He devoid of the Spirit of Conquest, who is honest with himself...who has gone beyond behaviorism, lost desire to achieve in a system that "giveth and taketh away." He who understands the bucket list will be overflowing when he dies, and makes peace with this while still young. He who doesn't understand what people mean when they talk of making an impact in the world. He who doesn't live for rewards (it's either all ends or all means, never a means to an end: he never treats others instrumentally and has a nuanced understanding of what this means). He who lets go with love. Dark triad doesn't apply to him. He's probably an outsider, unsuccessful by external validation.

Good deeds are poisonous if inner strife is too prevalent; to the extent inner harmony is absent, there is usually a desire to conquer, or make a dent in the outer world. So the good man has no desire to achieve or conquer, knows how much of anything is enough. Homeostasis is a paradigm for his psyche, not just the body. Achievement is a runaway, positive feedback system, which never knows when to stop, or what the endgame is. Then negative feedbacks operate in the nucleus of his mind, he never goes too far in one direction, is never one-sided. He holds some things sacred, sacrosanct, occult. He who can relax and do nothing, with no need for external stimulation. And much more.

Perhaps it's the human intelligence in me that doesn't grok the human artificial intelligence (H.A.I: there's no such thing as an intelligent, understanding machine, only unintelligent, non understanding humans) in cyborg wannabes. Neuralink would lead to a quick fading of natural freedom and intelligence and the agency to regenerate, and remake your mind.

Suffice it to say, I'm the type who just wants to be left alone. This would unstring me far more acutely than smartphone cyborgs do already.

Technological determinism reaches its apex with this. Determinism. Repeat: determinism! Some small freedom in the mass surveilled state capitalism tickles my fancy, you might say. Its funny the eliminative materialists treat thought like demon possession, yet they would be the same types, due to inability to collate terminal contexts of our existence, which might use Neuralink. What would it feel like using this crap other than possession?

Will we become reliant on technologies that we must master, to stay relevant in this universe - or is there another option? — Jhn4

Relevant in the universe, eh? There is no small conflation of the human system with the universe in saying this. Intellectual dishonesty. Bad. With absolute power comes absolute responsibility. Is the idea here that through Neuralink, we may merge with the absolute? How stupid, elbow deep in illusory concepts.

What is the end game with this sore of clap? I just don't get the kind of people who would want Neuralink. Narcissism on another level. There must be a hint in this unreflecting and ubiquitous, cankerous disease festering already in whatever is causing the narcissism epidemic. Mcluhan's understanding of narcissism is what has seemed most cogent: to the extent technological determinism is an extension of the senses and faculties of men, they see their own reflection in technics (selfie culture being the most patent symptom of this severe, widespread illness), but technology is not you okay. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. What the good intentions of something like Neuralink might be, haven't the slightest intimation.

just because it is a given (in our current society..so please no hypotheticals of post-work societies and the super rich), why should it be considered an acceptable or even "good" condition? — schopenhauer1

You got me. A genuine mystery...interesting to go into. Masochism gone rampant. I never blame the organization as much as the sleepwalking mob mentality of all those who have deindividuated, become incapable of self-information, organization and regulation having had a shift of agency into other organizational authority at some age usually by 25. .

The notion of a legal entity, wherein an organization is treated like an individual is a symptom of some seriously flawed, attempt at creating an impossible ontology. It resembles magic in what it presents for you to try to understand. Anyway, this morning I learned of a better denomination for this "entity" behind the primal horde: egregore; this is a term from magic and alchemy which describes collective thoughtforms and collective group mind; nowadays, when the group mind can't get much more literal (secular humanism in the main, meaning scientism and tech supersede God), the resonance of magical thinking still exists at the nucleus of legal fictions, legal entities like corporate personhood are homologous to egregore.

People sacrifice their lives to things that don't exist, that are impossible (often only because of conventional reality, legalism, hypnotic induction...or egregore). The selective attention of a vital human being is replaced by sterile and necrophilic undivided attention you were indoctrinated with in kindergarten.

Often in my antinatalist posts, I can see assumptions that because conditions of life "are" a certain way, that this is thus acceptable and good. Why should these inescapable conditions be considered a default or unquestioned position as acceptable or good? Perhaps these conditions of life aren't acceptable or good. Perhaps, for example, the tension between the individual and the demands of labor, though being a given, is not an acceptable condition and should not be forced upon another person. — schopenhauer1

It isn't a condition of life. It's social conditioning vs life conditioning (the ineluctables of life come from the demands of biology, chemistry and physics; collective ideologies aren't chemistry and physics, but idealism; mentalism becomes slavish when after deindividuation, peoples' undivided attention is on the same unvetted tripe). Conformity is the easy path, with goals, rewards, and such. Life has no ready-made answers for those who are living, not conforming. Your last sentence here is undeniable. Does this mean people successful according to socioeconomic norms are immoral...likely, yes. As you say, it runs deep into a zero-sums game, an unfortunate part of the truth of the way things are; the mind blower is that our species enhances, and doesn't diminish, so much that is hard to accept, or bad, in nature; another mind-bender: many admit there is a just world fallacy, yet go on contributing to such thought misbegotten values. And values formed in most confused adolescence are likely seen more often in the most successful people in the market society. Pride, lust, avarice, greed, competition, short temper, psychopathy, manipulation, narcissism ...dark triad.

A long, healthy life is considered desirable, good. But what if it were possible to prove someone protected from the needless restlessness/stress and complexity of socioeconomic demands lived the longer and healthier than those who take such demands head on? Wouldn't this be support for an argument a life based on impossibility (say that we've all gotten used to having an exchange value or that a qualitative life can be translated to numbers...egregore) is associated with poor physical and/or mental health? Diseases of affluence aren't the contagious kind, they arise from choice to follow an collective belief or lifestyle/egregore that sends them spells of heart disease and cancer. Yet the same people are scared to death of communicable diseases. What is it that makes this egregore so ingrained people accept diseases collateral to the requisite for valuing profit motive and upward mobility?

To what extent does truth have power? — frank

The truth has power to the extent it is unknowable. Unknown, unforeseeable apparitions of truth always have and always will shuffle the deck of the planetary biosphere along with everything on it. Homo narcissus has stayed with its science and tech. determinism for long enough now, men have convinced themselves they are the guardians of truth. Funny. Men are subject to truth in exactly the same way as other animals on earth.

Truth is an ontological force compassing not only the physical, but also mental. Epistemology can't take us to the truth. It's important then to understand truth goes where science or any human organization can't go. Science, as it's become the most dogmatic and exoteric (heavily socially determined as in peer-review and crowdsourcing), thoughtless organization ever known to man (seeming to exist to destroy the truth of mind) is ignorant of incomplete information which is a part of every experiment or decision. Truth=incomplete information. There are unknown ways (truth there may be an unlimited ways) this planet could meet its dissolution unpredictable to scientists. Once there's no planet left, there can be no more supercilious beings who have believe they have truth confined to their bailiwick of power or influence.

