jprussell: (Default)
[personal profile] jprussell
(The title's a joke, btw).

Check out the new post, and feel free to comment here on Dreamwidth.

Date: 2023-04-11 02:14 pm (UTC)
causticus: trees (Default)
From: [personal profile] causticus
I do think a select few of us are able to handle existential ambiguity. Many others can't and they'll get a mental "blue screen of death" whenever there's too many contradictory ideas juggling around in their noggin that they'll unable to quickly shut down with thought-stopping mantras and other forms of deflection and denialism. This is likely the same reason why occultism is only suited to a select few; the rest need religion or some other form of simple moral formulation to work from. So then "casual narcissism" is how so-called "normies" cope with reality when mentally stressed, especially in a hyper-individualistic culture such as America's. That last part I expand upon in my above reply to Jeff. I'm not saying us occult-interested weirdos don't have or narcissistic moments too (I've had too many to count), but I think we at least have more capacity for self-reflection and the entertaining of different ideas than the average person.

Date: 2023-04-11 02:26 pm (UTC)
sdi: Oil painting of the Heliconian Muse whispering inspiration to Hesiod. (Default)
From: [personal profile] sdi
I'm afraid you've lost me—I'm not sure what you mean. (Certainly I'm as mentally stressed as the rest of us!)

Possibly I'm just overtired and need to come back to all this a different day.

Date: 2023-04-11 04:13 pm (UTC)
causticus: trees (Default)
From: [personal profile] causticus
My apologies. Now that I reread what I rambled above, it's clear to me I was going off on a caffeine-fueled tangent ;)

What you wrote above in your comment triggered a series of brain farts on how different people deal with existential angst and uncertainty.

Date: 2023-04-11 04:25 pm (UTC)
sdi: Oil painting of the Heliconian Muse whispering inspiration to Hesiod. (Default)
From: [personal profile] sdi
I went for a walk and thought about it and I think maybe I figured out my confusion, which is simply this: I don't understand what self-reflection, or indeed occultism, has to do with any of this.

But let me back up. What [personal profile] jprussell is talking about is that some author says that everyone is selfish. But, like, no they're not: some people are selfless—and not just saints, there are plenty of normal people who are just plain kindly-natured, and there are tons of not-so-kindly people with self-consuming or martyr complexes, too.

So why is the author saying that? Presumably to justify his own selfishness, or at least justify his struggle with it, right? But, IMHO, this is just the Christian myth repurposed: that you are an irredeemably awful monster and here's what you should do about it. But I guess I fundamentally find that myth silly: it's not hard for some people to be a good neighbor, and saying no really it is doesn't change that. I can absolutely see how such a myth is valuable to people like Saint Paul or Augustine of Hippo or Bill Wilson who really did struggle with their problems and needed such a myth to help them overcome them, but not everybody has the same hangup. I think it was Raymond Smullyan who said something to the effect of, "there's a wide variety of religious beliefs because there's a wide variety of people in the world." So while I think the author's model of human behavior may make sense in some situations, I can't imagine that it's broadly useful.

So to bring this back around, the author that [personal profile] jprussell was quoting was making the point that most people think "I will be nice to X because I want X to perceive me as nice" instead of "I will be nice to X because I want X to be happy." I find that to be insane, but perhaps that's merely because my own hangup is that I struggle to get out of bed and endure through the pain of the day—it's easy to want to be nice to other people so that at least somebody will be happy even if I can't! (Perhaps it's also that I really do want other people to be happy, and if those people are selfish monsters, then my trying to make them happy must be a sinful act since I'm empowering someone to do more harm. This line of reasoning doesn't seem to be conducive to living a good life, though, which is why I think that one of the assumptions in it must be false.)

And so I think my confusion is that you're making the assumption that the author's point is fundamentally sound and correct, hence self-reflection and self-examination is fundamentally crucial to make sure you're balancing your own (selfish) desires against others' (selfish) desires, and since occultists spend more time on self-refection than others, then occultists are presumably better-than-average at being selfless. You're also, I think, making the point that since America is hyper-individualistic, and since individuals must be fundamentally selfish, then America is hyper-selfish, exacerbating the problem.

But since I reject the author's point from the get-go, neither of those further elaborations followed and I was confused why they might.

Date: 2023-04-11 06:54 pm (UTC)
sdi: Oil painting of the Heliconian Muse whispering inspiration to Hesiod. (Default)
From: [personal profile] sdi
I agree, I think my confusion is stemming from a different worldview: the very notion of identifying proscriptively (rather than descriptively) is foreign to me, and I would consider even Alice to be a very strange person! (Maybe I'm the very strange one? :) )

It could be that I'm running into the conflict of two useful rules of thumb:

  • "A tree is known by its fruit." (So, Alice's impure motivations are justified by their good outcomes.)
  • "When the wrong man does the right thing, it usually turns out wrong." (So, Alice's good outcomes are contaminated by her impure motivations.)


I'll have to spend some time pondering it, I think.
Edited Date: 2023-04-11 07:00 pm (UTC)

Date: 2023-04-11 08:14 pm (UTC)
sdi: Oil painting of the Heliconian Muse whispering inspiration to Hesiod. (Default)
From: [personal profile] sdi
Oh, so it's like how people talk about their jobs? They want to convince themselves and others that they're busy and important even (and especially) if they don't like their work or feel like it's pointless? If so, is this another manifestation of the commoditization-of-everything?

Date: 2023-04-11 09:11 pm (UTC)
sdi: Oil painting of the Heliconian Muse whispering inspiration to Hesiod. (Default)
From: [personal profile] sdi
I believe you're focusing on dead authors presently, right? If you have room for an author who is aged-but-alive, I might suggest "Seeing Like a State" by James Scott. His premise is that when a government (or anyone, really, but Scott's an anarchist and so he's talking about governments :) ) measures something, it optimizes for that measure at the expense of all else (including it's long-term sustainability).

A simple example from the first chapter is how a government (I believe one of the various German governments of the 1800s) wanted to optimize timber production on a piece of land, so they chopped down all the trees (getting timber), planted a monocrop of the best-producing species, in 30 years chopped down all the trees (getting lots of timber, hooray), replanted the monocrop, and then found to their dismay that the land was barren and none of the trees they planted grew. Turns out a forest isn't just a collection of trees, who knew?

The book is largely a series of case studies along these lines about various other measures (land use, weights and measures, etc.).

I suppose we're seeing now what happens when one applies such a methodology to the value of a human life?

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Jeff Russell

March 2025

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