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Ideals

Started by Jenne, December 07, 2006, 03:55:35 AM

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LHX

Quote from: Rev. What's-His-Name? on December 07, 2006, 04:00:42 PM
Quote from: LHX on December 07, 2006, 03:51:40 PM
also - it seems that 'ideals' get challenged from more than 1 angle:

there is the angle where even good things arent as 'romantic' or 'thrilling' as some may have been hoping

and there is the 'more fun than you really wanted' angle that we are reminded of around these boards

yup, I think childbirth is a good example of the first.  Not that bringing a child into the world isn't rewarding, it is.  However, the 'romantic' and 'thrilling' ideals before the event are quickly replaced by 'sleep-deprived' and 'trying'

And that is a case where not thinking it through can result in a drastic mistake.  You think making a child is going to be peachy and keen and cute.  Then it happens.  Then, perhaps one or both of the parents check out because it wasn't what they bargained for.  Then you have 3 fucked up people. 


Quote from: Rev. What's-His-Name? on December 07, 2006, 03:40:06 PM
"Oh shit, we just blew up Greenland!"

RWHN swings the sharp sword off accurate truth ITT
neat hell

Jenne

I know I keep going back to this notion of what you are socialized to do and become vs. what you are programmed through genetics (which, I believe, have been shown to have SOME aspect of environmental manipulation as well) to do.  I think idealism, in all forms, is a direct impact of your environment.  And, going back to what I said yesterday, people usually either mostly EMBRACE their environment, or reject it outright.

However, if you're someone with a jaundiced eye toward pie-in-the-sky goal-setting, you're going to not necessarily spend much time and resources trying to set and then attain these goals, though you might unwittingly be working towards them all along.

What happens to an individual when they realize they've been reaching towards all the wrong things all along, or what they were working for is imminently unattainable is really really interesting.  I think this serves as a wake-up point for the BIP analogy.

You take a person who is very AWARE of how reachable their set ideals were since the beginning, and they are an entirely different animal. 

So, when I say I think ideals set us up for failure, for my first example, those who are eventually disillusioned, is who I was primarily talking about.  We all know these people, hell, some of us ARE these people.  You were brought up to believe something, live a certain way, you go along with it with certain expectations in mind.

Then BAM! right between the eyes, the Hideous Troof(tm) is revealed, and you tailspin out of the path you'd preset when you were pimply-faced and jacking off in your parent's basement.

The second type of goal-setting idealist, the Realist Idealist(tm) that RWHN is talking about, had the smack between the eyes earlier on in life, and never saw the unattainable as part of his/her universe.  S/he may or may not recognize how different they may be vis a vis their own brand of idealism...generally they probably are and look with derision upon those who haven't "woken up" yet.  I think you can all recognize that this is generally a person who is drawn automatically or even naturally to a movement like this.  There is very little pulling them down into their set, societal ties, so loosing hold of them in order to accept a set of beliefs like what is here in the BIP is not so hard after all.

So...does any of that make any sense?

P3nT4gR4m

Quote from: Jenne on December 07, 2006, 05:37:25 PM
I know I keep going back to this notion of what you are socialized to do and become vs. what you are programmed through genetics (which, I believe, have been shown to have SOME aspect of environmental manipulation as well) to do.  I think idealism, in all forms, is a direct impact of your environment.  And, going back to what I said yesterday, people usually either mostly EMBRACE their environment, or reject it outright.

However, if you're someone with a jaundiced eye toward pie-in-the-sky goal-setting, you're going to not necessarily spend much time and resources trying to set and then attain these goals, though you might unwittingly be working towards them all along.

What happens to an individual when they realize they've been reaching towards all the wrong things all along, or what they were working for is imminently unattainable is really really interesting.  I think this serves as a wake-up point for the BIP analogy.

You take a person who is very AWARE of how reachable their set ideals were since the beginning, and they are an entirely different animal. 

So, when I say I think ideals set us up for failure, for my first example, those who are eventually disillusioned, is who I was primarily talking about.  We all know these people, hell, some of us ARE these people.  You were brought up to believe something, live a certain way, you go along with it with certain expectations in mind.

Then BAM! right between the eyes, the Hideous Troof(tm) is revealed, and you tailspin out of the path you'd preset when you were pimply-faced and jacking off in your parent's basement.