It makes no sense to say truths (plural), maybe facts can be plural...facts are always partial and obfuscate truth; facts are propaganda. The very nature of experience bars truth. Once you have had an experience, you live through conditioned responses...like glasses which polarize light, so is truth polarized by experience.

I'm there. Have yet to build a waterwheel behind the pond dam...:wink: And doing my best to dispel illusions of human domestication of itself as being any part of evolution. What evolves will be what separates humans from transhumans, or similarly, separates humans from humanists.

What is it which makes someone think he could adhere exclusively to demands of modernity, ignorant of the best of all erst eras, and retain any possibility of being a perennial man? What is it which makes one think the modern world is the best of all times in all ways (that it is progressing?). Every era has a socioeconomic variable to it more advanced than the era before and what comes after. Feudalism was far less alienating than capitalism, work was never in question, there was no "job hunting." One of the very few symptoms of sanity I've come across anent modern commercialized life is open hiring. Like a guaranteed minimum income, open hiring is another element of capital which is extremely slow catching up to the fact that if money or a job isn't guaranteed you (without any hoops/games)...guess what ...it's systematized murder.

Just don't pretend like your hobby is the fountain of happiness. — Hanover

I have more to add, maybe later. For now, there's a stinking little minatory piece of hindrance to well being in thinking of a hobby as a mere hobby. Where else can one go to intentionally make mistakes from which to learn? And what other kind of learning compares to that which knows there are no mistakes, that in order to learn, freedom to fail is foundational. Fail in commercialized - game of rules - society and you don't die. Failure within the truth of law, and you die. What some deem hobbies, then, are infinitely more valuable to me, inasmuch as these activities are in some ways, the only place to learn without being fired (or flunking out of school). It's far more relevant to life than a fountain of happiness. You have to be able to self-regulate to learn.

If only manna would fall from the sky. — Hanover

It is a self-sufficient adult's responsibility to acquire food and, at least temporary, shelter. Beyond that...grotesque, oblique, ontologies () have reared up in between naked truth and what is essentially thralldom to species-wide dogma of eusociality (if humans have mores in common with instincts of lower life forms...say, insects...it isn't an index of advancing).

Gandhi is an example of a man who understood well-being and self-reliance swam in the same fish bowl. Who here can make their own clothes? Better, who here doesn't feel like an undeveloped neonate they can't make their own clothes? No one!?! ? Simply astonishing! There are a lot of reasons for this (the absence of feelings of primal shortcomings) beginning with the pseudo relationships and environments experienced since infancy. Primary narcissism (and its later insalubrious growth into superego dependence) is associated with processes of projection and introjection inchoate in infancy. Would not some dependencies learned in infancy as part of the nature of being a helpless "larva," carried forward into the prime of life, not be an patent sign of nondevelopment, of something seriously wrong?

The man-child, used to market values having usurped all other honest ontologies, loves adages like, "no such thing as a free lunch." What mendacious whoppers those deeply dependent the current system repeat in their narratives! Who has adapted to this system that really doesn't look at another person in light of the value they may bring to capital, and perhaps not in the value he has as an honest, self-regulative and self-reliant human? To the extent one isn't self-reliant, materially, he also isn't self-regulative.

Espousing we should remain at a tribal state of advancement isn't the point, or rather, there is no such espousal here. My world would have no compulsory education, though what education was offered would have some time spent learning survivalism (starting at age 8 or so). Foraging (what nature offers you free to eat, usually with phytochemicals that go all the way back to the supernova, unkissed by the story of commercial enterprise, and quid pro quo illness), dressing game, bow-drill fire-making, basket weaving, finding clay deposits, making pots with primitive firing, and so on. And like kids wouldn't absolutely love learning these skills. A coincidence? I don't think so. My utopia is to be naturally free enough to actually be allowed to take care of myself, with nothing in between me and natural law (the only honest one), but human rule shows no clear sign of ceasing pretending to have superseded tempero-spatial order. Truly, I do not want 99.99% of the objects which come from the market fetishism of capitalism (and will be waste to the maw of some landfill). The few objects I do want from it, may join me to hypocrisy, though only if I can't care for myself.

The image is not to have to suspend all association with the false ontology of market society, only to have necessary skills to be able to honestly say you can be mentally and physically autonomous if need be. The ontologies collateral to being able to do this are direct and true and a part of a salubrious lifestyle. Ghandi spinning his own material for clothing is a good example. At some point the limits of what you can carry, whether in your arms, on your back, or in your gut, needs to become the paradigm for a return to natural law being as the bourne of honesty...where usually, less is more.

Most agree we are a social species, it's a pity it isn't lucid to the same people who would say this that in some central ways, the extent to which you are social is the extent to which you can't meet the needs of living, you are heteronomous and other-centered. Much psychogenic pathology rears up in other-centeredness, unless of course, the other compasses the totality of what isn't self (not only other selves). The most human people I've met are the types who can meet the needs of living if they have to...they may be the only ones deserving of the human denomination; more, a self-reliant person usually has more advanced social skills...it comes full circle.

Aseity is the attribute of God you seem to believe in. Ultimately, I take a negating approach to what God is(n't). Intellectual honesty says "who knows?" Whatever you can say it is, it surely isn't. If it can be described by us...it is limned too much like us to circumvent anthropocentric delusion. As a specie humans have reified so extensively (resulting in the most high delusion, the anthropic principle) , they think they are the source of the abstract. Humans can't give rise to abstraction or observe it fully, it is the bailiwick of the supreme being, we are a part of it, and issue from it, but it itself is without describable attributes.

In other words, we can't have knowledge of Truth/Absolute/Abstraction. Where this is the case...we can understand it best through a passive, empty and receptive style of consciousness, or mode of being. It's lucid enough the mind inhabits a liminality between the active immanent and passive transcendent. Every active attempt to describe Ouroboros, then, limits it, or at best depicts the immanent part it is possible to have knowledge of.

Fair enough. Dragon=chaos before creation, and presumably involved in any eschaton unravelling. Interpreting symbols generically is a good idea..otherwise symbol drain can completely change the meaning over time (why I stick to original, barest bones meaning). Each to their own when it comes to hermeneutics to be sure; then, depending on how singular one's interpretation, it's a matter of where he falls on the esoteric<<<<<>>>>>exoteric gradation.

JK was usually referring to inner states when he said the observer is the observed. If you are greedy and tell yourself you shouldn't be greedy, that very judgment takes you away from what is. The observer of greed is the greed...if you are greedy you are greed.

"The fundamental cause of disintegration of society is copying, or the worship of authority." - JK

On the tip of the Ouroboros' nose are transhumanists/futurists...on the rump of it is the primevalist. The symbol of Ouroboros is more one to describe eons of time and how time repeats (inasmuch as solar systems rise and fall, and rise again ad infinitum)...so the future is in the past...the past in the future. It being one of my favorite symbols also, helping to understand no matter how deranged transhumanists and the shackles of science and tech. determinism become it will eventually return to a less complex, less sterile, lifeless, and less human-exceptional world.

