ethnodat, Author at The Cracked Door

Taking a Few Weeks off from Posting

I am going to be traveling throughout the countryside until May 28th, 2025, so I will not have consistent internet access. Thus, I will be taking a break from my weekly blog posts every Wednesday. I plan to resume them once I get back.

I will also not likely post my daily haikus. I will still write haikus everyday. I not can but love writing these while traveling, but I will not usually have the internet to upload them here every day like I normally day. Once I get back, I hope to bulk upload all the haikus I wrote as I traveling.

Thank you for your patience and support. I hope you have an amazing April and May.

Chīwit Understands Her Ghosts

There was a Thai woman named Chīwit. She lived in a big house with her dog, and everyday she would see ghosts that no one else could see. Mostly, they were friendly, and she felt drawn to the ghosts to learn about their daily lives and their world.

Others in her town told her to stay away, that the ghosts were scary and dangerous. But that wasn’t her experience. They were like normal people living their lives with hopes, dreams, concerns, and yes flaws.

One day she decides to move to New York, and as she adjusts, she gets lonely and starts missing the ghosts. She tries calling her closest ghost friend so much that the ghost just ends up coming to New York to see her.

“I don’t understand this city and this culture,” she explained. “But most of all, I don’t understand why I don’t see any ghosts here. People don’t seem to believe in them.”

“The ghosts are everywhere,” the ghost responded. “But most choose not to see us.”

“Why don’t people see ghosts? Why are they so scared of you?”

“People see in us the others lives that could have been. They think this world is what is best for them, and they can only see our lives as scary and as a threat. That’s why they think they haunt us. Really their own minds haunt them with what could have been.”

That was when she realized that her ghosts were really people too. They were living the lives she and the communities had rejected when they made decisions each day about how to live life. For each other decision they could have chosen makes a ripple, and out of that, these ghosts appear embodying what could have been.

With that, she started seeing them everywhere. In every community, town, and city, ghosts would bursts forth. Some promising, and some desperate, some scary. She noticed people only paid attention when the ghosts made a better choice and thus lived better lives than they are, these ghosts being a sign of regret for what they did. As she started paying attention to all the ghosts, though, she would see the ones that were less fortunate, that looked to her with longing for the choices she made. Her version of herself was in the middle, with better and worse versions of herself, which gave her comfort that she was doing all right.

And she realized that every single day, she would have to understand and make peace with these ghosts. As all they were doing was helping her figure out how to live her own life.

Is “The Good Place” Really Good? Using Foucault to Explore Afterlife Engineering

I recently rewatched “The Good Place” (spoiler warning), one of my favorite shows from the last ten years, and I noticed so much more about the show the second time around. I decided to write a miniseries analyzing different facets of the show – some complimentary, some critical – as a tribute to one of the most thoughtful and interesting sitcoms on mainstream US television. I hope you enjoy:

The Good Place’s vision of personality reform is certainly innovative: Humans upon death go to a type of purgatory where a group of supernatural beings (made up of both demons and angels) force them to confront their biggest flaws and grow as people. Once these imperfections have been fixed, and they have been perfected, they get to go to heaven, where they can enjoy the remainder of their existence. This seems like an improvement from torturing everyone for all time that modern humans endured up to that point, but it still feels insufficient. This reflection will use the social philosopher Michel Foucault to analyze this new system.

A good starting point is to ask, “What are someone’s flaws, and how can we be certain that another can both know these flaws and put them in a situation where they must confront and fix their flaws?” These flawed supernatural beings can objectively know someone’s flaws and with enough time (not a problem in the infinite afterlife) eventually chisel humans down until they change who they are in a way that addresses that flaw. The show thus answers yes to both of these, but I find both ideas, especially the first, rather debatable.

The show presents this as good, because everyone eventually gets to go to heaven, and sure, such a universalism is certainly better than universal damnation, but it ignores the complexity of determining someone’s fundamental flaw. What if the supernatural beings have it wrong, interpreting something as a flaw that is not? Does a person’s flaws exist objectively in the first place? For example, historical figures receive intense debate about what about their lives are “good” or “bad”, virtues or vices, understandable, criticizable, or somewhere in the middle? On a practical level, these same beings had been so unable to empathize with humanity that they condemned all modern humans to damnation. How could such creatures really work through the complexities of a person’s entire life to weed out their weeds and their chaff? The sitcom depicts them as a positive, lively reform, but in say a horror, supernatural beings that use their control over us to try to remake us into what they desire would be nightmare fuel.

