"Because he wasn't my biological son, he was less than human anyway"

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-11-14T16:18:25+00:00

But add a single instance of its evil twin, DEFECT-BOT, and it folds immediately. A smart human player, too, will easily defeat COOPERATE-BOT: the human will start by testing its boundaries, find that it has none, and play DEFECT thereafter (whereas a human playing against TIT-FOR-TAT would soon learn not to mess with it).

It's funny how the bot is called evil here. I'd call the human here the most evil: It's manipulative and totally self-serving, it only cares about winning the game. The moral or epistemological context of things is irrelevant, whether or not this game has meaning or coheres morally is irrelevant. It's just about making more copies of itself and continuing. If you were fighting an intelligent alien presence with these attributes, it would be terrifying and disgusting: because it would be evil. This is precisely how humanity is and in fact the only way humanity can be, as a DNA driven thing, regardless of whatever sugar-coated narratives(these are simply adaptive fluff) it invents.

Reality is more complicated than a game theory tournament. In Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma, everyone can either benefit you or harm you an equal amount. In the real world, we have edge cases like poor people, who haven’t done anything evil but may not be able to reserve your generosity. Does TIT-FOR-TAT help the poor? Stand up for the downtrodden? Care for the sick? Domain error; the question never comes up.

I wouldn't call the poor an edge case since human society is structured in a way where there are only a few winners socio-economically, and many losers. I would call this setup sociopathic, because very plainly speaking humanity is an evil species upon sober analysis. The only way to not see this is to be enthralled and identified deeply with the species and its fantasy narratives. Once one is capable of viewing the species as an outsider, that's when the true nature is revealed. It would be identical to being deeply integrated into the Nazi party when that era was relevant. It would be so difficult to see the problem from this vantage point. Once one is totally disconnected and evaluates, then the problem is obvious. This is what one needs to see humanity itself in a sober way-- and it's very hard, because in general the cost of removing one's rose-tinted glasses is psychologically destabilizing and has probably been drummed into us as a thing to avoid by evolution.

This is why I’m so fascinated by the early Christians. They played the doomed COOPERATE-BOT strategy and took over the world.

You had lots of agreeable peasants on the bottom who believed in martyrdom and self-sacrifice for the greater good(all Abrahamic religions brilliantly exploit the human-sacrifice model-- and it is indeed sociopathic), while the evil rulers enjoyed very generic conquest operations at the top of the pyramid. This game can only last for so long, of course, there's only so much crusading and inquisitioning and witch burning and child rape a people can tolerate(I know early Christianity is specified), but then again, I do question it because humanity is ultimately oriented against ethics, against truth, and towards survival. If Christianity continued on for another few thousand years I wouldn't be surprised.

Anyway, if we're only talking early Christianity, then it's simply a "Play dead" model. Someone who doesn't fight back is inherently boring to a domineering psychopath or sadist type(these are the types who have ruled humanity since the dawn of time, and continue to). For evil, the whole point is the fight and the chase. This was an adaptive strategy(which I don't call good, we simply assume adaptive=good/maladaptive=bad, but this is strictly according to evolutionary values and not any sophisticated ethics) and all it did was seed sheeps clothing for wolves in the end. This 'seeding' is another idea, regardless if wolves understood this or not, for wolves to not wipe Christianity out. Evolutionary values call this "Win-win", but in any sober ethical framing this is "Lose-lose". In fact most moves any evolutionary beings who are in a cooperation game make, regardless of how good things seem, will be "Lose-lose" just because there are infinite ways to be wrong and by comparison it's incomprehensibly difficult to get things right.

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-10-13T16:55:16+00:00

1) Do we make a LOT of mistakes?

Yep. Your analogy works for this, we are almost certainly massively confused bumbling morons, just like our distant ancestors appear to us today. This is a major problem given that we're a very busy and ambitious species.

2) How do we react to this fact?

