I have complicated thoughts about all that. Firstly, I don’t think in this culture we’re in any danger of having people divorce people’s actions from their results. Like your argument has the form of a slippery slope argument, but from where I’m sitting that slope is uphill. I also don’t think we’re in any danger of people not feeling satisfaction in their accomplishments. Again, I think we more often face the opposite problem of convincing people that if they succeed it wasn’t entirely their doing.
Secondly, I don’t agree that praise from others or even a sense of self-satisfaction are things we should be looking to as lodestones. But I have to draw a distinction here between feeling satisfied with one’s work and a more ego-centred self-satisfaction. You’re a programmer, so you know what I mean if I talk about the satisfaction of a really well-designed, well-written piece of code, and the pleasant flow state achieved while creating it. That’s satisfaction with oneself, in a way, but its not your ego being on full blast because you just won a poker tournament or something. Those sort of highs are nice once in a while, but not sustainable. If you look at organisations like AA, or religions, or other community groups which work to pull people out of the sorts of tough life spots you’re talking about, “use willpower and determination and grind it out” is the opposite of the advice. People are advised to downplay their egos, become part of a community, surrender control and help others.
The other thing is that the flipside of praise is blame. If people deserve praise for pulling themselves out of tough spots, they deserve blame for not doing it, however much we like to pretend otherwise. And while it’s dubious that praise and ego-stroking from others helps much in getting people to improve themselves, it’s pretty obvious that blaming and shaming is a huge hindrance to those who haven’t managed to get things together yet.
AA to me is a perfect example of using the enormous power of social bonds to overcome something that the individual has finally accepted they don’t have the power to overcome on their own. For that to work, yeah, you have to surrender your ego to the group. It’s the same dynamic that works with frats, the military, etc. It can work for good or evil.
But I guess I’m talking more about personal triumph, which does happen. I was a weekend warrior crackhead. I’ve been to the edge and stood and looked down, to quote Van Halen. The next step is becoming a weekday crackhead. Then you lose your job, house and car in fairly short order. I had to make a decision to pull back, which felt like the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life.
Now, I’ve always acknowledged that I think I have an impulsive but not addictive personality, and I had the privilege to have a safety net and not live in a neighborhood where crack was easy as walking a few houses down the block. But it still was damn hard. I see no reason to not be proud of myself for walking away from the edge, while not shaming others who may have been in a much rougher situation.
It’s not just addictive type stuff. Walking up the steps to SF City College to take my first programming classes in my late 20s was way scarier than it should have been. Changing your life is terrifying sometimes. Putting all my shit in the back of a pickup and driving to California was scary as hell. So was driving to Panama. A lot of people never do anything like that in their lives.
So I’m proud of those things in the same way that I described someone being proud of pulling out of the morass in the previous post. My point is I don’t think all scary life decisions are the kind where you have to strip away the ego and not be proud of yourself. Being proud of past successes helps breed more future successes. And yes shame can work the same way in reverse when it becomes debilitating. But a little shame isn’t always a bad thing.
If I think about how I was pre-ordained to do all the things I’ve accomplished, that takes the fun out it for me, even though I know it’s true on the cosmic scale. It’s not true on the inside-my-head scale. This to me makes the concept of free will vs. not free will a semantic distinction that I don’t see having much real world application.
I finally bough Chalmer’s The Conscious Mind yesterday, and it’s really been blowing my hair back. It seems like it could be the book that I wished Consciousness Explained would be, although I don’t think I had the background to understand it 20 years ago. Not that that everything is crystal clear for me right now: he uses a lot of technical terms, but the biggest headscratcher so far was hotchpotch.
Anyway, I feel like this is the first book to give the vocabulary to talk clearly about questions that I’ve had for a long time and shortcomings that I’ve found in other sources. For example, he distinguishes between the psychological mind, which in principal doesn’t present any challenges to materialism, and the phenomenal (or experiencial) mind, which has always mystified me.
Yoga guy just posted this, which apparently really really speaks to third way bros. The youtube comments are just like “OMG this is so true!”. Not one real discussion because there is no real discussion to be had. The whole thing is platitudes and then the cartoonist is completely morphing the message into covid-related BS.
You can’t fix chicken pox without introducing another bug apparently. All the kid needed was vitamins. SO BRILLIANT!