Let’s consider what Michel Foucault, the French philosopher in the middle of the 1900s, would have to say about this. He extensively analyzed how modern Western societies focused on human reform, in order to “improve” people, fix their flaws, and make them supposedly useful or productive members of society. One key example is his book, “Discipline and Punishment,” where he discusses a shift in modern Europe a few hundred years ago from the state publicly and violently beating and executing criminals to a focus on locking them into reforming prisons to reteach them, all to remake them into useful members of society. For him, the punishment of criminals shifted from a vagrant punishment for daring to defy the government and the society at large by doing crime, an intense yet skin-deep attack on their bodies, towards the more “civilized” prisons, where instead of intense, physical violence but must experience the thousand little cuts of the state trying to reform the prisoners’ very selves.

The beings in the show make the exact same change. The demons of hell tortured humans with brutal physical violence (like forcing strange creatures into their butts and genitals), relishing their power over the humans’ bodies. The torture was extensive seemingly to punish people for their evilness. The new system, however, focuses on reforming their very selves, in order to fix their flaws. In the episode where the demons learn how to construct these learning experiences, they teach the demons how to use each human’s flaws to psychologically torture them: to put the human in high-pressure situations where they must encounter their biggest psychological insecurities, all in the name of reforming them. This may have a pragmatic pedagogical strategy to wean the demons off the mentality and slowly over the course of the lessons encouraging more positive ways to engage with people’s flaws, but either way, this illustrates how spiritually dark the idea of forcibly reforming people can become.

Now these differ from the states that Foucault in important ways. The Medieval and early modern European states that Foucault wanted to warn against threatening their social order by making a public spectacle of mutilating their bodies; in contrast to the demons seemed to do so partially to entertain and humiliate and partially because they thought the humans they were torturing were incorrigibly awful and deserved to suffer for it. More importantly, the new purgatory state at the end of the series was decidedly not a punishment but a refinement, and after they passed through it, each human got to live in heaven on their own terms for their own ends, not to benefit the community, in contrast to the idea of remaking prisoners into productive members of society.

At the same time, however, it is not a coincidence that the show writers would construct a similar process to a reformist prison. They are subconsciously tapping into the similar energy that Foucault was analyzing in contemporary Western societies. This energy makes the idea of changing people into what everyone else considers the best versions of them. It can also manifest as an energy to pressure people into optimizing themselves to perfect themselves either for their own good or the good of their communities, and contrasts with, say, the idea of engaging with people how they are and take collective responsibility for our role in shaping the so-called “bad people” into who they have become. My question is, Would such an afterlife, where supernatural beings who have absolute control over our entire selves (including of our very consciousness and memories) and use that control to remake us how they see fit, really be such a good world after all?

What Journeying throughout South America Taught Me about Find Meaning in Everyday Life

These are some of the lessons about life I learned during my trip in South America in 2024:

1) The Importance of Balance: I think I tried to do too much during the trip, hurting my mental health. Each day I gave myself too many items on my to-do list. This made me less in the moment, detracting from my ability to meet people and be open where I was. It also made me more stressed and irritable.

2) Always another adventure: No matter what happens, life goes on. There’s always another day, another struggle. When you travel, you don’t stay in a place long enough to really experience the benefits of community or the long-term consequences of your actions. You can keep certain positive things – like your memories, photos and most importantly, any good relationships you made along the way – but many negatives you can continue to leave behind. That person you accidentally offended because of a cross-cultural difference, you will never have to see again, for example.

This can create a type of Groundhog Day-like nihilistic feeling, if you allow it to. You are freed from certain types of consequences and can focus on those personal experiences, memories, and relationships that you do take with you. Navigating this can be very different from regular, settled life, and it took me many months to get used to that. You must create your own meaning as you go.

3) Finding Meaning: I think this trip made me think more about how I should find meaning and fulfillment in life. I learned how vacuous the typical “career life” can be, and how beautiful and fascinating other parts of the world are. At the same time, seeing more and more places took some of the novelty of adventure. It forced me to be more at peace with myself. I had to pause during the key moments and realize that I will be forever who I am and that I need to figure out how to find satisfaction in that.

