Caring is an action with a focus on control.

Caring is not a thought alone. Caring is an action we perform. We do not think of things unless we care about them. We do not make ourselves think of things in order to care. Thoughts come about repetitively when we happen to care. We do not seem to have control of what we care about. We can only control our proximity to them when conscious of the fact we care about them. Caring is an action because when we care in our thoughts we take physical actions due to the fact we care in our minds. If we are in denial about what we care about we may take actions based on artificial representations we make up in place of the things we really care about. Either way we are acting on something. Sometimes we may care about something, but feel powerless to overcome the challenge to acquire it. In these cases we tend to take on actions that reflect stress like drinking more or overeating. These habits of self-degradation only exist because we have not found the power in ourselves to overcome our fears and grasp our true desires. No matter how we look at it, caring is an action we perform, even when we perform actions that do not get us what we really desire. Sometimes it takes a little time and pain of avoiding someone or something that we cannot have to detach ourselves from them. We may take actions that are not in our favor in the short run in these times of stress, but if we act properly in our favor these times will pass in the long run.

Conscious struggle is key to grasping a denial and gaining power over our weaknesses. The reason we stay unconscious in many cases is because it is a control mechanism. I know a long time back I wrote on concepts of control and lack of control, and the conclusion was that there is no such thing as lack of control or disorder in the world. There are merely new forms of order and control that might not be in our favor or conscious to us. The constant changing of orders rapidly can seem like chaos, but in most cases the changes are stable whether we realize it or not. This is why we make ourselves unconscious sometimes. We do not want to see the order of how things really are in the world or ought to be in our lives. This is a control mechanism we create to avoid painful feelings and remain weak. Control mechanisms we create over ourselves exist in everyone. We are much less able to see the ones we have ourselves due to the way our emotions shape them in our lives. This is why a community is important. This actually a divide I see in method when looking at groups like Satanists that they themselves in many cases are not aware of. The divide I am talking about is Epicurean versus Nietzschean approaches to living a life in our favor. The Nietzschean approach is more focused on the individual priority and the willing of oneself to power. I do not prefer this approach because it is flawed to me. The reason is because the emotions we tie to ideas can keep us from seeing our own denial. The Epicurean seeks to strengthen the self through a community of friends. This is the idea of ethical egoism where we want to maximize ourselves for our own benefit, but the only way to best accomplish this is by benefiting those we know will treat us well back. We should all belong to a small community of friends who can be more objective to our weaknesses, and point them out for us in order to better us, and make the whole community better off. This is similar to a market system where we each seek to maximize our own utility, but the actions of all others will let us know if our actions are flawed or not working in reality.

There are some cases where even the community may lack the power to make some individuals see their denials. I can think of a few examples that come to mind when I think of this. One involved a father who was cooking hamburgers and asked the mother and son if anyone wanted a hamburger. The son said he did not want a hamburger. The father asked again just to make sure and the mother was sitting in the room the whole time. Once again the son makes it clear does not want one. When the father comes in the room eating a hamburger the mother asks why he did not make her one. He tells her that he asked if anyone wanted one and told her she did not respond. Her response was “I make dinner all the time”. This is a control method. She may or may not be conscious she is exerting this control method. The point is that she is not willing to admit she is flawed or wrong. If she can never admit this to herself, she can never work toward correcting her own actions. She wants to be in denial to her own actions, because it is painful for her to look at them and easier not to correct them. This allows her to keep acting as she chooses and take advantage of others. It is only the actions of the others who can change the way she acts in these situations by changing their actions towards her. In some cases the group may never cause them to become conscious of their actions. Some people just will not ever be able to look at the fears in themselves and overcome them, and it is because of some of these cases we must abandon them to make ourselves live better.

Another example I have experienced personally and have counseled many others on are situations where people will blow you off and act like it is not a big deal. These people do not really care about us. They only care what we can do for them on the surface and nothing beneath that. One instance is a friend I would call and ask to hang out. He in many cases would not call back for many days when he happened to be bored. He would make the excuse that he was busy that day doing something else, but never managed to call later that day to make plans for another time. By continually taking advantage of me by only calling at his convenience, the only choice I had was to stop calling him. The step beyond this of course is if he continued to call me and make pseudo plans I would have no choice but to advance further and say do not call at all anymore. The best method I found to deal with these people is to tell them not to call unless they are actually calling to hang out that moment. This confines them to only calling at your convenience and water is at its own level.

One more example has to do with something I have experienced and recently had to talk someone else through who was experiencing something similar to myself in the past. This had to do with a person they liked who would continually ignore their calls and would only call back at their own convenience. The pattern you start to see in these examples is that denial of others feelings is a method to keep these people from looking at their own issues. By projecting their personal issues onto others they can take advantage of them by assuming that their actions are completely proper and never seek to change themselves. This situation is very similar to the last one where she would continually call and when she would ask why he did not call back to at least say he would not be able to keep plans, his response was “I’m sorry if I hurt you in any way”. By saying this he was erasing the guilt from his actions and she would let him off the hook, only to do it to her again. Once again this is a control mechanism. As long as he could apologize whenever he took advantage of her and she would turn the other check, he would keep on taking advantage of her. It is only when she takes actions over herself to change what she is doing that he will stop taking advantage of her.

This is all in a sense a will to power, but you will notice that people have trouble accomplishing this on their own, and need someone from within their community of friends to give them strength to the see the situation for what it really is. Sometimes people will ask for advice or help and never act on it. They may become conscious of the desire to act and seem interested in talking about it, but afterward they will continue taking old actions anyway. We cannot be accountable for the actions of others. We can only seek to become conscious of our own and change the things we are doing. We should only go out of our way to understand the actions of others in our direct community, because understanding these actions and trying to better them will actually better our lives. It is true that in some cases we may not be able to better these people, but we should try if we have to deal with them in our everyday lives. Control is something we should only seek to get over ourselves, and we should always be ready to blame ourselves when something happens out of our favor so we can correct ourselves afterward. We cannot know better about the future without having some understanding of the past through experience, but a little superstition never hurts when seeking to try new things we may not have experienced personally.

What it means to care - The utilitarian flaw.

When looking at the definitions of happiness between the classics and the present you will notice the former sees happiness as a way of life, and the latter sees it as a temporary psychological state. Happiness for the ancients was not as we see it now, which a state that comes and goes in life, but happiness is a way we acquire when we live the right way. I believe it is possible to have a happy life by investing in actions that produce long-term rewards we can keep building on. Maybe there is no such thing as the happy life when it comes to the ability to feel good all the time, but a happy life can be one where if we look at the greater scheme of things we find a constant progression of the self. Happiness I believe is not something we get just by going through the motions. People who go through the motions of pragmatism at their job that has always brought them food on the table may be completely miserable even though they found something that works.

It seems happiness has three parts to it. One is finding pragmatic things that work. The second part is to work at new things that cause us to struggle while we subconsciously drill away at old mastered skills. It is odd to think that part of the happiness equation would require struggle. Even peaceful moments where we can be complacent only come about after we have struggled to reach them…and even then they are only temporary. Even if we relaxed all the time we would eventually become bored, depressed, and desire to struggle at something again. Struggle can only be done consciously, and those who struggle the most with success seem to find the most happiness. That is why the skills we have already mastered are like a monkey turning a crank unconsciously. They are no longer a struggle when we have mastered them. They become unconscious like chewing food while we consciously struggle at other things like thinking or working on something. When we are with friends we play, and sometimes the line between work and play is very thin. When we are in a conversation with friends there are many points where we are confronting each other’s beliefs and values. When we are playing active games like sports we struggle over who wins and who has control just as a conversation. Even in play we are working at winning or a goal consciously, and only in these conscious struggles can we improve ourselves. The funny thing is we all think everyday about things, and in many cases we all have thoughts of struggle with something in our lives. Most of these thoughts are struggles we may not be able to overcome. We just like having the ability to dream of overcoming them. The third part to happiness seems to be the ability to understand our true desires as well as knowing how to get those desires. It is getting to taste victory over and over again as a way of life that brings happiness after each struggle while never abstaining from a constant new struggle. Perhaps it is only those who manage to think of pragmatic ways to solve the riddles to some of these dreams in their real lives that actualize and conquer, while the rest just struggle in their thoughts and become depressed with their unchanging situations. They dwell on the past or things that they wish could be, but never seem to think of how to connect the “knowing that” of an idea to a “knowing how” of completing the dream. Happiness can only be found when we see a desire we want, find a pragmatic method to encounter it with, and conquer the desire through struggle to take it for our own. People who can keep achieving this continually throughout life by investing in things they know they can keep struggling and winning at are the ones who find happiness in the classical sense. They find happiness as a way of life. Struggle that is not happy is the kind that never brings a reward like a couple that never finds resolution in conflict or a dream that remains a dream while our real lives remain stagnant.

