I think subcultures in general shouldn't be trusted. My experience with them and with seeing their affects on others is that they are forms of cults, except less organized, with no charismatic leader. But they're nonetheless parasites on people's minds and time. I'll mention a few.
I_am_carrie is in the Inu Yasha fanfiction subculture. She spends up to 10 hours a day talking to other fanfiction writers, reading fanfiction stories, writing them, entering contests, moderating communities of fanfiction contests and stories, and so on. Since entering it it has absorbed her life and her life now revolves around it.
Newedition was in the Objectivists subculture; it too absorbed much of her time and beliefs, until she finally managed to escape. Unfortunately she escaped into the 9/11 conspiracy theory and natural health & medicine subcultures, but at least that's an interesting change.
The same is true for many other people I know: Miyu and the elegant gothic lolita fashion subculture, charbile and the furry subculture, etc. etc. -- it just consumes most of a person's time with very little given back to them in return.
I myself was never very absorbed in any subculture, with the possible exception of one I invented myself (the Heroists, which are a group of artists who seek to alter world culture and the future through art), but at least that's just being absorbed by something you created.
There's also the independent games subculture, but that one's kind of unavoidable because that's what I do, and even so I intentionally try to limit my time spent within that subculture -- I'm not as into it as most of the people on the TIGSource forums for instance, and have beliefs that most of them find unorthodox, such as the idea that story is gameplay, the idea that games are not just for fun, the idea that creating games just because you like creating them isn't the only valid reason to create them, etc.
Now I do think subcultures can be worth dipping into, they're interesting and often have ideas of value and you can meet interesting people through them. And if a person spent time in a subculture or two it tends to make them more interesting people. But when it reaches the point that most of a person's life is consumed by them, and when most of their thoughts and reactions and beliefs become indistinguishable from most of the other people in that subculture, I think they're more trouble than they're worth.
I_am_carrie is in the Inu Yasha fanfiction subculture. She spends up to 10 hours a day talking to other fanfiction writers, reading fanfiction stories, writing them, entering contests, moderating communities of fanfiction contests and stories, and so on. Since entering it it has absorbed her life and her life now revolves around it.
Newedition was in the Objectivists subculture; it too absorbed much of her time and beliefs, until she finally managed to escape. Unfortunately she escaped into the 9/11 conspiracy theory and natural health & medicine subcultures, but at least that's an interesting change.
The same is true for many other people I know: Miyu and the elegant gothic lolita fashion subculture, charbile and the furry subculture, etc. etc. -- it just consumes most of a person's time with very little given back to them in return.
I myself was never very absorbed in any subculture, with the possible exception of one I invented myself (the Heroists, which are a group of artists who seek to alter world culture and the future through art), but at least that's just being absorbed by something you created.
There's also the independent games subculture, but that one's kind of unavoidable because that's what I do, and even so I intentionally try to limit my time spent within that subculture -- I'm not as into it as most of the people on the TIGSource forums for instance, and have beliefs that most of them find unorthodox, such as the idea that story is gameplay, the idea that games are not just for fun, the idea that creating games just because you like creating them isn't the only valid reason to create them, etc.
Now I do think subcultures can be worth dipping into, they're interesting and often have ideas of value and you can meet interesting people through them. And if a person spent time in a subculture or two it tends to make them more interesting people. But when it reaches the point that most of a person's life is consumed by them, and when most of their thoughts and reactions and beliefs become indistinguishable from most of the other people in that subculture, I think they're more trouble than they're worth.
This was a comment in the Ron Paul LJ community which I meant to be much shorter but which spiraled off; it may be worth saving. And then after that was another comment on why I felt the campaign didn't win, which may also be worth saving.
*
I think the war of ideas is pretty much determined by who has the ability to transmit and disseminate those ideas.
RP took advantage of the current strength of informal media -- blogs, sites like digg.com and reddit.com and facebook.com and myspace.com, web 2.0 and social networking in general, even livejournal.com -- but the current strength of informal, secondary media relative to mainstream, primary media is an anomaly and in all likelihood won't last very long, perhaps not even the four years until the next election after this one. It certainly wasn't anywhere near as strong four years ago.
This election cycle was also very weird because it actually had a few politicians who were principled and on the people's side running for president (Gravel, Paul, Kucinich to some degree), but this probably won't be the case most of the time.
It was a constellation of unlikely factors which caused the RP campaign to progress even as far as it did. I realistically don't see that constellation repeating in the next 10,000 years. So it's unfortunate that we lost, because the chance of winning this time was higher than it ever was before.
That isn't to say things are hopeless -- the chance of a billionaire or someone of great wealth, fame, or power clandestinely gaining power and then acting on loyalties to principles and the people rather than the power structure is becoming increasingly likely. It used to happen fairly often during the age of monarchy and empires, due to the untrustworthiness of loyalties through hereditary dynasties, but it's still possible now. The Founding Fathers fell under this category to some degree, so were a few of the so-called benevolent dictators (Catherine the Great, Frederick the Great, Peter the Great).
But it's just as likely today, because of a decrease in the ability to control people's thoughts as effectively as was once the case, ironically through the increased ability for anyone anywhere to control the thoughts of others, as seen in cults, leading to confusion as minds are pulled in many directions at once and forced to adapt. And because no minds are more controlled than those in the power structure itself, this weakening of the ability to control minds may lead to anomalies like people in power caring more about normal people than about maintaining their power.