Contentedness does not mean I do not have passions or strive to do new things: knowing myself, I would not feel fulfilled with stasis. Contentedness, for me at least, means that I feel fulfilled as I follow my passions: that’s how I find satisfaction each day of my life.

4) Every day of traveling won’t feel magical: Endless amazement only exists in one’s mind. Some days feel drab, tiring, or just plain annoying, and you need these days to make the wondrous ones feel magical. Happiness and satisfaction are really in your mindset. I can do an activity one day and love it, and do an activity another day and find it mediocre or even taxing, and the main difference is my attitude. Maybe the trick to finding satisfaction in life is to align one’s passions with what one is doing so that the winds feel at your sails as you do it.

5) The importance of communication: Traveling with my girlfriend, I learned that communicating your expectations is crucial. I think I overall did a bad job at this, and we had two different expectations for how we were traveling. In addition to getting on the same page at the beginning, communicating expectations is a constant, iterative process at almost every stage of travel. We constantly navigated between what I wanted and what she wanted while traveling. This was a constant dance that we had to work on together.

All this said, the most important lesson I learned is that traveling the world is amazing, and I would recommend it for anyone who wants an adventure.

The Good Place Miniseries (Introduction)

I recently rewatched “The Good Place” (spoiler warning), one of my favorite sitcoms in this century so far, and I noticed so much more about the show the second time around. I decided to write a miniseries analyzing different facets of the show – some complimentary, some critical – as a tribute to one of the most thoughtful and interesting sitcoms on mainstream US television. I hope you enjoy:

Revolutionizing Sitcoms: “The Good Place’s” Unique Window into Making Television

Navigating the Afterlife’s Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Empathy, and Organization Change in “The Good Place”

What Kind of Morality Does the Good Place Promote At the End of the Day, Part One: Utilitarianism (First part in a reflection on The Good Places’s Moral Framework, reflecting on how the show depicts utilitarianism)

What Kind of Morality Does the Good Place Promote, Part Two: Deontology (Second part in a reflection on The Good Places’s Moral Framework, reflecting on how the show depicts deontology)

What Kind of Morality Does the Good Place Promote, Part Three: Virtue Ethics (Third part in a reflection on The Good Places’s Moral Framework, reflecting on how the show depicts virtue ethics)

What Kind of Morality Does the Good Place Promote, Part Three: Virtue Ethics

This is the third and final post in my miniseries about ethics in “The Good Place” (see Part One, Part Two, and all my other reflections on the Good Place here). All of this is part of a wider series I am writing about that TV show. In this post, I will talk about how the series portrays the ethical theory called deontology.

Now for the final major ethical theory in Western philosophy: virtue ethics. I think this one is the closest one to what the show adheres to. Virtue ethics emphasizes the development of people’s characters, focusing on how to develop virtues. Virtue ethics often emphasizes developing conducive environments where people can cultivate the instincts or dispositions to think and act virtuously.

This is in contrast to consequentialism, utilitarianism, and deontology, which seek to create a unifying criteria for how to determine what is right and wrong in all circumstances. Virtue ethics, instead, focuses on how to grow individuals’ character so that they have the skills and natural desire to make moral decisions on their own. Many virtue ethicists emphasize on how to develop the right settings that encourage people to develop virtuous behavior.

One way virtue ethics comes up frequently in the show is in its emphasis on doing moral behavior for the right reasons. This is most apparent with Elanor whose major flaw is selfishness. She frequently tries to perform good acts, but her points do not go up because she is doing it for self-centered reasons (e.g. to earn her way into heaven). And she is not the only character that encounters this. In a pure consequentialist or deontological framework, all that matters is whether the action is moral or immoral (even if they disagree on how to tell whether an action is moral), and thus one’s internal reasons for doing the right thing are not as important. For virtue ethics, though, one’s motivations are crucial: they impact what type of person someone is becoming.