If we could now superimpose the concept of happiness as a way of life onto caring as a way of understanding we might be able to reach an actualization of our actions and true desires. It is only by understanding our true desires we can understand what we truly care about. If we act on things we do not really care about because we lie to ourselves we only find pragmatic means of struggle over a false desire. Under this method we project our energy and power into an artificial construction of comfort. This is because I believe we are utilitarian creatures by nature. We naturally run from pain and towards pleasure. The flaw in utilitarianism on the personal level is it allows us to lie to ourselves about our true desires. This is because true desire lies behind pain and fear. When we deny the true pleasures we desire and project our energy into the artificial we become insecure and fear fearful covertly. This is the man who puts himself through torture just to be someone’s boyfriend and finds that the relationship is horrible, but lives in denial of the horror just to maintain the label of boyfriend and claims he is a happy man when his struggle brings no rewards. By projecting the energy to care into a label with a particular person that bears no fruit he has given up the desire to be in a happy relationship somewhere else or even be alone happy. Being pragmatic and struggling over broken things that do not bring about our true desires leads to a life of misery. This is just learning how to make broken things work well instead of fixing them. I am sure we could all get good at walking on crutches, but why not get good at walking with a fixed foot? To overcome this utilitarian flaw we have to face fear and conquer it. Some fears are natural for a good reason like running from a hungry lion, but perhaps a lion in a particular situation must be conquered to achieve happiness in our lives. We can only conquer a fear if we care to. The problem is we tend to care about the artificial denial we created in place of the obvious fear that only others can see in us more often than we can. Sometimes it takes dialect with others to point out our fears, but even in these situations we tend to get defensive if we are not ready to see our flaws. Caring is not the ability to look at a problem and acknowledge it alone. Caring is an action we do upon the thing we acknowledge and not just an understanding of it. When we take action to struggle over a problem in a pragmatic manner to solve it we truly care, but this can be fatal if we are acting something that cannot be fixed or if it is an artificial construction we care about. Performing the same action again and again with no reward or result would be insanity. Insanity is a dream we never conquer. True desires exist beneath a series of layers we may never get to the bottom of, but the closer we get the better, and we can only do this when those close to us can see these denials on our surface and help us overcome them. It is only by placing ourselves in environments with people that are conducive to our true desires that we can actually accomplish our true desires. People who are opposed to our desires are only artificial friends we constructed to find pleasure in, in order to avoid the pain covering our true desire that they help us deny we have to achieve them. They will convince us that we do not want to become what we truly desire so we can be dragged down to their level of less accomplishment. This environment is not in our favor and it is only by going to one with friends that support, or an environment where we are alone we can achieve what we desire, but an environment with friends is always more desirable if we can find those that fit our desires.

Maximizing utility and how true power is gained.

In liberal-democracy we are afforded the benefit of security for the surrender of some of our freedom. The more freedom we give up the more security we have, and the more security we give up the more freedom we have. In liberal-democracy in the West, rights are emphasized on the individual’s freedom to maximize their self-interest, where in the East there is a focus more on collective or state interest. It could be said that the West has more focus on the deontology of life, where the ability for the individual to have the right to make choices regardless of the outcome is the right thing to have exist. In the East there is a focus on utility, where some people may get hurt in the process, but overall the community is better off.

Since I live in the West and the state has allowed me enough security to exercise certain amounts of my will, the question then becomes, what is the maximized utility of the individual who has the right to act as they please? Going back to the last couple writings, I would argue the best way to maximize the self is to know the self the best possible. We can never fully know the self or we would be gods of the self. We can never know all other intentions of other individuals or this too would make us similarly godlike. We can obviously know the self better than we know anyone else. Who then, should we take the time to get to understand if we cannot possibly understand the intentions of everyone? Should it not only matter that as long as people are giving me the thing I want from them, that this is all I need to know? I would say yes for most people. We do not have time to understand why the man who sells us ice cream is driven to sell it beyond the benefit we get from it. We may only care to inquire further if we thought the ice cream may harm us, or the man selling it could offer us more in life than just ice cream. This all comes down to caring. If we care, then there is enough incentive to dig deeper into something. The thing we care about however may be a compensation for what we truly desire. This is obviously our problem and not someone else’s unless helping us dig deeper in ourselves is of some benefit to them. This means those who are willing to benefit us on a level where they will be regularly integrated in our lives are worth getting to know more deeply than those we have basic trades with, and these same people we gain a lot from are the ones we want to understand the most, because helping them understand themselves more, will lead to them maximizing their utility, and if they are integrated into our lives, that means it will help us maximize our utility better in the process of helping them toward knowing ourselves.

Going a step further into this game of utility we may come to a situation where we are playing a game of maximizing ourselves, and in the process of doing so, someone else steps on our game without meaning it and we make them conscious of the fact. Who is wrong? I would argue it depends who we are in society. If I was the president of an authoritarian country who was stepped on then they are wrong. If I as an authoritarian dictator step on them, then they are wrong for being in the way of where I was playing. What it really comes down to is whoever has the power to do harm or damage to another is right. Does this mean if we have this power we should always do as we please without taking others feelings into account? I would argue no to an extent. No, because if you keep stepping on people smaller than you, it is only a matter of time before they come together and revolt against you. If you cannot crush them as an entire community, then it is in a greater interest to our utility to seek cooperation with them wherever we can find it. Besides, it is very difficult to crush entire communities, because some will always escape and rebuild new communities that are similar and more extreme. This then goes back to the prior paragraph of seeking to benefit ourselves and any others who seem to have similar interests. It is not wise to benefit others without getting benefited, or benefit ourselves without benefiting others most of the time. To truly maximize a utility of self is to benefit ourselves in as many ways possible as well benefit others in the process. The problem with going out of our way to benefit others is they may not get the benefit we seek to give them, or we may help them hoping to get a reward and then do not. If I were a professor and taught things I thought would help improve students lives, the fact is only a small portion of those students may take what I said and apply it the way I intended or even in a way that benefits their desires. Why then should I go out of my way to teach? I would say it benefits the teacher in seeing how well they are at their skill and improving themselves more than the student, but because students can benefit in the process we should continue teaching. At the same time we never went out of our way to teach these particular people. They chose to come into our classroom. The people who are going to get the lessons and use it in a way that is beneficial to them are the ones who get it, and not everyone will get what we try to teach them. At the same time, many people in a class may not know why they are even in a class, or took the class because it was the only thing available for an elective. The point being made is we should not go out of our way help people become conscious of the things they will not become conscious of in life with or without our help. People who are going to get certain things in life will get them, and certain people will not. It is not our job to teach them lessons unless they seek them, and even in seeking them, they may still only learn through their own experience. We should not try to pull people up to our level of consciousness on an issue unless we can benefit from doing so in the process.


This goes back again to playing a game to maximize utility and who is right or wrong in a situation. In a liberal-democracy where the emphasis is on the individual freedom, people for the most part are equals under the law. We know that even though this may be true under the law, we still have hierarchies and power structures within such a liberal-democracy. Lets say I am a prominent figure within a subculture and someone starts dating a girl I used to have a good time with. When I was playing with the girl, I was playing game X. The new man is playing game Y. Game X and Y are similar in certain respects, but regardless are different games. Since there are some similarities in the games there is an area where similar partials overlap, and my toes are stepped on, because I am uncomfortable, but the player of game Y is not conscious till I notify them. Game Y had no intention in making me uncomfortable. They were simply going after happiness and my toes happen to be standing beneath where they are stepping. Who is wrong? It should not be game Y’s concern if my feelings are hurt or I am uncomfortable. In what situation should they care then? It should only be their concern if I had been integrated in their life long enough and deep enough that I brought more utility to their life than this new person. If I am more prominent than he is however within our subculture, I have the power to make his life hard on him by making others dislike him till he leaves and my zone of comfort has returned. Morals are decided by whom we care about and who benefits us. Therefore, right and wrong are only relative to those we have emotional empathy built toward. We have no obligation to make other people’s lives better for them unless they have the power to harm us. Even as a prominent figure however, we may perform an action that is seen as disgraceful to the community and this may lower our prominence within the community or even cause us to have to leave. The example is that, even though I have the prominence to make the player of game Y’s life harder on them by trying to make others dislike them forcing them to leave the community, I may be seen as dishonorable for doing so in my self interest to the community and fail in my plot to harm others intentionally that meant me no harm in the pursuit of happiness.

