deed to justify a present bad one.