Normally what happens currently when an anomaly appears within the power structure is that that person is identified and pushed out of it by the others. So what really needs to happen is that a network of them develop and keep themselves hidden within it. That too is becoming increasingly possible (and may even exist right now, for all we know).
*
I think the biggest reasons the campaign didn't win are:
- Most everyone focused on putting up signs and building airships and almost nobody focused on face to face interaction and convincing friends and family members one on one, when the second is easily ten-thousand times as important and effective. Most often my experience is the average RP supporter had not convinced a single member of their family or a single one of their friends, if they even had any, to vote for him.
- The RP campaign staff itself was surprisingly ineffectual, as described in good detail an article I linked to from this community a few months back. He really should have hired the greatest talent he could, rather than relying on his personal friends and the Lew Rockwell crowd, or worse.
- RP worship, which led to relying on him to do everything because of a mistaken premise that he's superhuman and that all that was required was cheering him or chanting his name like a mantra, despite his repeated claims that he was just a messenger and that it was up to us.
- RP himself failed to be as convincing or as charming as he could have been when the opportunity arose. Another reason was his earlier personal immoralities, particularly the issue with letting bad stuff be published under his name -- even if it was without his knowledge, it's pretty inexcusable to not have knowledge of things done by your own ghostwriters and such. Some slack should be given to him in the articulate department because he's like 73 of course, he did a good and occasionally a great job during most of his interviews and the debates, but it still could have been far better.
- Resistance from the other campaigns, including infiltrators, and resistance from the power structure, including mainstream media. But those resistances were expected and should have been taken for granted.
*
I think the war of ideas is pretty much determined by who has the ability to transmit and disseminate those ideas.
RP took advantage of the current strength of informal media -- blogs, sites like digg.com and reddit.com and facebook.com and myspace.com, web 2.0 and social networking in general, even livejournal.com -- but the current strength of informal, secondary media relative to mainstream, primary media is an anomaly and in all likelihood won't last very long, perhaps not even the four years until the next election after this one. It certainly wasn't anywhere near as strong four years ago.
This election cycle was also very weird because it actually had a few politicians who were principled and on the people's side running for president (Gravel, Paul, Kucinich to some degree), but this probably won't be the case most of the time.
It was a constellation of unlikely factors which caused the RP campaign to progress even as far as it did. I realistically don't see that constellation repeating in the next 10,000 years. So it's unfortunate that we lost, because the chance of winning this time was higher than it ever was before.
That isn't to say things are hopeless -- the chance of a billionaire or someone of great wealth, fame, or power clandestinely gaining power and then acting on loyalties to principles and the people rather than the power structure is becoming increasingly likely. It used to happen fairly often during the age of monarchy and empires, due to the untrustworthiness of loyalties through hereditary dynasties, but it's still possible now. The Founding Fathers fell under this category to some degree, so were a few of the so-called benevolent dictators (Catherine the Great, Frederick the Great, Peter the Great).
But it's just as likely today, because of a decrease in the ability to control people's thoughts as effectively as was once the case, ironically through the increased ability for anyone anywhere to control the thoughts of others, as seen in cults, leading to confusion as minds are pulled in many directions at once and forced to adapt. And because no minds are more controlled than those in the power structure itself, this weakening of the ability to control minds may lead to anomalies like people in power caring more about normal people than about maintaining their power.
Normally what happens currently when an anomaly appears within the power structure is that that person is identified and pushed out of it by the others. So what really needs to happen is that a network of them develop and keep themselves hidden within it. That too is becoming increasingly possible (and may even exist right now, for all we know).
*
I think the biggest reasons the campaign didn't win are:
- Most everyone focused on putting up signs and building airships and almost nobody focused on face to face interaction and convincing friends and family members one on one, when the second is easily ten-thousand times as important and effective. Most often my experience is the average RP supporter had not convinced a single member of their family or a single one of their friends, if they even had any, to vote for him.
- The RP campaign staff itself was surprisingly ineffectual, as described in good detail an article I linked to from this community a few months back. He really should have hired the greatest talent he could, rather than relying on his personal friends and the Lew Rockwell crowd, or worse.
- RP worship, which led to relying on him to do everything because of a mistaken premise that he's superhuman and that all that was required was cheering him or chanting his name like a mantra, despite his repeated claims that he was just a messenger and that it was up to us.
- RP himself failed to be as convincing or as charming as he could have been when the opportunity arose. Another reason was his earlier personal immoralities, particularly the issue with letting bad stuff be published under his name -- even if it was without his knowledge, it's pretty inexcusable to not have knowledge of things done by your own ghostwriters and such. Some slack should be given to him in the articulate department because he's like 73 of course, he did a good and occasionally a great job during most of his interviews and the debates, but it still could have been far better.
- Resistance from the other campaigns, including infiltrators, and resistance from the power structure, including mainstream media. But those resistances were expected and should have been taken for granted.
for all of these, i know people of one extreme, people of the other, and those with moderation, and for all of these the moderation best. moderation here is used in the Aristotelian sense, not in the sense of averaging.