If we look at the life of Jesus, we would not see a peaceful man according to an account like the book of John, but when looking at the Dead Sea Scrolls, the account of a man who wanted to change power structure of the status quo. Jesus preached of the coming of a kingdom that would liberate the Jews and replace the Roman kingdom. He not only wanted to abolish the Roman Empire, which he believed it would take place in the form of a holy war from forces above, but he also was likely an Essene, which was an extreme sect of Judaism that wanted to radicalize and take precedent over the other Jewish beliefs at the time. Jesus drove everyone from the temple, and was then put to death. His followers afterward sought to spread his message, and this message of a holy war against the Empire was seen as a threat. Eventually, the Jews all assembled at Jerusalem for what they thought would be the final apocalyptic battle to be crushed by the Roman army and had their city burned down. What is to be learned from this is that even though we believe having our own beliefs are important, if they come in conflict with those more powerful than us we should compromise our beliefs in the areas that are in conflict. If we seek to do harm on them for being more powerful and are treating us well, we are actually practicing weakness due to our insecurity. What you find later is that Christianity fuses with pagan beliefs due to its persistence not to die in opposition to the Empire, and then is eventually fused with the Caesar as the new monotheistic being that rules over everyone. Nothing really changed in the structure. The only thing that changed was the titles of the existence of the same things. Strength is something gained through the building of the self. It is not a building of the self in opposition to others, but should only be to define ourselves relative to others. To seek infliction of damage unto others is a sign of weakness for fear of them overshadowing us. To run from things that make us insecure or fearful of being in their shadows is also a sign a weakness. Strength is having the power to treat people well. It is not the giving kind in the Christian sense where we give for the sake of giving, because people who give just to be liked really do not have anymore to give than this, and this too is a sign of weakness. It is not giving to those less benefited than us just because we have the power too, because this then makes them reliant on us. It is having the power to make people’s lives better, because we see something in them that can help make our lives better too. If they have nothing that can make our lives better, or are making us unhappy, we should only exist relative to the weaker as the stronger, and in the shadow of those stronger than us as their weaker. To overcome those who are stronger than us, we must not fear them or seek to harm them, but seek to build ourselves up to their level from within through cooperation with them or others at our level till we reach them. This is justice created through peace, and peace created through justice by exercising power properly.

What this really comes down to is no matter how much power we have, the only real power is the kind we gain through cooperation with those who benefit us emotionally and tangibly the way we desire. Going out of our way to harm others for our own benefit will eventually make our lives worse, the same as going out of our way to help people who do not benefit us. This means we should do what ever is in our benefit where others can benefit too, but if people step on out toes on accident, it seems to be wiser to know ourselves better, so in the future we do not stand where our toes can get stepped on again instead of seeking to stop people from playing in a way that is maximizing themselves and might accidentally harm us. If we consciously seek to harm these people back for accidentally causing us pain or damage, they may not understand why we are harming them for trying to be happy, because once again, some people will get it and some people will not. If we try to educate them, they may still not get it. They will only learn pain by experiencing it in the same way they dealt it, and that is not for us to teach them. If we just learn to understand ourselves, we can know how to avoid being in the way of others and still find ways to better ourselves that are not beneath their feet when playing. Nobody likes a weak person. A weak person is one who seeks to harm others on purpose to advance themselves, the same as a weak person is always giving with their heart on their sleeve, because they have nothing to offer but just that. A strong person builds themselves up so they have things people want, and when they find discomfort, loss, or pain, they do not seek to change or harm others to benefit themselves. They seek to change themselves to benefit themselves and others in the process. This person will do what is best for themselves and the community.

The Noble Lie I can lie no more.

A motive is driven by a desire, but a desire may be driven by another desire. A desire we lie to ourselves about will never solve our dilemma. The only way to solve a dilemma is to hit the proper nail on the head. In many cases we hit the wrong nail on the surface of the wood and not the one ingrained beneath the surface. Going back to the thinking of those like Plato or Descartes we come to the school of rationalism and reductive logic. In contrast to this were Aristotle and people like Locke or Hume with empiricist, or deductive logic. The difference is the former believes we can reduce an issue rationally through deep thought, by thinking of all the things that are not possible until we are only left with what is possible, and can build possible options of these possibilities. The latter believes in a similar idea of reducing all possibilities down to what is possible, but also believes the process of knowledge can only be achieved by examining what is true outside of the body, rather than reducing possibilities in the mind alone. The difference in approaches comes down to inductive versus deductive at a certain point. Is knowledge gained from within the mind of one who thinks well, or is it gained from examining the world around us?

I would argue a combination of the two is the only way to have some knowledge of the world. All reality is relative to our experiences, but is knowledge gained from outside or inside of us? It is rather circular and going back to superstition and pragmatism we can see a dichotomy of rationalism and empiricism, because to rationalize properly is the theorize what may be possible, and to empirically examine is to be pragmatic, and to be too much of one or another is flawed. If we want to hit the right nail, we must first find if the nail is something to be discovered outside or inside of us. Is the surface nail in front of us outside our bodies to examine and behind it is the latent nail waiting to be hit, or is it surface conscience and the subconscious is waiting to be brought forward? The problem is we cannot separate facts from values. Facts exist in the physical world. We first gain values, beliefs, motives and desires from our interactions with the world. What about the innate motives and desires we are born with? I would argue those were put there by the experiences of our ancestors. At some point humanity was not conscious enough to understand our experiences and built unconscious emotional reflexes to pleasure and pain. Those experiences are passed onto us in the future and become the innate and a priori drives of desire we carry for survival. These survival traits are pragmatics given to us, but sometimes the emotional reflexes make mistakes when a past experience does not account well for a present experience, because environments change from life to life and even in our own lives, and if we do not create flexible habits for new environments, we may keep hitting old nails without overcoming them. These old nails are old values and beliefs that drive current motives. We attach them to current facts subconsciously through the lens of our minds. This prejudice is what causes us to never be completely objective. It is only through the lenses of many minds that we can have a slightly better or intersubjective meaning of the world.

The problem of not being able to separate the facts from the values exists because we cannot separate empiricist pragmatism and rationalist superstition. The difference in how much you want of either of these depends on situation. It is good to be more pragmatic is learning a skill that involves objects. This is what scientific study is for. It is good to be more pragmatic in hard science, because we are less likely to look at objects with the prejudice we do toward other people. When trying to discover the functions of an object, we ask ourselves, what can it do for us? We would never examine an object in the sciences if we did not think it would advance mankind or just ourselves. If we belief it will help mankind in the future, we will examine all the features of objects that we see as useful. When it comes to people, we should be a little more superstitious. The deductive model of scientific method works best on the world outside of our bodies, but it does not give survival reflexes the way rationalism will. You can know all you want about how the world works in books, but you can only learn how to fight or flight through interaction with others. We want rationalism in philosophy, law, and relationships with people. It is the tooth and nail struggle of interactions that build up our reflexes, the way we tooth and nail our way logically in an experiment till we get the answer. It is the innate desires and desires gained through action that are embedded in us. The process of interacting with others should be as inductive as possible. The problem with deductive logic in interactions is a scientific model does not fit everyone. We use something similar to scientific models called labels. A label is like a model in that a model is already set up like directions to the assembly of a car. If we follow the directions right, we can reach the proper end of the a functioning machine. Interactions with people on the other hand are more organic, and if we walk in with a label, we tend to do the same thing we do with other objects to human objects. We look at someone and think, what can they do for me? If we see an attractive person and we are single, we think, maybe they can be my boyfriend or girlfriend. We already impose the label on them based on our desires, beliefs, and motives. The process of interaction becomes one of trying to make them fit the label of what we thought they would best suit in our lives. This puts expectations up at a high level and makes us too superstitious, and when expectations are too high, we tend to get let down a lot.

Rationalizing is not about thinking of the best way to think our way out of desires that might be bad. I would argue that rationality is a slave to our desires instead. Rationality only exists as a mode to help us find the most pragmatic method of achieving emotional wants. The mistake of over rationalizing in most cases is we naturally tend to lie about true desire and emotion, and compensate for by creating an alternative for emotions to go into (surface nails). Plato would have us think that the rational part of the soul should rule the other parts of courage and appetite, but what if rationality is a slave of appetite? If the rulers of a city have no money, the moneymakers could revolt by withholding resources. The same goes for us. The rational part of us is at the mercy of the appetite. By compensating for the true appetite and telling ourselves the noble lie, we divert desires to places they do not really want to be. Sometimes those who rule over us do not know what is best, because some experiences must come directly from those in a situation. This means the ability to rationalize should only exist to let the appetite get the thing it desires most with the least difficulty. We do not want to tell ourselves the noble lie in life. Telling the noble lie makes us run from pain and toward pleasure when true pleasure is overcoming the pain we would naturally run from. Running toward pleasure is a surface nail of compensation. It would make more sense to punch the thing hurting us in the face than to hit a punching bag to make up for the life we do not really want. The reason we do the things we do each day without thinking about it, is because we are unconsciously compensating for a life we would really like to be living. It is only when we consciously struggle we are achieving something better than we are now. Rationalism of something that makes us uncomfortable is best grappled by asking why we are uncomfortable. We have to ask what is it I am trying to prove, what is the motive behind wanting to prove it, and what is the solution to the end desire? When we stop lying to ourselves about the true end desire we want from a situation, we can stop compensating for it with alternative desires and run at pain head on. The conscious struggle with pain will give us peace and we can start living the way we really desire to live in that department. If we know we cannot have what we really want in a situation after thinking it through and confronting it, we should just leave and look elsewhere for things we do really want that we can have.

