Pursuing Empowerment

One person might feel empowered by professional success, another by maintaining deep friendships, and another by savoring verifiable philosophical truths.  Someone else might feel empowered by buying a home or vehicle, wearing flattering or minimal clothing, or completing practical chores that need to be done.  What is empowerment?  It is the experience of feeling or being more secure in or accepting of oneself, of feeling/being stronger or capable in some way and enjoying this status, or finding pleasure in something like an accomplishment.  What of irrational or immoral things?

Yes, someone could feel or seek empowerment through any belief or action, no matter how false, unverifiable, or evil it might be.  Feeling strong or excited is a subjective thing, and perhaps even involuntary, though one could try to foster or control this experience by selectively engaging in an activity.  While one person might feel empowered by helping the poor, another person might feel empowered by exploring them.  If morality exists, only one of these two approaches to poverty could be permissible/good, and thus they could not both be good or both be evil.  This would be contradictory.

However, either thing could empower someone at least subjectively.  It also might feel subjectively empowering to kill anyone one does not personally like even though it might be murder or to be disproportionately brutal with someone else in order to feel or appear strong.  After all, if it makes someone energized, excited, or as if they are authentically realizing or expressing their true self, then it is empowering, even if this empowerment is derived from things that should not be done.  This is not the same as something being rational or morally correct.  One could feel empowered intentionally or by happenstance in practically anything, but the veracity or moral legitimacy of that thing has nothing to do with how one feels or benefits from it.

Empowerment in the truth, such as in knowing logical axioms and relishing how they cannot be false as self-necessitating, absolutely certain things, cannot be illegitimate.  If something is true, then one could only be free to want or try to cultivate a sense of freedom or pleasure in it.  Someone could, for instance, come to welcome the uncertainty of epistemological limitations with something like the seeming truth of Christianity by discovering evidences in its favor and realizing what does and does not follow from its real tenets in spite of their inability to verify it beyond the probabilistic level of mere evidence.

Feeling empowered because of a belief in something like white or black supremacy, in contrast, is to be empowered by something false and also assumed (one can only assume false things, not prove them).  Whatever one's asinine basis for such a belief, the feeling of power or correctness does not mean this ideology is correct.  In fact, each of these and other racial supremacist philosophies is logically false by necessity since the color of someone's skin does not dictate their worldview, personality, moral standing, and talents.  None of these things follow because they are objectively unrelated.  Subjective empowerment has nothing to do the objectivity of logical truth.