As a matter of fact, the whole show seems designed to cultivate virtues. The world Michael created to torture humans accidently forces them to develop as people in a trial by fire, and overtime, saving the themselves and all humanity ends up perfecting them as people. Their adventures force each character to confront and work through their major flaw and develop positive virtuous instincts. Then, the show concludes by replicating aspects of this environment for all humanity, who after death must go through a simulated environment forcing them to work through their major flaw/flaws and develop perfected (or at least better) virtuous characters.

The show routinely demonstrates that the environment produced by being with the others in the group is what causes each character to grow. For example, the judge tests all the characters in isolation, and pretty much each one fails. Similarly, when she sends each human back to earth to see whether they are better people, they quickly relapse into their old selves. It is only when Michael brings the group together reconstructing the dynamic they held in the afterlife, that they improve as people. The judge’s tests focused on whether each individual had grown by themselves beyond their personality problem, and the show demonstrates this to be the wrong question. They grow and improve as people when put in environments that help foster that in them.

The show starts with a consequentialist, multiversal afterlife system with a points system to determine moral worth to reflect that, and over time, the show demonstrates how lacking such a system is, consistently showing that instead humans develop virtues in relationships with others.

At the same time, the afterlife system is a labyrinth of bureaucracies full of various afterlife beings, so the main crew’s attempts to reform the universe amount to a pragmatic institutional change. Relics of the old system still persist at least at first: they still seem to use the consequentialist points system to ultimately assess people’s moral worth even in the afterlife. Many of the afterlife beings in that institution don’t understand the change and at least initially still operate within the old mentality. Maybe overtime, they learn this new way of thinking.

This leaves open whether this new system will work. Will these beings be able to change their approach as they operate within the new system? Will the continued use of the points system to evaluate whether someone is able to enter the Good Place introduce corruption, or will the fact that each human has an infinite chance to improve mean that eventually everyone will? In the show, the series heavily implies these kinks have been worked out, and the new system is working great. But, I am not sure the show did enough work to convince us of that. That said, the series clearly values virtue ethics, and the characters try to create an afterlife system that will foster virtues in every human.

What Kind of Morality Does the Good Place Promote, Part Two: Deontology

This is the next post in my miniseries about ethics in “The Good Place” (see Part One, Part Three, and all my other reflections on the Good Place here). All of this is part of a wider series I am writing about that TV show. In this post, I will talk about how the series portrays the ethical theory called deontology.

Deontology evaluates the morality of one’s actions based on a set of principles or rules. Different deontologists may have different principles (ranging from divine commands to general values or principles of what makes the best society), but deontologists view strict adherence to it as key in evaluating whether something is ethical.

Most of the series depictions of deontology center around Immaneul Kant, one of the best known modern European deontologists. Chidi, the main philosophy character in the show, was a Kantian scholar and considered himself a follower of Kant. In short, his system of ethics emphasized the importance of not using other people but treating their autonomy and freedom as paramount. Thus, for him, our actions ought to be those for which, if everyone did that action in that situation, would not hurt or constrain others in the world.

Chidi’s presence in the show is a constant reference to deontology. This is especially reflected in Chidi’s strict adherence to his principles about what the right thing to do is. Yet the show seems to use him to critique deontology. It puts him in situations where he must break his own rules as a source of plot conflict: forcing Chidi to agonize over whether to follow his principles or do the “dirty deed” necessary in the moment. For example, he must decide whether to lie for a noble cause, whether that is to not disclose that Eleonor (and later Jason) do not belong in the Good Place or pretending to be a fellow demon when a secret agent in hell itself. Kant famously argued that lying is always wrong, and even in a situation where it seems better to lie, it actually is not. It’s better for humanity overall to always tell the truth even in a situation that harms you or those around you.

Each time, he is put in a situation where he must decide whether to lie for a good reason. He struggles, but ultimately does lie. This seems to ultimately critique deontology, as if the show is arguing that sometimes the rules must be broken. Especially when the others around you are not willing to be nice or cooperate (like demons) or when the stakes are the eternal damnation of all humanity. Sometimes, though, he lies to uphold a contradictory value (such as to keep a prior promise made not to help before knowing that helping involves lying), but in a number of circumstances, it is clear that in some circumstances, he and the show thinks it is necessary to forsake one’s principles when push comes to shove.

