Much if it was a response to the Union with England. An identity crisis. — Jamal

Wow. I didn't realize that. Cool.

I get the impression that you aren't aware of the mistakes that were made with regard to "dreamtime." Surely not.

Or maybe you didn't notice that I was specifically referencing that to explain my desire to go straight to scholars and bypass amateurs.

I have an unending hunger to know about human cultures. Wrong information just gets in my way.

Funny you should mention that, because that’s pretty much what did happen with Scottish culture. — Jamal

How so?

I’m saying that every culture is determined partly by what it is thought to be, both by insiders and outsiders. — Jamal

Sure. The same happens with individuals. If I expect the worst of you, I'll communicate that in various ways. Then it comes down to how open you are to suggestion.

In the case of the aboriginals, it would be as if someone misinterpreted some Scottish document and went on to create a fanciful story about your ancestors' beliefs. This narrative becomes popular, and since the oral traditions have broken down, you accept the mistake as your heritage. It's kind of sad.

Maybe at that point it’s not bullshit any more. Maybe culture works like that all the time. — Jamal

Maybe. Native Americans are aware that their own cultures are mostly lost and replaced by an all-purpose image that's Siouxan: the teepees, feathered headresses and so forth.

Are you saying that every generation is served up a dose of bullshit with the facts about their heritage?

There is a fair amount of inaccurate information circulating about the native Australians. Poignantly, that information (baloney about dreamtime and so forth) made it's way back to aboriginals who had no knowledge of the culture of their ancestors. They adopted the bullshit as their own.

I'll stick to scholars, thanks.

One puzzler is whether a person can transform herself through redirecting self-talk.

We recently had a thread about a famous American comic strip author. One of the things he's famous for is that he apparently guided his career by writing down his goals as if they were bound to happen. In each case, his goal was realized. One of his written messages was something like: "My comic will become the number one syndicated comic in America." And it happened.

I've used this myself, recently. Learning to trade on the foreign exchange market is known for its choppy psychological waves, especially at the beginning. Even before I learned first hand what they were talking about, I figured I better write down my goals. At the time, I thought they were very modest. Turns out, they were actually pretty challenging. My goals are like the glimmer of a lighthouse, confirming that the shore is over there. As I travel, the light gets brighter. My goals remind me to stay disciplined. At this point, I have chosen a strategy and I write it out every morning when I analyze the charts. It's my magic.

Notably, I'm drawn to using the ocean as a symbol of the wildness of emotion that follows trying and failing. The market itself is like an ocean with unknown depths and travelling "whales." Whales are institutional traders or guys like George Soros (known for having made the historically largest profit off the foreign exchange market.).

According the American literature, the ocean is the watery depths of the psyche and in response to a battle waged against it by a captain of rationality, it sends forth a white whale called Moby Dick. It doesn't end well for the captain or his ship. This book is specifically intended as a warning in an age of hyper-rationality: that waging a war against the psyche is dangerous to the whole community. The psyche has to play out its stories and it will react violently to being molested.

So this kind of magic doesn't allow you to create whatever world you might think of on a whim. It just acts as a rudder to guide you through the maze of possibilities toward the one you want. Every step of the way, you have to acknowledge the majesty and power of the psyche. Pit yourself against it, and you're doomed.

Godzilla vs King Kong

How did that movie end?

It's not personal, that's the point. It was Oppenheimer who quoted the Bhagavad-Gita in 1945. "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." — unenlightened

I meant you were part of a generation baptised in it.

Speak for yourself Frank — unenlightened

Ok, sorry.

But we are already haunted by our selves. Billions of people all haunted by the way they interpret events, all seeing the magic from the outside, or not seeing it because it is inside. I was brought up with "The Bomb". It was the new thing in the world, to be accommodated by psyche; by pretty much everyone in the world. "When you hear the alarm, crouch under your desk, put your head between your knees, and kiss your arse goodbye." It was transformative, this new destructive power, and more shocking even than the revelation of the depths of human depravity exposed in the deliberate mass starvation in Russia, and the Final Solution in Europe. This is my interpretation of events: we haunt ourselves. The secular magicians are playing with forces they cannot comprehend because they cannot comprehend themselves. — unenlightened

You were taught to worship Shiva.