1 - people who are able to be self-critical without being self-hating or overly humble or self-depreciating. this is a middle ground between people who never find fault with themselves, and people who always do. it's lazy thinking to expect to always be right or always be wrong: sometimes we're right and sometimes we're wrong, and we need to identify which is which, not just automatically group everything into one or the other and group everyone else automatically into one or the other.
2 - people who are moral, rather than people who are moralistic or immoral. people who have their own set of principles which they live by, but not people who get angry or upset at others for not living by those principles, and not people who live by no principles at all. on the one extreme you have people who are fundamentalists about it who get angry at people who make the barest infractions on what rules they've set for themselves, and the other are people who don't live by anything, constantly act in a way to harm others or themselves, and mistakenly believe they're good people anyway.
3 - people who treat work and productivity and craftsmanship as important, but not people who see it as the purpose of their life. on one extreme are those people who don't take pride in what they do, or just work for some company and don't care about what they do as long as they get paid, and on the other extreme are people who see themselves as ___ machines (where ___ is their career), with everything else in their life revolving around optimizing the quality and quantity of their output. the moderation is to be very good at what you do, and take it very seriously, but not to identify with it so much that you'd rather be dead than do it or that you'd get depressed over something you created not being well-received, or not being the best at what you do in the world.
4 - people who are comfortable regarding sex or relationships or romance and not embarrassed about it, yet not promiscuous or obsessed with it or take it lightly either. i.e. people who aren't repressed and treat it as a source of enjoyment, but not as a particularly important or crucial one.
5 - people who are comfortable using abstractions as tools, but don't live in them. people who can read philosophy and understand it, and understand its importance, but not people who treat theory as more real than concrete, sensory existence, or some type of substitute for experience and empiricism.
agree/disagree?
I suspect these five are core personality traits -- things that change very slowly or gradually in a person, if at all. people who tend fall on one or the other side of these often stay that way, barring some enlightening experience or trauma, although it is true that generally people become more moderate in these with age. I can think of very few people who are moderate in all five of these ways (even myself, I tend toward the perfectionist extreme in #3, and I used to fall on the abstract extreme in #5); most of the people I've known, including most of you, fall to one extreme or the other in at least one of these.
1 - people who are able to be self-critical without being self-hating or overly humble or self-depreciating. this is a middle ground between people who never find fault with themselves, and people who always do. it's lazy thinking to expect to always be right or always be wrong: sometimes we're right and sometimes we're wrong, and we need to identify which is which, not just automatically group everything into one or the other and group everyone else automatically into one or the other.
2 - people who are moral, rather than people who are moralistic or immoral. people who have their own set of principles which they live by, but not people who get angry or upset at others for not living by those principles, and not people who live by no principles at all. on the one extreme you have people who are fundamentalists about it who get angry at people who make the barest infractions on what rules they've set for themselves, and the other are people who don't live by anything, constantly act in a way to harm others or themselves, and mistakenly believe they're good people anyway.
3 - people who treat work and productivity and craftsmanship as important, but not people who see it as the purpose of their life. on one extreme are those people who don't take pride in what they do, or just work for some company and don't care about what they do as long as they get paid, and on the other extreme are people who see themselves as ___ machines (where ___ is their career), with everything else in their life revolving around optimizing the quality and quantity of their output. the moderation is to be very good at what you do, and take it very seriously, but not to identify with it so much that you'd rather be dead than do it or that you'd get depressed over something you created not being well-received, or not being the best at what you do in the world.
4 - people who are comfortable regarding sex or relationships or romance and not embarrassed about it, yet not promiscuous or obsessed with it or take it lightly either. i.e. people who aren't repressed and treat it as a source of enjoyment, but not as a particularly important or crucial one.
5 - people who are comfortable using abstractions as tools, but don't live in them. people who can read philosophy and understand it, and understand its importance, but not people who treat theory as more real than concrete, sensory existence, or some type of substitute for experience and empiricism.
agree/disagree?
I suspect these five are core personality traits -- things that change very slowly or gradually in a person, if at all. people who tend fall on one or the other side of these often stay that way, barring some enlightening experience or trauma, although it is true that generally people become more moderate in these with age. I can think of very few people who are moderate in all five of these ways (even myself, I tend toward the perfectionist extreme in #3, and I used to fall on the abstract extreme in #5); most of the people I've known, including most of you, fall to one extreme or the other in at least one of these.
My mother has so many superstitions. Perhaps I should describe this to her now that I found it.
One of Skinner's experiments examined the formation of superstition in one of his favorite experimental animals, the pigeon. Skinner placed a series of hungry pigeons in a cage attached to an automatic mechanism that delivered food to the pigeon "at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird's behavior." He discovered that the pigeons associated the delivery of the food with whatever chance actions they had been performing as it was delivered, and that they subsequently continued to perform these same actions.
"One bird was conditioned to turn counter-clockwise about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements. Another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the upper corners of the cage. A third developed a 'tossing' response, as if placing its head beneath an invisible bar and lifting it repeatedly. Two birds developed a pendulum motion of the head and body, in which the head was extended forward and swung from right to left with a sharp movement followed by a somewhat slower return."