We cannot escape the process of labeling. This I believe is a survival mechanism created through language in order to describe what was harmful and not harmful in the wilderness humanity used to live, and even today to point out groups of people we see as threatening. We naturally walk into an interaction seeking people to fulfill our desires, but it is only through time we learn to trust certain people manage to fit these labels. If you think about it however, the people who managed to fit those labels the best, were in fact the ones we never expected them from. When we think of our best friends, and look back to when we met them, we never thought they would be our best friends upon meeting them. They ended up becoming the label even though we did not label them till later on when it was obvious. This was an inductive process where we learned what something was from a bottom up process, instead of a top down process of putting them in a model or label. Induction and reflex seem to work best with little thought applied. Since most of our desires and motives are unconscious in our interactions, the less we try to think about them, and the more we try to just do what feels good, seems to bring about results in our favor. However, just doing what feels good only works most of the time. There is one element of reductionism that needs to be accounted for, and that is the reductionism of the self. If we think too hard about our interactions we will drive ourselves insane. On the other hand we cannot escape the ability to dream about what others can be in our lives due to the fact we naturally seek to make them fit labels. The most we can do is make the expectations of the labels lower upon the urge to rationalize them. When we see the person that looks like a good boyfriend or girlfriend, we need to stop and think, maybe they will never be that, and the best we can hope for is a friend. If we remind ourselves that friends is the best it may be, we can stop trying to impress the way we would a potential mate. This is looking for a solution on the outside, by changing the values of the facts around us to something of a slightly lower expectation. The second part of the equation is to use reductive logic on our inner desires. If there is a desire behind another desire, then going purely on what feels good is a utilitarian pleasure and pain approach that can be flawed in some cases when new environments do not fit old habits and we hit the wrong nails. The only way to know thyself, is to trace back a desire in our mind through dialect with others who will see it for what it is beneath the surface. We need to talk to friends and ask, what is the real reason I sought out this interaction, and how is seeking out this desire valuable? What will be valuable in the long term? Once we trace back our surface desires to our true desires, we then readjust our values to ones that we think will benefit us the most. The mistake a lot of people make is they lie to themselves about their true desires and use the surface motives to make decisions that are not in their interest long term. It is the constant process of making sure the outer label is realistic and the inner desire is compatible with it that will lead us to desires we favor most often. Pleasure and pain reflexes are not enough when we do not understand the source of our pleasure and pain. It is only by knowing ourselves we can see our true pain and attack it. If we attack our insecurities and fears, we will gain more power over the desired meanings we want from life, which will lead to the true desired actions, and self-actualization.

One more point to add is how to keep people from taking advantage of our desires and asserting that we will get the desires we want. We have to acknowledge that people are selfish, and it is this selfishness we let take advantage of us sometimes when we do not use it properly to our advantage. What we are taught in many cases is to treat others, as we would like to be treated, but the only purpose of doing this is so others do not do bad things to us. What we really want are people to do the things we want. If we do this through force, we usually just make them resent us, but if we can do this through persuasion, it is in our favor. To put it another way, we should never help anyone unless they are giving us what we want back right away. If the situation exists where they could possibly not give us what we want at the same time we are helping them, then we should not compromise. The action of helping others now for a favor later should only be reserved for people who have earned our trust over time, and have proven they will return a favor later after many trades on the spot have passed. Helping people out for no favor but the favor of feeling good is not in our interest. This only makes us feel good a short time and makes them complacent as well as take us for granted. Getting people to help us in a way that will not help them in the long run will only cause resentment from them and sometimes revenge. The proper way to help people is to first make sure we are getting helped, and second find ways to make it so they get helped in the process too. This allows everyone to benefit, and most important of all, it keeps us from getting screwed. This is self actualized selfishness, because anyone who acts to only benefit themselves cannot get very far in rewards, the same as one person building house will not have as big a house as five people using each other for a better end. Acting in this way keeps us in control of our desires. The greatest mistake most people make is doing acts for others in hopes of later reparations, and this happens most often because we impose a label we think they will fill if we give them what they want now, instead of making sure we get what we want now. Building a dream is like building a house. If we dream a little closer to us, and do not have our head in the clouds, we are more likely to achieve a dream pragmatically, and slower build another small one on top of it. We can keep readjusting our aim with each shot we take without firing into the clouds and come out knowing how we end up where we did. If we understand how we did something intentionally, we can do it again and keep doing it better, compared to firing in the clouds on accident and never getting it right again if ever.

Overcoming fear and the route to self-progression.

Pragmatism and superstition play a key role in self-progression. We tend to generalize our experiences onto the world around us in the form of projections. When we have experienced the success or failure of particular actions in life, based on what has worked and has not worked, we project this into our superstitions of what will work in the future. To be completely pragmatic would be to go through the actions we know work without questioning them, but never questioning the actions beyond knowing they work will likely not lead to better actions or improvements of actions. If we do not know why something works, we will never get to the root of experience. To be completely superstitious would be to base the future on things other than primary physical experiences, only on secondary experiences, or those further removed than secondary experience. To be this superstitious is to base reality on what friends tell us about the world from their own experience (secondarily removed from primary experience) or what someone tells us they heard about someone else (more than twice removed from primary experience). The overly pragmatic person is a slave to the grind. The overly superstitious are lazy and talk about their dreams with little action.

Going back to experience of the particular in the first paragraph, the point to be made is if we base the most likely future on our experience alone, we are being too pragmatic, and if we base what is possible on secondary experience or more alone, we are being too superstitious. We need a combination of our own experiences and secondary experiences. The problem with some is they claim that their way works so they should never try anything other than what they know works. The problem with others is they speak of what works based on what they hear, but they have nothing to show for it in their own life. The solution is obviously, to try as many things as possible, but always question the motivation behind the action, and ask others their motivations behind the same or opposite action; especially the opposite action, because the opposition of our actions being brought into question will either strengthen our motive, or it will cause us to take on new and better motives. This would of course be a form of virtue ethics that we come to an understanding of through dialectic with others, but not dialectic in speech alone, but also with application afterward.

The true root of action is motivation and desire. The problem many of us run into is we do not understand our true motivations and may be in denial of our desires. Many religions preach a message of denying or desire because it is bad. This only causes us to compensate for desire with a lower grade desire. All motivations are driven by desires. If we can be honest with ourselves about our true desires, we will not have to compensate for them. Another reason people may compensate for a desire is because, to accept we cannot have a particular desire is painful, so we tend to lie to ourselves about what that desire is to us in our lives, and compensate for it as well by performing actions around the desire instead of engaging the issue we have with it.

Nobody can have a holistic understanding of reality. We all have fragments of it based on primary and secondary experience or more. What we have not experienced in the primary, we fill in with information from the secondary about the world. Once we have experienced something, we tend to claim we know better than the secondary, but how do we know our experience was the best way to experience, or if it was a bad experience, how do we know it cannot be better? We do not know unless we can be superstitious enough to question if another action is possible, and it is an action we can actually attempt in the future.

The only way to overcome a particular experience is to stop living in insecurity and fear. Nobody is insecure or fearful as a whole. We are insecure and fearful about particular experiences we have had. For example, we may be fearful of marriage, because we always had bad relationships, and everyone we know has been divorced. This is pure pragmatism, and any superstition is filled in with the emotional bias of cognitive dissonance. We want to believe that the thing we would really like (marriage) is a bad thing or thing that does not work, because we fear being hurt again, and we look at any other secondary experiences we can use to support our fear. This is an example of lying to ourselves about our desire, which changes our surface motive, but not the true latent motive. Motives and desires are tied together. What happens instead is we deny our true motive to ourselves, and then replace it with a lower grade desire of being alone, and we preach the greatness of independence and the fallacy of marriage. It is the particular fear that causes insecurity and the ability to lie to ourselves, and this creates discomfort, depression, and anxiety, because we are changing our lives to be something other than we would like it to be by changing the meaning of what is desired.

