Imagine coming to an internet philosophy forum to promote propaganda that everyone laughs at, day after day. — Mikie

Unfortunately, the science of marketing psychology shows how effective constant hammering of bullshit actually is for indoctrinating others... though attempting it on a philosophy forum might be a tall order.

A warrant should always be present when conducting infringements on people's properties or information. It's foundational in order to behave as a state of law rather than a state of power.

So, never mind that Trump's hare-brained tarrif wars are tanking the share market. Never mind that his war on US Aid is greatly excacerbating the worldwide spread of tuberculosis. Never mind that he's trampling civil liberties and constitutional norms. What's really important, is trying to help out that 'great patriot', who is doing so much to 'make America great', by doing an advertisement for Tesla on the White House lawn. The world's richest man, who possesses more wealth than almost everyone else in the USA combined, can sure use a bit of Presidential philanthropy himself. Never mind complaints about once again debasing the office of the President for crass commercial ends. — Wayfarer

With all that's happening... I'm wondering if there's not a lot of gathering data on everything they do. So many things are so obviously corrupt (as in the video I shared previously), that I'm wondering if people wait for the mid-terms and then rage hellfire onto everyone involved in all of this.

The thing is that Trump acts like a child, if no one tells him to be careful he's just going to do whatever he feels like and he doesn't seem to care for laws and regulations. So there will probably be tons of violations gathered and filed.

I think he feels invincible; being elected regardless of all the legal battles and being sentenced guilty last year, it probably fueled his narcissism so much I think he feels untouchable. And that's a good thing - because that may push him into a recklessness that comes to bite him in the ass later on.

If there are no consequences, then that's proof the US is a fundamentally corrupt state. Even if we say so, it's not before it's obvious that the people might do something about it.

In the name of making America great again, Trump is undoing the very things that made America great. — Banno

Primarily because the slogan never had any real meaning. It's just marketing, it's just like a cult who bullshits good sounding incoherent rants and the followers just eats it all up.

Nothing Trump says is real, it's made up in the moment in order for him to get an ego boost. He's basically like a child craving attention...

...but society tries to analyze what he literally says. So, is he the stupid one or is society stupid for playing along that game?

Don't agree. The US system has its problems, but it has held up for 237 years - until now. And now a convicted criminal and secessionist with an emormous ax to grind and hatred of government has been put in charge of it. He may well succeed in destroying the constitutional order, but it's not the time to try and devise a new model. What's important is not letting Trump destroy it. The kind of cynicism 'the whole thing is broken' is only going to make it easier for Trump's nihilism to come out on top. — Wayfarer

Trump and his kin isn't a one-off. We've seen a constant escalation of his type creeping its way into the top. And democrats seem to be totally oblivious to the problems in society popping up under their terms.

You can't just put hope into democrats, they will probably win the next term, put the nation into some pause while these idiots now in power return in force again after that.

It's a downward spiral, two steps back - one step forward. There's no solution in the status quo of the side who wins on doing essentially nothing.

If democrats keep dancing around their liberal centrism, they're part of perpetuating the status quo.

In other words, Vote Democrat. — Wayfarer

Temporary band-aid - It's not a solution. It's just putting the feet on the breaks into a stand-still for a moment only to continue down this path later.

This is a fundamental problem within the very essence of US culture.

Yes, I guess that's another possibility -- dream and body may switch roles, mutually reinforcing the experience. At one point the bodily sensation informs the dream, then at another point the dream that unfolds influences the body. — J

Yes, it's very interesting what happens to our conscious experience when our body are unable to regulate the chemicals that suppose to keep us sedated during sleep.

Another syndrome that happens because of this is sleep paralysis. I've suffered this experience and it is terrifying. Basically it lets dream experiences into our real world, a hallucinatory state in which I'm more in the awake state than sleeping, so the opposite of sleepwalking, being paralyzed while experiencing dream experiences forming hallucinations within the room I'm sleeping in. And since sleep also controls breathing, a state of fear doesn't register in the same way and leading to the same reactions in breathing, so you feel out of breath, which in turn led to the many artworks featuring suffocation in the state of sleep paralysis.

If dreaming is the result of our predictive coding being cut off from sense information and instead relies on virtual sense simulations to form consistent experiences of dream sequences, that forms the experience we have in dreams. But if the body have problems subduing the normal predictive coding behavior, getting actual sense data, I would assume that there becomes a point of confused state between the two; you have both simulated senses grounding the generated experience of reality, as well as actual senses coming through from your body in bed.

Maybe this has to do with how the different regions of the brain controls the body. That the region for motor control and the region for bladder control doesn't function on the same principles and therefore when the brain is scrambled between two states of sense data and tries to predict behavior and actions, it takes two different actions.

And you know, some people wet themselves during sleep, so maybe it's just a matter of automatic self-control that is programmed in our long term memory due to how emotional values attached to memories create stronger biases. That the emotional intensity of wetting yourself is so strong that compared to just "kicking", the bias forms two different intensities in whether or not to let the body act.

Sorry if I didn't engage with the X or Y event, but I think the science may hint at the reasons.

It's interesting how narrow minded business people are. The current idea that drives DOGE, Musk and Trump is to improve efficiency. But corporate efficiency relies on a replaceable workforce.

You push costs down, push salaries down in order to maximize what you get out of the workers. You put pressure on your workers to give up on unionized rights, try to manipulate them into valuing the company as a "family" and how their complaints is a negative impact on fellow "family members".

That is the foundation for how CEOs and companies operate. The only thing standing in their way are regulations and union power.

And then you have society, which doesn't run on these metrics. It's the opposite really. The wealth of a nation isn't really counted in how much capital the top leaders have. It's within the pockets of its citizens. The more citizens who has filled pockets, the more they can spend in the economy. It's the people who drives the national economy. So in order to improve a nation, the best way is to not try and take advantage of "workers" because there's no profit in doing so. You can't "fire a citizen" that isn't complying, they will just become a burden on society if they don't participate. And it's not possible to just force them into participating and work, because if they don't have a sense of purpose in what they're doing, they will eventually not be able to participate, regardless of force upon them.

Essentially, it's like having a company in which you try to fire the workers who are bad for your profit, but they stay in the office and continues to consume resources in that office. And while they're doing that, you try to get their children to work for you, but they have to take care of the previous ones let go, so they're down on their knees and eventually also just become people who stay at the office consuming your resources.

This is why a nation cannot be run like a business. It doesn't operate at all like one and is rather dependent on thinking the opposite. To spend money on the people is to profit as a nation.

This means that the well-being of the citizens is at the heart of a healthy economy and national identity. Good health care, good social securities, good security from crime, good infrastructure, good funding of culture, taking care of the sick, weak and old etc.

Since all the workers at the office will always be in the office regardless of working or not, you, as a CEO, are forced to rather make sure that as many of them as possible are healthy and happy enough to want to work for you. The better the conditions for these people, the more likely they will participate and the less people are there just consuming resources.

I think that Reaganomics made people forget this truth about a nation. When people started viewing other people as a disposable workforce in all areas of life and not just the workplace, it influenced politics and pushed business owners into running the nation, trying to operate on the same principles as a company.

And when they faced the fact that the workers "couldn't leave the office", they have been trying to "solve" this problem using continuous strategies that may work for businesses, but not for a society.

Essentially, ignoring the needs to the people, cutting back on health care, on social securities and helping the people seems to be a way of trying to "ignore the problem" and letting them literally die off in order to get rid of them. That's the only way to "fire them" from the office.

These politicians are so indoctrinated into the way of how businesses operate that they are unable to understand how society prosper and becomes healthy. And they've entangled themselves so deep into a web of this thinking that everyone at the top keeps holding actual improvements to society back.

They simply aren't wise enough to be able to improve society for the people.

Musk, DOGE and Trump is just the latest tip of this spear and the most obvious signifier of this mentality. But it runs deep within all politicians in the US.