The second type of goal-setting idealist, the Realist Idealist(tm) that RWHN is talking about, had the smack between the eyes earlier on in life, and never saw the unattainable as part of his/her universe.  S/he may or may not recognize how different they may be vis a vis their own brand of idealism...generally they probably are and look with derision upon those who haven't "woken up" yet.  I think you can all recognize that this is generally a person who is drawn automatically or even naturally to a movement like this.  There is very little pulling them down into their set, societal ties, so loosing hold of them in order to accept a set of beliefs like what is here in the BIP is not so hard after all.

So...does any of that make any sense?

Makes perfect sense to me apart from the last bit about beliefs Maybe it's just because 'belief' is one of my pet hate words but I don't think we really believe anything here and that's why I feel at home.

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
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AFK

Quote from: SillyCybin on December 07, 2006, 05:47:21 PM
Makes perfect sense to me apart from the last bit about beliefs Maybe it's just because 'belief' is one of my pet hate words but I don't think we really believe anything here and that's why I feel at home.

I call bullshit!

Otherwise this forum would be completely blank wouldn't it? 
Cynicism is a blank check for failure.

Hangero

Personal Liberty, in whichever way it can be defined, seems to be the central modest ideal of all I pick up from PD, and BIP and all that stuff. 

You can say you have no ideals, but by saying that you also intend that you have no purposes and wish for no changes.  Ideals are not poison, they just shouldn't have such incredible weight placed upon them.  But Personal Liberty seems to stand for me to be the principle that says people should be independent of all this bullshit that continually tries to entrap them.

And now another problematic thought occurs to me, and I think it is the main nerve of the problem overall:  What if, when man is given the ability to have control of his life, his eventual inclination is to hand over that control?  What if by fighting the enourmous constructs of civilization, we are only fighting something so inherit in mankind that it can not be fully extinguished, or that we are merely existing on the fringe of some terrible wheel that arbitrarily prefers liberty or dominance, depending on the day of the week?

Mmmm....this is how ideals become abandonned.

AFK

Quote from: Hangero on December 07, 2006, 06:11:54 PM
Personal Liberty, in whichever way it can be defined, seems to be the central modest ideal of all I pick up from PD, and BIP and all that stuff. 

You can say you have no ideals, but by saying that you also intend that you have no purposes and wish for no changes.  Ideals are not poison, they just shouldn't have such incredible weight placed upon them.  But Personal Liberty seems to stand for me to be the principle that says people should be independent of all this bullshit that continually tries to entrap them.

And now another problematic thought occurs to me, and I think it is the main nerve of the problem overall:  What if, when man is given the ability to have control of his life, his eventual inclination is to hand over that control?  What if by fighting the enourmous constructs of civilization, we are only fighting something so inherit in mankind that it can not be fully extinguished, or that we are merely existing on the fringe of some terrible wheel that arbitrarily prefers liberty or dominance, depending on the day of the week?

Mmmm....this is how ideals become abandonned.

Have you been reading The Machine(tm) thread? 
Cynicism is a blank check for failure.

Hangero

I think I glanced it over, but I didn't remember anything except that none of you agree on what The Machine is.

AFK

True but what you wrote above does have some similarities with some of the ideas discussed.  (I.e. the wheel metaphor you used)

That was one angle on The Machine(tm).  That you can change parts of it.  But, realistically, you can't overcome or change the whole of it.  Some may be optimistic and think if you continuously change little parts here and there that the cumulative effect will be whole scale change.

However, it is fluid.  Just because one part changes doesn't mean it won't change back.  There are many cells in the Prison.  Nothing keeps someone from going back to the original cell they were in before their "enlightenment"
Cynicism is a blank check for failure.

P3nT4gR4m

Quote from: Rev. What's-His-Name? on December 07, 2006, 06:03:56 PM
Quote from: SillyCybin on December 07, 2006, 05:47:21 PM
Makes perfect sense to me apart from the last bit about beliefs Maybe it's just because 'belief' is one of my pet hate words but I don't think we really believe anything here and that's why I feel at home.

I call bullshit!

Otherwise this forum would be completely blank wouldn't it? 

Like I said - it's prolly just the word that annoys me. Too many negative connotations in this head.

