I think that you are missing how people have a variety of capabilities and intelligence. I would pose you this theoretical to ponder. You have a maze, and six rats. Of the six, one finds the exit with ease, while the other five struggle and don’t find the exit. Yay for the smart, efficient rat!
What are you going to do with the other five? Maybe some of them can learn the maze, but is there any utility in this now? Will you, knowing their deficiencies, throw them back into the maze over and over until they learn it? Some of them never will. Is this not a cruelty to them? What benefit do you derive from doing that?
Beware this feeling: “I worked hard and I made it, while these fuckers dicked around. They don’t deserve anything.” That thought is entirely focused on yourself, and does nothing but cause suffering in others. What do you wish to do about the others, leaving your own feelings out of it. What is best for society? You know they are not as efficient and hard working as you are, but you really do not know why this is the case. What will you do about that?
Those are the useful questions. Feelings of self righteousness help no one. They harm even you.
plenty of my friends were smarter and more capable than me. they simple chose not to develop their abilities. a lot of them had wealthier parents than me too and didn’t have to pay for school like i did. they chose drugs and being deadbeats.
people have free will. do we want to actively subsidize people fucking up their lives? that they choose suffering when they had other options? that’s a hard thing to say yes to for the majority of people.
not everyone is an angel who is misunderstood. lots and lots of people are assholes. just look at what happens when rich and successful people have positions of power… they pull the ladder up behind them. hence the system we have now.
it’s not about righteousness, it’s about how people behave. and lots of people behave poorly and without consideration for their futures or anyone else around them. they ignore opportunity and abuse privileges.
people really seem to think the rich and evil and the poor are good… but they aren’t. they are just people.
nobody owes anyone anything. i’m not talking about theoretical questions, I’m talking about the real world in which people make choices for themselves. and a lot of people choose poorly even when they have good opportunities.
I don’t think your frame is correct. I admit that you might be, but I doubt it. There is plenty of research which shows that our feeling that we control ourselves, that we have free will, is illusory. For instance, your brain has already sent signals to your muscles to make movement before you are aware of consciously deciding to do so. The only thing you might do is change your mind, arrest the signal already sent before your conscious decision. Yet you and I are presently using our conscious minds to converse. We believe we control our own motivations and movements, even though there is scientific evidence that suggests it’s not at all simple like that. And that is to leave aside how very strange the universe we inhabit appears to be. We still live as if we inhabit the world that scientists and philosophers would now call ‘naive realism’ even though it is more than a hundred years out of date. In fact, I think all of us have had the experience of thinking one way, and then finding ourselves acting in another, against what we had thought consciously. I don’t think our consciousness, and that includes that which we write, has very much bearing on our actions.
Granting these things being the case, I submit that ‘blaming’ others is a useless enterprise. It’s akin to continuing to do that which has been proven not to work over and over.
Consider this. Given that we do not have complete control over our own impulses, what if we envision the course of all our decisions like a pachinko machine? The little ball falls, subject to initial conditions, and inertia, all that. Each time it bounces off a strut, it goes either right or left. If your ball of consciousness finds itself in the favorable position, let us just arbitrarily say that is the right half of the machine, then you may look back at all your ‘decisions’ with a sense of superiority. You may look at the balls that landed on the left with disdain. They made poor choices!
Yet if what you want is to get more balls to the right, you don’t change each ball. You change the way the pachinko machine is made. That’s social action, to step out of the metaphor. Think about what you’d really want, if you understood that people don’t all have the same capacities? You say that people who are smarter than you are make stupid choices… doesn’t that suggest that intelligence isn’t very useful by itself? Scientists have shown that our consciousness’ strongest ability is in rationalizing what we did, after we’ve already done it.
I look around at the state of the world as it is right now. Billionaires – those are the big winners, the most fortunate, have vastly more control over what happens to the people you disdain than they do themselves. And we’re not likely to do anything about that, because those of us who ‘win’ on a smaller scale, will use our rational minds to rationalize why we should have won. I think that’s what you’ve been doing. I don’t mean to insult you. It would not be very remarkable that you have. It’s what the vast majority of us are doing.
Unfortunately, it looks like the planet will burn before we figure it out.