From the view of collective society, it does. — Bitter Crank

How would such a view be described? How a collective could have a view or be viewed is a mystery to me. The kind of conversation one can have tete a tete compared to the kind he can have with everyone or more than one person at a time may be revealing. Then it may be discovered whether it is possible to have a meaningful conversation with more than one person at a time. How does the individual relate to this supposed collective? Is it by following standards of some sort? When "everyone" follows the same standards, everyone has the same unexamined areas of life, a problem which indexes illusion, and social decay.

Individual bees and birds aren't in the race to survive; it's their species that survive or not. Same with humans--which is not to say that individual humans are at all indifferent to their personal situations. We are quite concerned about it. But individually, we, birds, and bees will all die. Collectively, we endure -- or not. — Bitter Crank

Yet what is the collective without the individual?...an impossibility/nothing. What is the individual without the collective?...possible/something (depending on the degree of mental and physical autonomy reached by the person). Can the human collective know anything? Or can something only be known by each separate individual.

Most of the work the average person does has nothing to do with their survival. With this being the case, it doesn't make sense to talk about survival of the fittest/fit, or whatever. Some hayseed living close to the land, self-reliant, will out survive the infants consummately dependent on each other through the market/boob lactating its milk/money.

There's no significant reason for the false ontology of a money economy, with its singular way of forcing you into a helpless role, to ever be something thought of together with being fit. If anything, this has made the entire species unfit for survival (save the few who have felt too vulnerable in this system and gone on to learn the work of living according to what is). Intellectual honesty screams its way into this conversation. The usual questions of what is real? and what does it mean to adapt? are relevant here.

Interesting how Active Self-Care is part of the same feedback loop of Finding A Social Fit. You would think a smidge of honesty to be a part of what is central to the diagram: in other words, "self-care or self-reliance" is impossible if one is reliant on others in the market society. Unless you are okay with being called a "consumer" and a "human resource/capital," part of the "labor market," and so on, you are lacking self-care...?

It's my personal belief mental health requires veridical self-sufficiency, not pretend. People who strive to be self-reliant are often viewed with suspicion by the centralized powers, intelligence agencies, armed forces/police state (their goal is to steer you into market dependence with all its behaviorist motivation systems... to allow yourself to be farmed.).

Choosing psychosis and nonviolence over neurosis and violence of the market society's exploit or be exploited (kill or be killed in the military model it's based on) is an easy one. Some of the most tranquil and harmless (and more intelligent) people I've known had schizophrenic tendencies (and were of course struggling to fit in), whereas the more impulsive/compulsive, angry, hateful, and violent (and less intelligent) had a lot of material or social capital at stake (to lose).

The most depressing outcome of thinking fitting into a society which requires the being to marginalize his self-respect by selling himself alongside toasters, automobiles, tvs, smartphones, screwdrivers, hammers, and homes...is that this could ever amount to self-care. Marketing oneself requires self-neglect, abortion of the inner world, the opposite of self-care.

Being self-reliant (and self-regulative) goes hand-in-hand with salubrious health. Virtue is its own reward. The reason for strife is just this: the fact we are forced into dependence on others. That Jesus was a carpenter tells you he was self-sufficient, could build the structures he was dependent on, etc. Someone who does the work of living eventually becomes thoroughly vexed by a human system revolving around endless beliefs and no relation to the substrate of life on which the organism depends.

My wife and I believe it is a combination of being several steps removed from the necessities of life from division of labor, and, for many activities, not seeing a lasting finished product. — Noah Te Stroete

Yes, because in an honest human system, the finished product is the payment. You get to keep the result of your labor, after which you are responsible for its lasting. Your labor isn't tied to the clock or a global economy, it's task oriented, you can work like hell one day to take the next day off...so long as you're making progress toward the finish line. There is a finish line/a terminus (a completed "to do" list) in the truth context; there is no terminus in economic fundamentalism, there's a runaway thing called "bills" which are the sticks and carrots in the future which never comes. Living to pay bills assumes you know what the future will bring...do you know what the future will bring?

Behaviorism is the main cause of lack of purpose in life. Allowing oneself to fall to stimulus-response, conditioned responses, or operant conditioning...all which feeds the monkey mind, all of which betrays the reality we are thinking animals. It's not a fancy answer here, a little banal, but essentially being compelled to live for profit is the core behaviorism of which I speak; you could add compulsory education or any compulsion stemming from any fundamentalism.

Money has no qualitative relation whatever to the product of labor. Otherwise intelligent people (who would call it comparing apples and oranges in another context; that is, exchanging labor for something other than what was done) accept this for rather cryptic reasons, or unlike terms. Pavlov's bell has nothing to do with meat. Unless...it is an unthinking animal..which of course, can't see through this artifice. Man's extragenetic information has led to a mismatch between biological and cultural evolution. Now it appears there are those (the majority) who believe man can evolve apart from evolution. Living in conjunction with our master, evolution, instead of rebelling against it, would probably iron out some of these problems of purpose/meaning. Then the human system would dissolve: there is no human system apart from the supreme systemic network, it is a mirage.

It's shocking so few people feel infantile they can't take care of the needs of living. This, being dependent on others for subsistence, does in fact make me feel impotent. And the more
"successful" and "independent" one is reliant on the principle of exchange in economic fundamentalism, in truth, the more dependent he is (this being a central irony of the human system, it makes people feel more adult and mature the more dependent they are on the system). So the Noble Savage thing is true for me; in any supposed higher species, an individual must be dependent on nothing in between him and the work of living; in other terms, self-reliance/mental and physical autonomy, necessitates a first-order, or direct ontological orientation. What would you do if you had to actually take care of yourself and meet the needs of living? I'm not sure if a solitary, self-reliant animal, like a raptor, a falcon say, isn't more advanced than the average human.

Inasmuch as humans don't walk on humans, bask in humans, harvest and eat humans....human progress can't be separated from the setpoints and servomechanisms in our bodies and biogeochemical cycles. The organism-environment demands we include the environment in the definition of progress. Alas, we can't eat dirt or the atmosphere alone and live...so we have to take care of them or work within their delimitation to take care of and sustain ourselves.

On that note, progress= preserving life for as long as possible. Bioengineering mosquitoes out of existence rests on a crazed notion one species can determine the biogeochemical cycles of a planet and not disrupt interdependencies of delicate, complex, nonlinear systems and have them spiral out of control (butterfly effect). And somehow, I don't feel any of us would want to be a part of such a system that would require so rigorous, Procrustean control. An essay to replace the homeostasis of a planet with engineering would involve a kind of determinism worse than anything I can imagine (for the life it was meant to sustain). The humanist version of progress could ultimately lead to a life not worth living....sterile...vapid...no surprise.

Setting up a colony on Mars would be good opportunity for transhumanist elites to test their image of progress. Living in a big dome without anything unpredictable. So much so, even a animatronic man might come to life...