The only way to change this, is to change the fundamentals of the US, to focus on running society as a society and not as a business. Remove all of these idiots who try to operate society as such.

Or else, this way of running the nation will just deepen until the people have had enough. But since this mentality runs so deep, a revolution will probably just be a new run of the "Animal Farm", leading to new people operating under the same principles.

This is probably the underlying reason why the US doesn't operate like governments in the EU. Why the EU tends to install more regulations and why politics seem to be more stable and work far better. The EU nations generally don't view society as a company. Probably because of its long history with rising and falling empires, all constantly verifying what kinds of society that works and what doesn't. Letting society install guardrails to govern against those who would lead a nation in a direction historically proven to be destructive.

The US has always operated on transactions with other nations. Their entire existence is a rebellion against an empire, to be "free" to operate on business principles, and we're seeing the emergence of the end result of this mentality. The self-made nation. The CEO politics. So in a sense, Reaganomics just became a catalyst of a political journey that's been taking place since the civil war.

The US isn't an empire. It's a pseudo-business who doesn't understand that its actually a society. An office space with workers who may soon unionize a rebellion but lacking an actual philosophy of a true nation.

The US is pretty much doomed to fall as a nation eventually. Under its own weight of misunderstandings of what a nation and society actually is and what it needs.

No, it's not that it's unclear (although, I could wrangle it in that direction). It's that I think the 'view' described is erroneous to a rather extreme degree :) It was quippage, not argument. — AmadeusD

It is extreme to the point of provoking thought. I elaborated more in the second post, but imagine a scenario in which the US goes so far in the wrong direction that people has to do something about it. When is it time to think about such questions? Now, or in the chaos of such a situation? It would also be a point of provoking thought for the purpose of increasing the knowledge to prevent things from going in the wrong direction.

At the moment, Trump granting Musk entry and power within the government and letting him grant access to unauthorized personnel is considered breaking the law. That's the foundation of the lawsuits being drawn up. If Trump tries to block these lawsuit investigations, that will be a direct obstruction of the law. And with the track record of how things have been going, Trump seems much more inclined to go by force than anything else, threatening democrat officials if they try to object towards his policies.

When is the time to think about these things for real? Do you actually think nothing is happening at the moment?

My comment can be translated into your question. What hte heck is being talked about there? Nonsense, at best. — AmadeusD

What is unclear about it?

I get the impression that all the European Governments have recognized that and are working hard to adjust. They'll likely work out what they can do and how to do it before long. Whether they can "put him in his place" is another matter. There'll be a lot of damage that can't be repaired - ever. — Ludwig V

The range of industry partnerships that can be achieved within EU could just cut any trading of these things towards the US. If we also organize trade deals with Canada, essentially free trade, we gain access to a massive set of resources. If the EU establish these things we can cut off the US entirely without much setbacks to the economy, but it would tank large parts of the US economy, especially if the trade moves from being between Canada and the US to Canada to the EU.

Trump is acting according to "art of the deal". He's trying to push others because so many others are relying on the US. He can push Europe, Ukraine, everyone at the moment until he gets pushed back.

The fact of the matter is that the only way to stop Trump internationally is to push back. To not give in to his behavior. If he push hard, others need to push harder, to make sure he realizes he might lose something. In his eyes, he's not losing anything by losing relations with other nations, he's focused on "owning" the deals with these nations. He's behaving as a company in deals with other companies, not as collaborating nations.

As such, other nations cannot act on diplomacy as usual, they need to adopt the dealmaking behavior of Trump. And if they do it correctly, they will put him in his place.

....Even if you refuse to accept the unapologetic pivot to a fascist Russian modeled mob kleptocracy, the US is fucked. For decades.

Then why don't the US citizens who don't want this... do something about it?

Can I please know from what position you're watching this film? It's not one i've seen. Definitely not a documentary. — AmadeusD

What are you talking about?

Pragmatism and opportunism have bred terrorism and antagonistic views across the world against the West; let their hatred pour over the USA idiot in charge - the EU should leverage that undercurrent and position itself as a trustworthy partner not out to police the world but to facilitate cooperation and peace. — Benkei

I'm quite surprised that through all this I've felt a certain amount of increased energy. In the last Trump run, things just felt like geopolitical depression, but this time he went so far that Europe seems to collectively wake up to a new kind of elevated spirit.

If it goes on like this, it would end with a collective "fuck the US" and at that point I'm not sure the US will be able to get back to the relations until they crawl back on their knees.

We can argue that the economic power of the US is too large for this to happen, but if Trump takes it too far there's not gonna be a choice. And if the industry and collaboration across Europe increases and reaches a point of self-suficiency it didn't have before, we're not really gonna rely on the US even past this phase of toddler politics Trump wallows in.

Trump is effectively just operating on "the art of the deal". He's pushing everyone in order to own any deal. Europe, at the moment, is trying to play by his tune and I think political leaders in the EU need to wake up to the fact that Trump doesn't surrender to anything if there's nothing to lose. He will push until he gets pushed back.

So even if there are risks involved with going against Trump, I think Europe should just give him the fucking finger, even if that may crash the market a bit. Because that crash may lead to a boom when native industries start to form stronger trade deals within the EU.

A key point that fuels industry is diversity, it's proven in so many research papers that anyone disputing it is just ignorant. And the EU has more diversity than the US due to the fact its a union of nations rather than federal states. Increasing the free movement and industry within, beyond the current operation, may lead to an industrial boom. The US, even with immigration included, is too inbred into patriotic nationalism to function on gains in diverse thinking. And the EU has been too dependent on the US to seek collaboration with their neighbors.

I think there's just a matter of time before the EU organizes a European military, a federal investigation agency (akin to the FBI), joint industries spread across nations rather than centralized in specific nations etc.

And I kind of feel ok with how things are going in this regard. The war and Russia is the key area of risk and that's the only reason I'm worried; but outside of that, it's kind of refreshing to see European leaders being invigorated to collaborate more rather than less. The US essentially pushes us away from Brexit mentalities and that is a good thing.

Let's just tariff back against the US and they'll find out just how much trade is actually benefiting the US. I'd say, let the MAGA cult and Trump supporting voters of the US rot until they get rid of toddler politics. Let us drink fine, but through better trade, less expensive French and Italian wine while the US citizens grow fat and stupid on suger and suger-replacing chemicals. Let our EU regulations safeguard the citizens so they can live decent lives while the US citizens die from infections out of losing healthcare or die from not taking vaccines because Kennedy told them so.

Let the US suffer - If the US abandon us, then let's abandon the US. Why should we care for the stupid toddlers that vote and run that broken nation?

Soon, the dept crisis will swallow the US economy and if Europe builds enough security against that downfall, we will win the art of the deal in the end.

Yes, that's the choice. Though there's good reason to think that the French were too disunited to make a collectivve decision and it was more a matter of who won the war. That's the nightmare waiting at the bottom of the cliff. Perhaps the law will get there in the end. — Ludwig V

I think that the problem that has occurred in our modern times is that the materialistic and individualistic lifestyle programmed people into being too disjointed to ever mount any form of pressure that amounts to anything but some small protests on the street outside of people in power who couldn't give a shit what "lesser people" says about them.

Society has essentially programmed away the people's sense of community identity, programmed away any revolutionary spirit that could amount to actual threats against people in power. And while some would point at Jan 6th, there's clearly a difference between people in power rallying uneducated manipulated and indoctrinated people to be meat spears in trying to conduct a coup, to that of the people themselves rallying against people in power in order to fight for a better life and not being abused by these people.

Revolution, even by force, does not have to be bloody. The force can also be not to comply with what the enforcers of the people in power inflict on them. Just look at Gandhi's revolution.

If enough people were to occupy places in a way that the state stops functioning properly, in opposition towards the ruling government, then when the government turns to violence, every drop of blood from the people will be a loss for those currently in power.

