IF reducing or eliminating suffering is genuinely what you want. — Possibility

Reducing suffering and eliminating suffering are two categorically different things.



I'll get back to this thread in the next few days, provided the country I live in will still exist.

You keep complaining about the low level of public discourse.
However this Ukr. situation ends, one thing looks certain: afterwards, in the West, this low level of public discourse will be cemented as the norm that everyone must comply with.

What a bizarre claim, mirroring the stance of the OP: "People are atheists because they want to."

Anyway, the question was specifically for the OP.

If love is a matter of goods, why would I have less of a right to them then you? — Tobias

Not only that, but also: You must have love, you must have sex. Sex is a status symbol, and also a symbol of psychological normalcy. It seems natural to resent everything that stands in one's way of obtaining status.

In a matriarchal society would women end up being the nasty ones on account of having power or would the world be kinder on account of women being in charge? — Cuthbert

It's not clear why it would be kinder then.

Generally, I find men are kinder toward women than other women. If women would be in charge, that would possibly be better for men, but worse for women.

Yes, suicide is often used to hurt others too. Sometimes, it is not just self-violence; rather it is meant to scar others permanently. And it does. The suicide of a loved one is not something one can forget. — Olivier5

You dumped her. She was not a "loved one" of yours.

I was a fan of Merkel, but not because she was a women. — Olivier5

A woman. Please.

But women objectify themselves and other women in this same way. Pick up pretty much any "women's" magazine, book, tv show, seminar, webinar, and there it is: "see yourself as a piece of meat to be fucked".

It's a bit of a stretch to say that women do this because they are the poor victims of patriarchy.
— baker

I would agree that women, being people, have the capacity to make decisions. Bikini models choose to be bikini models, etc. Alcoholics choose to be alcoholics (60% of the revenue in the alcohol industry comes from alcoholics), etc.

But I think that it would be too shallow of an analysis to entirely put the blame for objectification on the women who choose to objectify themselves. — _db

The idea often put forward is that men objectify women and that women are innocent victims. I point out that this isn't the case, given that women are complicit in the objectification of women.
An abusive situation is complex and doesn't just emerge overnight. The objectification of women isn't solely the fault of men, nor of women, but both.

The objectification is marketed towards men - it is the male gaze that these women are attempting to satisfy. And by doing so there is the implicit message: that if you don't look like this, you aren't good enough.

This is a while back by now -- A man once told me that if I don't look like Claudia Schiffer (who was then in her prime as a model) then I shouldn't expect to be loved like her. But women are like that too. For example, in Jane Austen's and the Bronte's novels you can see characters say things like, "Oh, she's lucky she found a husband at all, given how plain she is!"

There is also a case to be made that the objectification of women reached new heights when women joined the workforce. After the feminine mystique was demolished in the first wave of feminism, there had to be a way to compensate for the economic loss that came with women leaving the kitchen. They weren't buying the household stuff that they usually did. The only thing left was to ramp up the body image ideal. More makeup, more clothes, more surgeries, more diets. It's all about the $ $ $ $ $ . It also happened to put an unfair double standard on women, who not only had to be professionals but also had to be beautiful (a fluid concept that cannot be pinned down).

I think it also has to do with women competing for men and for jobs with other women. Some say that women dress up and wear make up etc. for the sake of other women, to intimidate them and to chase them away.

Rates of youth suicide and attempted youth suicide in Western societies are quite high. — Olivier5

Such is life in capitalist paradise. If a person cannot live up to a certain standard, then they should not live at all. It's what the whole pro-assisted suicide culture is telling us.

Not in the context of the patriarch's fallibility.
An Orthodox patriarch is not the same as the Roman pope. If the pope advertises something, then this comes with the blessing of his infallibility*, while this is not the case with a patriarch.



(*Some limitations apply; the pope's infallibility applies only to matters such as faith.)

How can you tell whether some reasoning is false..........
— baker

By considering the premisses stated or implied and the conclusions purportedly derived from them.

