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A random’s trepanation

Started by Exoteric, January 06, 2021, 01:37:17 AM

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Exoteric

I think that right now I'm young and I'm stupid. One of those things is definitely going to change, but whether or not the other does is up to me. I have a lot of ideas, but I have a hard time thinking through them. My head's felt constipated for a bit; I think if I can get my thoughts someplace outside myself they'll start to feel more like concrete things I can work with, improve, and apply. And if it turns out I'm a dumbass now, hopefully that'll be caught on here before I can go off and seriously fuck up. So I'll keep rambling posts like this on this thread as I'm able to get them out.

1.0

I think it's possible for people to feel like every community or culture they're familiar with somehow dominates reality, and that they can only live along the lines they set out. I remember having that problem, and I've seen other people talk and act in ways that make me think they could too. And groups absolutely can have massive influence over peoples' lives. Even without formal power, cliques and circles can make people change in ways they wouldn't have without them. But there are more communities out there than I can imagine. I think there are more groups than there are individual people, because I feel like most people are probably part of more than one.

The thing is, no individual community out of the billions out there can claim to control the entire world. So, none of them should be automatically relevant to you. I think that ideally you would consider the positive or negative impact you think one could have to you, or other people you care about, along with any obligations you think you have to it, and then base how much headspace you give it on that. The problem is, not all groups a person knows exist has reasons to be important to them, but people can obsess over any they learn about. It's like we're born only knowing the groups we belong to, and as we grow up we don't realize alternatives exist. We also believe in some way that the groups we're part of are the only ones that really exist, and all others don't have the same depth, influence, or substance. Because of that, any circle of people that gets under our skin —that we don't cut ourselves off of as soon as we meet— is given the same importance in our head as the ones we've grown up with. We think that everyone, or at least all real people, belong to them and follow their rules, and that we have no choice but to too. I'm more uncomfortable trying to figure out the why of something than the what (I'll talk more about that later), so while right now I do think this issue is real, I think the explanation I just gave only could be its cause. I can't look into everyone's heads and confirm it, and I haven't collected enough of other people's experiences to even make it a decent theory. But it might make what I'm trying to say more clear.

2.0

I can't, under any circumstances, tell someone else what to be. I can only possibly have the right to tell someone else how to interact with other people, and even then I need a damn good reason to. The more I think about this, the more reasons for it I come up with, but this's the one I think works best.

If I see someone else doing something that I know won't cause suffering, then I can't possibly have a reason to try and stop them. Even if it's something I wouldn't do, even if it sets off alarm bells in my head, I have an obligation to shut myself up. Because —again, as long as it isn't a form of abuse— the only kind of suffering their actions are causing is my sense of offence. Obviously they can't control that, and whatever they're doing, something must be causing them to. Because of that, it would definitely take less strain for me to change my attitude than for them to change their actions, and the responsibility's on me to make the effort. Realistically, I just don't think people should change for no other reason than to fit into others' view of reality, but I have that justification to pull out if I ever need to.

This's one of the beliefs I especially want to improve because, as strongly as I think I hold it, it's still something that only clearly came to me relatively recently. I want it to be fucking solid in my head, so I'll keep hammering it in, thinking through its repercussions, and trying to solve any contradictions I find.
I haven't been writing for very long, and I want to improve. If any parts of my posts aren't readable, please point them out.

I'm coming off of a bad bout of anxiety, and I'm going to try stepping away from the Internet for a bit and working on my habits. I might come back here if my mental health ever gets more secure, but for now I'm gone. You all take care of yourselves and the people you care about, and keep moving.

Doktor Howl

A couple of things:

1.  Never underestimate the power of DUMBASS.  I have been a dumbass all my life and it's worked out very nicely.

2.  I have learned not to rely on any one community.  You have to maintain a presence in multiple communities, even if it means you get (and give) less per community.  A single failure point is always a really bad idea, and if for some reason you have a falling out with a single community, it's not as traumatic as losing your *only* community.  For entirely different reasons, I lost three longstanding groups within 6 months some years back, and it was like being amputated from the world.  Now I tend to spread myself a little thinner.