I like civilization, but ask yourself, how much longer did the pre-civilization cultures like the Australian and North American indigenous population last? — BC

Australians, around 60,000 years. Native Americans, about 10,000. True, it's a long time. Not a lot of Beethoven or Shakespeare, but robust in other ways.

As Augustine pointed out, where there are cities, there is continuous unrest and violence. It's more dramatic.

That doesn't mean that these other cultures are inferior to my preferred civilization-topics. Or does it? — BC

I don't think civilization is inherently better aesthetically. Obviously it ended up being more successful than other modes.

For anthropologists, monument building is a mark of civilization.

It's partly the way you're interpreting events. We naturally look for repetition, so we highlight the similarities between now and the 1930s, using words like "mirroring.". This view is melancholic per Kierkegaard.

Alternately, we may see ourselves as unique in all of human history, and in some ways we are. There's hard edged drama to this outlook, because we see how we have problems no society has ever faced before.

It's a matter of predisposition.

I'm a frontline healthcare worker, so I still see the posters left from the pandemic that say "heroes wear scrubs." I don't know what that's supposed to mean, though. I was just doing my job.

What does it mean to you?

But what about the heroism that ultimately saved the surviving folk ? Don’t you see any nobility in that?

That gives meaning, despite the tyranny of evil man.

Something worth living for.

Something worth fighting for. — invicta

If you say so.

I take it most nihilists believe that nothing means anything? If nothing has any meaning why aren't more nihilists jumping off bridges and what not?

Where do nihilists believe meaning comes from if it were to be legitimate? — TiredThinker

There's a crowd of self-proclaimed nihilists on reddit. The loudest ones are fairly plaintiff and anti-natalist. The rest are so-called "positive nihilists", such as myself. It usually comes down to what aspects of life transfix you and so forth.

The answer to the second question is basically, no where. There is no meaning. This is harshest in regard to things like the Holocaust. There's supposed to be some sort of redemption in meaning, I think. Without that, it's just abysmal and oh well.

There's a weighty psychological and emotional side to it. Some just aren't going to go in that direction because they don't have the constitution for it. Some can't avoid it for various reasons.

I think there's probably a lot of chanting going on, like "I'm a terrible son." "Why are they calling me? I prefer text messages because I have so much more time to prepare to act like a regular human being on text messages." "I work hard to protect my ability to be abnormal, so you guys can screw yourselves!"

Personal chanting is supposedly the magic by which we create the world. So why does it seem that the world is totally fucked up? Because that's what we wanted. Utopia is boring.

**God, that's such smug bullshit. I bet all the people who like smug bullshit will appreciate it. God, they're so smug.**

The US CPI numbers came out this morning and inflation is higher. Powell has already warned that he's hawkish on increasing rates, but there was just a bank failure in California that increases fears of more bank failures due to negative P&L on their books as a result of rate hikes.

So the economy is between a rock and a hard place: if the fed does nothing, inflation continues to climb, if they act, it could potentially cause a string of bank failures the government would probably have to deal with.

It all just dissolves back into the mud from which it came.

A convergent series tends to a limit, gets closer and closer to a given number as the set increases. — Isaac

It never reaches the limit. Ok, try divergent progression.

Then you're not distinguishing between progress and merely 'change'. — Isaac

Think of a convergent progression in math. If that doesn't explain it, I probably won't be able to by adding more words.

Then toward what is it progressing? — Isaac

Just means development. Like if a person has had a stroke and now their mental status is degrading, one of the possibilities is that it's a progression of the stroke.

Progress can also be an element of goodness. In Christianity, goodness is not something we necessarily see by looking at a person's circumstances. It's that a person is always progressing toward God, trying to become better and reaching for redemption. This is part of our Persian birthright.

If cancer progresses, it's not toward a goal. It just means it's continuing to develop along certain lines. Enlightenment progress is like that in some ways since evolution is an example of it. The whole point was that there's no purpose to it.