The only way to overcome fear and insecurity is to first know thyself. Some people will preach the understanding of others, or your enemy, but we really do not need to understand others beyond what they state their desires are. If we know ourselves, we will be willing to admit our true desires to ourselves, and from there decide what actions need to be taken in order to be happier. It is not till we deconstruct the meaning of a desire to its simplest component that we can build the framework to best achieve that motive. Once we know ourselves when it comes to a particular desire, we can stop living in insecurity and fear. Building off the last example we can say, yes I have been hurt a lot by people, and I deny wanting to marry, because I fear getting hurt, so I convince myself marriage is bad, because I believe people will only hurt me. With understanding of the self, we need enough superstition to think of people who do have good marriages, and then pragmatically seek out people who are successful in marriage and ask what they do to make it work well. To understand a desire is to understand the meaning of that desire. If we understand the true meaning we desire in an action, we can stand by the meaning of how we would like the world to work in a particular situation. When confronted with a situation of a boy or girl that does not exist in our lives the way we want them to, we cannot give up our meaning of how we would like them, and surrender it to their meaning, or they have power over our actions. We need to put our foot down where we desire and tell them, you will be these things in my life, or you will not exist in my life, because this puts us in the position of power. It gives us power because we are not giving up wanting more than they do from us, and are now offering them more than they want or nothing. Nothing is less than the less they wanted to give us, and as long as we stand by our meaning people cannot take advantage of us, because it is they who want less that have power in an interaction, but the underdog can take power back if they find the will to declare putting them at a lesser desire than something not good enough.

Desire is inescapable, but desire can be put in the right place to satisfy us. If desire is put where long-term rewards are believed to be instead of short-term rewards, it means we need to put work into them, and hard work will pay off for long-term benefits where they will not for short-term happiness. It is pushing the rock up the hill over and over that brings satisfaction, and not quick rewards followed by stagnation. It is overcoming the fear of pushing the real rock and not the pseudo rock to compensate for the real rock that gives us the life we really want. We cannot overcome the fear of a particular till we blame ourselves for all the things that go wrong in our actions. Someone might argue that they did not know any better when they made a decision. None of us act against our interest on purpose when we make a decision, but if we deny ourselves the blame we will never correct ourselves if similar situations come up in the future. This is knowing thyself. If we always blame others for the situations we found ourselves in we did not like, we will continue to find ourselves in those situations. It is not, they took advantage of me, but I let them take advantage of me, and understanding how we can correct the action of others doing the same to us in the future is the only way to get past fear of a similar event in the particular past. Once we confront desire and motivation, we can put our foot down by action and meaning without fear, and what does not meet our expectations is not for us, and we need to move on till only the things that fit in the frame of our desire are present without lying to ourselves. Overcoming insecurity and fear is the only route to self-progression. If we cannot overcome these, it is because we live too pragmatic or superstitious, and without dialogue to share with others we can put into practice in, we will never gain the consciousness of our own actions the same.

The balance between superstition and pragmatism.

This is an extension of the “Know That”/”Know How” application that takes some questions into further consideration. The first thing I’d address is Aristotle’s golden mean, which a lot like the idea of building the right reflexes for the right situations. This is mistaken a lot for moderation, but has more to do with knowing how to react in particular situations by applying the proper actions, and the best way to do with is with experience. Every time we fuse a new horizon with our old prejudice and create a new familiarity we tend to apply this to our everyday lives.

This leads into another issue, which is the problem of generalization. This comes about by human nature I believe. Generalizing is our way of explaining complexities we cannot possibly ever explain in detail. You will always get in debates with people where you hear comments like guys are like this, or older people are like that, and we are all guilty of this on some level, but what is more important is how to get around this problem. Since we cannot ever really explain the world beyond our personal experience, it would seem the only way to address the world is with what we best learn “how to” do that works for us.

An example of this is a debate I found myself in last night, where I was told I looked very young for my age, and my response was that it worked against me, because I attracted young girls who do not know what they want instead of mature women that do (a generalization). The response to this was women no matter what age do not know what they want (another generalization). From here of course comes another thing that people tend to do, which is cognitive dissonance. This is where we purposely gather ideas that fit the ideas we would like to believe, instead of looking at the ideas that might prove them wrong so we can hold onto our prejudices. This seems to be a natural human tendency where we do not alter this tendency till it is no longer possible to reject the thing that is obvious and we have to familiarize ourselves with the alien idea. Naturally this person starts to say all the marriages and relationships that do not work out and why you cannot trust anyone to be loyal. This to me sounds more like a projection of personal fear and insecurity due to their own personal experiences than how things truly are all the time.

This brings up my solution of how to get around the problem of generalizations, insecurity, and fear. I wrote before on the power of meaning. This is an important tool because it is a concept that shows if you walk through life knowing exactly how you want something and are not willing to change it unless you absolutely have to, you will be much more likely to get what you want in life or nothing, but nothing is better than something you did not want. The idea behind Aristotle’s golden mean is that we might not always hit the target we want right at the center in the things we do, but life is this ongoing process of continuing to aim in the right direction for the things we want, and continue to perfect our aim in order to at least come as close as possible to what we want in each pursuit, and then with each pursuit we can adjust our aim a little based on prior experiences.

Sometimes research can be an experience that will alter the way we look at the world. Perhaps if we have only had certain kinds of experiences, we may come to the conclusion that things must always work a certain way, but then when we look at a demographic of statistic, we will see something much different. I myself have not had a very successful relationship in one-way or another, but I also do not give up hope, because of research and from the few examples that look like they are working. You would not ask what kind of weight lifting diet to pursue from a skinny person giving advice. You would look to someone who has a strong looking body. You would not look at someone for dieting tips that was fat. You talk to someone skinny. You do not look at people with failed relationships and marriages for advice on how to have a good relationship and marriage. This is why I have a hard time believing someone who tells me all the reasons something is likely to fail and nobody can be trusted. I’m only hearing personal insecurity and fear based on personal failure and only seeing incidents of the same in their friends and relatives. It seems the way to aim at the mean of something is to seek out people who are doing the right things for the results you want.

Let’s take a look at some concepts that would make a more stable marriage. First it can be stated that psychology studies show people do not start managing to weigh the long term benefits of actions till they near thirty compared to younger people who act more on impulse for more immediate gratification, so age is a sign of greater stability and knowing more what we want longer term. We can also see that although everyone’s levels of extroversion and neuroticism vary, these two things also to go down with age in everyone, so this is a sign of greater stability too. People who cohabitate before marriage are more likely to divorce in sociological studies, but one variable to be aware of is it is not cohabitation in itself, but the mentality that comes with doing so. People who cohabitate as a means of “trying things out” to see if they can work are the ones who divorce more, but people who move in already knowing they intend to get married and just do not have the finances and resources to do so right away will more likely stay together. Maybe we should not move in with people if we know we are not ready to marry anyone. We can learn how to live with others by having roommates. Roommates are a good way to learn how to deal with others. The top five reasons people divorce in the United States are: Poor communication, Financial problems, A lack of commitment to the marriage, A dramatic change in priorities, and Infidelity, and if there is one variable all of these correlate strongly with it is age. Young people do not communicate as well, have good finances compared older people, have as great a commitment, have stable priorities, and are still playing the field. One more study is that red states have higher divorce rates than blue states, and the reason I can think of for this one as well is age, because red states have more religious people who do not believe in sex before marriage and/or abortion, so they get married to have sex and kids, or they get pregnant and do not abort and marry the parent. We do not know anything matter a factly in life, but we do have the ability to point our desires in the direction of the things that seem to work, and in the process of doing so we can get closer to and better at the things we desire. Beyond age we can see what kinds of people tend to be more stable in particular situations and realize that these are the kinds of features we should look for in others if we are likely to come close to the same things.

There is one more issue I would like to address here, and that is superstition. Superstition can be an enemy or a friend I believe. Someone like Richard Dawkins would likely argue that all superstition is bad, and the worst of course would be religion, but I take the side of William James more, who believed that pragmatism is all that really matters. Religion can be a positive thing in our lives if we can use it for pragmatic ends that help us get the things we desire in life better than without it. I part a lot with Dawkins on the idea that religion is a meme that had a function once and no longer does, because religion is the equivalent of superstition to me. Humans will likely always be superstitious. That means even if we rid ourselves of religious ideas, we would still buy into ideologies like Marxism and stories like Forest Gump, as pragmatic ways to deal with our issues. The meme argument to me is equivalent to saying we struggled to find food for so long and now our bodies still have this desire to overeat, because evolutionarily we did not know when we would eat again, therefore we should not ever eat again. Obviously we need to eat in order to live. We just need a pragmatic method of eating that does not harm us; very much like Aristotle’s mean, where we develop the proper virtue ethics to suit an environment and habitat in order to flourish the best way possible. Superstition can be a tool that helps us pull ourselves out of the hard times in life, because the stories and beliefs help us escape the current pain we are dealing with, or even give us the idea to try something we would not have thought was possible had we just relied on our day to day interactions with people on the street. On the other hand we might use our superstition to become complacent, and the example I used before was people who watch movies as a way to pass time and not actually use the ideas for potential action. This would lead to a dream state where we never actually achieve the ends we desire, because they are not realistic or pragmatic.