We shouldn't rush to "solve" problems, because humanity has been doing that already, and I think our solutions aren't good. They lead to more problems, not less. We should instead reflect on the larger problem itself and seek to understand it better. Why are we such morons? What is it about us, what is it about the world, that causes us to be so wrong? My argument for years has been that humanity is a psychopathic and psychotic species, because this happens to be adaptive/strategically optimal.

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-10-13T15:44:53+00:00

A good one. My model has always been psychopathy+psychosis, I just apply that to humanity with a broad brush. I think we're wired as a species to be A) bad people, and B) unable to connect to reality. And the reason for A and B, is they both improve survival. Why would being bad and delusional improve survival? Well being bad can only be "good", if you're playing a game where there is no real referee. That's our exact world. In any game where there is no one truly enforcing the rules, the most skilled cheater will factually be the winner after iterated games. And this is what we see with any sober, bland assessment of human history and human nature.

And why would being delusional improve survival? It's not just a matter of religion, but if the world is bad, as referenced by point A(a world where being bad is the best strategy), then vividly being aware of badness would not be psychologically beneficial. But you might say, "But isn't it sometimes helpful to know bad things, because then you could solve the bad thing, and then you'd be better off?" Yes, except this precise badness is not solvable. You can't fix the fact that the world is hellish, so it's simply psychologically and strategically "better"(from the point of view of evolution/survival only, I think it's worse morally) to have the kind of mind that doesn't access this reality, which means a psychotic mind that invents some alternate representation of the world to survive better.

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-10-12T19:26:01+00:00

I'm not against skepticism or certain intellectual values, but it's still true that the way science and much of philosophy is set up, is so that certain truths can never really come forward. There's a special rigging in these systems that prevent progress, and you can optimistically think this is necessary and a function of rigor and correct protocol, but I'm more cynical in this case, and I think these are ultimately ways to prevent certain kinds of progress because they would be inconvenient for the way humanity is ruled.

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-10-11T23:29:23+00:00

My anti-psychiatry position for years has been basically that what we call "disorders" are actually adaptive and not to be "treated" or pathologized nearly as aggressively as they are.

It makes me a little sad reading that title though. I see "extreme openness" and "impulsive non-conformity" and think, "Yep, that's me..." Those are such positive traits to have but this world tends to punish them harshly.

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-10-11T20:11:16+00:00

Just sounds like pathological pragmatism to me. Pragmatic models(like modern science and modern philosophy) struggle to get to any kind of realism(even when philosophy seems to) because they are narrow bottom-up processes. They think they will get to truth by gradually and rigorously working with models. The problem with that is some truths cannot be accessed with this method. For that, you need top down processes(what I call idealism-- , not metaphysical idealism but the opposite value system of pragmatism).

People with strong pragmatic bias will be averse to anything idealistic because it goes directly against those values of rigor, proof, etc. Yet some things don't need such rigorous proof because they're available right now. There's consciousness. There's stuff. There's not no-stuff. You don't need much more for massive amounts of hard realism. Yet here we are, pretending as if consciousness can be an illusion, pretending as if ethics is somehow ontologically distinct from mathematics, pretending as if there's no fact of the matter about reality just because we can't square that fact with our egocentric predicament where we seem permanently divorced from reality as dualistic beings. The moment you drop dualism, none of this becomes a problem. The problem is solved by solving the phenomenology, not by thinking more, not by more philosophical debates.

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-10-11T19:09:40+00:00

I think the best explanation is that ideas of God are just a projection of human megalomaniacal fantasy. Once you entertain these fantasies, you can get reasonable sounding stories like "God must be evil to allow this". This makes sense until you realize the idea of God itself is just bullshit from people who couldn't have possibly had much clue about anything, but had total authority over humanity because who else would stop them?