......and some behavior is bad?
— baker

I can tell that it's wrong to rape a woman either because she refuses sex or indeed for any other supposed reason. You can do this too. You don't need to ask me how. You're already there.

I can give you deontology and utilitarianism and intuitionism if you need the philosophical bases. But for this thread topic it really is not necessary. — Cuthbert

You are forgetting the role of the power relationship between the parties involved. What is true and moral is decided by the one who has more power.

Well, I wouldn’t assume they didn’t want to be in the relationship, although I would agree that it’s a possibility. I was referring specifically here to an ongoing relationship. My point is that I don’t think people are necessarily aware of this structure of affect while they’re in a conceptual-level discussion. And if they are aware, they don’t necessarily think it should factor into the discussion. Which I think is fine as long as there is no ongoing relationship between affected positions, or any chance of actual interaction. — Possibility

Ah yes, the old, "I love you, but you're such an idiot/loser/slut!"

There are things that one just wouldn't say to someone one loves. If a person calls you names, calls you stupid, makes disparaging remarks about your character, and so on, then they just don't love you and aren't your friend, even if they claim otherwise.

Women do that to women as well. In fact, even more frequently than men, insofar a woman has more interactions with other women than with men.
— baker

Sort of. Hatred, yes. Violence, no.

By whom were you hit more often? By men or by women?

But that would either make an end to the power game, or take it to a whole new level.
— baker

I agree with the first part - that’s kind of the point. But what ‘whole new level’ are you referring to?

When the nature of the (desired) power relationship is clearly spelled out ("I bring home the money, so I have the say!"), the parties involved cannot deny or ignore it anymore, and it seeps into every communication, every interaction between them.

The significance in the context of this invasion is the similarity of Putin's embrace of the Russian Orthodox Church to the Falangists who used the Roman Catholic Church to bring legitimacy to their fascism. — Paine

You are forgetting that the Orthodox Church doesn't work the same way as the Roman Catholic Church (or the Protestant churches).

The Orthodox do not and cannot make a claim to divine justification and infallibility, while the Roman Catholics do (as do Protestants).

As a rule of thumb, I think it is safe to say it will be kind of scary for anyone in the future who has to live in a country that becomes occupied/controlled by the PRC in their bid for world domination, unless perhaps you are one of people that enjoys things like getting a cavity search on a daily basis . — dclements

While more and more people in the Western capitalist paradise have to wear diapers to work and literally piss and shit in their pants because they don't get to take a bathroom break. Not to mention how normal it has become to live in constant fear of losing your job. In the Western capitalist paradise!

I will admit it has kind of the old school church mentality of "we sometimes have to kill the heathens in order to try to save some of their souls" or perhaps maybe a kind of old Manifest Destiny vibe to it where Russia has to do what Russia has to do in or to keep socialism/communism alive. — dclements

No, it has nothing to do with socialism/communism. It has to do with common decency.

Instead of seeing it in terms of "total world dominance by the US and its client states" we can see it in terms of "total world dominance by consumerism and bad faith".
— baker

I suppose, we could see it that way, but if consumerism is led by America (the world's largest consumer market) then it boils down to the same thing. — Apollodorus

The problem is that not all Americans (as in: American citizens) are the same, nor are all Russians (as in: Russian citizens), or all Germans (as in: German citizens), and so on. Nations don't exist as homogenous, unified entities, so using the national name can sometimes be misleading.

It may well be that mankind is "willingly" heading in this direction, but that "will" is due to ignorance of the fact that by acting on it we reduce ourselves to consuming entities chained to a self-interested system over which we have no influence or control.

Can you come up with a good reason as to why people shouldn't do that?
I'm asking this in earnest, because from what I've seen, people generally don't see this as a problem. They don't seem to see a problem in having a lot of money and fancy education titles to their names, while in their heart, they are lumpenproletariat.

I'm not saying that the US and her allies are the "good guys" and Russia, China, and/or anyone else not happy with the West are the "bad guys" as it is a given that at any given moment if those in power in the West are asleep at the switch that other powers will take advantage of it. What I am saying is that when these countries overplay their hand in trying to undermine the West and/or seize more power for themselves through military means that they should expect pushback or retaliation from the US and her allies. I think you can agree on that. — dclements

So the West is fully entitled to undermine the safety of others, but others may not even defend themselves?