There can also be a problem with pragmatism. What if we learned to be a good criminal, because through experience it proved to be the best way to survive in the environment we grew up in? If we are not flexible we would not be able to adapt well to other environments where this is not acceptable behavior. Just because we manage to be pragmatic does not mean we learned how to live well, or in a way that others will accept. This is where superstition would allow us to imagine a way to be a different kind of person in particular actions, even if nobody else around us is doing them, or we never saw them work. Sometimes watching movies or reading books and studies about other ways people can be and are will allow our superstition to motivate us in a way we would not have thought possible through pure pragmatic experience. Of course it is putting a dream into action and then seeing if it is pragmatic that seems to be the best combination. The proper balance then seems to be to do what seems realistic, but to try what might not be and through trial an error we can become more pragmatic in more realistic ways that are possibly superior to those who fear chance or dreams in the same environments too much and cannot find their golden means in life. I would add that taking our time when getting to know people seems to be more pragmatic in most cases because we do not put our hearts on our sleeves, which makes us look foolish, and can take more time to feel people out and see if they fit our dreams.

Weight lifting philosophy.

I started doing something a little different with my routine that I don’t normally try and I’ve seen pretty good results, so I decided to share it with anyone who wants to read it. I usually gain weight in the winter and this is the first winter…I think ever where the opposite has happened. In fact, I’ve dropped down to a lean 175 lbs (I’m 5’9) with a body fat of 15%, which is pretty good for a guy, and I’ll likely lose more fat.

First of all, I’m fairly sedentary most of the time, believe it or not. This brings me to the first point, which is 70-80% of physique is diet and nothing more. The way to get a lean build is to multiply your ideal weight by 10-12, but I’d say 12, because we’re talking ideal weight and not actual weight. If I want to weigh about 180 lbs., I’d multiply that by 12 and have a 2000 calories diet. From here I balance the caloric intake by measuring my food each evening to take with me the next day. The new ratio I played with is 40% protein, 30% carbohydrate, and 30% fat. I don’t know of anyone else who advocates this balance, but I think it’s perfect for the student or white collar person who isn’t that active, but wants to lift weights and a jog a little some days. I increased my fat and decreased my carbohydrates, and the reason this has caused so much weight loss is because I’m sedentary, so the excess carbs don’t turn into fat, and at the same time the fat and protein fill me up longer. This is good because high carbohydrate diets can cause diabetes, and diets high in saturated fat can cause high cholesterol. I just add a lot of olive oil to my food. I even put it in protein shakes (it tastes amazing). Other things to take note of are I have six small meals a day to keep the metabolism running, and to spread protein intake out to every few hours so it all absorbs the best it can. All the food of course is whole grains, vegetables, and lean meats with my shakes, and no processed stuff. Believe it or not, it only costs me about $30-40 a week for food to eat this clean.

Second of all, I changed my lifting routine in a way I never have that has shown great progress. Since I’m not eating a high calorie diet anymore, I found myself losing a lot of strength in the gym as my weight dropped. Part of this is obviously less fuel, but the other part is less carbohydrates for energy to run on. All I did to keep strength up was to do less. If you aren’t noticing a pattern, it’s that less it actually more in a lot of ways. Fewer calories are more shape and a bigger look. Even as you get smaller you look bigger, because as you get more defined it creates an illusion of size when muscle jumps out. Doing fewer sets in the gym and getting to the heaviest set as quick as possible is the other secret to staying strong when on lower calorie intake. What I do now it lift very heavy on the basic movements of bench, squat, and deadlift, and I get to the heaviest set within the least warm up sets needed. For example, a regular day at the gym would include starting with a flat bench doing 3 sets of 3. I’ll start with one set with a plate on each side, another set with 30lbs. less than the max weight, and then the max weight. For the incline bench I only do 30lbs. less than the max weight for one set, and then go right to the heaviest set, because I warmed up on the flat already. After this I can 2 sets of 8-12 on the lighter movements. I’ll do a couple sets of dips with a warm up and then a heavy, and finally a couple sets of curls, where one set is 30 lbs. less than the max followed by one max set of curls. The workouts only last 30 to 45 minutes, but the strength gains work great, and with the combination of fat loss it makes the muscles jump right out. You only need to do three days of these short lifting routines a week to get the whole body and jog a couple miles a couple days a week for cardio. The rest is all in the food.

The "Know That"/"Know How" application.

The know that/know how argument has been around for some time. I’m not going to get into what I think the proper route to knowledge is, but I would like to argue that the “know how” is much more important in life than the “know that” to an extent. I could know that Barack Obama is President, but what does this do for me unless I also know that this knowledge might be useful somewhere in my in everyday activities? To know that people might judge me based on the fact I don’t know this is the reason I would care to know. The real reason I’d want to know that would be because I’d like people to think I’m not stupid, and to know that is likely because of a prior interaction that taught me to know how people will treat me if I didn’t know that information. Obviously there’s a number of situations we come across in life where we lack experience and we’ll create abstractions of what we think will happen under certain conditions and be wrong. That’s because we don’t have true knowledge. The argument however, is that “knowledge that” is only useful if it can be used as “knowledge how”, and the way we reach “knowledge how” is only through the pain of not “knowing that” in a prior altercation where we didn’t “know how” to use “knowledge that” we had or lacked the knowledge in the first place that made us learn “knowledge that” we could apply later to spare future embarrassment, failure, or loss. To know that Barack Obama is President is because we either believe or know how this information will possibly be useful in action and interaction with others. The belief of some things may not be true, but the reason we believe anything in the first place is because of some prior know how that made us question a potential later action that could bring about a consequence we’d see in our favor. In other words, a life of action and practical application is the best life lived. Some act too much without thinking, while others think too much without acting. Aristotle would argue for the mean, which a lot of people have confused for moderation. The mean is a little different. It means to know how to act in the right situation at the right time. It’s kind of like building the right kinds of reflexes. If we have excesses or deficiencies in a given situation, we need to adjust closer to the mean. It’s good to be very angry sometimes or not too angry in other cases. Moderation would mean we always act a certain temperament in most situations. One more Ancient idea that appealed to me was the idea of happiness. Today we think of happiness as a psychological state that can come or go. For Ancients it was an activity that took place over an entire life, and if one was living a virtuous life they’d have a happier life overall.

For myself, the virtuous life is the life of action. Life shouldn’t be about contemplation or how much one can know, because nobody cares what one can know without an ability to produce actions from them. I can’t really say that producing actions will always make us happy. I question if even doing the “right” actions in our lives will really make us happy. From a sociobiological perspective, life isn’t about being happy, but passing on genes and survival. That means if being miserable helps us survive in certain environments it’s the proper way to live. I personally lean toward the sociobiologists. Looking back on my own life I can only see struggle, misery, and conflict, and I believe it’s only through struggle and conflict that we actually become better people. These are not happy experiences, but the outcome always makes us better people who are better able to survive in more kinds of environments. Going back to Aristotle, I can say I agree that finding the mean is and building the right reflexes to fit new situations is the proper mode of living. Even if we don’t find happiness, we’ll learn to live better. These virtue ethics part from the deontologists like Kant, or the utilitarians like Bentham. It’s more about developing a character for as many seasons as possible. Maybe we won’t be happy in the ancient sense for an entire life, even if we do all the right things, but we will be more adaptable and therefore more powerful in new situations where we need to know how to survive and overcome knew obstacles and competition.

We want the “know how” reflexes that will give us the most control in our situations with others. There’s so many kinds of people in the world, and so many different cultures, and subcultures, that it might be a question of where to start, but I’d say the starting point is rather easy. You just have to think about what interests you and attempt to get good at it, and through that experience you’ll likely gain more interests. The harder part for some people is that they might find things they like and never unlock the potential to use their “know that” and create a “know how” out of it. Let me put it this way. There are five activities that stand out to me as the activities people do because they’re bored. They are to eat, sleep, get wasted, watch movies/TV, and masturbate. These five things don’t take any skill. Some of them are things we’ve been born with a natural inclination toward, and the others are just passive activities. We know how to do these things, but they’re simple action skills, because they never took struggle or conflict to acquire them, and as I said earlier, it’s the struggle and conflict in life that force us to be better people. Someone might argue that watching movies is a good way to become cultured and to understand things about life better through the stories it teaches, and I’ll say that to “know that” about culture and life is worthless unless we can apply that knowledge to action, and it’s because most people don’t apply the watching of a movie to action that they fail to use the knowledge for anything useful. If we became good at deconstructing the meanings of movies as we watched them to have conversation and/or debate about the meanings of them with others, we’d be engaging in an activity that could be a “know how” activity, because we’re using it as a tool to get better at interacting with others and possibly having the ability to gain control over the direction of the interaction, because of the power of our knowledge and the ability to use it. Once we find something we enjoy, we need to seek out others who enjoy the same so we can use the thing we enjoy as a tool to get others to inquire about what they’re doing and thinking when they interact in the activity as well. A movie doesn’t have to be passive and some of us can be the catalyst to set the viewing of such into action with others in our own lives. I myself don’t relate well to movies, so I find more enjoyment in reading textbook style knowledge I think will help me in a career or debate, but I believe most activities that are passive for most can be turned into power tools for some. Those who can “know how” to turn the knowledge of “knowing that” into a weapon or tool the shape the direction of interaction have gained a tool or weapon of power. This parts from modern philosophy in some ways in the sense that moderns tend to think the best way to come to an understanding of knowledge is to keep to be an individual who wanders in the wilderness or hides in dim lit rooms reading away, but I’m more of an ancient that believes the best place to gain knowledge is right in the city, because we’re social creatures by nature, and through dialect with others we gain the most knowledge. Through conflict and struggle with others we become the best adapted for survival.