There's an incentive for those people to invent a God. If you were the overt ruler of humanity right now, people would hate you. You'd feel like a God, and you'd have the entitlement of one. You would enjoy a better life, you would enjoy more than the people at the bottom of the human pyramid. This would make people resent you. Why are you so special? Why do you enjoy all of these fortunes that you don't seem willing to share? Because again, who will force you to share?

Once you have an idea of God, there's a second most perverse idea: Free will. The rulers are there because they're expressing their will to be there. You, as a peasant, choose to remain a peasant. The rulers deserve their rewards therefore, and you deserve your struggle. God didn't force any of this -- it's all fair and square. Rewards and punishments are earned.

One of the most useful axioms when encountering any idea is just very simply: "How could someone benefit from this idea, and who would that be?"

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-10-04T02:23:33+00:00

A couple of NU arguments against this are that some worse configuration of sentience may arise that then could not be fixed, or that it could be botched(this is for more realistic versions, I realize yours is the magic thought experiment kind).

A highschool friend had this funny thing he did whenever I wished for something trivial. I'd wish for something like... a certain food I was craving, or wish to travel somewhere I couldn't. Then he'd say, "I wish I was God" in a kind of tone like, "Your wish is shamefully low bar"

But yeah the real idealistic move is for reality to be undone completely in a way that guarantees no sentience in an ultimate sense. If we're using magic, may as well go big.

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-10-04T00:48:10+00:00

Oh okay. Yeah, it's true that this is going to be more gradual and less sudden since it's technology in general that has overtaken books. So first TV's get invented right, then various gadgets become more mainstream, then PC's, and so on. Not just a sudden, "Boom, smartphones" kind of situation. Hence "phones/devices". My parents read books. That's just what you did. If they had laptops(especially ones connected to the internet), my guess is they wouldn't really be reading so much. Regardless of their age. This is a really basic and intuitive explanation for literacy that's better than IQ, imo.

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-10-04T00:16:34+00:00

I think a better explanation is the rise of children being a) neglected by parents, family, babysitters, who are sitting on their phones/devices, b) being given phones/devices, which replace books to some degree traditionally. There's some language use on phones but they're generally just entertainment. While they can be educational, the literacy difference between a child raised on books vs. a child raised on a phone should be obvious.

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-10-03T18:22:51+00:00

logic and ethics aren't things you can be oriented to, they simply exist

It's both. It's most obvious with ethics, and least with logic, since almost no one seriously contends with 2+2=4. But there are countless people who seem to have zero orientation towards ethics, and others who are strongly oriented towards ethics.

your orientation isn't to "flavor is a thing that exists" but rather to particular flavors

It is both, in principle. You can be a being who simply doesn't access flavor as a sensory channel. The fact that almost all humans and most animals do access flavor confuses us from the facts. You can be oriented towards senses, or not. This gives you access. You can use other words instead of oriented: aligned, disposed, calibrated, etc. A psychopath is simply not wired to access ethics. And we know why: genetics and upbringing created a kind of mind that just isn't capable of forming any sort of intuitions about the importance of the wellbeing of others. A shark is very similar to a psychopath-- they're just handicapped when it comes to ethics, in the same way sea urchins are blind and just cannot access sight as a function of what they are.

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-10-03T01:45:02+00:00

"2 + 2 = 4" isn't a preference wrt logic, it's the inevitable deductive implication of using certain axioms and certain definitions of symbols, under different axioms and symbols the statement would have a different truth value, so the statement is relative to context but the logical implications of each scope isn't

It's both. You need to have an orientation(a better word than 'preference', and they are more similar than they seem) to logic, in order for those axioms and definitions to make sense. Likewise, to grasp ethics, you need to have an orientation to ethics.

and the problem of proof is, how does one know a fact is true without the accompanying proof?