Skinner suggested that the pigeons behaved as if they were influencing the automatic mechanism with their "rituals" and that this experiment shed light on human behavior:
"The experiment might be said to demonstrate a sort of superstition. The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking. There are many analogies in human behavior. Rituals for changing one's fortune at cards are good examples. A few accidental connections between a ritual and favorable consequences suffice to set up and maintain the behavior in spite of many unreinforced instances. The bowler who has released a ball down the alley but continues to behave as if she were controlling it by twisting and turning her arm and shoulder is another case in point. These behaviors have, of course, no real effect upon one's luck or upon a ball half way down an alley, just as in the present case the food would appear as often if the pigeon did nothing -- or, more strictly speaking, did something else."
A week or two ago ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
harlockhero expressed the idea that humans are wolves in civilized clothing and to be honest should just rape each other all day due to our beast-like instincts and terrible natures; the idea is that humans mainly act on instincts which have evolved over time, and the idea that rationalizing those actions in terms that would make sense is dishonest.
This seems to be a commonly held view, because when I expressed this idea of Harlock's to Miyu she agreed more or less, with the caveat that (as I mentioned to Harlock) it's a bad idea to see instincts as base or to associate animality with evil, because animals most of the time are pretty decent and noble creatures, sexual and killing instincts and all. Cats have very strong instincts -- they go into heat during which they'd have sex with anything, and they attack anything that looks like a mouse's tail (such as a piece of string) with their sharp teeth and claws -- but nobody would say that cats are evil because of that. And yes when I see a cat purring and friendly I know deep down that it's only that way because acting like that has survival value, but does that make the friendliness any less genuine?
So as I woke up today, after a dream in which I killed my family because I was angry at them for spilling my orange juice of all things and then laughing about it (I don't even like orange juice when I'm awake and avoid it because of the high acid content), I realized a good answer to Harlock's belief. The answer is that yes, instincts did evolve in our long past because they have survival value, but rationality also evolved, in our more recent past, because sometimes deciding which instinct to act on, or deciding not to act on an instinct right now or in this particular instance, *also* has survival value. If we had never evolved it we really would be killing our families every day over orange juice, but that we aren't is proof that rationality is just as good an instinct as all the others.
Rationality and all of our other instincts keep us alive as individuals and as a species and we should be grateful we have them, not disdain them because of the rare exceptional cases when they cause harm. All of them can cause harm occasionally (including rationality), but we shouldn't essentialize something by it's non-essential elements.
harlockhero expressed the idea that humans are wolves in civilized clothing and to be honest should just rape each other all day due to our beast-like instincts and terrible natures; the idea is that humans mainly act on instincts which have evolved over time, and the idea that rationalizing those actions in terms that would make sense is dishonest.This seems to be a commonly held view, because when I expressed this idea of Harlock's to Miyu she agreed more or less, with the caveat that (as I mentioned to Harlock) it's a bad idea to see instincts as base or to associate animality with evil, because animals most of the time are pretty decent and noble creatures, sexual and killing instincts and all. Cats have very strong instincts -- they go into heat during which they'd have sex with anything, and they attack anything that looks like a mouse's tail (such as a piece of string) with their sharp teeth and claws -- but nobody would say that cats are evil because of that. And yes when I see a cat purring and friendly I know deep down that it's only that way because acting like that has survival value, but does that make the friendliness any less genuine?
So as I woke up today, after a dream in which I killed my family because I was angry at them for spilling my orange juice of all things and then laughing about it (I don't even like orange juice when I'm awake and avoid it because of the high acid content), I realized a good answer to Harlock's belief. The answer is that yes, instincts did evolve in our long past because they have survival value, but rationality also evolved, in our more recent past, because sometimes deciding which instinct to act on, or deciding not to act on an instinct right now or in this particular instance, *also* has survival value. If we had never evolved it we really would be killing our families every day over orange juice, but that we aren't is proof that rationality is just as good an instinct as all the others.
Rationality and all of our other instincts keep us alive as individuals and as a species and we should be grateful we have them, not disdain them because of the rare exceptional cases when they cause harm. All of them can cause harm occasionally (including rationality), but we shouldn't essentialize something by it's non-essential elements.
Oddly, sometimes I feel that I want to say something in LJ, and yet when I open it I don't know what I want to say, only that I want to say it. The unconscious is a strange thing.
There are times when you need to do what your unconscious says, times when you need to ignore it, and times when you need to appease it.
There are times when you need to do what your unconscious says, times when you need to ignore it, and times when you need to appease it.
Watching that I realize how crazy Jackie Chan is -- I mean that literally, he has to have some type of death-wish or addiction to near-death experiences.
http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In the usual course of things, we expect information to lead to belief, but increasingly belief precedes information. It is, in fact, immune to information. In the new book, True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, Farhad Manjoo traces the evolution of our tendency to tune out facts that don't jive with our beliefs.
He begins with a study conducted in the late '60s. Psychologists put college students in a room to listen to various speeches that were obscured by static. At any point the test subjects could press a button to temporarily reduce the static. Farhad Manjoo says that nonsmokers would repeatedly reduce the static during speeches about the bad effects of smoking.