Postmodern critiques and the nature of power.

Postmodern critiques and the nature of power.
I found myself rather irritated in a class today where we discussed the categories of standpoints women have, and the intersectionality of other minority groups within women based on a text we’ve been reading. The problem I had with this book to begin with we’ve been reading is that it’s a feminist inquiry book where the author points out three different feminist perspectives, which are feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theory, and feminist post modernism. The author takes the stance of standpoint theory, but I believe she completely butchers standpoint theory. I researched these theories outside of the text and standpoint theory has its root in a Marxist concept where the dominant group of bourgeoisie can only see the surface of what those in the working class experience. The working class participants each experience life as a proletariat from the standpoint of one, but they don’t recognize themselves as a group. It’s not till they realize they’re experiencing the same standpoint as a class that they can unify and overthrow the bourgeoisie. The postmodern assault on this when applied to feminism is that women from different parts of the world don’t all share the same female values like the working class does in capitalism, so they can’t unify under the same banner of women’s rights the way workers can. First world women seek the means of sexual reproductive rights as a standpoint for their belief. They should therefore have a choice over the legality of reproduction rights because they own the sexual means of reproduction. Third world women are more focused on equality in wealth and to get out of poverty. Women of color are more focused on being equal in race as well as sex if not more, and the list goes on. I point this out to the professor and he makes the claim that they’re all arguing from their standpoints and that’s how she applies standpoint theory. If that’s the case she’s butchering standpoint theory and post modernizing it where we’re all subjective and see things different ways and there is no one set way of seeing ourselves together. The criticism of the feminist post modernism of course is that they want to get rid of the categories of groupings we place people in, but in doing this we’d eventually come back to the enlightenment where everyone is seen as an individual and not a group with individual rights and views and so on. We didn’t discuss all this in class of course. These are just my thoughts. The only part that took place in class is where I called the author’s flaw on standpoint theory to the professor and feel he talked around my critique instead of addressing it.

This is where the class took on the debate that refers to the problem I had in particular with their stance toward categorization and power. They didn’t realize it, but they were arguing from a postmodern perspective about the issues at hand. The professor points out the different kinds of feminism we discussed, which were conservative, liberal, socialist, black, and postmodern. Everyone starts making the argument that the problem is it’s because we put people in categories based on race and gender that creates the problem in the first place, because this is what makes them different even though we’re very similar biologically. Someone even said something about the nature of putting things in categories is what creates the problem. I was all alone in my rebuttal. I said that it’s not the nature of putting things in categories that’s the problem. It’s that putting things in categories is our nature, because life is about power. There will always be in and out groups, dominant and subordinate groups, and a hierarchy that structures how we exist within society. You can look for what we have in common, but the only the way we do this is by finding what another group of people don’t have in common with us. Even if we familiarize ourselves on commonalities with those we fist saw as alien, we will only fuse with and create new outsiders. The argument that the fusion of horizons is how we can familiarize with the alien and can end prejudice falls short of the fact that it ignores that there’s always a new horizon that is alien upon the last fusion. No matter how far back we go in history there was always groups we defined ourselves with and groups we didn’t. Even Aristotle points out that the telos of a knife is the fact that it cuts, but what defines it from other knives is how well it cuts. Obviously whoever has the authority to decide one knife cuts better than another has the power over it. The knife is inanimate though, and when we can dominate others with the authority of categorizing them into what is better or worse we exert power over them within a society. It’s not till the subordinate group manages to get enough power to redefine itself that it can manage its way into the in group, but upon doing so a new out group will be created. Life is about power and although many talk around it and try to ignore it they still address it without realizing it. In the dialect between Socrates and Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic, they debate what justice is, and Thrasymachus claims injustice is better because it’s what benefits the stronger. We feed sheep to fatten them up so we can eat them. We look like we’re being kind but it’s to benefit ourselves. Socrates argues that justice is to benefit the weaker, but when we benefit the weaker it’s not because it’s good in itself for the sake of it, but because we can benefit ourselves in the process. Even if both parties gain from the interaction, the fact is we don’t do anything for people unless we can get something to benefit ourselves from doing so in the process. This is a form of soft power, where we seek to get people to desire the thing we wanted them to instead of physically coercing them, which is hard power. Soft power is the way of the future, because although some may wield soft power by having the legitimate physical means to back it up, others who would appear to be on an equal playing field are still not, because in every relationship there’s a dominant and a subordinate whether we see it obviously or not. The best way to exert power over someone without them thinking you’re doing so is by giving them several options, but you always create incentives to make yours the most appealing or easiest to attain. This gives them the feeling they’re making their own choice while they tend to head in the direction you wanted them too. All interactions have a dominant and subordinate and all interactions are struggles over power. When we’re finally on equal footing it’s because we have created solidarity among ourselves as a group of one against another group, and even when our group grows large enough there will be a hierarchy in that group where some dominate others. This is our nature and nature is a power struggle. What happens when we move from physical coercion to verbal and mental is how we become “civilized”, because the ability to oppress the will through symbols and language is the newest phase in the evolution of humanity. All battles at some point in the future will be about competition on a abstract playing field of verbal and psychological coercion with the back up threat that the physical force is possible but never has to be used anymore.

The power of meaning.

The power of meaning.
The writings I have in my notes on the politics of social technology are about ten pages long, so I'm just going over a couple pages at a time and posting them. This way anybody semi interested doesn't get too overly bored or overwhelmed.

The next question is how do these politics become elevated by technology besides changing the ways of objective (the physical world’s) life? The answer I have for this goes back to hunter-gatherer. What helped us develop the ability to survive beyond epinephrine (fight or flight chemical in the brain) is the ability to have abstract thought. This ability could help us perceive where prey was in our minds that disappeared from sight. The ability to do this gave hunters an ability to talk about what wasn’t in front of them and develop plans to track down and attack the prey. This ability to imagine, create, and dream narratives of the things that can’t be seen has transcended with us over time, but we now use it to theorize about what might be physically possible before putting new ideas into action more often than hunting prey. When we fail at an action we have to readjust our theories and try again and that’s one of life’s main processes for survival or to better our lives beyond survival. There is an element of this I’d argue that becomes a burden more than a reward. The ability to think about what isn’t there when it isn’t in front of us is a great tool for things that used to be in front of us, and we’d like to know how to confront them best if we assume there’s a probability of them being back in front of us again. However, there’s also a problem when one of two things happen. When we assume the thing that will act a certain way is a person, they don’t always come back in the form we think they would, because they too have the ability to imagine the world a certain way different from us and act on those dreams. It’s the ability to understand our desires best that gives us leverage in a confrontation. What we tend to do is let our imagination tell us how we’d like things to be, and in reality we’re willing to surrender the meanings of certain words to another in order for the dream to become a reality. This is a form of trade off where we desire to attain one label by giving up the meaning of another instead of maintaining both and we lose power. For example, when I ask if we’re friends and you say yes, but we only hang out once a month and my definition of a friend is someone I see once a week, it’s only when the definition is mutual that we have real friendship. We obviously won’t hold elements of friend in a holistic sense but if we have enough partial definitions that overlap we can have mutual ground. You may however have something I want like a cool video game and it’s because I desire to play it those few times I see you that I’m willing to concede to your meaning of friendship in order to get to the ends I desire. My dream was the video game and yours was friendship on your definition. We’re playing out what seems like the same dream in our reality till one person communicates what they believe is happening. We either maintain the reality and let the new meanings stick to our actions, or we call off the actions in order to assert our desired meanings. There may be other cases where we do communicate right away, but one person will surrender their meaning even after communication for a lower grade their desire rather than nothing. This occurs because the social market has subjective value and we convince ourselves that what someone has to offer is of higher grade than anyone else simply because it’s from them, even if the quality of the product is lower than what we could get elsewhere. Why would we do this? It’s because we aren’t bargaining goods, but services from people. The service of company by some people is held at a higher value even if we don’t get it as often as we want, because we’re willing to convince ourselves that this person is more special than someone else out there we might come across. When we tie a subjective value of higher meaning to the label a person can give us over the original meaning of what we like from people in general, we give them over us. It’s only through the conflict of experience with these people that we learn what we think they could be versus what they are and will be are very different, and this is when we finally move away from them back into the market. If we really want water to meet at its own level we will not let ourselves change the definition of our desires and wait till someone who feels the same can meet them. Sometimes we may find that after enough time our desires aren’t realistic, but this is better than changing our meanings for others in trade offs of one meaning to sacrifice it for another.

