People really like conflating “this is morally good” with “this will make you strong.” 

It’s not a surprise.  If someone is in favor of a thing, he will try to give you incentives to do it.  He will try to tell you that it will help you accomplish your other goals.  No one wants to be in the position of saying “my purposes are righteous, so you should make sacrifices in order to help me accomplish them.”

But, most of the time, that is actually what’s being asked of you.

And maybe those purposes really are righteous; some purposes are.  Maybe you really ought to be making sacrifices for them.  In the final analysis, the universe was not designed to offer us a perfect virtuous spiral, most truly worthwhile-in-their-own-right things are (at best) orthogonal to success vectors, and there are constant complicated tradeoffs between cultivating strength and spending strength to do good.

Don’t be fooled.  Don’t let yourself drift into the fantasy where there are no tradeoffs of this kind.  Don’t let anyone sell you a pipe dream.  Always consider how the proposed course of action will influence your future capabilities, and how positive its effects will be on their own merit. 

This particular vagueblog isn’t in reference to any discourse I’ve seen recently.  It’s just…groping at something that deserves a much more substantive treatment.