Comments on “Nobility”

This topic seems to have a lot of potential for getting your point across. I would expect that most people are extremely familiar with both the “special”and “ordinary” stances, but for some reason I’m not aware of really sophisticated ideas in the public consciousness on this topic, the way there are for ethics and purpose.

So with fewer established ideas jumping to mind, maybe people will face less resistance in considering your thinking from this point of view?

This sentence:

Nobility is using whatever abilities we have in service of others.

about nobility somehow reminds my of a way out of nihilism I found:

Meaning is (only) relative, and for the sake of things you can do: Meaningful actions are such that help structures to develop/accomplish/act out/… the potential they have within themselves.

I’m confused by the distinction between specialness and nobility. I associate “nobility” with the concept of “noblesse oblige,”responsibility implied by circumstance of birth. When I think of the special “Chosen One” in mythology, I see it as a metaphor for how ones life circumstances are not chosen by oneself but must be dealt with by oneself, through the cultivation of potential abilities which are not of ones own selection. Everyone is “chosen” in this sense. The idea of being “Unique, just like everybody else!” gets made fun off, but I don’t think it’s actually illogical. Uniqueness in the sense of being within ones own life context and possessing ones specific qualities or potential qualities is a form of uniqueness which exists in abundance.

However, this might be too obscure of a way of understanding “specialness” and not what people really mean intuitively when they say they long to be “special” or that something was meaningful because it was “special”.