Progress in a game of chess would be making a move toward checkmating your contestant. If the game had no checkmate as the end, it could be played interminably, and it would be impossible to say what is progress. This, then, is the thing lost on me when hearing people talk of progress. Progress toward what? Techno-utopia? Yet there's a point of technological comfort and convenience beyond which it starts to appear as though people don't want to live or do anything to take care of themselves. In this case, techno-utopian progress might be defined as an ever augmenting accelerant finalizing in destruction of life and spirit.

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1. To stop thinking humans are anything like machines...we're more like dirt than machines.

2. Forget everything you know. Learning a skill or rote memory is complemented by learning to forget. Full use of the mind involves forgetting as well as remembering. Without doing this, everything you learn has to fit into a preconceived notion, or conditioned response.

3. No comment, really. This is where mind manifesting (psychedelic) drugs come in handy.

4. You mostly answered your own question here. Effortlessness. Stop making effort today, yet do more, genius will follow. Wu-wei.

5. Myth. Functions repeat throughout the brain, similar to how a hologram works.

6. The mind doesn't process data...that's what computers do. Computers can't learn because they can't grow. See 1. Slow down as much as possible. Do you feel smarter or more stupid when dreaming? As someone who values creativity as the main aspect of genius, dreaming is pure genius. You can't fall asleep by speeding up the mind. Slow it down and effect a decrease of thought...then pay close attention to knowing. Whatever images are observed in this substrate contain genius hard to access otherwise.

7. Why so concerned with "fast" everything. Relax, let things come to you. Let it flower, then come to know the veridical secrets of bees. If you've done enough inner work you come to know all we can really do is create the conditions for growth...the growth itself can't be forced. Plant the seed, amend the soil, shew away pests, water...repeat... watch and wait. Gardening is a source of wonderful metaphors for increasing intelligence. Actually, literally going for mastery of organic gardening helps understand truth. Dirt.

8. Meditate and memorize what little you can, build from there. Try memorizing your favorite poems or maxims. Unlike the more sage components of mind, which emanate after the pattern of what was said in 6 above, memory is like a muscle, you have to actively memorize content to improve it. I have a lazy memory, though I've lived enough to know this can be rectified simply by making it an intention to memorize something...the more you memorize, the easier it gets. Creative thought, however, is more ex nihilo than ex cathedra. Memory isn't related to truth. I'd recommend not worrying about it. If the concern is to be smarter, work on expunging all authority and mimesis within and without you.

9. The senses are one thing, infinite possibilities another. Infinitude is the arche according to
Anaximander. Infinity lacks any principle itself so it can seed elements with principles. I've always thought something like the extent we can imagine nothingness is correlated to intelligence or imagining infinite possibilities. Comparing one thing to another doesn't help us see a thing for what it really is. Only comparison to no thing can do this.

10. Spend more time in nature off the manmade trails. Get lost, even. When you find yourself lost in an sublime sylvan setting, don't panic, use those feelings to explore the mind, think with them. When you can't find your way out of the wilderness, think over the epigram: not all those who wander are lost.

We don't have a measure of consciousness so that we can prove anyone any organism is consciousness. — Andrew4Handel

And it's impossible to prove consciousness/mind even requires energy as we know it. Seeing the mind as though it were an open system the same as the body (open to energy) fails to understand the mind or conscious awareness is in need of organization and information in an entirely different manner than food intake. Extensive knowledge without processing or thought about what is known amounts to a very low level of intelligence.

Important unknowns. All information is incomplete. Knowing this is more important than the "content" of what is unknown. Really, being able to ask a question distorts the concept of the unknown unless the question is "what is unknown?" This would be about the extent of what you could even ask regarding the unknown. If it's unknown...you can't say anything about it. Whatever you can say something about is a derivation of the known, not the unknown.

It hasn't been subsumed by science, though. A syllogism isn't physical evidence, e.g.

And I've had a hard time understanding how scientists revel in evidence, yet think. Thinking has no evidence. There's no evidence for the empirical method, it was born of thought. "Science" (personifying it here), from a certain persepective is stuck at the level of sensorium. The senses have nothing to say, they're dumb. Any time we have a thought, idealism has entered the domain. Scientists are exceedingly ignorant of this point. The entire enterprise of science lies on a foundation for which there is no evidence because it is idealism. A heavy contradiction to put it mildly.

I oriented in science until realizing it can't address truth. It makes sense for the half of reality which is physical...but to only see half of reality is a chimerical chase...especially when the part of reality closest to each of us is without evidence.

(I think this is why philosophy struggles because arguments don't trump evidence or aren't as compelling) — Andrew4Handel

Philosophy doesn't need evidence, it arrives at truth through raw thought power. Science, for some poor reason, has come to supplant philosophy. If you want to be a scientist, think scientistically. If you want to do philosophy, think philosophically. Philosophy was originally written in verse. Today, there are those who would have it it must be constrained by evidence-based objectivity. Philosophy isn't objective at all in the same way as science.

What is the relationship between fight and flight and anger? Are we slaves of our physiology? That would be a world run amok, which it pretty much is. Still, it seems to be a fragmented view thinking we are merely the result of our physiological processes. If anything, the rare apparition of fight and flight isn't associated with anger, but a kind of unconsciousness action. Anger is something else, it isn't anent fight or flight.

The mind-body problem is still wide open. It is a little bizarre not to see the mind as having its own ambit and not merely an epiphenomenon of the body. There's even sacred scientific evidence which has proven protein synthesis in the brain is increased by mental imagery. At least it would be all or nothing thinking to believe fight or flight is 100% the driver of anger. Living like you have a gun to your head is the province of fools. Who wouldn't agree with this?

Isn't testosterone the culprit from a physiological point of view? Responsible for aggression, sex drive, and so on. Those with the strongest libido usually have the worst unresolved anger issues. Even women are influenced by testosterone when they are feeling sexual, so testosterone is associated with anger and aggression in woman as well, I'd assume.

These generalisations don’t help explain your theory, except to say that anger is evidenced in the smallest acts. Which is just a subjective view on your part, and consequently everyone is neurotic. Regarding pretensions: I imagine most people would probably be laughing inside rather than preparing to give someone a good thrashing.

Earlier I had asked you to address this view of yours. I’d still like to know. — Brett

As to your accusations of generalizations: I can't help but notice how many posters here conflate science for philosophy. Philosophy deals in generalities and contexts endlessly missed by the vast errors of reductionist scientism fallacies gone rampant. A particular by itself has no conceptual transferability, tells me nothing. Truth is not data you can run in a computer simulation. I'm not going to put a handle on my views here. If I give a detailed example (not that I can't or won't, only that it will probably cause you to miss the theme of my conceptual framework), you will try to induce what I'm saying, which is again, the error of scientists (believing they have the whole jigsaw puzzle put together with three pieces in place). Philosophy is mostly deductive, it stems from the totality.

All views are subjective, or at least have a subjective element. No two people see the same world or think the same thought.