Why are people theists? Why do people believe in God?

Atheism is a rejection of free-speech (primarily another element of the Left).
— Gregory A

this has to be a troll. Best left alone. — Wayfarer

Like @Tom Storm, I, too, have heard this type of reasoning before. The constitutionally given right to free speech trumps informal logic.

"If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then, brother, that person is a piece of shit."
— 180 Proof

Ergo, 45% of people alive today are 'pieces of shit'? — Theorem

What do people generally believe is the percentage of those who are pieces of shit? Somewhere in the 90% + range, probably.

False reasoning and bad behaviour — Cuthbert

How can you tell whether some reasoning is false and some behavior is bad?

Psychology, as a (scientific) discipline can say at most that the statistically average is the norm. For everything else, some other worldview, philosophy, stance is needed and the supremacy of which is implicitly taken for granted.

I'm saying that for criticism, one must have some philosophy, a stance that is _not_ rooted in the idea "the statistical average is the norm", and that, moreover, this philosophy or stance needs to be generally accepted as being superior to psychology.

For example, a humanist worldview, or some religious views.

One is fully capable of overcoming one's idle fascination with paradoxes and mysteries.

Criticized on the grounds of what? With what justification?

- the idea that it 'cannot actually make one happy' is not really a defensible posture. It might have been closer to being trivially true if you phrased this like so - 'doing things that one finds pleasurable may not make one happy.' However, from what I've seen, it's a hell of a good start. — Tom Storm

Indeed, what I said earlier is not empirically defensible, on account that it would be unethical to perform experiments with which we could test the hypotheses necessary for this (as I noted earlier in the thread).

So we're left with whatever each person has in terms of personal insight and what they're willing to share with others.
While psychologists/psychiatrists play Procrustes.

I think in Europe only Turkey has sent into it's combat operations conscripts. — ssu

Long live the Ottoman Empire!

Or maybe the widely held and tabooed assumption that life is for eating, drinking, and making merry, is not justified.
— baker
Why "tabooed"? It's not a forbidden subject. Most people believe they are here to enjoy all that and that this is the purpose of life! And it's not an "assumption"; it's a belief and way of life. — Alkis Piskas

It is tabooed to suggest that the assumption (that life is for eating, drinking, and making merry) is not justified.

Like you say, we usually take for granted and we are expected to take for granted that life is for eating, drinking, and making merry. We're not supposed to question this. We're supposed to go with this program. And if we ever feel dissatisfied by this program, then we are expected to conclude that the fault is with us, not the program.

Indeed it is.. Existence is a burden, hence efforts to prevent it for others. Meanwhile, we just have to "deal with it" in the ways that we do. Once born, we are "stuck" in the position of making a choice at all, once we reach an age where we can self-consciously make these decisions. These are the problems Existentialists describe.. Absurdity, isolation, doing something but with no inherent reason other than taking on arbitrary reasons (e.g. it's my role, it's what is expected, it's what everyone else seems to do, etc.). This is often called "authenticity" in behavior. What choice to make when faced with life's dictates (the situatedness we are presented?). — schopenhauer1

Rather, dissatisfaction is more of a restless feeling that one must DO anything.. Get "caught up" in something. Thus like Schopenhauer's pendulum, survival and boredom kind of do describe a large part of what is going on with human motivations. — schopenhauer1

Early Buddhism distinguishes between two types of desire: tanha and chanda.
Tanha is the craving we're all familiar with; we tend to imagine it in the form of hunger, or sexual lust, then in the vile craving of the heroin addict seeking his next fix, or the greedy capitalist ammassing more and more wealth. But also comes in much more subtle and sophisticated forms, like insisting the walls of your dining room be painted in taupe.
Chanda is the desire to overcome this mess of craving and suffering.