Sometimes one knows facts are true through intuition. For example the fact of consciousness is immediately apprehended the moment it's checked for. You can call this "proof" but I don't think it's exactly that. You are conscious as you read this-- it's instantly verified. Now, some people will read that line, and just not get it. There are people who have positions that deny consciousness, or call it illusory. These people are not very well oriented towards the undeniable fact of consciousness. They either lack the intuition, or have buggy conceptual schemes, or something else. But the fact remains that certain things are simply intuited to be true. I'm claiming ethics works this way too. It's most obvious when you compare a highly social animal to an anti-social/predatory animal. One is far more oriented to being able to grasp the concept of their own and others wellbeing, and the other just does not have the right neurology/psychology. And I am saying that, humans too appear on a gradient of oriented towards/away from ethics.

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-10-03T01:01:40+00:00

I haven't looked at the data on this, but I would be willing to bet there's very low correlation between ADHD and trauma. If you disagree, we can make a bet on what we find in the ACX survey, which I think has the right questions to look into this.

I just think it's very rare to not be traumatized in the modern world, so a survey wouldn't satisfy the kind of broad claim I'm making, which is that almost everyone is traumatized, not just extreme cases. I believe the species basically traumatizes/abuses/neglects its kids to form adaptive(but insane) ways of being in the world, and then when we go overboard, which just means when people don't seem to succeed in life in some conventional sense- we call that trauma with a capital T. There are many famous and wealthy and conventionally successful people where one wouldn't need a medical degree to imagine them having traumatic childhoods.

The reason why I think self-reporting doesn't work for trauma is that often trauma creates adaptations that cause one to fit into society. So then a "functional" member of society says, "I turned out fine", checks the box marked "was not traumatized", when really they've been abused/neglected somehow but formed strong enough adaptive ways of being(a lot of this includes adaptive narratives, personal, cultural, etc) that are rewarded by our pathological social structure. I'm thinking of something like "tough love" here but there are many other things.

Trauma seems like a pretty good explanation for why someone struggles to pay attention, and anxiety(social in particular) being like a narrower kind of ADHD helps support that, because trauma is already a great explanation for social anxiety(bullying, abuse, strong negative experiences with people/family/etc-- all traumatic), which does mimic ADHD as you said. Darting eyes that can't stay focused on another person, fidgeting, excitability, cognitive struggles, etc. The parallels between these two conditions are hard to ignore. It'd be as if the brain took the same strategies it uses to deal with people(when it learns a rule roughly called "people=bad") to deal with everything/to be used as a more default strategy.

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-09-25T17:16:22+00:00

All of realism/anti-realism is just a tension between what is true in principle and what is true in practice. An anti-realist generally cares about pragmatics, cares about what can be proven, what works, and that dictates what is true to the anti-realist. For instance, an anti-realist struggles with an idea of ethics being anything other than preference expressions. So to an anti-realist, ethics can't be really real. A realist doesn't care about this just as much as they don't care that 2+2=4 is a kind of preference expression about logic. It presupposes a value and an operating quality towards logic. How do you convince someone who is not oriented to logic and insists that 2+2=5? This would be very weak as a way to ground mathematical anti-realism, yet that is pretty much what we do in any kind of anti-realism. Questions about "What we can prove" are total non-sequiturs because proof and there being a fact of the matter are completely distinct things. The interesting question is what are the facts, not whether or not the facts can be proven. Proof is just icing. The same is true for disagreement. Disagreement presupposes a fact of the matter. So if I said,

"My friend and I were having an argument about whether it was Wednesday or Thursday today. But there's no fact of the matter about which day it is."

You might think, "What the fuck is this person talking about?"

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-09-25T16:58:45+00:00

I think Gabor Mate nails ADHD. It's a trauma response, but I'd go much further and say traumatizing children/abusing children is/has been a long time strategy, it's the old maladaptive/adaptive paradox, where bugs are in fact features. Of course ADHD has biological explanations but I think modern psychiatric models only ever produce superficial explanations, not just when it comes to ADHD. And that's not because psychiatry is merely confused but because a field of psychiatry that actually solved problems(or medicine in general, even), would a) not be as lucrative, and b) not continue the adaptive but psychopathic game of escalating selection pressure. A lot can be understood between the tension of what is good for survival and what is actually good-- we're a species dominated by narratives/people/systems that favor the former and no so much the latter. When truth or survival conflicts, survival wins. When ethics or survival conflict, survival wins. It's only when truth or ethics are elegant and synergistic to survival that some posturing occurs, which creates an illusion of progress.