If everyone who oppose Trump were to organize for something like this, it would have an effect.

But the people won't do it.

If there's anything I hate more than dictators and abusers of power, it's the apathy of the people just doing nothing. Just turn inwards into their own echo chamber, into the comfort of social media spaces were they can complain about everything in a way that makes no difference whatsoever.

Apathetic people deserve any abuse that people in power inflict on them as their apathy rolled out the carpet for this abuse.

Your attempt of bait-rhetorics won't work. You're only on this forum to DoS climate debates. As long as mods tolerate this, there won't be any good discussions on the topic. You win, or whatever the fuck you attempt to do.

Let's face it. Law that cannot be enforced is dead letter. Government that does not respect the law is tyranny. What next? — Ludwig V

This is why the US is broken. No laws seem to have any effect on the people in power. It doesn't matter how many times lawyers, officials, police, artists or philosophers point towards laws being broken or manipulated.

If the law doesn't have any effect on people abusing their power against the citizens and nation, and no one who's on the side of enforcing the law does anything to uphold the law; the only action left is to remove the power abusers by force.

It's either that, or accept being ruled by these abusers. This is a pretty binary choice for the people. The French at the end of the 18th century could have just accepted the status quo... or not.

You are an evangelist if you think that there is no disagreement about anything to do with climate change. — Agree-to-Disagree

Disagreement does not equal scientific data and research being wrong. There are lots of uneducated and low intelligence people who disagree with facts all the time, which leads to "the existence of disagreement", but that doesn't make the uneducated and stupid in the right about anything. Such an idea is just an attempt at manipulating the debate. There are tons of people who believe in flat earth and who would use the same type of argument in an attempt to validate their stance.

A lot of my posts are about whether the proposed solutions to climate change will work. — Agree-to-Disagree

A random sample quote from you:

What proof do you have that the current temperature is not just a "normal" temperature for an interglacial? — Agree-to-Disagree

That's not something someone who agrees with the science would say. It's something that climate science deniers usually says; a rhetoric aimed to bait a non-scientist to get lost in evidence data that requires the knowledge of climate scientists. It's a rhetoric that works against everyone but climate scientists who can provide and answer due to their deeper knowledge of the subject. Because it doesn't matter if the actual evidence is provided; the interlocutors do not know how to interconnect specific data with the holistic understanding of the subject and through that the denier claims victory without actually having won any argument. These rhetorical strategies are dishonest and hollow, and for anyone observant of such behavior, a clear indicator of who the person is and what they attempt to accomplish.

Mikie is getting the titles of threads changed to suit his agenda. — Agree-to-Disagree

What agenda?

I will be creating a new thread to discuss whether changing the titles of threads is dishonest and unethical and a form of censorship. — Agree-to-Disagree

He started a thread that has been hijacked by climate science deniers to the point an actual discourse is impossible. For you to call that unethical, one can turn it around and ask if it's ethical to spam a thread to the point the OP gives up on even trying to continue it. Who are you to place yourself on a moral high ground like that? Isn't that rather delusional and arrogant?

And a further point, the destructive use of censorship is something done by official institutions and governments. It is not applicable to other individuals, especially not within a construct they've created. If they create a place of discussion about something and someone doesn't follow the intention of that space, it is not censorship to silence those who disrupts things for the people there. This use of the concept of censorship in your rhetoric is another form of dishonest manipulative rhetoric aimed at painting your opposition as dishonest. You attempt to bootstrap yourself to a higher moral ground. But as always, it's obvious to anyone who's ever been involved in online debates. It's also rather clumsy to attempt to use that rhetoric when the entire right-wing culture at the moment have proved just how dysfunctional that rhetoric is by Musk's treatment of the concept of censorship on X. It should be obvious to all nowadays that the idea of censorship and free speech by certain people in society follows that trend of claiming to be arguing for free speech and opposing censorship, while then trying to control the flow of communication to align with their own ideology.

In that regard, it would also be a form of censorship to spam a discussion so much that people can't have a proper discussion anymore. I would argue that this form of rhetoric is a hidden form of silencing people far more than the people trying to govern discourse manners - A rhetoric in the same operation as DoS attacks towards websites. This type of DoS rhetoric functions in the same "denial of service" way, pushing so much noise into discussions that it becomes impossible for honest interlocutors to have a proper discussion. Essentially drowning out the flow off discussion with the noise of bullshit.

So I would be careful lecturing others on unethical behavior like you want to attempt.

Climate change alarmism meets this definition of evangelism. — Agree-to-Disagree

You are basically only on this forum to spread disinformation about climate science. You basically interact with no other thread or category other than spam threads which focus on climate change and climate science.

I don't think anyone fit the category of forum rules against evangelism better than you do. Your only defense is that mods don't seem to care about topics in the lounge.

But I would argue that if a member is only ever posting on one subject, over and over, to the point of the creator of the thread having to change the title and intention of the thread to reflect your hijacking of it, that would warrant mods to take action.

I think perhaps most mods also have a different opinion on climate change. — Mikie

Are you saying many mods are climate science deniers and effectively won't ban evangelists of climate science denial because of this? I sincerely hope not.

Since the climate change threads are allowed to become a cesspool of denial and misinformation, I’m no longer posting on them— I’ve moved any serious discussion to private group chat. Feel free to message to join if you haven’t been invited already. :up: — Mikie

I still don’t understand why the mods let evangelists keep infecting the lounge. I understand it’s more lose in there compared to the proper philosophical pages, but if there’s no moderation at all it just becomes infested with posters who are only here for the purpose of evangelical propaganda for their disinformation rants. They just infect every topic so there’s no point in any discussion.

Forum rules state

Types of posters who are not welcome here:

Evangelists: Those who must convince everyone that their religion, ideology, political persuasion, or philosophical theory is the only one worth having.

If someone is having an unpopular stance that’s fine, as long as they take as much care in their arguments as everyone else. But this constant spams of bullshit everywhere just makes the lounge impossible to be in.

Shouldn’t there be at least some minor standards? Where obvious evangelists and spammers get banned even from the lounge? If someone is a member here to clearly only post in a single thread over and over, that shouldn’t be allowed. That’s not what this site is about. These are spammers.

The Republican Party is utterly culpable in this matter. — Wayfarer

The old republicans need to realize that there's no republican party anymore. It's just MAGA and Trump loyalists. The sooner they realize this, the sooner they could organize into a new republican party. Maybe even brand it as such, "new republicans" to win on sounding "edgy new".

Key point is that people need to realize that republicans are gone. The ones in power in that party are these MAGA fanatics and Trump loyalists.

Everyone needs to wake the fuck up to this.

It has been pointed out, that while Associated Press and Reuters have now been banned from White House briefings, that the official Russian state media had a reported in the Oval Office today, to conveniently broadcast Trump and Vances brow-beating of Zelenskyy to the whole Russian federation. How convenient for them. — Wayfarer

If it turns out that Trump is collaborating with Putin... remind me again, how does the west treat Russian spies who infiltrate positions of power?

Could you explain how it is? The US has a giant nuclear arsenal with the ability to deploy them with ICBMs, medium range missiles, submarines, and Air Force bombers. Why does the US need NATO? I'm asking. — frank

You think warfare is only military means and explosions? People listed all those things as well for Russia and then it turned out the military strength wasn't enough. Then we can also look at how a single Swedish submarine sunk one of the USs largest cruisers during a Baltic exercise.

And looking at the innovation rate of China, what would happen if China went to full scale war with the US after leaving NATO?

NATO is not just a numbers game for military spending and hardware, it's an alliance of collaboration, of spreading out into the world as an extended shield. Imagine a US crippled by internal politics, not in NATO, cut off from intelligence collaborations.