Pretentious people are one of my challenges. As such, they do not "gore my ox" anymore, however, it has taken a lot of practice in mindfulness in dealing with them.

Everyone is neurotic, I never denied that...some are way too much so, though; this is increasingly so in modernity (the just world fallacy is popping up all over the place in this thread). I see that war is justified to some of the posters here. If you aren't anti-war...be careful you don't have anger, hate, and violence in you. It's true you have to be a dreamer to cultivate peace in the world. Aspects of consciousness are dreamy, though, and it's a mistake to think the mind isn't like a dream in certain ways.

What do you mean by anger when you say ‘People who get angry’? — Brett

Surgeons would be an example. Here is profession of high functioning individuals. They have to be automatons. Surgeons rather scare me, not because they cut into your body, but because of how much information of the primary process/instinct they have to deny to do their job (what if a hallucination should force itself upon them during an operation?...seems entirely probable, like a computer glitch). Every surgeon I've encountered was an unmixed asshole, frigid, cold, inhuman, nonliving, an algorithm. For me, they aren't as intelligent as most assume. Other high functioning professionals that likely have anger issues: lawyers, judges, CEOs, etc., are often psychos, and unintelligent just the same. Not making assumptive statements, here: yes, some of them haven't taken on more than they can handle and maintain composure (they may be the true masters of life, not a specialization). As an anarchist, I don't respect the incoherence of the statutes. If the law lacks internal consistency, it has broken itself before any human attempts to interpret it. It only makes sense people who get involved with jurisprudence would be of low intelligence..adhering to systems with little internal inconsistency and all. Only the individual's nous can possibly collocate a system of coherent thought...and it verges on esoteric, non transferable. A tangent, sorry.

As to the second paragraph you quoted of mine: not sure what to add. People who don't trust themselves, the plenum of emotion (also being referred to as primary process, psychosis, and instinct; with emphasis that emotion can be thought of as movement and behavior), have anger, hate, and violence problems sometimes. Alexithymia dug into them at some point in their lives for some reason...perhaps they had a patriarchal authoritarian father that beat them as a kid or verbally abused them or tried to indoctrinate them with legalism. This was bad with baby boomers....a generation of psychopaths that then went on and applied it to their own children. Authoritarianism is like the pure stupidity of military dressing down: your opinion doesn't matter, right? Conform to the group. This is like saying it isn't important to have a well-communicated psychical apparatus, and that you shouldn't worry about doing away with internal conflicts which can develop into destructiveness. But then the military psychology exists to make soldiers destructive. How much of military psychology has spilled into the market/industrial/technocratic society? A militant, aggressive posture is a part of social conditioning in the human system, thus blind, unexamined faith in norms can be concomitant with anger, hate, and violence.

What do I mean when I say 'people who get angry' you ask. This can't be more straightforward. What do you mean by asking this? Clarify, please. Anger isn't really circumstantial as I see it, it's intentional. You either intend to avoid being angry or you don't.

Again you conflate anger with certain behaviors, as if the emotion must lead to specific actions. — Coben

As always, it's a matter of definition. An act can be a thought or emotion, or a spoken word. As I'd said, any movement of the mind conditions it. Identifications with these movements or impressions in the mind, while losing sight of the mind as such (which always stands apart from its impressions and movements), can be the beginning of anger. How the mind becomes conditioned ultimately bleeds into the environment as a physical, sensible consequence of these conditioned responses. Behavior doesn't come out of nowhere.

For example, the most subtle violent act is to make another person feel inferior. Not that being thick-skinned isn't necessary in life, but you never know who you're dealing with. Also, we're all sensitive to the slightest metacommunications. If some one's tone of voice betrays pretension...it may affect you, and sets in motion retaliatory thought-actions. So in order to prevent a snowballing that could lead to physical violence...you wouldn't return the like; which again, requires self-awareness, and a desire to establish peace on earth, and also extensive training of the mind.

Don't you think the people around you know when you are angry? So what you're saying is you have no desire to keep from spreading anger into the world...when actually, a peaceful, tempered person takes responsibility to avoid destructive contagious emotions, by preventing them from arising, to the fullest extent possible, within him at all.

It sounds like maybe you confuse anxiety with anger. As you are right, anger=violence in my handbook, it is destructive. Kinda how the dark triad consists of related illnesses psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism, so anger, hate, and violence are related illnesses. I thought this was commonly known.

I don't think further discussion between us would be useful for either one of us. — Coben

Oh, ok. Hope you have a good day. Peace.

People who on certain occasions get angry are stuck in an emotional state of development? — Coben

No, he said anger has a function. This was the context of what I replied to. Anger is natural for toddlers, only. Maybe up through adolescence. Otherwise, it is a symptom of disease/juvenile, usually in the form of repressed derivatives.

Intelligent people can get angry, even be angry people. — Coben

For you. This is one of the criteria for unintelligent people for me, whatever they may present otherwise. Consistent self-control is a requisite for intelligence.

But notice you are using the pejorative phrase 'acting out' which means bad behavior. — Coben

Ok, then. Call it what you will. Acting out, hysterics, conniption, rage, anger, wrath, ire, crying, babbling. Give such a person a pacifier, that's literally what they need. Some have never come to terms with being born. Experiences in the womb (signals from the world outside) influence the person long after being born, I'm saying this as a context to the sentence before this one.

Having anger issues isn't associated with adulthood just as many other adolescent complexes aren't if they've continued into "adulthood" (society promotes adolescent behaviors, to be sure; anger, sexual deviance and narcissism are sanctioned). Usually, childish people are angry at life and haven't come to terms with it. Sure we all experience the perversion of violence rousing in us from time to time, it shouldn't be acted on or allowed to proliferate in us. When you experience anger rearing up...hold as still as ever...because you're about to do something really stupid. It's important to practice being consciously aware of anger when it arises, hesitate, be aware of it... Of course, my thesis rests on handling of these displacements and precipitations in a quiescent manner over periods of time. Someone who doesn't practice management of their inner space constantly won't succeed in vanquishing anger as soon as it arises and will be more likely to let it proliferate within him (it can be contagious to those around him, a concatenation of depravity released into the world). When accommodation has been made for the full spectrum of emotion all the time, anger doesn't exist anymore, as it shouldn't. Peace.

In psychoanalysis, the most important thing in accessing the subconscious is for the subject to suspend all goal oriented thoughts and motivations. Perhaps the type of person who can't relax and stop chasing carrots every day of their natural life is motivated by anger. And they are likely out of touch with themselves and their emotional gamut. We're subliminally taught by society to win, succeed, achieve, conquer, stop at nothing, etc....all which is a process fueled by violence, hate and anger...a runaway feedback system. Homeostasis between the primary and secondary processes require constant vigilance within. Saying anger has meaning is like saying you don't think there is a primary process to include at all...which is false and will definitely lead to stunting of emotional growth/alexithymia (precipitating in recurrent anger issues). There's moving parts within; everytime the mind moves it conditions your reality, conventionally. Yet the natural state of the mind is to be still, so its easy to confuse mental impressions for the mind itself. If one's lost track of the mind itself...trouble will follow.