3.  Depends on what they plan to be or do, I guess.
Molon Lube

LMNO

It also occurs to me that if "suffering" is your baseline, you could be in trouble.  "There is no ethical consumption" and all that. 

Exoteric

QuoteIt also occurs to me that it "suffering" is your baseline you could be in trouble. "There is no ethical consumption" and all that.
Thanks for the warning. What do you mean? Or, where should I go if you don't feel like writing out something I could just read somewhere else.
I haven't been writing for very long, and I want to improve. If any parts of my posts aren't readable, please point them out.

I'm coming off of a bad bout of anxiety, and I'm going to try stepping away from the Internet for a bit and working on my habits. I might come back here if my mental health ever gets more secure, but for now I'm gone. You all take care of yourselves and the people you care about, and keep moving.

altered

It means there is literally no way to survive in our current reality without profiting off of the suffering of others.

Your computer, phone, every electronic device you own, they all use rare earth metals mined in Africa by literal child slave labor. This is just scratching the surface; you can go full Luddite and unless you personally grow, harvest and produce EVERYTHING THAT YOU OWN, BY YOUR OWN HANDS, it's /still/ all built upon someone else's misery. Hell, let's say you DO go european peasant and make your own clothes, grow your own food, etc. Where'd that land come from? Unless you're indigenous to the area you live in (and spoiler alert: there's some damned good reasons to believe that most white Europeans aren't indigenous to where they're from if you turn time back far enough!) you're building that life on stolen ground.

No ethical consumption means exactly what it says. None. Zero. Ethical consumption is impossible. Consumption in any form is set in ground dyed with blood. Your survival demands violence in every form. You kill uncountable microbes with your immune system, you eat either plants or animals or fungi -- and do so by doing violence to them. Every trapping of civilization you know requires the exploitation and subjugation of others, vegans talk about how it's more ethical to consume plants but it turns out plants react to stimuli (WHOOPSIE) and all of the food they get at Whole Foods is harvested by slave labor and sold to rich white people who talk about how ethical it is while the people in the region it's harvested in die of artificial, market-created famine (WHOOPSIE AGAIN).

The only way to be truly ethical is to opt out of existence.

Otherwise? You have to accept some level of suffering, and know what levels of suffering can be reduced or eliminated and what levels are forever a part of the world you live in.
"I am that worst of all type of criminal...I cannot bring myself to do what you tell me, because you told me."

There's over 100 of us in this meat-suit. You'd think it runs like a ship, but it's more like a hundred and ten angry ghosts having an old-school QuakeWorld tournament, three people desperately trying to make sure the gamers don't go hungry or soil themselves, and the Facilities manager weeping in the corner as the garbage piles high.

LMNO

altered said it better, but since I was typing this out at the same time I'll post it anyway.  It'd be a shame to waste the most words I've written on this site in more than a year.

__________________________



To quote the OP: "If I see someone else doing something that I know won't cause suffering, then I can't possibly have a reason to try and stop them."

At what point do you draw the line?  If they're using any sort of modern technology, there's a 99.99% chance that it was in part created by the exploitation of child labor.

Basically, anything that uses cobalt or lithium.

Same with mass-produced clothing - lotsa child labor there.


In fact, you can take just about any behavior, and if you look closely enough, suffering is included.  Let's think for a second that American success (and European success, if I'm guessing you're not in North America) was built upon colonization and slavery.  It's a safe bet to assume most of our lives have benefited from the suffering of others.


Not to mention, depending on your definition of "suffering", almost all agricultural products cause suffering to animals -- and not just meat production.  Farming at a scale that can feed enough people destroys ecosystems and kills all sorts of animals as "pests".  And if you don't draw the line at the suffering of animals, the process of agriculture damages the environment, depletes water supplies, engenders climate change, and causes all sorts of human suffering as a result.