And also add all other things I said, that the consequences of being in NATO is also affecting collaboration outside of NATO as the collaborative security also means higher safety trading and collaborating between NATO members in other areas.

If this was a RTS (strategy game), you're the type of player who would just produce as many soldiers and vehicles as possible and then be surprised by someone utilizing their resources better to hit your weak spots rather than just using brute force. Like the single submarine taking out the cruiser because it was technologically superior going against hubris.

It's a perverse way to go: to say to fight corruption, one enables rampant corruption. To say one is improving the lives of the ordinary people, one makes everything even worse with few insiders going from corruption to outright looting and kleptocracy. To say one is for freedom of speech, one implements the most outrageous word-policing that is fitting to an authoritarian state.

Yet Trump supporters are totally fine with this, because they have blocked away any criticism towards their leader. This is the way that conspiracy theorists work: they think that everything has been this huge conspriracy, and what they want is to have the conspiracy of their own as they don't believe that the antidote to conspiracies would be openness and stronger democratic institutions. People are sheeple, so it is necessary to use propaganda. Now the correct propaganda of the anti-deep state people. Conspiracy theorists are the enemy of a democracy, because they don't believe for starters that a democracy could or would be possible. — ssu

I'd wish the conspiracy theorists all unite under their own flag, make a unity of bullshit and fascism so it's easier to categorize them as extremists and fight them. Right now, they're so scattered and so undefined that it's impossible to fight against it while they're also too stupid and disorganized to ever do any serious harm. They simply act as a big iron chain to society, holding back good progress, holding back improvements and holding back fighting climate change.

They're a sickness that holds society in bed, making everyone apathetic and without energy. Honestly, I hate them all and despise their disgusting stupidity. The negative consequences to society over time is larger than people seem realize.

I see what you're saying, but the US put trillions into NATO because it was defending itself by containing communism. The US isn't defending itself through NATO now. It's just exercising global influence. I think most Americans would question the wisdom of continuing to take that role. What's in it for us? — frank

The US has at the moment the historically delusional idea of isolationism. The collaborations through NATO is not contained within the operation of NATO. It's like installing tax incentives on something which boosts an influx of tourists, the tax incentive is essentially a loss of tax income, but it boosts the economy anyway through the resulting tourism.

What I mean is that economy doesn't work like you're hinting at. Trillions into NATO over its entire lifetime is nothing compared to the unquantified income of how other transactions have been between the nations within this alliance.

Such an alliance becomes a security to do further business between nations as it is as much a prevention of war against NATO members as it is between NATO members. Effectively it becomes a somewhat better deterrence than both threats or the UN.

Society isn't a company in which everything is a basic balance sheet. It's operating on so many hidden parameters that anyone just looking at costs fail to see the benefits and future gains. It's not something that can be looked at in quarter-term results.

And how do you know that the US isn't defended through NATO? The very point of NATO is deterrence, it's not just defense whenever there's an actual war. What if leaving NATO actually opens up the US to threats far greater than things have been if they would have stayed in NATO? That the fact that a military strength like Russia didn't go that well in Ukraine shows that there's a lot of hubris in the idea of just military might. Comparably, look at all the American hubris throughout history, Vietnam war, Gulf war etc.

On top of that, NATO isn't just military collaboration, it's intelligence. The members share intelligence information that isn't visible as pure military. And the US also has a lot of defensive bases that are part of defense lines for the US as a first line of defense further away from the US borders; these are NATO collaborations. So without NATO, intelligence information might be cut off and these defensive lines disappear.

I don't think most Americans understand anything about NATO. And showing by how the US citizens voted, I don't think most of them have even basic understandings of foreign politics or how the world actually works in trade and collaborations.

But if NATO disappears, then there will just be a new alliance among the other nations. It's too effective as deterrence and security to just be removed, regardless of the US involvement or not.

But the US shouldn't be as naive as to think they're untouchable if they leave NATO. It's more than just a numbers game.

I see that evaluation - whatever you mean that in regard to human behaviour - is very important to you. I don't quite understand why. — Vera Mont

I'm not sure what you mean? I'm following in the direction you're taking the discussion by choosing to answer on certain parts of what I wrote.

In order to 'evaluate' anything, you first need a standard against which to measure it and some unit of measurement. — Vera Mont

But morality is fluid, changing between cultures and through time. How can you have a standard with such a fluid foundation?

And why is it fluid? Because we evaluate and dissect our morality in every generation. And that is impossible without the ability to empathically understand other people's point of view.

How such standards and norms are defined is according to the precepts and world-view of the culture: what a society expects, accepts and tolerates from its members. Moral and legal systems differ, as do human attitudes from one historical period to another. That is why I find your demand to evaluate behaviours and their motives so perplexing. — Vera Mont

Culture, world-views and society change massively over time. It isn't static.

How can you find a stable moral ground while society is changing without careful evaluation and dissection of the moral values that are changing?

What is perplexing is that you point out that morality is different between cultures and through time, but then state that it is at the same time a standard world-view that should define the norms. How can you both have a constantly changing morality and at the same time letting it be a standard norm? It becomes a paradox in which society should always adhere to the societal standards and norms of morality, but at the same time these norms and standards are constantly changing.

Isn't it then true that since morality constantly change and this morality is informing the societal norms and standards, that in order for it to change in a rational and thoughtful way, people need to carefully evaluate societal morals in order for them to change over time in a thoughtful and responsible way?

That cannot be done without fully understanding the emotional realm of morality, which requires an empathic understanding of all people.

We don't. Every society sets up a system of laws to regulate its members' behaviour, and every society fails to prevent crime, interpersonal conflict, injustice and abuse. — Vera Mont

It fails because it still operates on mob mentality. A problem with democracies has been that crime and punishment becomes voting issues, and so we have outsourced an academically sound topic to that of the mob screaming for solutions and politicians promising solutions that are satisfying for the crowd/mob, not those that are effective in preventing crime.

Laws are only able to guide those already law-abiding, and only able to invoke justice after a crime, not prevent them. As plenty academic studies have shown, laws mean nothing to those who do crimes, because that's not how the human psyche and emotions work.

Crime prevention requires understanding the situations and emotions which leads up to crime, and adjusting society to prevent those paths taken. But this is not emotionally satisfying for the mob/crowd, who operates on the bloodlust of revenge, which in turn informs political decisions that supposedly are there to deal with crime.

The mob and public is not intellectually and emotionally mature enough to stand behind actual solutions. This has been proven over and over. There are so many researchers who comment on bad political decisions for crime prevention over and over that it's become satire. The public is immature in this area.

Inside and outside are hardly abstract concepts. (and I didn't say appearances inform our moralities; that's far more complicated than everyday assessment of another person's actions). We see what other people look like, what they do, hear what they say and judge them accordingly. We can imagine how they feel if it's similar to how we might feel in their place.
In general, human do not treat one another as if all that understanding and bridge-making were very effective. — Vera Mont

It is abstract because you refer to it as some standard within a system that is constantly changing. What is a standard and norm within something that is constantly changing? A person within this system might adhere to the norms and standards around them, but a citizen in Nazi Germany did so too. It's not enough to just conclude morality to come from this illusive "standard" because that standard is constantly shifting. In order to find good morals when living in Nazi Germany, only those with functioning empathy were able to see through the indoctrination narrative that skewed the morality of the public. As I mentioned, the public is generally stupid and emotionally immature; that's true for both Nazi Germany and modern times.

Only through empathic understanding can we truly evaluate and arrive at good moral standards that consist through time rather than change by doctrines.

I thought NATO had to do with opposing communism. Communism is gone. — frank

Society and world orders evolve, what was once one thing evolves into something else. Most things in society started out as one thing and evolved into something else. Police forces were a pretty new thing as we see them today, so why don't police forces still act on orders by the head of state, acting from their orders? Because it evolved.

