Principia Discordia > Think for Yourself, Schmuck!

A random’s trepanation

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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.

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.

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:

--- Quote ---It also occurs to me that it “suffering” is your baseline you could be in trouble. “There is no ethical consumption” and all that.
--- End quote ---
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.

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.

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