Chidi’s insistence on adhering to strict moral principles is part of what causes him to struggle to make decisions, his biggest flaw in the show. At the same time, though, his principles were his most virtuous trait. It influences the other characters, catalyzing their own development: in almost every time the characters’ minds are wiped, Chidi ends up teaching them philosophy, which betters them as people (especially Eleanor). His strict adherence to more principles makes him reliable.

One penultimate example of this during a major climax in the series is Chidi helping the entitled and narcissistic former CEO, Brent Norwalk. The character seems almost utterly unredemptive, but in the heat of the moment, when helping could mean eternal damnation, Chidi was the only character willing to help him. He did so not because he thought that Brent deserved it (Brent had done no redemptive action) but because of his internal principle that it is morally right to help others in need. Through this and other moments, the show illustrates how standing by your principles can be an incredibly morally virtuous act.

Another way the show reflects on deontology is in how the show emphasizes the people’s motivations and inherent goodness or badness in its points system. The points system uses people’s intentions to determine how good or bad an action is. Utilitarianism or other forms of consequentialism often do not see internal motivations as important: instead what happened is only what matters, no matter their intention. In the show, though, being nice for a selfish reason seems to lower the point value of the nice act (and in some cases, make it wholly negative). Although keep in mind, this could really better reflect virtue ethics, which I will discuss in my next article in this miniseries. This aspect of the point system could be a thread deontology.

All of this illustrates the show’s complex relationship with deontology. Overall, the show does not endorse deontology, preferring more nuanced, maybe pragmatic, circumstantial ethical deliberations cultivated overtime than developing universal ethical principles for all time. Chidi has to overcome his principles constantly throughout the show, arguing that at the very least strictly following one’s ethical principles is too much. Life (or the afterlife) is too complex for rigid moral rules.

At the same time, it illustrates how honorable it can be to have principles and stick to them. Importantly, in all of these quandary moments, Chidi decides to do what is best for others around him, especially those in a vulnerable position. Thus, it presents helping others as honorable, whether that means lying to protect someone or like in the situation with Brent, selflessly risking one’s own salvation to help save another. Its view of when to follow principles and when to break them is more fluid, but having ethical principles in itself is noble.

What Kind of Morality Does the Good Place Promote At the End of the Day, Part One: Utilitarianism

“The Good Place” spends a lot of its runtime evaluating and critiquing the various ethical theories, making it difficult to classify it according to some predefined ethical school of thought like checking a box. It also has its ethical theory unfold over the show, both defining and refining its views over the seasons.

Chidi, in one episode, remarked how there are three forms of morality in Western philosophy: utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics. And all of them stink! Well put: these are the three major moral frameworks someone might learn about in an Introduction to Philosophy class, but most people’s views of morality in the real world draws from aspects of all three. In this three part series, I will investigate to what extent the show advocates for each of them . Through this I will investigate the nuances of how the series works through morality. (See Part Two on Deontology, Part Three on Virtue Ethics, and all my other reflections on the Good Place here.)

Utilitarianism

Let’s start with utilitarianism. Utilitarianism argues that what is moral is what produces the greatest amount of happiness. It’s a form of consequentialism, since it uses the consequences of actions to evaluate whether something is moral. So, in some forms of consequentialism, if I intended something good or positive, but something bad happened instead, then the bad consequence, not my good intentions, is what matters, and we should condemn that action as immoral. For example, if I gave someone a candy bar as a gift, with good intentions, but they died eating it from a peanut allergy, then that action would be unethical despite my positive intentions.

At first glance, the points system seems rather utilitarian or at least consequentialist. It evaluates the morality of human actions based on whether the actions have positive or negative consequences in the world. The show emphasizes multiple times that this includes instances where a character was not aware of and did not intend those bad consequences.

But the characters ultimately argue that this is a flawed way to evaluate morality. For example, when discussing the potential problem with the point system, Michael describes how thousands of years ago, giving someone a gift of flowers was seen as a good thing, but now, because of societal consequences unknown by the character, such as the poor labor conditions of the flower picker or environmental costs required to ship the flowers, the action is bad. These bad consequences are outside of the person’s reasonable knowledge or control, and thus it is not fair to use them to condemn the person for deciding to give flowers.