Alliances evolves too, what NATO was is not what NATO is today. Today it's an alliance to protect against mostly corrupt states from making hostile actions. And I would say it functions as its intended. Russia is not very keen on invading the Baltics for instance, even though those nations are pretty easy to conquer, much more easy than Ukraine.

Mostly, it's people who aren't even living in proximity to hostile states who complain about NATO. It's another reality for those who live close to and having their borders constantly violated by a hostile nation.

But as I've discussed earlier, I think a new alliance needs to be formed. That is defined by democratic stability and low corruption. In which it's not just an alliance in military power, but for all things like free trade and travel. It would more easily brand itself as an alliance of the "good".

Because people argue over the origin of NATO constantly in some belief that such a thing even matters today. It doesn't. And arguing about it is as useless as arguing over who has the right to a land based on hundreds of year old decisions.

The modern world, after the wall fell, internationally evolved into better agreement about how borders were drawn. It's become part of how the world argues for peace. And through trade agreements and travel, most nations have settled into a better society without invading each other. But there still are rotten eggs trying to behave like the old times and NATO went from an alliance of the cold war to an alliance to protect this new world order, against those nations which tries to play the old games.

Imagine that we dismantled NATO tomorrow, it's gone. There's no more NATO... *POOF*
And then the day after tomorrow, the nations of the world gathered around and discussed forming a new alliance to help protect each other, leading to a new military alliance, under a new name, say "Alliance of Military Protection Internationale", AMPI for short. Most of the old NATO members, who already have a good military collaboration, sign up for it, forming basically the same composition of nations as NATO, only, it's not called AMPI and is not formed based on the old reasons, but primarily out of the modern condition and nation's need for an alliance of protection.

What has effectively changed in that scenario? Other than basically changing the name?

Evaluation is intellectual — Vera Mont

Empathy is used to understand information. Evaluation can only be done out of information. You can't evaluate without anything to evaluate and draw conclusions from and you can't evaluate if you don't understand the information.

What's the standard against which you evaluate another person's behaviour? Your own, or the norm accepted by society. — Vera Mont

How do you arrive at moral behavior? For yourself and society? You keep returning to some "standard" or "norm", but how are these defined? How do you evaluate these if you aren't open to understanding behavior fully through empathic understanding?

Emotions may cause him to act a certain way, but he's not evaluated by society on his feelings, only on his actions. Behaviour, is judged on legal considerations of prevention, correction or punishment. No empathy required. — Vera Mont

This is plain wrong. Courts evaluate the reasons for a crime all the time. The lust-filled smiling murderer get life in prison and the person struck with passionate revenge get a lower sentence. An action is always evaluated out of what caused the actions.

But empathy is not about justice, it's about understanding any action and behavior. Through empathy we can understand others in society doing good or bad, it's how we function socially, it's why the mirror-neurons are an important part; they're key to humans even being social animals.

And if we speak of crime preventions, how do you think we can prevent crimes without empathically understand the drive behind certain crimes? It's only through proper empathy that we can understand why certain crimes happen and be able to prevent it in the future.

Not to evaluate. Only to understand and figure out how to deal with the destructive ones. — Vera Mont

And how do we figure out how to deal with destructive ones without fully understanding their emotions?

That judgment is made from the outside: What did the person do? Does our collective moral framework condone that act? (Morality is not a given; it varies by culture, circumstance and time.) Should we allow him to keep doing it? If not, how do we stop him? (More often by incarceration than fellow feeling.) — Vera Mont

And how does this collective and individual moral framework form in the first place? Through time and culture, how do you think morality evolves? How does it change?

You're referring to this abstract "outside" which informs our morality, but what is this "outside" but the thing we formed by our empathic understanding of the human condition? Of each other and everyone's struggles? If we didn't use empathy to discern morality, then we would chop off the hands of the thief who stole some bread, regardless of that act being to save their child from dying of hunger. We don't do that, because we mold morality out of our empathic understanding of other's acts.

Who says it needs to be quantifiable? Humans do torture one another as well as other animals and not necessarily for their own pleasure: sometimes it's just business. — Vera Mont

I talked about how to evaluate the complexity of human thoughts and acts, which aren't able to easily be evaluated through mere data collection about the physical chemistry of the being.

I do not believe that every executioner feels the fear of his charges, that every pain researcher shares the distress of his lab specimens, that the members of a lynch-mob identify with their victims. Conversely, I don't believe that it is necessary for a surgeon to experience the suffering of his patients or a psychotherapist to identify with the glee of a serial killer. — Vera Mont

Empathy isn't a one-note thing. It's not either on or off. As I mentioned, people who are unable to handle empathy can end up in a cognitive dissonance. Some train themselves to utilize empathy for research, others to evaluate complex societal issues.

An executioner doesn't have to understand the person they execute. A lab researcher doesn't have to understand their subject if that's not vital to the study, a lynch-mob wouldn't exist without their failure to empathize. A surgeon might not need empathy when doing surgery, but sure does so when evaluating their well-being afterwards and before. And a psychotherapist absolutely require empathy to be able to understand their subjects, how would they otherwise discern the emotional dimension of their subject and form a proper explanation for their behavior and actions?

What you're describing isn't what empathy is about. Empathy is an ability to help understand another person through a deep emotional understanding of their feelings. It has nothing to do with sympathizing with other people's morality, their actions or anything like that. And that's my point; people constantly mix things up believing that if someone through empathy, show understanding of an immoral person, then they also agree with them.

It's this that prevents society to fully function and fully deal with morality's complexity, because people judge each others ability to evaluate morality based on a misconceived idea about how we form understanding about individual's actions. And this concept of some overarching morality that is guided by society, leaders, god or whatever, is what existentialists throughout the 1900s tackled because how society, especially Nazi Germany in the 30s and 40s proved that such faith in institutional morality is plain bullshit and corruptible to the point an entire society becomes immoral.

This is why empathy needs to stop be seen as sympathizing. Our mirror-neurons, which are the most important part of empathy, does not have any part in how we judge other people. This function works regardless of morality, but being aware of our empathy helps tremendously to form judgements and morality that is just and fair; and much better than faith in institution's corruptible definitions of morality.

By having studied similar cases and followed similar behaviours back through their history. Like understanding the malfunction of a car engine without feeling like a car engine. — Vera Mont

That comparison is not valid as not having an insight into the experience of emotion means you cannot evaluate the emotions that led to a certain behavior.

It's Mary in the black and white room, or the chinese room; you cannot fully rationalize human morality without understanding the experience. And how do you know that all the definitions in academic psychology doesn't derive from also having an empathic component?

You're basically asking humans that do scientific research on humans to evaluate emotional driving forces behind behavior, without an understanding of what those emotions really are.

It is impossible to study human behavior, without our mirror-neurons firing off empathic reactions. We can study an animal and conclude their pain-centra to fire when we do something to it, but to study complex moral actions by examining the reasoning and emotional complexity that caused it is not quantifiable in the same way.

The normal kind, yes. — Vera Mont

That's just arbitrary. What is "normal"? In relation to what? You're not talking about empathic reactions and mirror-neurons, you're talking about values in morality. You are moralizing the action in order to argue for there not to be an empathic reaction.

This is the kind of fear I'm talking about. A fear people feel of in some way get "infected" by what they argue is immoral if they were to empathize with someone acting immorally and why people mix up sympathy with empathy.

It's so mixed up that when trying to research the clear definitions of the two even the sources of information are unclear and rather treat them as blurring the definitions between them. And I think that's a mistake. Primarily by society being influenced by people fearing to investigate immoral behavior. It's why the FBI agents who inspired the series "Mindhunter" got so much criticism and lack of understanding when they formed the research material for how to profile serial killers. They did their research in large part through empathic understanding of these serial killers they researched. The research they had before that simply concluded "crazy", which had zero substance to qualify as enough explanation to act as profiling material.

some degree of compassion is possible — Vera Mont

Compassion is not needed for empathy.