Anger being a natural aspect of being human, — Brett

What you describe is being stuck in an emotional state of development. It isn't natural to be stuck in a state of emotional unawareness. People who have alexithymia may have fell out of touch with their feelings at a very early age. Anyway, anger is synonymous with the same stupidity seen in all hysteria, it is absence of intrapersonal intelligence. It has a function? Maybe on a battle field where the enemy has been demonized. Demonization is usually the result of projection of internal conflict...if a war is seen in the external world, then the one inside one is justified.

Usually impulse control disease is associated with internal conflict. One component of the subject's mind is incommunicado, no feedforward to other components because it has been locked away in the dungeon of consciousness. Could be early traumas, or abuses, or delusions for some other reason (or lack of reason rather). When a person's own psychal apparatus is out of sync with itself...it probably isn't going to get along with other psyches very well. On that note, I've always thought kicking an inanimate object or buffeting a punching bag to be different than anger directed at other subjects.

There's a kind of tug-o-war between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. More than anger (which is partially caused by an over inhibition of the emotion driven primary process/psychosis=neurosis) primary process involves being irresistibly drawn toward the primal, dreamy, nostalgic memories of childhood satisfactions (we can go too far here obviously, my point was never that we don't at all inhibit the instinctual processes and its displacements in the psychical apparatus); a person stuck in the primary process of instinct would live in a dream world of early memory (possibly to the point of hallucination)and unable to care for himself and do the work of living (note: the work of living has a special connotation: we have primal needs which are decreasingly satisfied in modernity). As said, I have my own hermeneutic of Freud's theories, and at times he seems to have not fully unraveled his own ideas, or to have understood how they work together. Unimpeachably, the reality principle includes the primary process maybe even more than the secondary neurosis, which is a lot of what my interpretation includes; reality is supposedly handled effectively by the inhibitory governance of the secondary process, neurosis/ego, and so on. And the pleasure principle can easily be said to be the domain of ego and neurosis...plus, my notions of displacements and precipitations between preconscious and conscious processing is different than Freud himself understood it.

From the standpoint of survival...you can't argue we have to be alive to have any mental processes occurring whatever. Enter the modern world. How much of what we do these days has no direct relation to survival...must be filtered through idealist systems and technics invented by man post the advent of agriculture? Money is a construct of the mind, it's exclusively mental media, for example, you don't eat it or build with it and can't possibly be self-reliant with it, in essence, it makes you an infant before those who have it, as they had to be puerile in their relations to those who had it, in turn. We make executive decisions within a fictive world, essentially...so where there's mental processes so far removed from survival (equatable to playing a game, where winning at a game has nothing to do with surivial), or where using the rules of a game to win have been confused with doing the work of living/surviving to such an extent...primary processes definitely become as important as secondary ones: pleasure vs reality, dream vs reality.

The concept of reality in modernity is getting significantly diluted; or you could say that what most agree is reality exists in a plainly idealistic realm. In the final analysis, reality is what keeps you alive and what can kill you. When so much of what keeps you alive and what kills you - within the human system - has nothing to do with physical processes, but idealistic ones, the work of living isn't really the work of living and truly enters a dreamy confused state. IN this state, it could only be that the secondary process of ego-neurosis struggling to inhibit the primary process of dreamy psychosis, is being asked to do an extraordinary amount of damming back of emotion. The modern world is giving rise to either extremely emotional or extremely angry people due to this push and pull anent psychical discharges, displacements and precipitations, preconscious and conscious, primary and secondary prcoesses. Grow a garden, go foraging, go out in nature, leave the automated human system for a space...it helps in spades.

his is an ambiguous sentence, but I’ll address it anyway. In my experience ‘professionals’ (whoever they are) show or display less anger than I see in others. If you’re correct about suppressed emotional issues leading to outbursts of anger then surely they would be displaying acts of anger all the time. How could they not? — Brett

Not what I said, this was the chosen term (have to be careful): repressed emotion. Suppression retains conscious control, repression becomes automatic, taking on an agency of its own; this automaticity is associated with impulse control illness. The difference (between suppression and repression) is crucial in understanding those with this illness. We all inhibit emotions somewhat, and are as such neurotic, but not all of us choose a path that requires feeding protracted repressional automatisms growing to the point of being their own psychic apparatus and a cut-off agency.

My sentence includes the locution "market society" which I do use a lot as it's important in understanding what, as I see it, is irritating many people - as they conform to it - to the point of anger. It connotes people who are okay with chasing profit as the end of life, upward mobility, relationships filtered through transactional values (principle of exchange), themselves and others being commercialized and commodified objects same as the car they drive to work, and perfunctory, mechanical values replacing the need for liberation, etc.

They wouldn't be "displaying acts of anger" all the time because they'd be repressing the prismatic ensemble of full emotion all the time. Then the impulsive break with temperance occurs; usually whatever elicits the break being completely out of proportion to the magnitude of the acting out event. I've been on the receiving end of this many times, possibly owing to an easygoing disposition: people who don't have problems with anger are often the recipients of emotional precipitations of those who act out. Also, people who think it is right to repress emotion, seeing as they believe they won't reason correctly if they include feeling or whatever, wind up being more controlled by their repressed emotion, which as was said, takes the form of pure anger and hysteria...in other words, an eclipse of reason (which includes the totality of emotion).

It's how I interpret psychoanalysis. Ego/neurosis/secondary process is made of instinct/psychosis/primary process, it has no well of substance of its own separately from which to draw. Ego, high functioning neurosis, or secondary process, is the effort to control and shape the primary process as though it - the secondary process - had its own source. The primary and secondary process are opposed to each other, even though they are impossible to tease apart. Hence, there's a possibility of chasing after will-o-wisps at this point. When one believes in and espouses a illusory nature of mental processes...violence is likely to surface.

In order to eliminate a false, because impossible, sense of order and get one's psyche working together instead of at odds with itself...what ought be done with these processes in the psychic apparatus? Ought he continue damming back the primary process, like trying to ride an elephant with tenuous, sewing string of some sort for reins? The thin strings are going to break, it is a given. So what to do? The elephant is symbolic of metaphysical pathos, or the totality of emotions within, it is psychosis and the primary process, impossible to vanquish. What to do? It's clear the more you try to push it around and control it, deny it, the more violent and uncontrollable it becomes. Perhaps if the concept of control is dismissed it could be noticed the primary process has inenarrable elements. Pieces we can't fit into our narrative of our self, the neurotic and violent, secondary process.