Quote from: Hangero on December 07, 2006, 06:11:54 PM
Personal Liberty, in whichever way it can be defined, seems to be the central modest ideal of all I pick up from PD, and BIP and all that stuff. 

You can say you have no ideals, but by saying that you also intend that you have no purposes and wish for no changes.  Ideals are not poison, they just shouldn't have such incredible weight placed upon them.  But Personal Liberty seems to stand for me to be the principle that says people should be independent of all this bullshit that continually tries to entrap them.

And now another problematic thought occurs to me, and I think it is the main nerve of the problem overall:  What if, when man is given the ability to have control of his life, his eventual inclination is to hand over that control?  What if by fighting the enourmous constructs of civilization, we are only fighting something so inherit in mankind that it can not be fully extinguished, or that we are merely existing on the fringe of some terrible wheel that arbitrarily prefers liberty or dominance, depending on the day of the week?

Mmmm....this is how ideals become abandonned.

I think the majority of people are like that, whether thats down to conditioning or basic nature I'm not so sure. But there is definitely a significant minority who have the opposite nature, despite the conditioning.

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

DJRubberducky

Quote from: Hangero on December 07, 2006, 06:11:54 PM
And now another problematic thought occurs to me, and I think it is the main nerve of the problem overall:  What if, when man is given the ability to have control of his life, his eventual inclination is to hand over that control?

It's a rare human who *doesn't* have that inclination, especially in "emergency" situations.  One of my housemates has been trained in the CERT program (FEMA's attempt to build a network of "local" first responders), and one of the things they were explicitly taught was that if you walk into an emergency situation and sound sufficiently authoritative, most folks will obey you without even realizing it.  They will assume you know what you're talking about because you *aren't* panicking, and they'll be naturally inclined to follow your directions.

Do with that information what you will.   :evil:
- DJRubberducky
Quote from: LMNODJ's post is sort of like those pills you drop into a glass of water, and they expand into a dinosaur, or something.

Black sheep are still sheep.

Jenne

Well, the word "enlightenment" bugs the shit out of me, so we're even, then, Silly! ;)

P3nT4gR4m

Quote from: Jenne on December 07, 2006, 06:26:09 PM
Well, the word "enlightenment" bugs the shit out of me, so we're even, then, Silly! ;)

I'll keep that in mind.

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

Triple Zero

if people use their freedom to hand over the control, that would be fine, as long as they don't get in the way of others who want to hang on to it.

this is of course a paradox.

perhaps it's the paradox of the Machine. people are inherently free, but some (a lot, in fact) want to hand over the control, and thereby deny others who in fact do want control of their life, to have it.

(that could have been worded more clearly i think, but i hope you get the gist of it)
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e-prime disclaimer: let it seem fairly unclear I understand the apparent subjectivity of the above statements. maybe.

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DJRubberducky

Quote from: triple zero on December 07, 2006, 07:47:55 PM
if people use their freedom to hand over the control, that would be fine, as long as they don't get in the way of others who want to hang on to it.

My mom thinks like this with regards to feminism.  Somehow one of my cousins turned out socially conservative (I blame her husband, or should I call him hubby so folks will hate him more? ;)).  This cousin has talked about how she doesn't support feminism at all, and my mom's take on it is "Well, thank God we fought so hard all those decades ago so you have the freedom to make that decision for yourself!".

I don't think humanity is ready to become a bunch of 100% individualistic thinkers.  Even if we were to undo any social programming that would cause people to think in groups, you'd find them reinventing that mental wheel.  There's strength in numbers, especially when that strength comes from a shared worldview.  The best we could possibly hope for is to keep chipping away at that social programming, so that if folks are groupthinking, then at least we can be reasonably sure that they know about the alternative.
- DJRubberducky
Quote from: LMNODJ's post is sort of like those pills you drop into a glass of water, and they expand into a dinosaur, or something.

Black sheep are still sheep.

DJRubberducky

And just to reply to myself: I do suspect that if we undid all the programming, folks would probably end up in a mix of group thinking and individual thinking.  Wasn't it Jefferson who said "in matters of style, flow with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock"?  I think that's what we'd end up with.  The fun would be in seeing what everybody thought was style or principle. :D
- DJRubberducky
Quote from: LMNODJ's post is sort of like those pills you drop into a glass of water, and they expand into a dinosaur, or something.

Black sheep are still sheep.