It’s killing me, listening to you talk. I don’t see duality, I see duplicity.
Folks are either straight up screaming for blood or they’re moping about affecting melancholia about how it’s so sad that we have to do that all the time but whaddayagonnado? Ever notice how in every story, fictional or otherwise, life and “fate” and “history,” the inexorable forces tossing our characters or people about are all just people being assholes and trying to hurt or kill each other?
Of course you have. The authors, the researchers, they come so close to it when they say that most violence is moral violence, this is true – but it’s only half a thought. This equation, violence is moral, is more instructive the other way about, but the point is in arithmetic and logic, it’s all one, only expressed differently – but that matters. Let’s turn it over, see if it’s a boy or a girl, see what changes.
Morality is mostly violence.
What do we do when we see something “bad?”
This is the central confusion for me my entire life, I don’t know about you, a million rules and not hurting folks isn’t one of them, I mean if I break one of the million rules, then there is no rule against hurting me. I see a hole in this policy. If you were trying to stop folks from hurting each other, making a rule for them to be obliged to hurt each other is . . . backwards. It is nearly impossible for me to type that, to insult you all, to suggest you can’t see something so obvious, but – gestures grandly, showing you the world. If you understand that much, them pardon me, WTF is this?
No way out, I know.
I have beaten my arguments about human origins and evolutionary psychology as it stands into the ground and I see it, it’s not working, it’s powerless. Yesterday’s effort was the fizzle-out of that effort, I need a new angle. I’m going to try to go straight to it, good and bad.
They do not, repeat not, create each other.
Yes, they define each other, the portion of one defines the portion of the other – but they are logical opposites, one annihilates the other, so I repeat, they do not create one another, good does not produce bad, when good intentions go bad, when “all that is required for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing,” it’s still not the good part that is causative. If I led the Nazis to Anne Frank’s attic while bringing them food, I may have caused something awful, but to name my mistake as “the cause” ignores more direct and powerful “causes.”
More to my point, bad cannot create good either, and so punishment cannot be what it purports to be, some magic whereby we create good people with violence. For evidence, we see the violence – we do not see the saints, the better people. What we see is the creature that seems to always need the beatings and somehow never changes even so.
That’s because the change happened before, at the very start, you’ve already been changed. The change was here before you were.
Uh oh, new thought, probably doesn’t belong here, that Rousseau was only wrong in his real world application, in naively thinking the “savages” of his time weren’t also fully developed warrior societies also antisocializing themselves – perhaps it was more of a children’s group situation like Mead described among the Yanomami that those early Europeans saw, that it wasn’t the adults doing the antisocializing like it is in Europe, so they missed it.
Some caveats – that made total sense to me, antisocialization is real to me, it has explained too much, given me a way into the world, a grid by which I am able to connect things and so not live quite as fractured and confused as before. If it’s a blank spot, some bit of magic I’m pulling out of a dark place and doesn’t help you, please, ask me, talk to me. I am trying to anticipate the objections, but this has been my mode of thought for years now, I don’t think I remember how you all think about it.
Sorry. Moving on.
“Human nature” isn’t a debate, it’s a before and after situation. You were born good, and by the time you had any power in the world you were bad – they’re both right, sort of. Sure, humans are greedy, selfish violent creatures – now. Humanity was born good, I cannot seem to find my way all the way to discredit the urge towards morality, but by the time we had power over the world we were bad, same, same, fractal sort of model. Ah – I think this may be new.
I’m saying antisocialization – meaning just what it sounds like, the process of making you antisocial – is what we get from our efforts at alchemy, of trying to turn bad to good by abusing people to improve their behaviour – again, both in our lives, starting early and in the life of our species. In the here and now, we solve the problem, the disconnect of the supposed magic, the dissonance, by simply deciding antisocial is good and necessary. And necessary, we can talk about that – well, I can.
If you think it’s necessary, then it’s not up for discussion, is it? And if it’s not up for discussion, not slated for review, if it’s not going anywhere, then I guess it had better be good, otherwise life might suck. But it’s not good. Also, you know you can’t win the necessary debate, that’s why it’s “good.” Nobody’s going to argue with “good,” are they?
Hi, I’m Jeff, pleased to meet you.
God sent me to argue with “good.”
Some things exist because they are necessary, and other things are necessary because they exist – they will tell you this regarding our weaponry, well after the fact of our desire for it, that once one culture acquires a weapon, they all must, or be selected out. Once guns exist for you, they are necessary for me – this is the same with our antisocialization, which adds up to our desire and proficiency with weapons, to a large extent. Guns are “necessary,” well, at least until I get my rechargeable phaser, they are. They weren’t, until they existed, but now they are, before and after.
But they’re bad, guns are bad – they would be if I had one and you didn’t, right? One gun is bad? I guess that’s a way to look at it, the first one was bad? Once everybody has one, it’s all good? When is that scheduled to come about, would be my question, what exists that everybody gets one, of course it’s a trick question, folks are dying for not getting water. Guns are bad.
I said it already, the point is, some things are only necessary because they’re already here, I said guns and our self-antisocialization – the latter manifests as “strength,” our pain, our damage, our being antisocial and needing some enemy to work off of, I mean, it’s “strength” when it’s working for us. If you got it, I need it – but it’s bad, you having it is bad, and my whole life is the argument that if it’s bad for you then damnit it’s bad for me too, it isn’t magically transformed to “good,” because I got it too, I am not special, I am not magic. Good is good and bad is bad.
Tell me we do not differ on these points, please.
With that little bit of game theory, I guess the entire time spent worrying about origins was a waste, we’d just do it all again today, our origins never leave us. I suppose that’s a before and after also, good used to be good, bad used to be bad. Violence, aggression, all were bad at that point in the past when we were small and vulnerable ( must have been a verb, like edible, huh? PaTING! Ow! Ya vulnered me!). Love, tenderness, mercy – these were good when we were helpless, these things met approval all around. Power turns all good things to bad. The strength that replaces them is bad and bad is not “the new good,” although slang that plays on that is always there, bad, nasty, filthy, all these things get twisted to mean good, ostensibly ironically.
Of course, when you have some weapon that’s bad for me and if I get one that’s bad for you and what is bad for you is good for me, I have heard it before, I’m not arguing with some meme I’ve never heard. That logic, bad for you is good for me, really only works if your mind cannot see over the fence of your self, if you really can’t take one more step to realize that you are his problem, that your good is bad for literally everyone else, that it never made the magical transformation and protest all you like, you’ve been outvoted by literally everyone else.
You’re bad. And no-one needs your bad self to be stronger, you’re causing enough damage. Just stop. Face your pain, acknowledge it and accept that bad things have happened to you, don’t let the ones who hurt you win, don’t become your tormentor, don’t decide it’s good when you do it, because then it was “good” when it happened to you too, you’re signing off on all of it, that bad is good, which is what is just underneath loving Big Brother, logically speaking.
Seems a good a place as any to drop the mic and run.
Jeff
Aug. 4th., 2020
Abuse with an Excuse 