Comment on Dumb glasses
HalfSalesman@lemmy.world 1 day agoHow does the world take responsibility for its individuals if its individuals refuse to take part in anything?
That isn’t what I said, in fact that seems like a pretty bad faith interpretation, though I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that’s some kind of psychological defense mechanism or really poor reading comprehension, rather than deliberate manipulation of the conversation.
What I was getting at is more of a guiding principle for how society ought to operate, rather than a strict mandate of how things must be. And in reality, if we did operate in this way things would likely function better than they do now, where the individual is expected to sacrifice to the collective. Having to kowtow to the cultural, social, & moral norm demands of the mob for your survival or comfort is a curse born of collective conservative thinking.
A sufficient portion of people naturally want to contribute. I would even count myself largely among them. Helping people feels good, solving problems feels good. However, I deeply resent that it is expected of me. That I owe anyone anything. Further, if you have a lazy slob that wants to stay home and get drunk/high all day and not work: society let them, and support them. Forcing that sort of person to work for a living does nothing actually beneficial for society anyway and they never choose to exist. We collectively don’t have the right to demand anything from them.
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Mate, I was just asking for clarification.
I feel like you don’t understand what I’m asking.
Imagine that everyone was doing that. Everyone wants to get drunk and high. Who is supporting them, then?
I imagine you think I’m doing some reductio ad absurdum thing, but I just don’t understand how this is tenable.
Like, you’re suggesting that society shouldn’t expect anything of anyone, but it must, otherwise there is no one to support the drunk guy.
How can the collective support anyone if the collective is not expected to exist?
I’ll raise the stakes on this: what you’re describing is fundamentally anti-taxes. I don’t care if you pay your taxes or not, this world view of yours is not accomodating of compelled financial contributions. Billionaires who have stolen our money and are hiding it in little safety deposit boxes would be unobligated to return it to us. This is, obviously, a profoundly conservative stance to maintain.
HalfSalesman@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Its an irrelevant question because this isn’t what would happen. I would go so far to say that we’d even still have centralized services, its human nature and its efficient. And if it did somehow happen it still wouldn’t matter: a system of enforcement would barely hold things together anyway in a society of people who insist on being lazily drunk/high all day. People who authentically want to be that way are rare.
That said, if it really magically came to be: So be it. It’d functionally be the end of humanity and I’m more or less ok with that. I’m a soft anti-natalist. I wouldn’t be happy, but I wouldn’t be that sad if the alternative is a continuation of what currently is (capitalism) or some kind of collectivist authoritarianism.
Taxes are largely meaningless to an individual without an earned income or land. Taxes can still be a function of a society that operate with the ethical north star I’ve described. Accepting taxes would just be the contract one signs when they decide they want to work for additional money on top of a UBI/welfare/whatever. At least ideally.
As for billionaires, they’ve effectively stolen the power and responsibility from the collective in the current system. I was describing of the collective with their leveraged wealth, exploitation, negative extenalities of their business, excessive political manipulation power, etc. While they are themselves individuals, the collective owes them only the lack of an expectation to work while staying comfortable, not their outsized wealth based influence over the collective. And since they now wield the actual power they are morally culpable for the state of mass individual suffering. In fact, they’re essentially often responsible for depriving other individuals through their political activism of “economic bootstraps” and the like. They’re almost always literally ideological enemies to my perspective, with perhaps only a handful of exceptions.
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 21 hours ago
Okay, real question, think about this from my perspective for a second:
Why would I give a shit about anything you have to say after hearing something like this?
As a matter of strategy, a very good phrase, I don’t take opinions from people who are societally suicidal.
When I talk about bolstering and reinforcing a strong community, perspectives like yours are exactly the kind I’m talking about pruning. Society cannot suffer your intellectual poison. If you want to die, do it on your own terms.
My only expectation of you is that you will live, and that living means something to you. The only thing you can do is disappoint me.
And also, don’t film people who don’t want to be filmed unless they’re cops.
HalfSalesman@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
I’m about to clock out from work and I wont have access to this account until Monday morning. I may or may not respond to you after this, but I am curious enough that if you have something notable to say I probably will.
I don’t know you so I couldn’t say. It sounds like you shouldn’t if you are an incurious person or intellectually fearful person.
I don’t care about your virtue though. Why should I? We will never meet in person. We don’t need to respect each other here, that isn’t why we’re talking still. We’re here for the discourse, no?
Strategy to achieve what? I’m advocating to make things better for individuals. Conscious beings. However, the collective, society, human civilization, none of these things are themselves conscious. Why do you care about these concepts over the conscious individuals materially contained within them?
I never said I wished to die. At least not in the sense that you probably think. I already exist, me dying does not close Pandora’s Box, it cements the the fact that to live at all is a horror and a tragedy. Conscious mortality is fundamentally disturbing.
I’m sad that I have ever existed because I’m doomed to face death and suffering, but mostly the former haunts me. It haunts me that my loved ones will one day die, some already have a long time ago and it still disturbs me on a fundamental level. I’m also horrified at the prospect of bringing more conscious beings to suffer the same nightmarish fate of being brought into existence strapped to a metaphorical conveyor belt ending in death and oblivion.
Because I will continue to live or commit suicide? Or are you saying either or? I’m not entirely clear one what this means. As paradoxical as it sounds I don’t legitimately know if I’m capable of suicide. Its strange to even think about given my sheer terror of death itself, but also yeah… death will happen eventually, why not rip off the bandaid? I really don’t know what is the rational choice. Perhaps I am a hypocrite in this way.
If our axioms are really fundamentally different from mine, then perhaps there is no reason for us to continue. But if any of the questions in this response to you has you reconsider anything there might be something interesting here to talk about.