FARHAD MANJOO: The smokers, on the other hand, wanted to only listen to the stuff that confirmed their belief that smoking wasn't so bad for them. [BROOKE LAUGHS]
It was sort of one of the first and really one of the most clear-cut experiments on selective exposure. It's this psychological concept that basically says we tend to seek out information that comports with our beliefs and we avoid information that is dissonant, that kind of contradicts our views.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And when your beliefs are not borne out by the facts and you can't tune the facts out, you can engage in something else, which you call selective interpretation. And that's what a doomsday cult did in 1954 when the world didn't end on schedule.
FARHAD MANJOO: Right. When the world didn't end on schedule for this group, they decided that, well, maybe the message that they had been getting from this divine prophet actually suggested that their work to prevent the apocalypse worked. So selective interpretation means you see a set of facts and you fit the interpretation to your beliefs.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, you use examples from, you know, decades ago to illustrate selective exposure and selective interpretation, but you contend in your book that these are really manifestations of the current media world of blogs and talk radio and email.
FARHAD MANJOO: Yeah. And in this world, there is the front door, the big newspapers and big network news outlets. The side doors are the blogs, talk radio, cable news, which actually draws a very small audience.
These side doors allow us to kind of amplify these factors of selective exposure and selective interpretation, and they make these factors kind of more important today than they were in the past, because in the past, you couldn't really seek out media that comported with your beliefs because, well, there weren't that many media choices.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We all know it's really easy to manipulate audio, video, and especially with Photoshop and digital images. But it was interesting – you said that the biggest effect of the Photoshopification of our society is not that it's easier to fool people but that now they have even more reason not to believe the evidence of their eyes and ears if they don't want to.
FARHAD MANJOO: If you live in a world where everything is possibly fake, where every photo you see could have been Photoshopped, it gives you license to dismiss that photo. This is true not only of photos but of basically all kind of documentary evidence that comes at us these days. We can always assume that there's been some digital foul play there and that it's possibly not a truth.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: How do we have an informed society if you can disbelieve anything you aren't likely to approve of?
FARHAD MANJOO: Well, in a number of areas I argue that we don't have an informed society; that one of the problems of this age is that we have people disagreeing over things that in the past I don't think they would have disagreed about – over the basic science behind global warming, for example, where you have huge numbers of Americans who simply dismiss the science.
And one of the difficulties about this situation is that the whole system sort of operates unconsciously. You can't really tell people that your truth is not true. They're not going to believe you.
It's possible with the Internet to go out and search for the well-researched documented truth of the situation. It's more possible now than it was ever before. I suppose I can suggest that people try to do that, but I don't know how well that's going to work.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] They could have done that all along. It just feels good to listen to the information that supports what we already want to believe. How do you fight something that feels so good?
I know Charbile will snicker at this idea, but lately I've been finding the more instinctual/social emotions -- embarrassement, shame, feeling good when you get attention or bad when you're shunned, pecking order stuff involving being bossy or being subservient, guilt, pride, narcissism, and all that -- pretty elegantly done.
Of course it's not a good idea to get too caught up in them or else you'll be like Peter Keating from The Fountainhead (for those who read that), but as evolutionary solutions to the problems and conditions of civilization we've had and still largely have they're amazingly well done, and people shouldn't, like, be ashamed to feel shame, and treat all those things as petty or beneath them.
We should feel those things fully rather than resist them, and even find enjoyment in them, while recognizing when they work and when they don't work and what they are so that we don't only act on habit or instinct, and even when we do we should recognize it.
This goes for instincts in general too, it's only through embracing something that you gain control over it, rather than feeling antagonism toward them or pretending they aren't there.
An analogy I can think of is: we have instincts to walk: (yes, we have to learn how to walk, but instinct doesn't mean born with, it means born with a tendency toward; we aren't born with sexual desire either and that's pretty instinctual). And it's true that walking isn't always the best way to get places, there's also cars and bicycles and such now, but we didn't achieve those better ways through saying walking is beneath us or being resistant to walking. Likewise we can't achieve a better society by disliking the instincts responsible for the way group harmonies works, even when those lead to distasteful results like racism, or in-groups of cool kids and outcasts, or whatever.
Of course it's not a good idea to get too caught up in them or else you'll be like Peter Keating from The Fountainhead (for those who read that), but as evolutionary solutions to the problems and conditions of civilization we've had and still largely have they're amazingly well done, and people shouldn't, like, be ashamed to feel shame, and treat all those things as petty or beneath them.
We should feel those things fully rather than resist them, and even find enjoyment in them, while recognizing when they work and when they don't work and what they are so that we don't only act on habit or instinct, and even when we do we should recognize it.
This goes for instincts in general too, it's only through embracing something that you gain control over it, rather than feeling antagonism toward them or pretending they aren't there.
An analogy I can think of is: we have instincts to walk: (yes, we have to learn how to walk, but instinct doesn't mean born with, it means born with a tendency toward; we aren't born with sexual desire either and that's pretty instinctual). And it's true that walking isn't always the best way to get places, there's also cars and bicycles and such now, but we didn't achieve those better ways through saying walking is beneath us or being resistant to walking. Likewise we can't achieve a better society by disliking the instincts responsible for the way group harmonies works, even when those lead to distasteful results like racism, or in-groups of cool kids and outcasts, or whatever.
Lately I've been losing whatever inclination I had to express thoughts in words. The very idea of writing something has become detestable. EDIT: Let alone writing something as long as this entry.