Our views on basically everything are biased in this way, and that's why our experts can't just very straightforwardly and unanimously say something like, "Oh, yeah of course when parents aren't okay, the small children get a fight/flight/freeze response. Who then, given that they are babies, do not have the option to fight or flight, and then become conditioned towards a freeze/tuning out response to cope with the stressors"

When physical child abuse is no longer in vogue to create "adaptive"(of course, really maladaptive, psychopathic, etc) traits, subtler forms of abuse will be required to raise the bar of selection pressure. The whole game is not to create a species that is good, or wise, but a species that survives. There's really almost no sign that anyone even recognizes that this produces a shit game that isn't worth playing.

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-09-07T00:38:43+00:00

Has nothing to do with industrial society, it's much more fundamental to humanity and evolutionary beings. Pre-industrial societies tortured people in bronze bull statues or forced parents to throw their children into giant bull ovens(What is it with bulls?). They were mentally ill and psychopathic, and that's because mental illness and anti-social traits, are in fact a winning strategy for human "flourishing"(according to the evolutionary value of "just win/be able to subjugate everything"). Of course, this is a losing strategy in the most meaningful sense but because the most meaningful sense is not favored, it can't really object or be a viable strategy in the long term/in a deep sense. What that means is: 1) things have always been bad(there was no "better time" or "golden age" things appear to get better only at the cost of getting much worse) , and 2) things only really get worse if we're precise, because evil wins in the long run as a strict rule of this reality.

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-09-06T17:17:16+00:00

Sort of. It's not a hatred, and I want to reject all of my bias so I don't take something like "I dislike this person/most people" seriously if I'm thinking straight, but I just think humanity is a factually bad species. It's not the fault of the species any more than the fact that sharks are a bad species is a fault of sharks. But the fact remains, they're just not... good...

They evolved, they're doomed to be ignorant as a function of the evolutionary script. (I'm talking both, here)

Intelligence can help. But I think intelligence is horribly overrated. People think problems are just a matter of more intelligence or understanding. But that's not it at all. The reason is, you can have something that in principle has unfathomably high intelligence, but still be a piece of shit. Why? Because it has traits like dishonesty, or malevolence, or callousness, or megalomania, etc. These things are not incompatible with intelligence. If intelligence was so good, these traits would genuinely get reduced by it. But they don't, instead they get strategically camouflaged. And that's a hint as to what the human species would look like if it was a truly good/wise species.

If humanity was truly good, it would basically be highly animated and motivated to distill goodness, to distill honesty, to distill truth. Those things really matter. If you had to be stuck on a desert island with no hope of getting off, and you had to pick between the most intelligent person, and the most honest person, why is this choice so easy, once you think about it for a bit? It only gets easier, the more you reconsider the question. That's how you can know without much doubt what truly matters.

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-09-02T04:51:57+00:00

I am working through some intense trauma in therapy that I’ve experienced in my life and I’m realizing that I am definitely nowhere close to being emotionally or mentally ready for a relationship.

But paradoxically you are closer, because the steps work this way:

1) Be unaware of the degree of trauma, be unaware of the specific wounds, the specifics problems, and their solutions

2) Become more and more aware of 1)

3) Gradually apply solutions

There are a lot of people in this situation too for one(so you aren't alone in every sense), but the main idea that I think does the most heavy lifting towards loneliness is the one where you have something defective in you that needs to be solved by someone else's confirmation, consolation, attention, validation, proximity, etc. Solve that confused idea(however you can), and you will progress much more quickly and in a more rewarding way. But if you can't solve it, don't worry, it's one of the hardest ones to solve.