I think that you are missing how people have a variety of capabilities and intelligence. I would pose you this theoretical to ponder. You have a maze, and six rats. Of the six, one finds the exit with ease, while the other five struggle and don’t find the exit. Yay for the smart, efficient rat!
What are you going to do with the other five? Maybe some of them can learn the maze, but is there any utility in this now? Will you, knowing their deficiencies, throw them back into the maze over and over until they learn it? Some of them never will. Is this not a cruelty to them? What benefit do you derive from doing that?
Beware this feeling: “I worked hard and I made it, while these fuckers dicked around. They don’t deserve anything.” That thought is entirely focused on yourself, and does nothing but cause suffering in others. What do you wish to do about the others, leaving your own feelings out of it. What is best for society? You know they are not as efficient and hard working as you are, but you really do not know why this is the case. What will you do about that?
Those are the useful questions. Feelings of self righteousness help no one. They harm even you.
plenty of my friends were smarter and more capable than me. they simple chose not to develop their abilities. a lot of them had wealthier parents than me too and didn’t have to pay for school like i did. they chose drugs and being deadbeats.
people have free will. do we want to actively subsidize people fucking up their lives? that they choose suffering when they had other options? that’s a hard thing to say yes to for the majority of people.
not everyone is an angel who is misunderstood. lots and lots of people are assholes. just look at what happens when rich and successful people have positions of power… they pull the ladder up behind them. hence the system we have now.
it’s not about righteousness, it’s about how people behave. and lots of people behave poorly and without consideration for their futures or anyone else around them. they ignore opportunity and abuse privileges.
people really seem to think the rich and evil and the poor are good… but they aren’t. they are just people.
nobody owes anyone anything. i’m not talking about theoretical questions, I’m talking about the real world in which people make choices for themselves. and a lot of people choose poorly even when they have good opportunities.
I don’t think your frame is correct. I admit that you might be, but I doubt it. There is plenty of research which shows that our feeling that we control ourselves, that we have free will, is illusory. For instance, your brain has already sent signals to your muscles to make movement before you are aware of consciously deciding to do so. The only thing you might do is change your mind, arrest the signal already sent before your conscious decision. Yet you and I are presently using our conscious minds to converse. We believe we control our own motivations and movements, even though there is scientific evidence that suggests it’s not at all simple like that. And that is to leave aside how very strange the universe we inhabit appears to be. We still live as if we inhabit the world that scientists and philosophers would now call ‘naive realism’ even though it is more than a hundred years out of date. In fact, I think all of us have had the experience of thinking one way, and then finding ourselves acting in another, against what we had thought consciously. I don’t think our consciousness, and that includes that which we write, has very much bearing on our actions.
Granting these things being the case, I submit that ‘blaming’ others is a useless enterprise. It’s akin to continuing to do that which has been proven not to work over and over.
Consider this. Given that we do not have complete control over our own impulses, what if we envision the course of all our decisions like a pachinko machine? The little ball falls, subject to initial conditions, and inertia, all that. Each time it bounces off a strut, it goes either right or left. If your ball of consciousness finds itself in the favorable position, let us just arbitrarily say that is the right half of the machine, then you may look back at all your ‘decisions’ with a sense of superiority. You may look at the balls that landed on the left with disdain. They made poor choices!
Yet if what you want is to get more balls to the right, you don’t change each ball. You change the way the pachinko machine is made. That’s social action, to step out of the metaphor. Think about what you’d really want, if you understood that people don’t all have the same capacities? You say that people who are smarter than you are make stupid choices… doesn’t that suggest that intelligence isn’t very useful by itself? Scientists have shown that our consciousness’ strongest ability is in rationalizing what we did, after we’ve already done it.
I look around at the state of the world as it is right now. Billionaires – those are the big winners, the most fortunate, have vastly more control over what happens to the people you disdain than they do themselves. And we’re not likely to do anything about that, because those of us who ‘win’ on a smaller scale, will use our rational minds to rationalize why we should have won. I think that’s what you’ve been doing. I don’t mean to insult you. It would not be very remarkable that you have. It’s what the vast majority of us are doing.
Unfortunately, it looks like the planet will burn before we figure it out.