It's instructive to make this conceptual difference, so as not to be unduly pessimistic.

a lot of other problems starting from the motivation of the conscripts — ssu

Yet conscripts might also have a far more pragmatic approach to fighting, an attitude of "Let's just get over with it, as quickly and as effectively as possible". They don't have any profound moral or otherwise metaphysical motivations for fighting, so no issues with justification.
There's even a saying, "It's easy to do that which must be done."

Of course, it also seems to make a difference what the general atmosphere in a country is. If the people of a country are already very nationalist, then conscription can be a mere formality. In countries that are not particularly nationalist, conscription is more likely to appear something alien and forced.

All this is still firmly in the realm of craving, tanha. The craving for sensual pleasures, the craving for becoming, and the craving for non-becoming.

(Your project is based on what is sometimes termed "the third-and-a-half noble truth: suffering is manageable".)
— baker

I’m not saying that suffering is ‘manageable’. You’re grasping for criticisms, here. Reducing suffering is not the same as avoiding it. — Possibility

"Suffering is manageable" is a phrase that I expect you to be familiar with, given the terminology you use.
You keep talking about "reducing" suffering, "minimizing" suffering, but not once have you advocated the complete cessation of suffering. Reducing and minimizing fall under "managing".

It’s easy enough to translate every action into craving. We cannot act without translating reason into affect, so I’m not going to deny this.

Actually, it looks more like there's quite a bit of terminology you didn't learn, even though you're using some of it from a certain field.

But you’re just avoiding what I’m actually referring to.

You're working on the premise that your worldview (which you probably don't consider a worldview but The Truth) is greater than mine, that it contextualizes, encompasses mine. That you can explain me, but that I cannot explain you.

And why do you think merely listening to music is not an example of collaboration?

In the same way that the beggar in a Mumbai street selling paper handkerchiefs cannot be meaningfully said to "collaborate with the world's economy".

But in moments when we are genuinely doing nothing, fully awake and alert (such as in meditation),

That's not "meditation", that's zoning out.
— baker

Fully awake and alert is not ‘zoning out’. Come on, Baker!

It's the "genuinely doing nothing" that gives you away.

Buddhism explores the possibility of a complete cessation of suffering - this is not the same as saying we all should follow that path to the end. I think that would be a misinterpretation.

You don't seem to understand just how egregious it is what you're doing. It's standard fare for New Agers, to be sure. You're basically telling me I should settle for cold pizza.

I have not said that we should collaborate, although if reducing suffering is your priority, then yes, I think increasing collaboration is the most efficient method - but not at the expense of awareness or connection. This is not a normative statement, but a rational one. I’m not talking about collaborating on isolated projects, but simply a general decision to collaborate rather than exclude whenever the opportunity presents - because one option never presents without the other, despite appearances. It’s invariably painful, humbling, risky and seemingly impossible, but it’s always ultimately worthwhile (just maybe not for any particular individual). — Possibility

That's like saying that the operation was successful, and who cares if the patient died!

But that’s not what I’m saying. Why bother to survive? What does that achieve? No one survives, in the end. Stop trying to survive or be socio-culturally productive, andinstead find a way to make an incremental difference in the bigger picture.

A.k.a. bhava tanha.

No, I don’t know, but I do have ideas. And you can’t be certain that it has nothing to do with what I’m describing, because you don’t know, either.

"Just like you, we also don't actually know whether God exists or not, but we'll burn you in his name anyway!"

In the end it doesn’t matter if I think your perspective is wrong - it’s a valid perspective - but the fact that it requires you to reject valid information from others’ experiences indicates logical inaccuracies, or at least limitations.

While you reject valid information from others. Why don't you see that as a matter of logical inaccuracies or at least limitations on your part?

I’m simply saying that there is more to a conscious existence than you are describing here, and choosing not to follow a particular socio-cultural agenda does not necessarily entail premature death, pessimism or antinatalism.

You'll need to spell this out. What other options are there?
In specific terms, please, not just anything that might fall under "awareness, connection, collaboration".
— baker

Oh, so many. — Possibility

Despite repeated requests, you provide no examples.

But you’re only looking for actions so you can reduce them (in your worldview) to ‘following the socio-cultural agenda’.