The idea that it's only progress if it's toward something good is the reinsertion of values after we've already seen that we're just accidents doomed to oblivion. Since we can't seem to maintain an entirely amoral outlook for long, we'll find values one way or another. In other words, it's going to be progress of some kind, since progress has been an element of goodness since the west adopted the Persian worldview a few thousand years ago.

That’s my middle name. — Jamal

I knew it!

Fair enough. I have no wish to trigger sensitive Americans so I’ll retreat from this conversation. — Jamal

Looks like unjustified arrogance.

:up:

But is that like saying that since knives are used to kill, and killers are destroying their own world, knives are inherently self undermining?

I think you have to argue that we'll never have the wisdom to use our power wisely. It comes back to your vision of humanity.

I'm sorry if it wasn't clear. A species, such as Elm disease, that destroys its environment will not last long. Aeroplanes are part of the fossil fuel dependent culture that cannot long continue and will die out. — unenlightened

You mean the petroleum dependent way of life is doomed. I agree.

Looking for Progress and her sister, Endless Growth, is a wretched mistake that leads to the cliff edge — unenlightened

But amazingly, it's the technology rich societies whose populations are decreasing. It's countries that allow education and opportunity to women who have the unprecedented problem of transitioning to a smaller labor force because women are becoming professionals instead of baby machines.

It appears that it would help the environment if this culture, which for the first time in history treats women as adult citizens, would spread and bring the global population down.

There are alternatives to petroleum. We're working on fusion power now. It's possible to maintain the infrastructure of global community which allows us the ability to help one another and fulfill the potential we see in our dreams. We don't have to go backwards.

I am likening humanity to a species that we call a disease, that has not established a stable relationship with its environment but undermines it. I am arguing that this undermining is what we call progress in our own case. — unenlightened

I agree with this assessment. What's at issue is whether progress is exclusively a threat which must be abandoned, or if it's the solution to the problems we face.

This is where temperament comes into play, isn't it?

Maybe if it were possible for us to step back far enough we'd clearly see the Truth of Eternal Recurrence. Everyone's experienced déjà vu, after all. How much more proof do we need? — praxis

There's a little underground railway between the Eternal Return and Kierkegaard's Repetition.

The charge to board that train is 5 euros.

I think you have lost track of the argument.The demise of the dinosaurs made room for the age of mammals. This is not a progression but a succession. — unenlightened

I think your argument was that airplanes are the product of a diseased breed, so it's foolish to think of them as progress.

The sun of optimism can never bring light to pessimism. That bitterness is a black hole.

I said it was a rumor, not that it was God's Truth. — praxis

It's opposed to evolutionary biology. That trumps whatever God was going to say.

That's pseudo-science

Rumor has it they tend to be selfish. — praxis

Humans?

Do I? — unenlightened

You overlooked the possibility that our demise might allow some other species to flourish, and therefore the airplane very well may be a stepping stone to something amazing. I think that's because you think the end of us is the end of everything.

As I see it humans are making progress like Dutch Elm disease, thriving and growing and spreading until it wipes out all the Elms, and then itself. — unenlightened

You talk of humans as if they're the epitome of life. Who knows what glorious six legged creatures require our particular ashes in order to take off and become galactic explorers?

You aren't truly pessimistic until you rejoice in it. You're just jaded.

if the starting point is the extended family/tribe, the smallest viable group, there are only extinction, stasis, or enlargement as options. — unenlightened

But for hundreds of thousands of years, our species acquired skills only to lose them again. Stasis was the rule.

Something unusual happened about 60,000 years ago so that we started maintaining skills over time, allowing for accumulation and advancement.

So instead of developing the smelting of iron, only to lose it in the face of environmental disaster, disease, or war, we kept that skill and then went onto invent airplanes and so forth

I don't expect a response, just pointing out that progress isn't accidental for us. The conditions that set us in the path to progress may have been accidental, but ever since then, we've been taking the world into our own hands.

I'll just be over here in the corner.

Ok, cool. I don't know how that affects the discussion. The word used to mean that, now it means what it means now. There's no special mojo that makes the original use of the word have some power after that use has fallen out of favor. — Noble Dust

True. Today they take it to mean submission to God. I just meant that it doesn't come from their fiber, it comes from their heritage.