The idea of monogamy and that Ponzi schemes are bad is just people conforming to the society they were born into. And the fact that he bought off many famous and powerful people was evidence that he is correct in his base assumptions of the world. So he still believes that he has the power to change society and doesn't need to follow any laws. When he gets out of jail in 25 years he is going to be back at it with a vengeance.
Though I'll agree on one point.
His parents had raised him to be a more efficient, cold hearted version of themselves, and even helped him setup the massive shell corporations.
Their liberal connections also greased the wheels into him meeting powerful individuals in politics so early on, something no one else in the industry could.
His brother is even still actively trying to grab that multi-billion dollar healthcare govt contract with their nonprofit.
Not pointing at either political party, simply noting that sam knew to play the system his parents worked in their entire lives.
To me, the issue is not that norms don't or shouldn't exist, but how the parent comment uses norms that are currently at the forefront of social controversy and rapid change with a subtle implication that breaking these norms is worthy of judgement, and an explanation for larger transgressions.
Having views about sex and drugs that break from societal trends is not an indicator that someone is more or less likely to behave as if norms don't exist at all. Most people who practice ENM are fully aware of the delta between societal attitudes and members of that community, and have no illusions about how society will perceive them. They just don't care, and they don't have to, because they're free to pursue relationships with whom they please.
Believing all norms are arbitrary seems more like a product of privilege leading to an unbalanced and limited understanding of the world than a product of any of the individual factors mentioned by the parent.
SBF's father is a member of the Federalist Society, a far-right political group that has taken control of the federal judiciary over the past 2 decades.
The judge that granted SBF bail is also a member of the Federalist Society...
Go on linkedin and you will see people bullshitting just as much if not more, its basically a meme at this point.
What you call anti-social, some other group call it life. And vice versa.
A christian taboo or an american indulgence is not a universal construct. The same construct is not event stable throught time and extremely diverse and functioning social configurations have existed along history. Also, there is such thing as one that was so good that it lasted forever. No reference point to consider a standard.
However, they are local norms and ignoring them will cause contextual mismatch. So indeed, an austistic person may fail to appreciate this and only see the arbitrary aspect of it, and cause trouble.
Muslims are not as a rule poly amorous. Only a select few. Mormons are a very very small portion of society.
Through millennia of cultural iteration we have arrived at monogamy and for good reason. You can already see what a society without monogamy is starting to look like. Thanks to Tinder, birth control and degradation of family values you get a lot of single mothers and 'incels' that have little to no incentive to contribute to society and every incentive to play video games and waste their life away. All from the fact that a few man have sex with all the women and society accepts it
On the other hand one beer calms me down a bit and too much coffee means that I'm a nervous wreck. Three puffs of a cigarette and I have to sit down.
Don't really get your point.
If you know too much coffee is bad for you why on earth would you even drink so much after the first couple of experiments?
I think you have it reversed: because those taboos are pro-social, they exist in virtually all societies. Very few societies condone drug use or polyamory.
> What you call anti-social, some other group call it life.
You can call it “life” (I.e. the pursuit of personal satisfaction) but it’s still anti-social. Using drugs or having multiple partners might feel good to you individually, but it has only negative externalities on society at large. That’s pretty much the definition of anti-social.
> A christian taboo or an american indulgence is not a universal construct.
These rules aren’t “Christian” taboos. Drug use and polyamory are frowned upon across the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Polygamy is accepted in specific contexts in the Muslim world for reasons particular to those societies. Nor are those rules a matter of preference. Quite the opposite: they are nearly universal across diverse societies and cultures because they are rooted in physical, economic, and social realities.
Using sweeping terminology to dismiss drugs is problematic. Does your definition of anti-social drugs include legal drugs like alcohol and caffeine, partially illegal drugs like marijuana and psilocybin, etc?
In what way is having multiple partners inherently harmful to society? You are stating these things as if they are self-evident truths, but that is far from the case, such sweeping claims need some pretty hefty backing.
> Drug use and polyamory are frowned upon across the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.
The prevalence of a social reflex is not sufficient to justify it (see: racism). Setting aside the overly broad definition of "drug use", why would such a default state about polyamory be inherently correct, both through history and into the future?
One could speculate that such intuitions are primarily about one's personal notion of right and wrong, and for most folks that includes a deep sense of commitment to their partner. For the monogamist, the very idea that their partner could be participating with other partners is incompatible with their value system, and therefore they would never except that in a partner.
And that's perfectly fine.
But there are arguably social configurations that are perfectly compatible with polyamory. As long as all parties involved are on board, I see no further social harm unless you place particularly high value on procreation.
As it often goes with religious arguments, one need not impose those beliefs on others, nor is the existence of people with other belief systems a problem purely on the basis that they are non-conforming.
There is this tiny sect you might have heard of called Hinduism.
Come on. And God's in Hinduism are polyamoous except Rama. All of this is well known.
Nobody that's actually raised in modern mainstream Hindu society is conditioned to accept drug consumption or polyamory. The only way one might draw a contrary conclusion is if they were from the outside looking in, merely studying the mythology and totally ignoring what modern Hindu society has looked like in the last 100 years leading up to today.
I was raised in an extremely orthodox Hindu household, worshipping all of the Gods of Hinduism. Polyamory/polygamy is unheard of — if anyone in one's local temple engaged in it, they would be the subject of everyone's gossip. Ditto drug use...
that's not a partisan position, there's fruitcakes of every political persuasion who think they're above the law. for every poly leftist who thinks ponzi schemes are justified because the money can be used to promote veganism, there's a person on the right who thinks ponzi schemes are justified because money can be used to promote christian values.
Just because something is socially constructed does not give a person living within that society the power to deconstruct it. That's where SBF's hubris distorts his reality. Society is an arbitrary social construct and social rules can change, but individual people (even ones who steal $9B) have little power to effect that change.
given a group of people, it is much more efficient to e.g. task some people to farming, some to textile production, and some to animal rearing, than expecting each person to spend a portion of their day doing each task
and since most people prefer using fewer calories to accomplish the tasks necessary for living, some natural gravitations towards 'society' start springing up
That does not follow. That people violate norms does not mean norms are "arbitrary". We aren't automatons living in some kind of Platonic universe. The good can be frustrated for various reasons, and in your example, by the very people people making the aforementioned immoral decisions. They are frustrating their own good and the common good.
Good and sound norms are rooted in the human good as determined by human nature. Part of what makes humans human is our social nature, which entails society, which further entails a common good because there is no society without a common good. Liberalism gets things backwards by atomizing human beings and construing anything common as a voluntary cession in some way. So, for example, private property is construed as something more basic, prior to, and even in competition with the common good, whereas the traditional view is that private property exists precisely to secure the common good which means it is secondary in this sense.