So, yeah.  There is no ethical consumption, and existence is suffering.  Might as well become a Buddhist.

Exoteric

Thanks for the replies, I see what you mean.
I know what I'll be obsessing over next.
I haven't been writing for very long, and I want to improve. If any parts of my posts aren't readable, please point them out.

I'm coming off of a bad bout of anxiety, and I'm going to try stepping away from the Internet for a bit and working on my habits. I might come back here if my mental health ever gets more secure, but for now I'm gone. You all take care of yourselves and the people you care about, and keep moving.

Exoteric

3.0
This's something that doesn't come up on its own that often, but some of my other ideas are based on it. This's my first time writing it out, and it was tough. I'm sure there's vocabulary out there that could talk about this stuff clearly, but I don't know it. Still, being able to just point back to this could make describing some things easier in the future, so I wanted to try getting it off my chest.

What I'm talking about is how I think people build up their knowledge of the world, and the way different types of knowledge usually take different amounts of effort to be useably solid. So there's the world, massive and complicated, there's me, and then there's the image I have of it. As far as I can tell, that image is made up of a catalogue of facts about the things -any kinds of thing— I know about: the way they effect people, the ways they'd react in certain situations, what I can expect from them in the future, those kinds of info. I've been building it up across my life based on direct experience (touching a hot ban burned me, so the next time I see a pan it reminds me of that and I check the burner), hearing secondhand (someone I trust told me that hot pans can burn), or thinking over what I already know (I know hot metal can burn, so when I see a metal pan I figure I shouldn't touch it). I don't have a deep understanding of everything I'm aware of, I feel like there's a small collection of things I'm actually familiar with and then a drop in comprehension down to most of what I know about.

Also, it seems like there are three stages or tiers of information that a person's knowledge of something can belong to. First of all, you can just be aware that something's real, because of its effects. Someone doesn't need to know what a hot pan is, or what it's used for, or anything else about it to know that touching it hurts. I think this's something people do passively, and is out of their control. I can't decide to learn about something that I don't know exists. Once that first step is passed, and that thing has a place in their mind, someone can look for opportunities to learn more about it and figure out what it is. This's something people have to actively do. I've talked about hot pans enough to want another example, so I'll imagine you showed a car to a bunch of people who'd never seen one before, then asked them to figure out whatever they could about it. In the system I'm trying to describe, them seeing it for the first time would be them becoming aware of it. The second step would be when they start to try and see how the car behaves. This could take experimenting on their own: pulling on its handles makes its doors pop open, or relying on things they already know:  some people could look at a car and figure that it had to be artificial. Sooner or later —probably after a lot of mistakes— they could work out enough to drive it around, though in a dangerous way outside of example-land. At that point, I'd say that they'd built their picture of it to the second level. But then, no matter how hard it was to work out how it behaves, their jobs would jump up in difficulty if you told them to pop open the hood and figure out how it works.

Without all the examples: I think that figuring out how something behaves takes more effort than just seeing it in action, and working out why it does what it does is even harder. One problem I have this idea is that it applies to objects and events evenly, and I'm not sure that the ways things work and the reasons behind events are really equivalent.

So I just explained part of how I think the world works, but on its own that doesn't show how I act because of it. So now that I've said what I think, I want to try and explain that thought's consequences.
To start with, because I just made a decision based on this, I think that the effects anything has on people are what's important. So, even if an idea I have isn't terrible, the way I apply it might be.
I feel like taking something you know is true about one thing and then trying to apply to another that's similar, but that you aren't familiar with, is the way a lot of mistakes are made. So, I think I should be careful about assuming I know how anything works because it reminds me of something else I do understand, if I don't know they're comparable.
I'll talk more about this in a minute, but I'm worried about being too confident in what I know about other people. I also can't expect others to just magically understand or trust me.
And the last thing is that if I've only just built an idea of how something behaves that I feel confident about, I shouldn't expect to have a decent understanding of why it does what it does.