The second flaw that can be made in the imagination are the things we imagine that weren’t ever objects in our lives. Unlike people we thought may come back in a way we assumed they would, these things are intangibles. We get these ideas by getting a conglomeration of all past physical experiences through our perceptions and create combinations of these things in our minds that don’t actually exist in reality. For example, heaven brings a picture to our minds based on all things we’ve actually come into contact with and we assemble a picture of something we’ve never seen based on what we have. I’d argue the first flaw in the last paragraph was about physical interactions that reflect the natural language, and this second scenario about heaven is the metalanguage. The metalanguage represents ideas that are inventions of the minds that made up of words that represent natural objects of the world. The natural language is layer one once removed representing the objective world, and the meta is layer two representing layer one, and sometimes we combine both layers together into a third layer. For example, there’s a word for sun, which we can see (layer one of natural language). Then there’s a word for god that we can’t see (layer one of metalanguage). Then we combine the ideas of the seen an unseen into one and say god is the sun (layer two spoken about and representing layer one) and it has powers over us (layer three describing layer two). The metalanguage is the description of abilities the world has that we invent without testing them empirically, and sometimes never can test them that way. The metalanguage is the kind that exists in religion and laws. It’s only when the language is up to date it can better represent the times that it reflects closer to objective reality. If the laws are flexible to change with a society to reflect the desires of the people in a context, then the laws will be closer to reflecting the way people choose to live. However, if a religious way of life or law isn’t adapted to constant changes it reflects older ways of life that aren’t in our favor. Just as we may assume people will be other than they actually are based on dreams we create that are based on the past interactions we had with them and merely reflect who they were and can be. The dreams can carry into the present without reflecting the present mode of reality, but our actions on the dreams create new realities. It’s the epiphenomenona of the meaning from our past being placed on other context in our present that the meaning changes, or the meaning of the present is altered to fit the present, so we accept it rather than seek to change it. It’s only after conflict has occurred enough times between two people that we learn to respect each other, and develop feelings for each other. The reason there is conflict is because someone won’t surrender their meaning for what another sees as a greater meaning they could both share, but in giving up this meaning for the other person’s greater meaning we are giving them power over us if the greater meaning isn’t one we truly hold in our hearts mutually. If we do find mutual meaning without sacrifice in enough partials then we can finally stop taking from each other what someone has to offer, and start giving one another because the product is no longer important in itself as much as who it comes from and this giving is reciprocal so it doesn’t look like taking anymore. That’s because the product is in lie with the person as we intended instead of seeking to shape them in the product of our meaning. This also only works when water meets at the same level because both people haven’t altered meaning of desired actions and came to take on an equal playing field instead of one person taking while another changes meaning to take on a lower grade in return.

Morality and technology.

morality and technology.
Due to my inability to sleep I’ll add on to the social politics of Internet communication. I have a lot to say so I suppose I’ll start at what feels appropriate. In a writing sometime back I wrote about morality from an emotional perspective. The point being made was that natural morality versus synthetic morality is more potent, embedded, and realistic, where synthetic is more of an extension of the moral through religious scripture. In other words, natural morality is created through confrontation like the kind seen in the prisoner’s dilemma. It’s only by earning respect by giving rewards when we’re getting what we want that we’ll get what we want back in return or move onto another person who may be more willing to meet at the same level as us. It can be seen as social market competition. I’d argue that synthetic morality in scripture was originally written to represent the struggles that took place at the time of their writings, so people could have the answers about how to live right in the temporal cultures they were created in. This would let the following generation avoid the prisoner dilemma by teaching the struggle that took place in the generation prior, and in turn wouldn’t have to continue being acted out to reach the same state of morality. Morality could then transcend into the following generation and by living properly we could have a stable civilization. It’s obvious religion and laws played a vital role in the structuring of the boundaries of how we are taught to live proper. I’d argue however that when these concepts try to transcend over time and culture two things happen. The first is over time the object of prior physical struggle of daily life changes, but the words from prior contexts stay within a language of a culture itself. The objects of the subjects no longer exists or is so far removed from the numerous transitions over time that the subjects align differently with newly evolved objects of action (people’s lifestyles). There can also be epiphenomenalism of objects of action that arise next to subjects tied to different objects, but the words of one object are transferred in meaning onto another. An example could be the rise of capitalism and the protestant work ethic. Capitalism was in conflict with the protestant way of life, so words like ambition in business had to be neutralized by giving them positive connotation, so ambition could also be something Christian like being ambitious in our faith. At the same time positive words already in protestant mentality could be transferred onto business making the act seem more righteous and less greedy. Different cultures have epiphenomenalism to one another and the transfer of the meanings of the way we live in a culture that has a scripture or law written one way that can then be applied to how we live to today in a different culture. I’d argue however, that the temporal/cultural changes in ways of life and meanings of words have changed so much that we tend to act out of our favor and since technology is causing the way of life to change faster to point that even within generations the rules are different, we have no choice but to play out the prisoner dilemma more frequently and keep rewriting the rules of how to live moral and proper to constant changing words, new words, and new objective human actions.

The question may be, what do morals and religion have to do with social technology and how it elevates politics? I’d say that social technology changes to rules of interaction on a level so frequent that the written rules of how to live proper are constantly changing with it. That means the only proper way to live is through conflict of social interaction on these constant new horizons. At this point I’ll address another issue that helps relate this complexity to our everyday lives. I’d argue there is a lexical language and my version of a metalanguage. The lexical language is the natural language that transcends time and space. It can be seen as holistic in a sense. These are possible because some objects don’t change fast enough over time for there not to always be words to represent them. It’s because of these universals that all the partials that overlap into the whole have partials in common with each other. This means I can communicate with someone from another culture and language simply by pointing out the objects (signified things) and labeling them with the subjects (signifier). Then someone else can point to the same object and place their signifier different than mine on it so we understand each other. Objects like the sun, earth, rocks, and even emotional expressions on faces are all natural and part of the natural language. Some objects are manmade, but even these can transcend in some cultures, such as industrial cultures can have similar objects like skyscrapers and video games that other parts of the world don’t. The metalanguage on the other hand signifies things that have no objects and the partials are more subjective, because we can buy into or invent their meaning. When I say god, everyone gets a different idea in his or her head. When we say someone is prejudice we’re claiming an idea that can’t be seen. These metawords can change meaning much more quickly over time. These I would argue are the words of scripture and law. Many of the objects still exist in writings that we can relate to because they lexical, but they’re tied into metawords that mean new things more frequently. It’s because technology expands boundaries of cultural possibility that more and more sub genres of lifestyle can be created from the original norms, and it’s this that makes the written morality from the age before that keeps becoming outdated faster ever before from old way of interacting. In other words, morality that isn’t defined through conflict is morality for the weak. This is because the conquering of the old horizon may still be lived out as proper while new horizon is eclipsing it. Everyone who can’t change from the old way of doing things are the first to be dominated by the new way. I’d argue that if Christian morals can’t adapt to the constant changes by changing its meaning of scripture in the church quickly enough, it will be eclipsed by a new religion. Even if it does change quickly enough it will only be called Christian in name, but practice may be very different.

The problem is they teach giving oneself to another in hopes that they will give the same back out of righteousness, but this is only true today within a sub genre of a cultural group that have identified with each other on an emotional level that they will treat each other right out of respect in order to maintain the existence of the unit or group. The human self-interest is only overcome when the individuals collect into a group that seeks strength through solidarity within the greater society of other sub genres. At this point it becomes the group interest, and the groups are partials that overlap have the societal interest. However, since the boundaries of society are always shifting faster with technology, we keep creating more new partials or cutting the pie slices thinner of society. Eventually old partial groups become obsolete and are absorbed into new partials to compete once again. It’s the constant changing of subcultures within greater culture that change the groups and the rules of morality, so that being giving is giving to new strangers who have self interests that don’t coincide with ours, and the objects of reality and lifestyle change so quick that the set way of living right and moral can never apply beyond a handful of people we’ve bonded to within our own lifetime. The reason strangers interests don’t coincide with ours the way they did in early societies is because the objective way of life changed much slower. Being giving within a community kept that community stable, the way giving in a church keeps the church community stable. If everyone in the community is giving we have a good community. The numerous institutions in the greater community at larger are constantly changing though and since they overlap each other we have spillover of people from one institution into another. The philosophy of morals therefore is not to give, but to take, and when we make sure we don’t change the meaning of what we want to take we won’t get screwed over. When two people want to take the same thing from each other at a given point, then it’s reverse giving, and two negatives make a positive. If we both want to get sex from each other, we are both giving each other sex to each other from the inverse perspective. This inverse of giving is only created after two people take from each other enough over the long term that appears reciprocal and we’ve developed emotions for each other that make us want to uphold the unit of us instead of you and I.