Pascal’s Wager, you know, it’s like risk/reward in golf, the odds get worse as the rewards or the punishment gets greater, how does it go again, “Sure, the odds of the Christian salvation story are not good, but the price, should it be true and you didn’t choose it, is terrible, eternal,” something like that?
It is predicated on the idea that it is highly unlikely that what you believe can make you live forever, but what if? You don’t want to be the only one sitting at home in your urn on the mantle when everyone else is flying around enjoying their lute lessons, do you? Ha – it’s social, conforming stuff about the afterlife.
Well not really, of course.
But people do appear to make the choice, I suppose some need the reward, or fear the punishment more than others?
I would like to adapt that, from Christianity to everyone, exactly like I have adapted their Original Sin for everyone as the Human Nature myth.
Most people take the long shot in a version of Pascal’s Wager.
You know what I’m going to say, if you’ve read one of my rants, you’ve read them all. We take it every time we provide a deterrent, every time we solve our problems with abuse. Most people bet the world that their deterrents are “virtual,” and not really hurting anybody, not really affecting anything, but it’s a landscape of fear. It changes everything.
If you haven’t heard that term, it’s worth a look.
Short and sweet, when Yellowstone Park was all herbivores, the herbage didn’t have a chance, and much smaller life dependent of the sweetest of it was not thriving, not coming back, but the re-introduction of wolves and grizzly bears changed the herbivores’ lifestyle, they weren’t free to be out in the open eating the only the best stuff and balance was restored. Landscape of Fear. I think it’s an episode of Nature or some such. National Geographic, maybe.
It makes, vast, forever changes to your lifestyle. From diet to habitat to everything. It is the furthest thing from virtual because reality is not virtual and reality doesn’t have buttons that don’t do anything, nothing is virtual. What you lose are the same things the elk lost in Yellowstone: free, open spaces, and the best food, the sun on your hide. The freedom to go where you like. Security for your children.
I don’t really know, or at least it is not my place to talk about what the Christians lose betting on Pascal, but they don’t win the prize that is offered, I don’t take that bet so I don’t see the reward, so I say this, that they do not win the prize for making the gamble. If they live well, I hope they win the prizes we get for that. But I assure you, we win no prizes in the everyone version of the game. OK, stupid prizes, as they say, war is not much of a prize, is it? From yesterday’s blog, about Nature and Nurture being a dodge:
The creation of deterrents is like some kind of rebellion against evolution, the plan of deterrents is that we make people and things better, by intentionally adding stress and fear to the environment everywhere they turn. “Deterrent,” is literally another word for environmental danger. A world of deterrents is a world of predators and a life based in terror, in the fight or flight response, in our amygdalae.
Morally, developmentally, every way, this is evolution in reverse, to simpler forms, to a life, “rough in tooth and claw.”
I suppose under the duress of the grizzlies and the wolves, the elk are never going to have enough leisure time to develop written language and pottery and under the iron rule of ourselves we are never going to have our utopias and reach the stars. It’s not balance when you do it yourself, apparently, the humans living from their amygdalae has not produced balance or the restoration of the environment, oh, gawd, did I have to say that? I’m sorry, I usually err on the side of brevity, I usually try not to waste your time.
Obviously, the fact that humans live in the fear while simultaneously dishing it out is different than it is for the elk and the bison. Like Sapolsky says, there is never a stress free time for us when we know the predator has just eaten or something. But, getting back to simpler matters, how is the deterrent of an actual spanking or an actual prison sentence any more virtual than the deterrent of an actual pack of wolves?
It is not, or the way it can be is a matter of your neurotype, a matter of how you process that information, maybe. Evolution, for good or ill, operates with or without your understanding though, and none of these things are virtual, and so the odds of winning the Punishment Cult’s version of Pascal’s Wager – wait, what is the tease, what is the reward? What is it in lieu of eternal life in this analogy?
If we believe in Human Nature, that we are born flawed and need to be controlled and directed and so we are controlled through the deterrents and then, what?
Civilization?
Don’t tell me it’s supposed to be peace? Because that isn’t working out.
I know, mere survival. Not peace so much as strength and victory.
About that, I’m sorry to tell you, that isn’t working out either.
Also from yesterday’s exploration:
It means everything, whether we see life as evolution or deterrents and punishments, if you believe in the latter, you make the environment worse, and the reality of evolution changes you to match. If you believed in evolution, you would see rewards instead, and that good things make good people.
In theory, you would build good things, make the environment better, easier for people, remove the fear wherever possible – certainly stop creating it all day every day your bloody self – and watch people adapt to be better, kinder, and smarter instead. Or, you know, gamble it all for a shitty life during wartime, why not.
You do you.
Jeff
Jan. 10th., 2024
Abuse with an Excuse 