The show ultimately presents the points system as a flawed way to evaluate morality, and thus I do not think it endorses utilitarianism. But they do seem to present aspects of utilitarian and consequentialist thinking as valuable. The points system turns out to be fundamentally flawed, but they do not do away with it altogether. It is still the primary way they evaluate humans morality throughout their lives; they just limit the extent to which that the points system is the final decider of each human’s fate. Instead of damning those who failed to eternal torment, created a space for humans to refine themselves until they got a sufficiently positive score.

The main cast’s criticism is not that people’s consequences cannot be used to evaluate the morality of their actions, but that modern individuals cannot be reasonably held accountable for these unforeseen consequences because it is too difficult to keep oneself abreast on every potential result of their actions in the increasingly interconnected modern world. Thus, the show still seems to endorse a type of limited consequentialism but with caveats on the degree and scope of what consequences are reasonable and unreasonable to hold someone accountable for.

But, maybe making only a change to allow humans to reform their behavior and earn their place in the Good Place was a pragmatic move from the time-crunched main cast (and show makers who seem to condense the series at the end to wrap it up early). A massive bureaucracy of supernatural beings governed the afterlife, and maybe this was the one practical change they thought they could make to reform it over time. It would undermine the whole points system as an evaluation of morality anyways, without having to officially change a point system that many supernatural beings like.

It is hard to say, but the points system is still the basis of people’s moral worth and whether they made the subsequent moral improvements necessary to be considered “reformed.” Thus, it still has the central role in evaluating people’s moral worth.That said, I do think the show makers intended to seriously critique utilitarianism and consequentialism, although were not able to fully eradicate the system in the world without spending too much time articulating alternatives. Thus, the series inadvertently endorses these two systems while trying to officially oppose its excesses.

The Angry Firecracker (A Short Story)

There once was a firecracker named Pow Pow. He loved his life hanging out with the other firecracker friends in his bundle.

One day, they were bought by a family, and he was excited to meet them and discover what kind of fun they’d have together. The family took them out on the patio of their home. The mother took one of his firecracker friends. All the other firecrackers were excited to see how they might play with her.

The woman took a hot flame and lit it under her butt. This caused her friend to shoot away as fast as possible, screaming in pain, and die an explosive, painful death. The woman, her husband, and her kids just squealed with glee at the ordeal.

One by one Pow Pow watched as his friends were snatched, taken, and exploded in the same way. He turned hot with anger at how they could torture and kill his friends for fun like this.

Then, finally, he was picked. They carried him over to the edge of their patio where they had done away with all the others. He burned hot with rage.

Suddenly, they lit a match in his hindquarters, and he burned with anger. He broke free from their grip and flew away, shouting every obscenity he could at these murderous people. He could finally let his anger out, and it boiled within him.

Eventually that was all he could feel as he exploded with rage, becoming another fun firecracker explosion for the parents to enthrall their children.

The Hamster amidst of Gerbils (A Short Story)

Leah the Hamster lived in a terrarium full of gerbils.

And everyday, she felt different. She looked like a hamster, behaved like a hamster, thought like a hamster. When she was a pup, her mother used to tell her, “You don’t think like them. Be careful. You may misunderstand their cues and get yourself in trouble.”

And so, she grew up always scared. Scared that she couldn’t understand or relate to the gerbils around her. Every time she talked with the gerbils, she was afraid she might misunderstand something and get herself in trouble. And some days, some gerbils would make fun of her for being different.

So, she mostly stayed in her den with her toys, worried that any gerbil she talked to would hurt her.

But one day, she got fed up with being home and decided to approach a few new gerbils who had just been brought into the terrarium.

She told them, “I’m sorry. I feel so nervous talking with you. I feel like I am messing up. I just wish to have a pleasant conversation, but I don’t always understand you gerbils and how you think,” afraid that they would gnaw their teeth at her and scurry away.

But instead, this encouraged them to also share how they felt: how they felt out of place in this new community and how they were constantly messing up.

They formed a group of friends who could relate to feeling different from everyone else and slowly helped the others in their community who always fit in to understand their own feelings in the moments they didn’t quite belong. Through this, they built a more accepting community together.

She learned a valuable lesson that day: that being genuine about how she feels to others allows them to relate to her and encourages them to reflect on and be honest about their own feelings. Feeling different forced her to turn inward and understand her feelings in a way that the normal gerbils that fit in did not have to. This was a gift she brought to others around her.