As a friend pointed out in my other article on the Swiss depression, the Swiss education system is not designed to nurture academia solely, which I might have implied there. That is a valuable suggestion to me, and he was correct, although that wasn’t what I meant, I wrote it insufficiently that there was indeed this implicature. But instead of editing it to make it clearer, I think that topic deserves another article on the specific subtopic of morality and legislation.
What I wanted to say then, instead of the problem of education, is actually the situation where a society sets the bar of morality too high as if it were legislation. This is something that I used to think would be good to the human soul: when the bare-minimum legislation is guaranteed, a higher collective morality is a sign of a progressive (a modifier that I used to think was positive, now neutral, if not frowned upon) and better society, because then the morality is motivated by a sense of voluntary integrety. I still think highly about morality, but only when it is followed voluntarily on the microcosmic scale. If people actually think of morality as if it were set in stone, then the de facto effect is that the moral rules are kept with the same standard of legislation, and it can backfire – people can be depressed when they don’t achieve the high moral standard as what the society expects.
The problem is not morality, but the scale of its rigidity. A trite but sufficient metapher is eating fruit – a good amount of it is good for heath, but way too much or way too prescriptive would cause other problems. The question to be asked is then: how much is good enough?
A higher moral standard can also trigger a high standard on mannerism, and thus hinder social interaction, because socializing causes awkwardness, faux pas, and slips of the tongue. A dynamic socializing process is to socialize, err, and reflect. But if the standard is high enough, then quitting the process once for all is the safest bet.
Again, my opinion on Switzerland doesn’t mean I don’t approve of this society. On the contrary, I repect it very much. But I see there are some problems in the society that are causing it harm, namely the mental well-being issue that isn’t caused by material scarcity, and thus cannot be solved by material abundance.
In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the angels are “Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall,” and this is what I think a society should tolerant. Above the bar of legislation, everybody has the freedom to fall, albeit the choice of not falling is what makes people grow.
On the other extreme, if the morality is not only considered legislation, but also made as legislation, then it produces a corrupted society, which has many examples in the history worldwide.