Hitler supposedly wanted to make the world a better place. Yeah, so did abolitionists, to which all of these virtue-signalling arguments could just as easily apply.
I tried searching for just the transcript. But apparently Watts, like Jordan Peterson, must only be watched on video. It’s not about the words or meaning, it’s about how it makes you feel. Or something.
People are just fucking stupid and can’t think critically, that’s all there is to it.
At least the derpers are pretty much being straightforward in their belief that everyone is as big of an asshole as them and is just faking it. The third-way bros wrap their BS in all this mystical mumbo jumbo that doesn’t even mean anything, but vaguely puts down those annoying liberals who keep complaining about stuff like racism, and the end of our democracy. So annoying. Fix yourselves first liberals. Stop putting chemicals in your bodies. Take some vitamins!
The same problem arises in medicine, because the body is a very complexly interrelated organism. And if you look at the body in a superficial way you may see there’s something wrong with it, here’s chicken pox. And the spots that it should come all out all over the place well you might say well spots of that cut them off. So you kill the bug. But then you find you’ve got real problems. Because you have to introduce some bugs to kill the bug, it’s like bringing rabbits into Australia. And that starts going all over the place and getting out of hand. And then you think well now wait a minute, it wasn’t the bugs in the blood there are bugs all over the place. What was wrong with this person that his blood system suddenly became vulnerable to those particular bugs his resistance was in doubt? Therefore what you should have given was not an antibiotic but vitamins. OK so we’re going to build up his resistance but resistance to what. You may build up resistance to this and this and this class of bugs, but then there’s another one that loves that situation it comes right in. See we always look at the human being medically, in bits and pieces, because we have heart specialists, lung specialists, bones specialists, nerve specialists, and so on. And they each see the human being from their point of view there are a few generalists but they realise that human bodies. Complicated that no one mind can understand it. And furthermore, supposing we do succeed in healing all these people of that diseases. What do we then do about the population problem. I mean we’ve stopped cholera, the black bubonic plague, we’re getting the better of tuberculosis, we may fix cancer and heart disease.
So brilliant! So beautiful. This speaks to my soul.
Then what will people die of? Well they’ll just go on living. On the enormous quantities of others. Then we have to fix this birthing. Pills for everybody. Then we find one of the effects the side effects of those pills. What are the psychological effects upon men and women of not breeding of children in the usual way? We don’t know. And what seems a good thing today or yesterday like D.D.T. turns out tomorrow to been a disaster. What seemed in the moral and spiritual sphere, to like great virtues in times past are easily seen today as hideous evils, let’s take for example the Inquisition, in its own day among Catholics the Holy Inquisition was regarded. As we’d today regard the practice of psychiatry. You, you see, you feel that in curing the person of cancer almost anything is justified. The most complex operations, the most weird surgery people suspended for days and days on end on the end of tubes with X. ray penetration burning.
Like just wtf.
Our opponents, whether in China or Russia or Vietnam, have the same feeling of righteousness about what they’re doing as we have on our side. And a plague on both houses because, as Confucius said “the goody good is of the thieves of virtue.” Which is the form of our own problem the road to hell is paved with good intentions. So in a way the moral, or the immoral, of these considerations is that if you are really aware of your own inner workings, you will realize there’s nothing you can do to improve yourself. Because you don’t know what better is, in any case, and you, who will do the improving, are the one who needs to be improved. And this also goes for society. We can change society, we can get enormous enthusiasm going out of the idea that there is a revolution afoot, and that this revolution is going to set everything to right. Do you know a revolution that ever said anything to right? Whether the revolution came from the left wing or from the right wing.
Never try to make anything better. Just do your breathing exercises and take vitamins. That is the highest true virtue.
Science without ethics would just be, like, measuring things and recording facts randomly. As soon as you make any judgments about what’s worth studying or why not to stick a dude’s testicles in the electric socket to record the results you’re already doing ethics.
Trying to do science without doing ethics is about as dumb as trying to do ethics without doing science.
By the law of the excluded middle, either ‘A is B’ or ‘A is not B’ bust be true. Hence either ‘the present King of France is bald’ or ‘the present King of France is not bald’ must be true. Yet if we enumerated the things that are bald, and then the things that are not bald, we should not find the present King of France in either list. Hegelians, who love a synthesis, will probably conclude that he wears a wig.