4.0

After that, I want to talk about something based on it that does come up pretty often: everything I just said applies to my understanding of others. If I try to map this system onto people a person's effects are their actions, what they are is their personality and identity, and the reasons behind them are the experiences that ended with any part of that identity forming.

So, when I learn about someone new, from meeting them in person or otherwise, I start building an idea of what kind of person they are. The problem is, I think it takes a lot more time and effort than most people think to get a decent read on how someone ticks. Also, I think it should be impossible to know what made specific person have any character trait just based on my observation of them.

It seems like when some people see others they don't know very well they assume that their whole personality fits together in an obvious, intuitive way and don't consider how they've developed through their life. To have a chance to know someone well I think I'd need to see how they act in a whole range of situations, because if I only talked to (or saw, or just learned about) someone in one context, I couldn't know how much the way the acted around me shows how they'd act in any other.

As far as I can tell our personalities grow organically from the moment we're born onwards, and that makes it so that I can't intuitively understand someone after only learning a few things about them. Let's say a friend introduces me to a stranger and tells me they work in construction, were really into sports in highschool, and which city they're from. Great, with that information I should know next to nothing for sure about them. But I feel like some people let the first things they know about someone colour the way they process everything they learn after, so that their image of them ends up like a caricature of their first impressions. As someone on the ground I can't look at another person's trait and intuit what caused it. There're too many possible reasons behind any one character trait for me to just snap my fingers and know which is right. But the biggest problem I have is that I think the same trait can have different causes for different people. So if me and a friend both love walks down the beach, and I know why I do, I can't be sure they do for the same reasons.

Everything I've seen makes me think that if the clouds ever clear and I feel like I've grokked people enough to extrapolate their whole identities from only a couple facts, that'll just mean that I've bought into some shitty group of stereotypes. So I think I should keep my weight on my back foot and avoid trying to fill in the gaps as much as possible when learning about other people, unless I absolutely need to make a leap of faith based on what I feel confident about.

So, I think it's tough to get to know someone, and probably impossible to completely understand them, but maybe still possible to get by. I don't need to be totally familiar with someone to decide how to act towards them, and even if I can't be 100% sure they think a certain way, I can still have seen enough to think they probably do. I couldn't tell anyone else how much exactly how much observation that should take, because I don't know, but from what I remember I've been more confident that I know other people in the past than I'd want to now.

This's kind of a swerve, but in the past I've seen people try to argue against retribution using language like what I've been using, focusing on how we can't be certain of who other people are. I don't agree with that, so I want to say outright that some people do deserve shit. Nazis and terfs are the first that come to mind. Wish I could give this the intensity it deserves, but Fuck Them like they fuck others.

I've used "effort" a couple times here, but I haven't actually said what it's supposed to mean. So when I used it in this I was talking about noticing the way other people act or react to things, remembering how they do, and then making a picture of their personality based on that.

5.0
This'll be shorter. So, I'm a big believer in Murphy's Law, and I think it applies to people too. If I can imagine a belief I can assume that some people, somewhere and sometime, hold it, and that if an experience is physically possible there are people who've gone or will go through it. What looks unlikely when I imagine it happening to me or any one person I know will probably be a lot more believable if I think of it never happening to literally anyone who'll ever exist. I figure something needs to have conditions stacked on super-specific conditions to have a chance to never happen.
I haven't been writing for very long, and I want to improve. If any parts of my posts aren't readable, please point them out.

I'm coming off of a bad bout of anxiety, and I'm going to try stepping away from the Internet for a bit and working on my habits. I might come back here if my mental health ever gets more secure, but for now I'm gone. You all take care of yourselves and the people you care about, and keep moving.