Linux DHCP

In my last post I spoke about how tracking incentives can lead to the
answers for why the world is in such bad shape. If you take that a bit
further you can see that the role of a parent, a school, or a society should
be to create good incentive systems in our children.

That made me think: if there are good incentive systems, what are the bad
ones? Asking that question to myself immediately yielded the worst one:

These are horrible systems because they don’t coincide with a reality that
humans interact with. They see a world where the incentive is to be evil,
not good. Those who take advantage of others are rewarded, so they emulate
that — very logical, really.

This is exacerbated by the fact that God is supposed to be punishing those
who do these things, but he isn’t. So essentially, the only reason not to be
evil and live a life of luxury is because someone invisible, all-powerful,
and supremely benevolent will damn you to eternal pain and suffering if you
don’t.

That’s not a good reason to be good, and we shouldn’t teach people that it
is. This is the reason so many Catholic school kids become the bane of
society. It’s because upon seeing the real world and leaving the influence
created by the school, the main reason for them not doing evil is
lifted from them, i.e. fear of God. They come to say, “Wait a minute, nobody
else believes that crap — those people were crazy. I’m not going to hell for
this stuff, everyone’s doing it, and damn — it sure feels good…yeehah!”

In other words, once they stop believing to any major degree, in the
all-powerful, invisible, God who will punish you eternally, every single
reason to not cheat and steal is removed. You aren’t taught in religious
school that it’s universally wrong to hurt others. There is no “universal”.
There is only God. And without God there is no morality; hence, for many, if
you stop believing in the extreme, Biblical God taught in religious schools
there’s no longer any reason to be moral.

This is a horrible way to teach people to be good. Unless you’re a small
child, you shouldn’t need a “reason” to be good to others. Be good because
it’s “right” to be good, not because something bad will happen to you if you
don’t. This is harder to teach than, “You’ll burn in hell”, but it’s the
only path to a truly moral society.