To call it psychosis is going out on a limb for the hermeneutic of most people's understanding of mental health, to be sure. And this is where I diverge: neurosis is more ill than psychosis in modernity, because it has been so naively accepted as part and parcel to functioning in a profoundly sick system. How sick would the milieu of our psychic information need to be before considering whether or not some or most of our anger is arising because it's impossible to adapt without yellow bile accumulation? I've thought ego/neurosis and algorithms are nearly exactly homologous in function. The automated world is perfect derangement of tranquility of psychosis (with its plenum of emotional beatitude); violent, Procrustean, controlling neurosis (where everything must be in its place ever increasingly) dovetails seamlessly into pseudo contacts with people and the environment, forming the virtual "reality" in which we move and have our being. How much pseudo order are we dependent on nowadays for our feeling of well being? It's the pinnacle of neurosis with the secondary process dominion of the primary. Anger ensues to extraordinary degrees, instinct is looking to squelch its rider. And it has a huge, column- like leg to crush heads like melons.

To sit and do nothing but open up to the elephant and let go of the reins and prods, let it take you wherever it wants and to see the world the way it sees it is enlightening inasmuch as it reveals the common spring where all the animals go to drink without violence. A metaphor for a complex mental apparatus. Anger, though, isn't an emotion as most think, but a reflection of fully repressed emotion.

I'm not a big fan of IQ tests. They seem to attract the wrong type of emotions and sentiment in society. Be it a motivating reason for eugenics, designer babies, scientific racism as seen in the Bell Curve, narcissism, confirmation bias, and so on. — Wallows

I share these sentiments.

More generally, quantification of life is an ethical problem which has yet to be an obsolete way of thinking. Whether it be the concept of net worth, or selling one's life by the hour (wage slavery)...romanticism of numbers continuously goes too far. We can blame scientists, with their autistic-like obsession with metrology, and also economic fundamentalism (which fractionates objects for sale in most arbitrary ways, combining qualitative value with quantitative appraisal in a manner that doesn't really make sense, having had the outcome of people unwittingly accepting commodification of their life, and phrases like "labor market" still being used). For incomprehensible, subliminal reasons eugenics lingers as an inchoate ethical doom (faith in science and tech, transhumanist, technocratic elitism) whereas auto de fe (elitism of nobles and church prelates). is generally agreed to have been superseded and decried by the better, more ethical stance of scientists eradicating superstition. Same type of people either way...history has been written of the elites, by the elites, for the elites....and it still is so right now. Who are they? Those who sew violence and discord, dark triad sentinels lying to themselves and others that they may get their just reward, which is always presented by the powerful to those who wish for like power. If you desire no power, you won't "succeed," will suffer, and perhaps die young.

Surely there's no such thing as generalized intelligence. I'm not smart in ways you are, and, perhaps, vice versa. If it weren't this way...we'd basically all be the same. Kinda like the personalities of those who live motivated by money profits(definitely not "prophets"). They are usually the same type of people which believe money is the measure of a person's intelligence, or success, what have you. Riffraff all.

I.Q. is a standardized test. These tests rank people that have the same strengths and weaknesses...essentially replicants of each other. Different types of intelligence are a sort of checks and balances against sterile uniformity and social decay of our specie.

Anger is no emotion, it's the absence of it; the result of living with stored up repressed emotion. The sum total of repressed emotion=anger. People who get angry believe their emotions can't be trusted and hence deny them...invariably leading to the boomerang return of emotion in neurotic acting out. The psyche is led by instinct. Too much neurotic blocking of instinct only gives it more power over us. Instinct itself isn't violent as most believe...it's the process of denying it which pisses it off. Really, then, ego, self, and all attempts to subdue instinct and constrain it, result in frustration and acting out.

What can you do to tame the childish temper in you? Allow some peaceful psychosis. Only psychosis can combat neurosis. Personally, I believe the nature of psychosis (also primary process) to be fundamentally peaceful and neurosis (secondary process), violent. When the instinct or primary process is given some control, it is the blooming of all emotion at once, rather antipodal to anger (according to above definition). Probably most high functioning "professionals" in the market society have anger issues. Their schemata waxing neurotic, bordering on "algorithmic."

Not sure why says anger and hatred are comforting. They are very uncomfortable. They could only be seen as comfortable through a sadomasochistic lens, where sadomasochism is the highest level of mental disorder. I get angry less than most. In part, this is because it feels disgusting and perverted. By the by, it feels like losing your mind. If you'd thought you lost your mind, but then experience several episodes of violence/anger/hatred, you realize you hadn't lost your mind before the way you'd thought; getting angry shows you what it means to lose your mind, it being the king of all hysterias. As long as you don't have problems with yellow bile, there's always a chance of getting to your highest self...in other words, you still have a kind of philosophical guide to follow (manas). The secular rational ethos unquestionably rewards angry, aggressive types of people who stop at nothing to get what they want (conquer, achieve, win). For me, then, successful people in the market society aren't really successful if they have issues with losing their mind in fits of rage. Alpha males are rewarded for remaining like undeveloped children..

Is belief in the supernatural an intelligent person’s game? — Gnostic Christian Bishop

People believe in all kinds of things which wouldn't exist apart from the belief. Justified, true, belief=knowledge. How much of what makes the anthropocentric world turn has no seat in anything but belief? Humans are untrue beings as they revolve around constructions impossible to have knowledge of. When enough people believe the same thing to be so, it is so (becomes same as gravity)...even if it isn't so in the extrahuman world. Social constructions are similar to the supernatural in this way. Money is ghosts. The content hardly matters when the content is belief in something that doesn't exist.

It's wise to be a cynic toward shared beliefs rooted in impossible knowledge. Where this is the case - shared belief in something that has no existence - it is wise to go ahead and have your own individual esoteric beliefs no one else may agree with. Where the esoteric is made exoteric, and enough people believe in the same fantasy, mass hysteria and disorder is usually following close in the wake.

What causes an individual to become violent and act out? Hopefully not personality variables we entrust to AI and surveillance state- capitalism to sort out. Is it even possible to predict a public shooting? What are these people - shooters - made of? What can we say about them? Are they even angry? What does AI, as it sifts our data, assume to "know" about thinking animals that know and are instilled with noetic qualities?

There's always been murder with instruments of every kind, if you can't accept it, not sure what to say (the desire to kill doesn't originate in America). What scares me more than these senseless murders is the slightest intimation AI could predict public terrorism/shootings. Let's not be too over alarmed by it, eh. After all, a lot of people are killed by cars and other technics, if you want to look at that way. Blaming technics when they fail or do harm (in combination with agency) is failure to think on it in the round.

Who is America? How will "he" stop? Yes, the gun laws seem to facilitate public terrorism in U.S. Ultimately, not to see it as a mental health issue at the individual level is the wrong understanding to start. Laws aren't facultative, will is. Only an individual can be good, only an individual can be evil; a country as an entity has no existence any more than corporate personhood. Here substitute "peaceful" for "good" and "violent" for "evil" if you like.

Occams razor and I'm not using these poorly defined and loaded terms, like "spirituality", "sacred" and "divine". — Harry Hindu

Sacred entails non human. Fully valorizing what isn't human, and fear of autonomous history or time without subjecting it to abolition and recreation. In a way, prehistory or the Golden Age could be considered sacred. It doesn't make sense to attach special importance to recorded, additive time, lineal historicity, or to treat modernity as more advanced. It isn't more advanced for all we know.