This might be due to an increasing distrust of the abstract (and all words are abstract, some more than others, but all of them.) I think a good response is to instead only write in a storytelling, pointing way. Truths that exist which cannot be conveyed in that way aren't usually worth conveying.
China will replace the US as a superpower solely on the basis that they eat more omega-3 fats than we do, and because the lack of them is associated with most forms of mental illness and all kinds of neurological troubles. They also don't have HFCS and so on (which is not to say that their diet doesn't have some problems, but it's far better than here). Also, although both the US and China are fascisms (in the sense of an unholy alliance between business and government), but at least theirs is more corrupt, and corruption is usually good for the people of a country because it keeps fascisms weak and ineffectual. Their economy also grows at around 10% a year and ours actually shrinks at around 1.5% a year if you account for standard of living and inflation. I suggest a good time to immigrate there is around 2035, 27 years from now; the relevant stars align around then. By 2050, definitely. To bad I have to wait so long to see how this turns out, but there are interesting things to do in the mean time.
There are all kinds of things happening in the world and it's hard to decide which is the most interesting to follow and work within. Just through proximity and other accidents the ones I follow the most are independent game development, nutrition / scientific alternative medicine, and the ridiculously ineffectual minarchist movement. But they could just as easily have been any of a thousand other things that people are interested in and work within, and although it seems to me that these three may be more important than most of those, anyone with a familiar knowledge of any of those thousand other movements would likely believe likewise. I do think that some may be more important than others, but just that with the bias of knowing some in more intimate detail than others, it's easy to be mistaken. For all I know, the so-called Mexican illegal immigrant invasion or the so-called Jewish banking conspiracies or the people who talk about drunk driving or the war on terrorism or the problems caused by not banning (or banning too many) guns or global warming or abortion or class warfare could be more important than the things I'm interested in are.
There are thousands of things that seem important to a lot of people which are irrelevant, stupid, or only mild curiousities to many other people. I wouldn't even dismiss the possible importance of celebrity culture and the people who intensely follow the activities of movie stars (even those who do so while admitting it's not important), even that kind of stuff could be more important in its possible effects on the world than I or even they realize: it sounds ridiculous, but maybe Clay Aiken really is more important than the torture camps in North Korea, or something (and I don't mean that just humorously, it's possible).
Okay, that sounds ridiculous, but here is how it's possible: people are largely controlled either through pleasure or pain. The more cruder nations tend to use pain to control, the more sophisticated countries tend to use pleasure to control; that goes not only for nations but also for just individual control of one person over another, parents over their children, cult leaders over their cult: the greater and more subtle control is obtained by pleasure rather than pain. Threating to cause someone pain is actually less effective than threatening to cut off their pleasure; psychology has shown this in studies as well. The Victorians as an example prevented people from having too much sexual pleasure, whereas other societies did the opposite and tried to overwhelm with too much of it. So while North Korea uses torture camps and force to keep its people chained, other governments have celebrities -- and many other things, such as pornography or various customs and holidays and economic products like drugs (illegal, prescription, or legal) -- to keep its people not chained but in a way enraptured.
And I'm not saying it's preferable to live under the former than the latter, or that NK does not use pleasure (think of those perfect birthday dances they have) or that we do not use pain (look at all the brutality in our prisons), just that one should recognize the essential similarity between the two methods to reduce the extent to which one is controlled, either by pain or pleasure, at least when you don't think it's a good idea to be controlled in a certain way (and it's usually not). Left to their own devices people in nature do not naturally seek out to maximize their pleasure to the extent that people do in many industrial democracies, and when they occasionally do they don't feel as guilty about it as the civilized do, but above all they don't drastically change their principles or their lifestyle or what or who is important to them just to maximize pleasure the way that's routinely done here. Pleasure is a mechanism and when it's working correctly most every-day things are pleasurable, just staring at the snow fall or doing a good day's work or just waking up or going to sleep. Requiring specific objects or activities or substances, at cost, in order to have pleasure is strange and inhuman when you think about it, it's kind of the inverse of torture, where there's pain for the sake of pain rather than pain for the sake of avoiding every-day things that are harmful.
So! What I think is good: ever-constant pleasure from every day life rather than its rise and fall, avoiding exterior behavior controls most of the time which limit you, being interested in a few domains while recognizing that they probably are no more important than the domains others are interested in, and moving to China around 2035.
This might be due to an increasing distrust of the abstract (and all words are abstract, some more than others, but all of them.) I think a good response is to instead only write in a storytelling, pointing way. Truths that exist which cannot be conveyed in that way aren't usually worth conveying.
China will replace the US as a superpower solely on the basis that they eat more omega-3 fats than we do, and because the lack of them is associated with most forms of mental illness and all kinds of neurological troubles. They also don't have HFCS and so on (which is not to say that their diet doesn't have some problems, but it's far better than here). Also, although both the US and China are fascisms (in the sense of an unholy alliance between business and government), but at least theirs is more corrupt, and corruption is usually good for the people of a country because it keeps fascisms weak and ineffectual. Their economy also grows at around 10% a year and ours actually shrinks at around 1.5% a year if you account for standard of living and inflation. I suggest a good time to immigrate there is around 2035, 27 years from now; the relevant stars align around then. By 2050, definitely. To bad I have to wait so long to see how this turns out, but there are interesting things to do in the mean time.