Morality is irrelevant; emotions are not ruled by moral precepts. — Vera Mont

Exactly. Empathy is not about morality, it's about mirror-neurons, about the ability to understand feelings in others. To understand feelings, to understand an emotion of sexual desire in another person, is not the same as morally agreeing with why they feel that sexual desire.

I disagree. People study and understand all kinds of things from virology to cosmology without any sort of identification with the objects they are observing. — Vera Mont

How do you discern an immoral act without examining the emotions that informed that act? And how do you examine emotions without understanding what those emotions are? Researching cosmology is not the same as researching our psychology.

And even if you attempt to, through neuroscientific studies, most can just conclude that a sexual predator has the same neurological pattern as someone in a normal sexual encounter. Are we to conclude then that the moral act of the sexual predator is as moral as a normal sexual act because the neurological data is showing similar results? Or is our research into the morality of this person's act in need of a more subjective realm utilizing the experience of what it means to be human, i.e using the mirror-neurons to fully grasp the causal effect of the predators act?

While empathy isn't about morality, it's both needed to fully examine moral acts, and impossible to rid yourself of when examining any humans. You cannot exclude your mirror-neurons from your experience, and if you examine morality and other humans, you will always be a slave to those mirror-neurons.

And I think that's key to understand why people become so emotionally panicked when being asked to examine some immoral person. Because their mirror-neurons functions automatically and when they become conscious of their empathic reactions towards a criminal they morally despise, it creates a heavy cognitive dissonance that they, without training, doesn't know how to handle.

Researchers, like those FBI agents who researched serial killers in the 70s, essentially train themselves to use their empathy to examine immoral people. They train away the dissonance, understand how to handle their emotions during research to understand what they are researching.

This is far to vast a blanket! There are crimes of so many different kinds, committed by so many different people for so many different reasons, nobody on earth can empathize with all of the perpetrators. — Vera Mont

Yes they can. The emotions behind crimes are based on the same emotions anyone feels. You're still talking about sympathizing. You are thinking about evaluating each crime under their moral dimension, evaluating if they are moral or not. As I've said, evaluating the morality of these crimes is not empathy; empathy is used to evaluate the moral dimension.

You can have two crimes of people killing someone and robbing them, but one has been working in slave-like conditions under the person they rob, fearing that this person will strike back at them so they kill him and take his money to be free and be able to afford living - while the other is excited around killing and did so regardless of getting the money without killing. How do you evaluate the differences in morality between these two if you aren't able to empathically understand the differences between the two people's emotions that informed their actions? The fear and desperation in the first, and the joy and excitement in violence of the second?

This is what I'm talking about. Empathy and sympathy should be regarded as two different things. Empathy is fundamentally our ability to feel the emotions of another, it's the mirror-neurons firing; it has nothing to do with the morality of that person, or our own feelings judging that person. I can absolutely despise a criminal, hate him and hope he rots, while still empathically understand the emotions he felt that drove him to his immoral act. Holding those two paths in my mind at the same time helps inform my moral judgement of the man, and it's the difference between me being part of a raging mob and being a supporter of a functioning justice system.

I'm not sure about that distinction. One can understand things from a purely academic or clinical position, that requires no empathy. Once you recognize yourself in the other, you share their emotional state, 'feel' their pain, fear, hunger, anger; they are reacting as you would react in a similar situation. — Vera Mont

That doesn't really change my take on it. The ability to feel as another does not mean to agree with their actions out of those emotions. That's the difference. And we can understand academically and clinically, but I'd argue we do wo better with a high empathic ability. How do you academically evaluate a murderers psychological state of mind without the empathic ability to recognize that psychological state of mind?

I doubt you can empathize with all murderers. The one who does it for sexual pleasure? — Vera Mont

Can you not emphasize with sexual attraction, pleasure etc.? The emotions involved has nothing to do with the context. You either sympathize with the actions and decisions out of those emotions or you don't. Empathically understand a sexual predator is absolutely possible, but sympathizing with them is immoral.

Without the ability to empathically understand, we are unable to discern and investigate motive of an immoral act. And I'd say this is a key area to which society often fails when trying to fight crime, the inability, or the rejection of empathic thinking around a crime leads to societal actions that goes against what researchers tell society is the effective path towards reducing said crimes. Most of how society operates on, is on reactions of sympathy values; "do I sympathize with these actions or not", which in turn leads to blanket solutions like stronger punishments rather than looking at the mechanics that formed an individual into a composition of emotions leading to the crimes in the first place.

It's this mix up between sympathy and empathy which makes people blame those who empathically understands some monster in society. Like when Lars von Trier said that he "understands Hitler" at the Cannes film festival and then became a person non grata because of it. That's a display of people not understanding the difference between empathically understanding Hitler and sympathetically agreeing with him.

knew a woman who claimed to be an empath, highly sensitive to the emotions of others. She was actually borderline, but that's a whole other story. To the extent there are those whose empathy levels are off the charts, I agree that it can be limiting. There are instances where hard decisions have to be made. People have to get fired, be imprisoned, and sometimes wars must be waged. It's not that these tasks must be reserved for the psychopaths and the cold hearted, but they should be reserved to those who have taken the responsibility to protect an even higher good.

Pacifism doesn't work in a world where there are hawks. To the extent the OP suggests everyone will be a dove, I don't know the world would work with all doves. It seems like evolution didn't send us in that direction at least. So maybe that's the question: Should there be no hawks? What would they eat? — Hanover

Which is why I constantly, in my intellectual pondering, ends up in a place where "harmony" and "balance" has more importance than anything else. To find a balance that still incorporates complexity. We can't exist with too much empathy and too low empathy, both leads to inabilities to function in both emotion and reasoning.

Without some diversity of emotion we also lose much of what constitutes an emotionally rich experience of life. We cannot have joy without sorrow. We need both to feel emotionally rich. Just look at those so heavily medicated that they don't have a large spectrum of emotion, is that experience a truly rich life?

Balance and harmony is to find the middle path between the extremes. To dip toes on each side, sample the reasoning of both and have both conflicting sides exist simultaneously in order to form a complex rich experience of life. If either side becomes to strong, you will become a slave to that bias.

First off, how much of this is argued by the AI? It reads like the AI wrote it all. What is your own argument in this? Because it's not allowed to just use AI on this forum, you have to formulate your own argument. AI is allowed to proofread or to test your hypothesis, but you need to write your own argument.

Second, empathy is only part of how to solve many of society's issues. While higher empathy may improve certain aspects, it's also part of forming bias. Look at how empathy is "hacked" by marketing, pushing narratives which simplifies a conflict in the world down to a tool of manipulation. It can be used and abused like any other psychological function.

Empathy can be sharpened to be a weapon and enhancing it could make that weapon more efficient.

What's needed is a more broad empathic framework; a set of balanced emotion and introspection of those emotions. While high empathy is good, you also need to be able to think about your own empathy. This awareness of your own emotional life and how it affects your thinking is more important than just increasing empathy.

And there's also the case for certain people benefiting society by not having too much empathy. Sometimes we need someone who see past the biases that empathy forms and rationalize clearly about an issue that may need more tough decisions. Empathy can paralyze some people when they need to make hard decisions.

I'd say that the more proper way to handle this is to classify "low empathy" as a psychological disorder. That those with extremely low empathy may be needed to medicate their empathy up to a certain societal norm-value. That way we would still enable the range of necessary variety in thinking required for actual survival, but reduce the problems of low empathy in many individuals in the same way we medicate and treat other psychological disorders which are dangers to others in society.

Empathy is, essentially, sharing: the ability to recognize oneself in another and thus to understand and sympathize with their feelings, their attitudes, their condition. — Vera Mont

I'd say end it at "understand". While people debate the difference between sympathizing and empathy, the ideal understanding is that empathy does not require sympathy.