Youre comparing your view with humans' preliminary explanation of the world and their place in it - when humans believed that they were the focus of creation. — Harry Hindu

Animism is more the opposite of what you say here. Human exceptionalism has never been higher than it is today. If this is the concern, religion has played a minor, though not exempt, role compared to what has occurred since the Enlightenment, which gave rise to a belief that nothing ought to be subscribed to that couldn't be measured.

The Enlightenment has led to transhumanism, the most human-centered orientation ever; to be sure the post human thinks he is the focus of creation. It's already an anthropocentric view to think in terms of a creation, we don't know if the universe had a beginning. Ancient or modern anthropolatry hardly makes a difference to my way of seeing things. How I choose to sculpt my belief system takes more from archaic ontology (less object proliferation determinism), however, than mania of physicalism we have today. How has so much overextension into physicalism orientation transpired when we have met survival needs, keeping the organism alive, probably 10,000 years ago? A prodigy. Must be for sport, play, or carnival or whatever, beat me. Somehow excessive concern with material things has led to many, many unnecessary objects to exist, and determinism that came with said objects. It isn't a parsimonious or Occam's razor situation we have today, hate to say.

I basically believe that nothing has any meaning. — yupamiralda

You have to make your own meaning. People who try to find meaning, never do. You have to create it in philosophy, myth, art, etc. A true nihilist wouldn't have anything to say.

A sign you haven't created your own meaning might be excessive interest in ancestry or genetic bloodlines. As though the bodies and thoughts of your predecessors could be reflected perfectly in whatever you are. Which of course requires no myth-making or mythopoesis or meaning whatever.

Start with abolition of the past, realize there's no such thing as autonomous history. Return it to chaos, to in illo tempore. From the chaos, cosmicize...solarize your life according to prototypes/archetypes. Reactualize these gestures once a year with the beginning of time over and over again following each year's rite. Chaos to cosmos...unmanifest to manifest. The ultimate meaning is in regeneration.

Endlessly repeated history, together with the wrong image that it's autonomous with intrinsic meaning tends to make me feel the way of the OP. Intrinsic value is is imputed, not the sort of thing you find evidence for or data. I believe this is why meaning is disappearing in our species...meaning requires thought and can't be gleaned from physical observation or data. Nothing is more empirical than a kickshaw you are about to ingest...and yet it is without intrinsic value. The value of it is in the domain of idealism. Otherwise you just eat unconsciously.

That is reality. — Hanover

If it is reality, it isn't the truth. Similar to how there are unconditioned stimuli/response in the fabric of our being as truth, which are then, through social Machiavellianism- behavioral conditioning- replaced with conditioned stimuli/response systems. Truth=unconditioned stimulus/response or primary process; reality=conditioned stimulus/response; secondary process.

Unconditioned behavior is independent of experience. It's of note how crowd psychology has taken control of the masses' primal intelligence. Social systems, through the unvirtuous tit-for-tat market societal values, are homologous to the reality of conditional stimuli of Pavlov, one monumental ringing of the bell. What makes it conditional? Agreement writ large, nothing more. And the agreement is to accommodate the dominionism of behaviorism. This is the thrust of what drives some of us mad. How is it that a system developed on experiments with animals can go on to apply on such a large scale to a supposed intelligent, thinking animal, like us? I'm not not at all convinced our species is as advanced as most have come to believe.

Classically conditioned behaviorism works best when the interval of time between the conditioned stimulus and the appearance of the unconditioned response is shortest. In other words, when there's no awareness of what's happening to you, of what you're experiencing, you can be manipulated as a circus animal. Thoughtlessness and intemperance replaces reflection (what makes us human, metacognitive hesitation).

Astonishingly, it appears many people have agreed to call conditioned response learning. Also of note: only a single trial , or pairing of conditional stimulus and unconditional response , is necessary to produce fear conditioning. What a system of learning, I must say. There are those of us who have a difficult time with this. This is not learning, it's the absence of metacognition, the monkey side of us with no self-recollection. Metacognizance is our unconditioned state before domestication, before the water is made turbid by feces of behaviorism.

Wouldn't it be revealing to reverse the cyclopean bell of conditional stimuli (domestication/crowd psychology) back into the truth of what it really is, just a bell. This would be nothing less than the extinction of behavioral conditioning. Let it be so, amen.

Sure, there are those who live in reality and accept it for what it is and those who don't. You have utilitarian value as an employee, and it has to be measured. If I can till a field in an hour and you a day, I get the job and the town gets fed. You get the job and not.

This has nothing to do with your value as a person. You can't conflate employee worth with human worth. — Hanover

Reality would include its critique. Negative utilitarianism is downplayed vis a vis positive utilitarianism. Merit is rewarded, while suffering is ignored. Survival of the fittest, I would have thought, could be diminished or eliminated by the most advanced species on Earth...but it has only been displaced into zero -sum games of social Darwinism (and social engineering). And if you aren't a conqueror, beating out others, you have to allow yourself to be conquered. As you have said, it isn't fair or just, which translates into a significant social problem. If you don't want to be a part of a system that centers on gain and loss, winning and losing, and these recognized realities aren't without verity, they are reality. That such a social system is unfair and unjust is reality. Albeit, one rooted in idealism, not behaviorism.

If my value as a human is separate from my value in some other way, it's associated with departmentalization of the psyche; if you have a Venn diagram...the circle with "human" in it doesn't really cross over with any other one, save maybe "sacred or inviolate." That said, there may be one other circle to add to these two: self-sufficiency, self-reliance, autonomy. The eusocial system man has created for himself steals away self-sufficiency through specialization...which segues into a diffusion of responsibility. Never should you be forced to ignore your infrangible value as a sentient being for some notion of gain. In what way, I wonder, do you think it sensible to multiply and divide one's value as a human and maintain non-eusocial self-sufficiency, and sacrality of the work of living? So many jobs are extraneous to cultivation of autonomy and shouldn't exist. It's amusing to hear someone say the system of capital gives one the choice. What actually happens is that if you are perfectly self-sufficient, can take care of yourself and do the work that supports life, you then have to figure out how to put yourself on the market to be dependent (other-organized).

Social dissimulation as far as it is ungenuine, is essential in a job interview more than in any other relationship. Obviously whoever behaves the way they do in an interview everywhere they go, would be insufferable to be around as the pretense becomes a repulsive effluvium. Its easy to tell when people have cogntiive dissonance stemming from this dryrot of market repression. Antagonizing how you feel, going against the grain, too often is a major cornerstone of mental illness. Then you get people coming home from work and displacing onto their wife and kids, the dog, etc. Living two separate lives as in employee vs. human can be disastrous; it's consequences are seen in the common torpor of people who suddenly cease doing what they've been doing their whole lives, known as retirement. Surely we have only one worth: being. So if you try to divide the immiscible, and merge it with employee value data, it is no longer sacrosanct, no longer the worth it's claimed to be.