There are all kinds of things happening in the world and it's hard to decide which is the most interesting to follow and work within. Just through proximity and other accidents the ones I follow the most are independent game development, nutrition / scientific alternative medicine, and the ridiculously ineffectual minarchist movement. But they could just as easily have been any of a thousand other things that people are interested in and work within, and although it seems to me that these three may be more important than most of those, anyone with a familiar knowledge of any of those thousand other movements would likely believe likewise. I do think that some may be more important than others, but just that with the bias of knowing some in more intimate detail than others, it's easy to be mistaken. For all I know, the so-called Mexican illegal immigrant invasion or the so-called Jewish banking conspiracies or the people who talk about drunk driving or the war on terrorism or the problems caused by not banning (or banning too many) guns or global warming or abortion or class warfare could be more important than the things I'm interested in are.
There are thousands of things that seem important to a lot of people which are irrelevant, stupid, or only mild curiousities to many other people. I wouldn't even dismiss the possible importance of celebrity culture and the people who intensely follow the activities of movie stars (even those who do so while admitting it's not important), even that kind of stuff could be more important in its possible effects on the world than I or even they realize: it sounds ridiculous, but maybe Clay Aiken really is more important than the torture camps in North Korea, or something (and I don't mean that just humorously, it's possible).
Okay, that sounds ridiculous, but here is how it's possible: people are largely controlled either through pleasure or pain. The more cruder nations tend to use pain to control, the more sophisticated countries tend to use pleasure to control; that goes not only for nations but also for just individual control of one person over another, parents over their children, cult leaders over their cult: the greater and more subtle control is obtained by pleasure rather than pain. Threating to cause someone pain is actually less effective than threatening to cut off their pleasure; psychology has shown this in studies as well. The Victorians as an example prevented people from having too much sexual pleasure, whereas other societies did the opposite and tried to overwhelm with too much of it. So while North Korea uses torture camps and force to keep its people chained, other governments have celebrities -- and many other things, such as pornography or various customs and holidays and economic products like drugs (illegal, prescription, or legal) -- to keep its people not chained but in a way enraptured.
And I'm not saying it's preferable to live under the former than the latter, or that NK does not use pleasure (think of those perfect birthday dances they have) or that we do not use pain (look at all the brutality in our prisons), just that one should recognize the essential similarity between the two methods to reduce the extent to which one is controlled, either by pain or pleasure, at least when you don't think it's a good idea to be controlled in a certain way (and it's usually not). Left to their own devices people in nature do not naturally seek out to maximize their pleasure to the extent that people do in many industrial democracies, and when they occasionally do they don't feel as guilty about it as the civilized do, but above all they don't drastically change their principles or their lifestyle or what or who is important to them just to maximize pleasure the way that's routinely done here. Pleasure is a mechanism and when it's working correctly most every-day things are pleasurable, just staring at the snow fall or doing a good day's work or just waking up or going to sleep. Requiring specific objects or activities or substances, at cost, in order to have pleasure is strange and inhuman when you think about it, it's kind of the inverse of torture, where there's pain for the sake of pain rather than pain for the sake of avoiding every-day things that are harmful.
So! What I think is good: ever-constant pleasure from every day life rather than its rise and fall, avoiding exterior behavior controls most of the time which limit you, being interested in a few domains while recognizing that they probably are no more important than the domains others are interested in, and moving to China around 2035.
I was eventually going to write an entry about this but Harlock did it better. A few points:
- I agree with his BEAST level of consciousness, there should be one.
- There's one I forgot to tell him about. To quote from an IM to charbile:
(02:23:02) Paul Eres: after 'the here and now' level [the book describes this as]
(02:23:06) Paul Eres: is 'pure reason'
(02:23:12) Paul Eres: where one ceases to be one's mind
(02:23:21) Paul Eres: and instead of a mind with a body
(02:23:24) Paul Eres: one becomes a body with a mind
(02:23:29) Paul Eres: using the mind objectively, as a tool
(02:23:35) Paul Eres: instead of identifying oneself with it
And the book says that it's at that point that one becomes 'a creator', capable of bringing things into existence just because you love the idea of that thing existing.
- I agree with his BEAST level of consciousness, there should be one.
- There's one I forgot to tell him about. To quote from an IM to charbile:
(02:23:02) Paul Eres: after 'the here and now' level [the book describes this as]
(02:23:06) Paul Eres: is 'pure reason'
(02:23:12) Paul Eres: where one ceases to be one's mind
(02:23:21) Paul Eres: and instead of a mind with a body
(02:23:24) Paul Eres: one becomes a body with a mind
(02:23:29) Paul Eres: using the mind objectively, as a tool
(02:23:35) Paul Eres: instead of identifying oneself with it
And the book says that it's at that point that one becomes 'a creator', capable of bringing things into existence just because you love the idea of that thing existing.
There was a psychological study once when a bunch of inmates in a mental home were asked to pretend to be normal, to act in a way that they thought normal people acted. Surprisingly, this cured most of them, and they were soon able to be released.
Inversely, sometimes I get the feeling that the world is populated by insane people pretending to be sane; they're cunning enough to have learned all the tricks of sanity and not be picked out and recognized as crazy, but under the seeming order is a fairly big degree of chaos.