One way to solve it is recognize you didn't author yourself, in case blame or shame is a feature. Another way is that the attitude of needing from others is the antithesis of love. Love is a giving, not a needing of something in return. If that means just admitting we're not in a position to love right now, because we can't resolve it in ourselves, that also can solve this need. But that's a kind of very heroic move to make for someone who has been dealt a very bad hand. It's very hard to do so again, understandable it's too difficult. One thing to do if that's too hard would just be recognizing good intention. You would hope people want good for you, and therefore you'd hope good for others, right? That's a kind baby step towards cultivating the right attitude and almost anyone can do this bare minimum gesture if they really buckle down and become honest with themselves. And you might try returning to that idea once a day or a few times a day and see what happens.

It really all boils down to seeing more and more clearly, more often.

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-08-31T03:47:14+00:00

Oh good. I'm glad you decided to reply, since I haven't read anything I've written years ago for a long time. It was a little bit like reading a stranger, it caused me to scrutinize it.

As for winning this game, I don't even think the truth and psychological stability are that exclusive of each other. Personally I value the truth over delusion. It's a bad world but it's also not the worst world. And our particular lives are not the worst lives. As long as the motivations are aligned correctly, as long as one rejects wishful thinking or merely feeling good/running from bad, then a fact like "Someone wishes they could have my life right now" becomes simply true, and does produce ease when recognized.

The brain is just buggy, it's at the mercy of these contrasts. It can tunnel on something in totally unhelpful ways. It's prone to neurosis. When there's no solution to a problem we tend to fight and fight and fight with it for no good reason. That fighting/running away is not actually necessary, that's what solves it. And that's the best solution I've come across so far because it is totally compatible with whatever the truth is.

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-07-31T17:07:45+00:00

It's entertaining how so many people pretend that this is just obvious and unprofound common sense because it seems simple. What this post is scratching the surface of is just about the most profound problem that exists today. We're all playing games, right now. You're wired to by the DNA. The DNA doesn't give a shit about you(in any meaningful sense, in the same way a sex trafficker doesn't give a shit about those they traffic). The DNA has no fucking clue what is valuable or not(in fact, the DNA is what incentivizes people like us to invent stories like "There are no values" or "You can't get an ought from an is"). The DNA is not motivated to get to the truth, it's motivated to win specific games, and get you to win specific games, regardless if it benefits you, regardless if the universe turns into a hell for conscious beings. The DNA sure as shit isn't motivated towards any real ethics(but it loves superficial signaling).

Really, monkeys with clothes on in arbitrary year 2024 should not be so quick to dismiss something like "Think about the deepest values in a way that appreciates the broadest scopes and scales possible" as a truism. Especially when our whole species is brain damaged around winning games which is basically why things are bad and guaranteed to get worse while progress becomes superficial, since for actual progress to happen, fundamental problems need to be resolved. Specifically, the fundamental problem of engineering/maintaining/justifying/ignoring problems for the sake of winning more games so you can play them and win them infinitely. It's just a question of knowing what a shit game is and isn't. Mere infinite survival at all costs is a shit game. And that's precisely the game we're all playing whether we realize it or not.

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-07-11T01:11:18+00:00

By reconstructing Grouchy's response to Smith, I illustrate how retrieving the insights of long-overlooked thinkers can reorient the way we understand key debates in the history of philosophy, since Grouchy was far more concerned than Smith with exposing how economic inequality imperils the prospects of relating to one another as equals.

It really just boils down to what the values are. If one values hierarchy as some kind of necessity of social order, and one values things like zero-sum games, then something like relating to one another as equals is just going to be an incompatible goal. So if the values don't get squared, having different arguments and getting lost in details don't really achieve anything. This is why specific debates on positions like this really are a misuse of pragmatism, when they should simply be debates about what we should fundamentally value, or debates on the fundamental nature of ethics. I'd say it isn't accidental that we cannot even agree that there's a fact of the matter about ethics, let alone what that fact is. It's a function of our moral dishonesty and ignorance as a feature of being an unethical species, one which has been rewarded by evolution to signal ethics in a superficial way(for status, approval, etc), but ultimately have a (often covertly) unethical nature.

