I wonder who you have heard making that claim. I can’t imagine anyone seriously saying that what is inescapable is good. You can’t escape from prison, so prison is good? You are destined to be slave, so slavery is good? Life is misery, so misery is good?? — Congau
What you often notice in people, though, is an incapacity to imagine things being different from what they are. It hardly makes sense to complain if a different condition is not even imaginable. You don’t complain of the grass being green even if it’s not your favorite color. You don’t object to having to eat beans every day if that’s the only food you know to exist. — Congau
It is indeed often the case that people like what they have just because they can’t envision anything else. This is far from being a philosophical position, though. The essence of philosophy is exactly to be willing to examine everything and not take anything for granted. We should never assume that something is good just because it appears to be an inescapable reality. — Congau
The common saying that “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, is probably true, but that doesn’t mean that that thing itself is good. It’s just to say that nothing is so bad that there’s no good in it. — Congau
Inescapable suffering is bad. Buddhism offers an escape from suffering by not desiring. But not desiring is still bad, relative to the good of satisfying desires. But still better than suffering from unsatisfied desires. — Pfhorrest
I understand what you mean, but I'm not sure if that tension inherently exists. I think a lot of it is taught to us at an early age. — Tzeentch
This tension between what the individual wants, and what they must do for something like a workplace is taken as a given of living in a society. — schopenhauer1
What is it that is "inescapable"? Life? Existence? There are escape routes available. Being born is inescapable (because the unborn do not exist in the first place and are not party to the problem of existence and escapability). Suffering? Again, it is not inescapable. Death is inescapable, if one has been born. — Bitter Crank
The argument isn't that it's inescapable and therefore acceptable or good. The argument is that it's good overall, in spite of inescapable downsides. — S
The distinction can be as blurry or as narrow as you like between "good despite the bad" or "good in the bad". It still holds. — schopenhauer1
What still holds? The distinction between good and bad? I never denied that distinction, nor did I intend to "blur" or "narrow" it. This seems entirely irrelevant to my point. — S
Work/labor is ... inescapable — schopenhauer1
Life is like that: inescapable but provides intermittent pleasure and suffering. ("Inescapable pleasures? Sure. Antinatalists focus on the inescapable sufferings, but overlook inescapable pleasures). — Bitter Crank
Forget it. Forget as much as possible. Forget the absolutely real suffering one endured, forget the insults, the failures, the disasters. Forget the pain. A cop out? Not at all. Forgetting lessens the suffering of the inescapable. One may have had an extremely painful physical or emotional experience last week or 50 years ago. One can either dwell on the suffering for years, or one can let it go. ("Forgetting" isn't like the destruction of traumatic brain injury. It's selective.) — Bitter Crank
Whether we can easily let the memory of suffering go or not is not entirely voluntary. Depressive types tend to hold on to the memory of suffering. Being depressive is not a voluntary condition, but the most depressed person can still make an effort to forget unpleasantness. The goal is not to escape into 'la la land', which in any case is short term and involves the payment of unpleasant withdrawal later on. — Bitter Crank
Successful forgetting won't change the antinatalist into a population explosion; it will just make their life more endurable until inescapable death provides relief. — Bitter Crank
It seems like you're saying, as long as there are coping strategies and preferences (like jobs that are more preferable than others), then it is justified to put people into these situations which inevitably cause suffering or are at least known to be a source of it. — schopenhauer1
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
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.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
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? — Anthony
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