That sympathy is emotionally and intellectually agreeing with something, while empathy is emotional understanding of someone or some people.

Basically, I can empathize with the emotions that drove a murderer to commit murder, but I don't sympathize with any of it. I sympathize and emphasize with someone standing up for themselves against an abuser.

Sympathy is a choice. Empathy is a trait. Sympathy evolves out of moral understanding, knowledge and wisdom. Empathy evolves out of social understanding and mirror neurons.

If evolution has implanted within us all these cues to identify the foreigner, the question is why and the further question is what happens if they are suddenly removed with this empathy chip. Has our ability to identify those different from us become a maladaptation from a more dangerous past or does it still offer us some degree of safety from far away travelers? — Hanover

Yes, viewing empathy as something singular, different and separate from all else that makes up our psychology is a mistake. I mean, we already have lots of drugs which enhance our sense of happiness, but the downsides of that shows up quite dramatically when in between those drugs and the brain composition of people regularly taking them.

That it's not so easy just to adjust something. And especially, as you touch upon, if we all increase our empathy, our brain will change its composition to adapt to these new conditions and we will face a new set of problems.

For instance, as I mentioned above, we could decide that extremely low empathy is harmful to the individual and society and have some treatment for that. But there's also the other side of the spectrum, those with extreme empathy and who become unable to act and decide anything because they become paralyzed by the consequences to others.

This opposite condition does not have a classification yet, mainly due to it being mostly just affecting the individual, compared to psychopathy which is mostly harmful against others. But if you've ever met someone who's extremely high sensitive, the experience is of a person who's completely neurotic around any decisions involving others, showing signs of borderline disorder between depression and euphoria.

In the end, as with any problems revolving around psychological issues in society, it's about cutting off the extreme ends at which it becomes damaging to the individual and people around that individual.

Never in history has a Great Power destroyed it's own structure of power as Trump has done now. You lose credibility only once. — ssu

Yet, if the US rid themselves of this cancer and forms a new paradigm of politics with an exclusion of charlatans and the corrupt, they may return their credibility. Most people know that what drives and leads the US today is a sickness, not a vision.

The sickness need to die and the world waits for the US immune system to deal with it.

In a timely manner to what I wrote, this thing popped up. While as a non-believer I don't ascribe to the religious and spiritual undertones, it speaks towards the other things I've touched upon; the need for a sense of harmony with everything that is objectively outside of us, and that the solution is for our subject to find this harmony, not to suppress ourselves into merely becoming an objective object that fades into the background.

worry about what you can change and learn not to worry about what you cannot change. It is a philosophy of the inevitable, it posits no afterlife or immortality for us (just as the Epicureans do not) and rather counsels personal acceptance of mortality and all its attendant rigors as the way to peace of mind. — Janus

I see no difference between that and many self help strategies. Which is what I think is a problem with stoicism. It's easily adopted as methods for coping with a meaningless existence, but the detachement behaves like denial. I'd rather live in authentic emotion, in honest harmony with nature and people around me; constantly learning knowledge to distinguish my irrational emotions from my rational ones.

What point is there to detachment if there's no emotion to experience the resulting tranquility? There is no peak without a valley.

I see more stoics eventually falling into existential crisis than those who gain knowledgeable reflection to guide emotion.

A stoic approach is good for helping others as it is a good behavior for giving knowledge, but for the self it is suppressing an honesty towards existence. Emotion is part of our very being, but its the inability to understand and channel emotion properly that is the problem, not that we feel.

The idea of not worrying about what you cannot change also ends up being ignorant for fixing issues of the world. It's easy to end up in a state of not caring. Emotions about what feels like cannot be changed is often a drive into innovation that do change.

The stoic approach becomes a passive setback. In terms of the world today, many adopted stoicism in face of climate change as a way to basically live by that quote; most of climate change feels like you cannot change, so don't worry about it, it is inevitable.

In my opinion, there are better ways to find harmony and balance with existence that doesn't rely on such forms of detachement, and which is better for the self and humanity at large.

For instance? The only example that stands out to me is Albert Camus. — Wayfarer

Buddhist traditions, Shinto tradition, American Native traditions. After some searching there's also stuff like Neo-Druidism, Animism.

For philosophy, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, in some forms Rousseau as well.

The primary thing is something that I touched upon in another thread:

There's no culture around non-religious existential meditation and people have no standard framework to even begin such things. That's why people end up in either surrendering to the easy choice of religious belief, or they wallow in materialism and simple pleasures, postponing their existential introspection. But in my opinion, it's just a matter of society slowly maturing into a new paradigm of dealing with existentialism. This type of non-religious meditation on existence is for the most part extremely new in historical terms — Christoffer

Primarily that we struggle with these things because there's no really good attempts to form a cultural movement for such thinking and structuring of society. We have basically let the free market replace it all with materialism, rather than engaging with existentialism honestly and with a purpose. If the existentialists brought up the questions and examined the nihilism post-religion, there's now time for a practical solution that formulate a practice for non-religious people. It's like people are unable to think about how contemplation, meditation, guidance and similar practices essentially have no belief system at their core, but we've surrendered all such questions to religious practice, while attempting to medicate it away for any non-religious who suffers. It's either follow religion or you're on your own, which is a root cause for much existential suffering today.

But surely the aim is always to integrate the data with the hypothesis, or alternatively develop new hypotheses to account for any anomalous data. What would something 'without any interpretational properties' be, in that context? And what would it mean? The difference between 'data' and 'information' is precisely that the latter means something. So if you mean by that data which does not have interpretational properties, then how could that mean anything? Wouldn't it just be the white noise, meaningless data, that is to be sifted out? — Wayfarer

In mathematics, a solution to a long held mathematical problem is at its core not really up for interpretation or a subjective experience. The logic derives from how it intertwines with the problem and its implications for other mathematical equations. The subjective meaning of it becomes somewhat illusive, how do you subjectively experience a math problem or solution? Some mathematicians so versed in thinking about these things experience some solutions and define them as "beautiful", even though there's no actual interpretational difference between a non-mathematician and them viewing the thing. That meaning for them of being "beautiful" is also not relevant in order to explain or define the equation, so while there's a subjective experience, it's not required to engage with the information/data of the specific equation.

And many things in science has their hypothesis derive from something other than subjective interpretation. One conclusion from a set of experiments becomes a new hypothesis out of the logic it implies rather than a subjective mind interpreting it. Or we have AIs structuring and looking for patterns looking for a context we aren't yet aware of.

In essence, much of science aims to reduce as much subjective interpretations as possible. While much is of course needed in order to do actual research, I do think that what most people read and hear about when engaging with scientific literature, is a scientific communicator who's job it is to transfer the complexity of a field and making it understandable for common people or people in power. Their job is basically to subjectively interpret science into understandable concepts, into a form of storytelling.

But returning to the the mathematician finding an equation "beautiful", I think that kind of subjective reaction is close to what I'm talking about. That a scientific objective fact, a pure logic without any actual emotional values built into it, still manage to give a sense of "beauty", due to its elegance in the mind of the mathematician. It's a meaning derived from and out of a cold fact, that is for that mathematician just as emotionally valid as a meaning attached through religion. It's hinting at how there's a possibility of finding a meaning in the meaningless, without fully having to surrender to the absurd.

You're not grasping the broader epistemological point at the heart of the issue. Modern scientific method begins in exclusion, idealisation and abstraction. It is an intellectual and practical methodology for framing what kinds of questions are meaningful to explore and what to exclude, and what kinds of factors ought to be taken into account in framing and exploring them. As I explain in Section One, The Cartesian Division, central to that method is the division of res cogitans, mind, and extensa, matter, on the one side, and primary attributes of bodies on one side, opposed to the secondary attributes, on the other. That is a construct. It is not and could never be 'naturally occuring' or 'part of nature'. It is thoroughly grounded in the acknowledged and concscious separateness from nature on the part of the scientist.