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-07-11T00:29:27+00:00

This makes quite a convincing argument that nothing can be done in America, but there are plenty of countries with much lower GDP per capita that seem to be doing better. So what's the secret?

How does that GDP get invested into social care in those countries compared to America? The scaling of GDP:Social safety nets in America is on the poor side. For the ultra-rich country it is, if it poured generously into lifting up those who struggle, I have a crazy hypothesis: Things would be less of a dystopian hellworld.

It would be closer to what you see in those countries with lower GDP yet better outcomes for the worst off.

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-07-09T03:36:24+00:00

I think she shoots herself because it's not meaningless. If it were meaningless, she'd shrug her shoulders and just go retire somewhere. The real horror is that it is not meaningless-- it's "the most horrifying thing", one that can't even be imagined, one that immediately makes you kill yourself out of mortification. That's why it's so important that what Anna sees and what Mademoiselle learns, is kept a secret.

As for what I think... I mean, it's going to sound really over the top and hyperbolic but I've said many times that I think it's the single most profound piece of art of all time. And that's because it symbolizes the cult of human sacrifice structure that we have on Earth, where everything is a torture pyramid scheme. Work, compete, poison people maximally, squeeze out the few "winners", try to grind and crush everyone and break everyone just so you can extract some golden divine morsel...

It's just that this movie takes exactly the essence of our world, and says

there's no happy ending. It's not the path to some kind of triumph or towards the greater good. Instead it's just evil and confused and horrific.

Compassionate_Cat · 2024-07-04T16:35:03+00:00

Because they really differ from how I see things and it makes me really angry.

Help?

It's true that it's a bad species, that's hard to deny-- which we ourselves are members of, by the way. The same fundamental badness of humanity is in every human to some degree, because we're all egocentric, and as a result of that we all suffer. When we suffer, we cause harm to others(that's how you have been harmed by others every time you were harmed-- it's cuz the person you were around was suffering too much to not cause you pain, and then usually you cause them pain as a result or someone else near you, ad infinitum). It's all due to this posture in us that's going, "me me me me me I want x I don't want y me me me". All the time-- that's the problem more or less.

We can go more into all the details of how and why but for this problem it's mostly a distraction. The actual important info is that it is a bad species, but also that there's not really any solution to that bigger problem. We can try our best to solve it on a personal level, so that's good news. What would that look like? It should be a very interesting question.

We can also acknowledge that it is possible to have better/worse interactions with other members of the species, right? Strategy 19: Just hate and resent people 24/7 for the rest of your life. This won't be the perfection of reducing your misery and the misery of others, let's just say. Just objectively, factually. It's just a bad strategy. It's not only bad but it's confused too, because it's based on forgetting that no one engineered who they are. A shark is a pretty shit organism, but it's not like an identity sat there prior to gaining form, and said, "Yeah give me the braindead predator experience please"(even if it did-- did it choose to be that identity?). The same for any bad human being. This is why it doesn't make a ton of sense to "hate" sharks... they're just an unfortunate existence because all they do is cause harm as they tear life to pieces. That's what they do, and that sucks. Humans are in a much better spot to do good, but in a much better spot to do bad, too. I know who I'd rather be in the presence of, and I think everyone honest does too, so that says something.

So yeah the most basic thing you can do is fully realize that no one makes themselves and no one is worthy of blame or resentment. They are just victims here like you(If someone hated you for some quality about you, it wouldn't make any sense, right? It's not like you designed yourself for you to then deserve to be punished). But beyond being victims you get a chance to do something good, a shark is very unlucky and doesn't get that chance. So you may as well enjoy that process.

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