White Hats and Black Hats

This is becoming a common and edgy meme among truthers these days; “Is Trump a white hat?” or “Ahh, now I see that gAtes was a black hat all along!” What do these terms mean?

Spoiler alert, the meaning couldn’t be more mundane; it just means good people and bad people, virtuous/vicious people.

Why not just say he’s good or she’s bad? She’s virtuous, he’s vicious? We already have these words, why hide them under hats?

In a single word, it’s EGO.

Calling someone virtuous may seem nice, but it’s dangerous. What if they see themselves as not virtuous? They could get puffed up and do something stupid. Or maybe they’re just too humble to accept it socially, and they get embarassed. I notice that all the time with East Asians, especially virtuous ones!

Calling someone vicious will of course lead to tons of problems. If they’re virtuous and you call them vicious, that might be the best situation. As for me, I’d just laugh it off or ignore it, because I KNOW (not think) they’re wrong. Another serious problem here is stigma. Most English speakers don’t actually use the same definition for “vice” that Aristotle does. To most of us, it means someone who is cruel or mean to others. To Aristotle, it means being excessive/deficient in our habituated responses. Even simpler, vice means “missing the target.” In the same way that “sin” can be translated as missing the target. Likewise, virtue simply means hitting the target! It’s not some fancy sacred thing. Saying that Michael Jordan has great ethos is fundamentally the same as saying he’s virtuous.

What if you call out a vicious person for being vicious? Well I do this sometimes. If they’re a little vicious, they typically thank me in the end, because once they accept their error, I’m still right there next to them to offer guidance and love. Espeically with my students, I ALWAYS call out their serious errors, and they ALMOST ALWAYS thank me in the end and improve a lot. But, I’m not so lucky with everyone else. The relationship and context is crucial. If they’re VERY vicious, they typically get defensive, fight back, and it can easily spiral into violence/aggression quickly.

In the end I’ll just say this; I’m glad we have these kinds of code words to talk about things without losing face. But the problem is that many people forget there is a whole science to this, called ETHICS! Especially in the truth community, I see so many people ready to call out pedophiles, but fewer ready to do something about it, and perhaps even fewer who deeply understand why it’s bad within the system of human behavior and character as a whole. The only way to have that knowledge is to read and practice the Ethos. Or perhaps the Analects by Confucius, or similar texts (but not really the Bible, and even the Bhagavad Gita falls short on secular ethics). I know many of you reading this have YOUR OWN WAY of moralizing things, and that’s fine, but that’s just it, it’s YOUR own way. It’s probably not standard/universal. You can build a log cabin in the woods yourself, but it may not be a good standard approach that should be applied to millions of people building their own log cabins in different climates and landscapes.

The Ethos gives ALL people, in all times, a standard, secular and universal approach to ethics. How to understand white and blackhats, how to deal with them, how to become them, all that. It’s not explicit of course, because no such book can be written; it’d be too long. Ethos cuts to the essential core, in around 400 verses. The way you follow it is up to you. But, if you don’t know a standard way to talk about ethics, and you feel proud for calling out some blackhats, just know I’m coming for you on the debate stage, and you’ll probably lose. This whitehat stuff is essentially childish. It’s the good kind of childish, so I’m happy about it, I go along with it, but it’s not sustainable. Virtue and vice is the name of the game, and it’s really not a personal game. Taking this stuff personally is one of the best ways to lose the game. Just play more, and you’ll get better at hitting the target. Stay wise out there.

Etymology; “whitehat” on urbandictionary also refers to a kind of hacker that deliberately breaks his own company’s firewall to make it stronger. I’m guessing that this is the original usage of the word, and it later generalized. And once it generalized, then blackhats came onto the stage. I’m also guessing that they use hats as a metaphor because ALL hackers typically have to wear some kind of hat/mask, they’re not exactly out in the open.

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