So what you're saying is tantamount to asking 'hey, what if the James Webb discovered Heaven out there amongst the stars? Wouldn't that change your attitude to science?' Your question is based on misconstruing the premise of the argument. You're looking through scientific method, not at it (which also applies to — Wayfarer

You excluded the second part of it:

And now, think of what science actually did and ask yourself if there's any difference? Did it not open up a new realm of meaning? That it showed us how false narratives in religion were constructed for other reasons and that the meaning we felt in society was built on lies and fiction, of ideas of power and control? In essence, the meaning we had was false, it was a lie. And scientific objective answers have opened a door for us to actually find true meaning, not by giving an answer to what it is, but by dismantling our ability to lie to ourselves, to form false narratives that give ourselves a delusional false meaning.

In essence, does scientific objectivity actually exclude us from the qualitative dimension of existence? Or is it freeing us up to truly find it? — Christoffer

My point was that science can't provide meaning, because it was never meant to do or have that purpose. It primarily began within the hall of religion, argued out of faith, but it, by the nature of the method, began dismantling religious belief and the meaning people previously found there.

And so it removed our blindfold and put the demand on us to find meaning. That's where our subjective experience comes in. If science had proven the premises stated by religion, it would have confirmed that there was a meaning beyond this realm, but it didn't and instead society formed a culture around science in opposition to religion. Science in opposition to meaning. It became a scapegoat and responsible for robbing society of meaning, even though it was never there to provide it or had any intention to do so.

Fundamentally, if the question is how scientific objectivity never accounts for the qualitative experience of the subjective and risk throwing people into nihilism, I'd argue that it frames scientific objectivity in a relation to that experience that it did not have to begin with. The reason for nihilism and the loss of meaning comes out of the same type of inability to think about something like a complex immoral act, not just scientific objectivity.

A complex immoral act exist within the subjective interpretation of our existence already, and is presenting a dilemma to our morality. It produces similar nihilistic experiences of a lacking meaning, even without relating to scientific objectivity. It's about uncertainty, not our relation to objective truth.

It's not the relation between scientific objectivity and how it describes the world, and our subjective experience that produces this lack of meaning, it's the basic relation between a lack of answers and our need for answers. It's just that the consequences of scientific objectivity has been the largest historical introduction of lacking answers on the existential level.

This argument is two-part on your end, because on one side you're dealing with the question of science's inability to find meaning for us and the other is how to essentially cope with that.

But science never had the purpose of finding meaning for us and deconstruction of our subjective need for meaning has more to do with our lack of ability to formulate a meaning within the realm of these objective facts. That doesn't mean it's about scientific objectivity itself, it's only about our relation to uncertainty in the wake of a previous certainty rendered false.

The issue is that I'm not sure all parts of your argument follow each other. First, you have an argument for how the subjective experience is distinctly different from scientific objectivity, which I don't think anyone would disagree on. That our experience of the stone is not the stone itself.

But how does that relate to our struggle with a lack of meaning when that lack of meaning isn't due to scientific objectivity, but rather the consequence of society learning religion was false?

Our sense of lack of meaning is related to a similar emotional reactions of being betrayed. Like a friend we trusted turning out having used our trust for their own gain. And we feel anger against the one who revealed this fact to us. And now we're trying to find our place in the new order of things.

And that's where I argue for dismantling religion away from beliefs, gods, spiritualism and discern practices that does not require belief to be good and mentally healthy for us; focusing on accepting existence for what it is and find a sense of meaning in that meaninglessness. Not to accept the absurd, but to be able to honestly look into the universe and nature and accept it for what it is, to find it meaningful as it is, in that objective nature. Not to demand more meaning than it is capable of. A harmony with nature and the universe without suppressing emotions or trying to manipulate our own perspective in order to cope.

Not a credible criticism, based on any dispassionate reading of the texts. — Wayfarer

It's generally speaking, condensed down. The suppression of emotions becomes an inauthentic living, opposite to Heidegger. It's generally an alienating view in which the self detach itself, suppress itself thinking that gives harmony. But everyone feels a form of harmony through ignoring certain peaks of emotions and distancing. But it's a false sensation as the authentic experience of our emotions and engagement with the world, nature and the universe is suppressed.

And the reason it has a surging today is because it aligns with societal values of detachement. It's being used by influencers and crypto bros and people like that to justify ignoring any consequences of their behavior. And its focus on individualism aligns with the ideals of the self-made man, forming his own destiny, gaining his own wealth. The surge is because of the fundamental surge in a focus on the ego. Laissez-faire stoic ideology basically. I don't see people actually engaging with stoicism for real, it's part of their 12 steps to success strategies.

So why is stoicism your answer to solving the lack of meaning? Or giving us the ability to see beyond the subjective? Is stoicism needed in order to see past emotion or is a true, deep and authentic understanding of ones emotion equally or even more suited to experience beyond the subjective?

The mathematician knows his feeling of the equation being beautiful isn't defining the reality of it. He knows where the line is drawn between his experience and the objective. Is your argument focused on them who are unable to discern where this line is drawn? I'd say that's merely a confusion in the wake of religion dying, not an authentic existence in harmony with objective reality.

In the end, it seems to be about coping rather than harmony.

..it became evident that the self is a mental construct — Wayfarer

Yes, the self is a construct. But I would go further and argue that our mental construct is just a byproduct and emergent factor of a biological entity. We aren't even in control of this construct, we are just given an emotional experience that we are, an illusion that isn't even experienced by an acting will, the illusion and the one experiencing it is one and the same. But that's a whole other topic.

However, is all religious education necessarily indoctrination? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'd say that if it's studies about religion and theology in a intellectual, anthropological, sociological and historical way, it's not. But if it's a direct programming of a belief system, either through courses and classes or even just demanded behaviors surrounding it, like prayers before class or the school day, that is indeed a form of indoctrination.

School should be about knowledge and teaching children and young people about the nature of different perspectives on topics. If one topic is taught without the insight of an opposing view, then it's a direct programming of a certain narrative rather than knowledge.

This is why it's always going to be as struggle for updating history books with footnotes and additions as while history is written by the winners, when the winners are dead other stories emerge to nuance the back view. And children need to learn the closest we can get to what is real, not what is demanded from people in power.

At any rate, it seems obvious to me that secular ideologies are every bit as capable of advocating for a sort of "indoctrination," and also every bit as capable of precipitating existential crises.

For instance, "everything is little balls of stuff bouncing around" and "any notion of goodness or value is necessarily illusory," thus "we should embrace a sort of rational hedonism," seems to set plenty of people up for nihilism and existential crises. Yet such a view is sometimes defended with religious zeal, in part because it is an essential component of some religion-like philosophies (e.g. one cannot be strong and "overcome" the meaninglessness of reality and rejoice in one's own strength and "freedom" if one is not assured that the world is properly absurd). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Such crisis is not for the school to provide. It takes a village to raise a child and the village is not school, but society at large. The solution to nihilism has to do with the necessary work to formulate a living condition free from religion, not to install religion because there's no other option. A belief should be a choice and plenty of non-religious people already have beliefs without putting any religion into practice.

What society needs is better philosophical guidance. Religion is not needed in order to prepare people for thinking about existential questions, but we just have a society that's never formulated any common practice of doing so. There's no culture around non-religious existential meditation and people have no standard framework to even begin such things. That's why people end up in either surrendering to the easy choice of religious belief, or they wallow in materialism and simple pleasures, postponing their existential introspection. But in my opinion, it's just a matter of society slowly maturing into a new paradigm of dealing with existentialism. This type of non-religious meditation on existence is for the most part extremely new in historical terms, and religious groups don't like losing members, but if religions demand respect, then so should they respect those who don't believe and need to understand that the struggle to find a sense of meaning isn't solved by forcing them into their religion.