GENIUS FORUMS

RZoo wrote:Trick question - you can't eliminate anything without eliminating it all. Although that's a good question - would you happily eliminate it all?

Let's discuss the human bias against life. Almost everyone seems to want to eliminate something, be it violence, lying, fallacies, poverty, or so on.

Why is everyone so pessimistic? Why is life viewed as "imperfect" and "flawed" (metaphysical nonsense, but it reveals a bias)?

Is it likely that these people will eventually destroy humanity along their quest?

RZoo wrote:Let's discuss the human bias against life. Almost everyone seems to want to eliminate something, be it violence, lying, fallacies, poverty, or so on.

Diebert van Rhijn wrote: Part of waking up and smelling the roses is the realization how twisted, sad, damaged and alienated humanity is. And so the disgust ("shame") is the first sign of any deeper consciousness of the situation. For the average man this works mostly subconsciously, he will actually work very hard to put the genie back in the bottle, achieving "happiness and contentment" by some formula or practice ("clothing"). Ignorance swiftly follows in its wake with various forms of institutionalized insanities. The Big Project of the human race appears to be this, to hide its own inherent violence toward life, nature and essentially truth, pushing it deeper in many creative, enticing ways. And on this shrine, this secret burial place whole civilizations have been built nevertheless. Which is intriguing!

It's unclear if humanity is not doing something very natural by destroying itself. Perhaps to change that, one first has to redefine human and reconstruct the notion.

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:The Big Project of the human race appears to be this, to hide its own inherent violence toward life, nature and essentially truth....

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:Part of waking up and smelling the roses is the realization how twisted, sad, damaged and alienated humanity is.

RZoo wrote:one must wonder what is so bad and ugly about "truth" that it made life turn a 180 and evolve as fast as possible in the opposite direction. :-)

Diebert wrote:Part of waking up and smelling the roses is the realization how twisted, sad, damaged and alienated humanity is.

One more thing - is this really how you judge humanity? (If so, you're getting close to demonstrating the bias quite well. :-)

RZoo wrote:Trick question - you can't eliminate anything without eliminating it all. Although that's a good question - would you happily eliminate it all?

Let's discuss the human bias against life. Almost everyone seems to want to eliminate something, be it violence, lying, fallacies, poverty, or so on.

Why is everyone so pessimistic? Why is life viewed as "imperfect" and "flawed" (metaphysical nonsense, but it reveals a bias)?

Is it likely that these people will eventually destroy humanity along their quest?

Diebert: The Big Project of the human race appears to be this, to hide its own inherent violence toward life, nature and essentially truth, pushing it deeper in many creative, enticing ways. And on this shrine, this secret burial place whole civilizations have been built nevertheless. Which is intriguing!

It's unclear if humanity is not doing something very natural by destroying itself. Perhaps to change that, one first has to redefine human and reconstruct the notion.

movingalways wrote:The problem is, once the Wizard is revealed, it's back to life on the farm with Auntie Em.

Intriguing, no longer intriguing, we're back to the same old loop of "to be or not to be." As for enticing, is this not the poison of Femininity that the reasoning Masculine mind is "supposed" to reject and overcome? And what are shrines but someone's subjective idea of what is holy, right and true, another "supposed to/should" that the will will inevitably resist with all its might?

So what are we changing from/into except our individual, subjective, momentary definitions of being?

Leyla Shen wrote:Well, if you're Nietzschean (and therefore anti-metaphysics) at heart, it's not really a matter of pessimism and optimism so much as it is a matter of strong and weak will; strong will as creator of values, weak will as slave morality.

We see how the history of industry and the established objective existence of industry are the open book of man’s essential powers, the perceptibly existing human psychology. Hitherto this was not conceived in its connection with man’s essential being, but only in an external relation of utility, because, moving in the realm of estrangement, people could only think of man’s general mode of being – religion or history in its abstract-general character as politics, art, literature, etc. – ||IX| as the reality of man’s essential powers and man’s species-activity. We have before us the objectified essential powers of man in the form of sensuous, alien, useful objects, in the form of estrangement, displayed in ordinary material industry (which can be conceived either as a part of that general movement, or that movement can be conceived as a particular part of industry, since all human activity hitherto has been labour – that is, industry – activity estranged from itself).

A psychology for which this book, the part of history existing in the most perceptible and accessible form, remains a closed book, cannot become a genuine, comprehensive and real science. What indeed are we to think of a science which airily abstracts from this large part of human labour and which fails to feel its own incompleteness, while such a wealth of human endeavour, unfolded before it, means nothing more to it than, perhaps, what can be expressed in one word – “need”, “vulgar need”?

The natural sciences have developed an enormous activity and have accumulated an ever-growing mass of material. Philosophy, however, has remained just as alien to them as they remain to philosophy. Their momentary unity was only a chimerical illusion. The will was there, but the power was lacking. Historiography itself pays regard to natural science only occasionally, as a factor of enlightenment, utility, and of some special great discoveries. But natural science has invaded and transformed human life all the more practically through the medium of industry; and has prepared human emancipation, although its immediate effect had to be the furthering of the dehumanisation of man. Industry is the actual, historical relationship of nature, and therefore of natural science, to man. If, therefore, industry is conceived as the exoteric revelation of man’s essential powers, we also gain an understanding of the human essence of nature or the natural essence of man. In consequence, natural science will lose its abstractly material – or rather, its idealistic – tendency, and will become the basis of human science, as it has already become – albeit in an estranged form – the basis of actual human life, and to assume one basis for life and a different basis for science is as a matter of course a lie. The nature which develops in human history – the genesis of human society – is man’s real nature; hence nature as it develops through industry, even though in an estranged form, is true anthropological nature.

Leyla Shen wrote:Why would you be concerned about the slander against reality of the weak-willed? Reality certainly isn't. In fact, isn't it necessarily true that it's reality that makes the weak-willed weak, just as it is reality that makes the strong-willed.

Will the "meek" destroy the Earth from an inability to act?

Probably.

RZoo wrote:Trick question - you can't eliminate anything without eliminating it all. Although that's a good question - would you happily eliminate it all?

Let's discuss the human bias against life. Almost everyone seems to want to eliminate something, be it violence, lying, fallacies, poverty, or so on.

Why is everyone so pessimistic? Why is life viewed as "imperfect" and "flawed" (metaphysical nonsense, but it reveals a bias)?

Is it likely that these people will eventually destroy humanity along their quest?

It's looking pretty bleak. We have the power to physically destroy humanity and we're constantly improving our power to control people (for instance, we already attempt to reduce mental diversity in our population via "medication"). Unless we colonize other planets or dismantle or develop something to neutralize them, our nuclear weapons (and fuel sources) will continue to pose a threat to humanity. Controlling ourselves is less of a threat (in my view), as diversity (change) would be extremely difficult to completely contain.

Russell wrote:Good and bad, right and wrong, here and there, i.e. all dualistic viewpoints are part and parcel to the experience of consciousness. In this sense, you're right to say that you can't get rid of one without getting rid of the other.

Pessimism is a part of life because we are caused to value life, or at least certain aspects of it. Flaws and imperfections are perceived when our sense of self, the ego, perceives a lacking in that which it values.

Do you perceive "metaphysical nonsense" to be a human flaw? Do you see it as something that should be eliminated?

Russell wrote:My question is, is there a degree is pessimism driving you to ask such a question?

RZoo wrote:Strong will as creator of values, weak will as slave morality. Values that slander reality ("idealism"; values that glorify some other world) as "pessimism" (this world sucks). Metaphysics as the means by which other such worlds are imagined.

Bobo wrote:What would be left is something that lives beyond the breaths - Faith.