While you reduce whatever I (or some other posters) say in such a way that you can dismiss it.
Talk about ignorance and exclusion!

Both the individual and this worldview are five-dimensional conceptualisations that vary in relation to each other - and you know that your conceptual structures are far from identical to schopenhauer1’s, even if an evaluative relation reduces to the same side of the binary. But you’re not meant to look at the concepts, just trust that the word is the same, so it must represent the same consolidation of value.

Really, I do that? Thank heavens I have you to tell me that!

I’m not very good at logic

Then you should be more careful in how you use the term.

No, no such opposition. The idea is that doing things that one finds pleasurable (in the broadest sense of the word) cannot actually make one happy. Ie. that it's in the nature of doing worldly things that they cannot satisfy. (This is also the theme in Ecclesiastes, so it's not some "esoteric Eastern" notion.)
— baker

I've known too many people who are, for want of a better term, 'happy' doing things they find pleasurable to agree with this in its entirety. — Tom Storm

So what conclusion do you draw from this?

And what implications does your stance have here for the possibility of philosophically approaching the topic?

In my view, a person is more likely to find happiness doing what they enjoy than doing what they hate doing.

This is trivially true, and nobody suggested otherwise.

The term 'happiness' is a problem I think because it sounds a bit trivial and Californian to me. 'Contentment' may be a better word and preferable from where I sit.

You know what I mean. "Happiness" is a good enough word for the purpose of this discussion. Unless you have a further point to make and, perhaps, qualify your earlier statement (quoted in this post at the top)?

You used the word first.

Exactly the kind of treatise a Zen master/Taoist would like to get his hands on to mystify his/her students! — Agent Smith

Why mystify??

Don't dismiss his findings so flippantly. — Agent Smith

It's entirely in place to dismiss the remarks of someone who has presumably devoted decades of his life to something, but who then made a flippant remark to the effect of

he Bible, from the first page to the last, amounts to saying "married bachelor!" — Agent Smith

In any case, instead of having one economic and military bloc constantly expanding at the expense of others, I think it would make more sense to have some kind of balance of power in the region and in the world. Otherwise there is a real danger that Western imperialism – economic, financial, military, political, and cultural - will lead to total world dominance by the US and its client states. — Apollodorus

Instead of seeing it in terms of "total world dominance by the US and its client states" we can see it in terms of "total world dominance by consumerism and bad faith". Thus the New World Order: "The only things that matter are things that money can buy, and all else is worthless. Adjust your life goals and values accordingly or perish."

This seems to be the direction the entire mankind is heading to, and, it seems, gladly and willingly. Who can stop progress ...

Putin's close connection to the Russian Orthodox Church should not go unnoticed. — Paine

The religious theme not often mentioned in regard to the recent Ukr. crisis. But this conflict isn't just NATO/the West vs. Russia, it's also Western vs. Eastern Christianity. It's the Great Schism that goes back a thousand years.

Taiwan is pretty much the world's most important factory of semiconductors. Whoever has Taiwan has the say over one of the most important commodities in the world.
Who wouldn't want that?!
— baker

I agree, but wanting to take something and actually taking it are two different things. I sure China would love to take over Taiwan's semiconductor making facilities but they would most likely have to invade Taiwan in order for them to have any hope in getting them. — dclements

It's not clear, though, whether China wants Taiwan for itself, or whether they just want that Taiwan wouldn't come into US' hands. Because it's questionable how long Taiwan can maintain relative independence, even as it has ties both to China and the US. Would China still want Taiwan if there would be no US or similar power? Perhaps not.

I wonder what Barker thinks about cookbooks. Maybe he just barks about them.

Altruism is idiotic, some might even say it's insanity; psychiatrists/psychologists should categorize it as a mental disorder that makes people (altruists) do patently dumb stuff e.g. sacrificing themselves for people who don't give a rat's ass about them (that's suicide, just dressed to look like something less moronic, less dangerous). — Agent Smith

In Freudian psychology, altruism is classed as an advanced ego defense mechanism.