I think that if this is true, this used to be true of me too during my teenage years, but isn't anymore. Because I remember what I was like to be 12 or 14, and I remember that a lot of what I did and said and thought was pretty purposeless and irrational, although I was always able to give rationalizations and paint it as semi-sane.
And now that I actually do feel sane, it's harder to convince people that I am, and I act much more stereotypically crazy, because I can no longer rationalize or explain why I do things, and just kind of treat it as unknown and mysterious.
But returning to the original point, I kind of strongly suspect that most people are as crazy as I used to be. For instance, creating a rationalization for what you do or believe or say, and believing in that rationalization, instead of just recognizing that you don't know why you do things, is pretty crazy. And that's just one example of how most people are pretending to know what they're doing and pretending to be in control of what they do even though they don't and aren't. I can recognize it because I used to do it myself.
Not that I'm defending mental institutions, I think everyone in them should be released immediately. Except for those who got out of going to jail because of the 'insanity defense', they can stay.
Inversely, sometimes I get the feeling that the world is populated by insane people pretending to be sane; they're cunning enough to have learned all the tricks of sanity and not be picked out and recognized as crazy, but under the seeming order is a fairly big degree of chaos.
I think that if this is true, this used to be true of me too during my teenage years, but isn't anymore. Because I remember what I was like to be 12 or 14, and I remember that a lot of what I did and said and thought was pretty purposeless and irrational, although I was always able to give rationalizations and paint it as semi-sane.
And now that I actually do feel sane, it's harder to convince people that I am, and I act much more stereotypically crazy, because I can no longer rationalize or explain why I do things, and just kind of treat it as unknown and mysterious.
But returning to the original point, I kind of strongly suspect that most people are as crazy as I used to be. For instance, creating a rationalization for what you do or believe or say, and believing in that rationalization, instead of just recognizing that you don't know why you do things, is pretty crazy. And that's just one example of how most people are pretending to know what they're doing and pretending to be in control of what they do even though they don't and aren't. I can recognize it because I used to do it myself.
Not that I'm defending mental institutions, I think everyone in them should be released immediately. Except for those who got out of going to jail because of the 'insanity defense', they can stay.
I know self-diagnosis is stupid, but I've been reading about adult ADD recently. These quotes are from Wikipedia:
The above is often what I complain about in LJ.
Of those 17 I have: 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 (but I wouldn't want to change 9), 13 (but only the cognitive part), 14 (but only if you consider information addiction or playing videogames addictions), 17, which is 10/17. Maybe a mild form of it?
...It's like being super-charged all the time. You get one idea and you have to act on it, and then, what do you know, but you've got another idea before you've finished up with the first one, and so you go for that one, but of course a third idea intercepts the second, and you just have to follow that one, and pretty soon people are calling you disorganized and impulsive and all sorts of impolite words that miss the point completely. Because you're trying really hard. It's just that you have all these invisible vectors pulling you this way and that, which makes it really hard to stay on task.
The above is often what I complain about in LJ.
1. A sense of underachievement, of not meeting one's goals (regardless of how much one has actually accomplished).
2. Difficulty getting organized.
3. Chronic procrastination or trouble getting started.
4. Many projects going simultaneously; trouble with follow through.
5. A tendency to say what comes to mind without necessarily considering the timing or appropriateness of the remark.
6. A frequent search for high stimulation.
7. An intolerance of boredom.
8. Easy distractibility; trouble focusing attention, tendency to tune out or drift away in the middle of a page or conversation, often coupled with an inability to focus at times.
9. Trouble in going through established channels and following "proper" procedure.
10. Impatient; low tolerance of frustration.
11. Impulsive, either verbally or in action, as an impulsive spending of money.
12. Changing plans, enacting new schemes or career plans and the like; hot-tempered
13. Physical or cognitive restlessness.
14. A tendency toward addictive behaviour.
15. Chronic problems with self-esteem.
16. Inaccurate self-observation.
17. Family history of AD/HD or manic depressive illness or depression or substance abuse or other disorders of impulse control or mood.
Of those 17 I have: 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 (but I wouldn't want to change 9), 13 (but only the cognitive part), 14 (but only if you consider information addiction or playing videogames addictions), 17, which is 10/17. Maybe a mild form of it?
There are only a few types of awareness we deal with: external senses (looking, listening, tasting, smelling, touching something), internal sensation (the state of one's body, pain and pleasure, temperature, how tired one feels, and other internal signals), thoughts (usually as words or some type of symbols, with or without a grammar), and imagination (which includes memory, imagined scenarios, dreams, etc. -- one's internal "drawing board"). Different ones or combinations of those are dominant in different people (almost to the extent that they "live in" that one and "visit" the others), but everyone does each at least a little. And they're pretty arbitrary, I'm sure thousands of other forms of awareness are possible -- just not to us. I said a few years ago to someone something which I still find interesting: that the only part of reality we can't really know (where to know means to be able to predict what it will do) is any means of knowing reality. In other words, we can't see sight, can't feel feeling, can't know knowledge, can't imagine imagination. I don't mean that we can't infer it, just that we can't see it itself, awareness isn't subject to awareness: I can't be aware of your awareness, which is too bad.
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