Joe Rogan (JRE)

[TheReal_ND]

I think even recognizing the trend of civilizations being perhaps somewhat cyclical and still striving for what you believe to be true and just, must in itself be a form of religion. It requires great leaps of logic and faith.

[Fife]

Nietzsche understood the concept of the Pareto principle, at least. That's a lot more than I can say for most all current year chatterers.

[heydaralon]

I think even recognizing the trend of civilizations being perhaps somewhat cyclical and still striving for what you believe to be true and just, must in itself be a form of religion. It requires great leaps of logic and faith.

100%. I feel more strongly about this idea than any other.

This is what is so stupid about all these meliorists today. Steven Pinker and those people talk about how humanity is at its least violent. I believe it, although they are using some enron style accounting for their stats. They are desperate to believe this fairy tale that atheism, or free trade, or progressivism, or technology, or whatever will lead to a perfect society in the future. Lets look at the past. Every society ever has gone through cycles. It has achieved high art, high culture, and economic and military dominance, and then collapsed. This has always been the case, even if it has taken centuries. We act like we are immune from this cycle, but that is a bigger act of faith than saying that Christ died on the cross for our sins and rose from the dead. Boiled down, it basically assumes that human beings will behave differently in the future than they always have in the past. That is absurd.

Even the idea of societal and global progress is a relic of Christianity. Before this belief system, every single ancient society understood that they were a part of a series of endless cycles of rising and falling. There is a book called The Heavenly City by Carl Becker that shows how all the Enlightenment thinkers who influence us today borrowed their ideas from Christianity, replacing good and evil for ignorance and knowledge, and how that redemptive idea has influenced stuff from economics to beliefs like Transhumanism or Kurzweil's Singularity. It is a powerful idea, and it is still with us.

[heydaralon]

Nietzsche understood the concept of the Pareto principle, at least. That's a lot more than I can say for most all current year chatterers.

Can you find a post where I argued that people who took a large risk or worked hard shouldn't get a larger share than someone who didn't do shit? I don't think I made a case that hierarchies or inequality was evil, unnatural, or something that can be fixed...

you may be in the wrong thread

[TheReal_ND]

Intriguing. I wish I was as euradite as half this forum so I could have something to screed about more often. I would say that my limited knowledge of Gnosticism, (I'm a huge PKD fan and listen to a gnostic podcast sometimes,) has at its core a breaking of the cycle. The universe is a Matrix or "simulation" as some people would have it. Meh. Whatever. I like me some mysticism.

[Ph64]

Boiled down, it basically assumes that human beings will behave differently in the future than they always have in the past. That is absurd.

I read that and Forbidden Planet pops into my head.
For all our technology/advancements we are the Krell.
Underneath the veneer of technology we're ruled by the same base instincts/impulses we always have been.
We ignore this with the fantasy of how 'civilized' we are at our own peril.

[GloryofGreece]

I think even recognizing the trend of civilizations being perhaps somewhat cyclical and still striving for what you believe to be true and just, must in itself be a form of religion. It requires great leaps of logic and faith.

100%. I feel more strongly about this idea than any other.

This is what is so stupid about all these meliorists today. Steven Pinker and those people talk about how humanity is at its least violent. I believe it, although they are using some enron style accounting for their stats. They are desperate to believe this fairy tale that atheism, or free trade, or progressivism, or technology, or whatever will lead to a perfect society in the future. Lets look at the past. Every society ever has gone through cycles. It has achieved high art, high culture, and economic and military dominance, and then collapsed. This has always been the case, even if it has taken centuries. We act like we are immune from this cycle, but that is a bigger act of faith than saying that Christ died on the cross for our sins and rose from the dead. Boiled down, it basically assumes that human beings will behave differently in the future than they always have in the past. That is absurd.

Even the idea of societal and global progress is a relic of Christianity. Before this belief system, every single ancient society understood that they were a part of a series of endless cycles of rising and falling. There is a book called The Heavenly City by Carl Becker that shows how all the Enlightenment thinkers who influence us today borrowed their ideas from Christianity, replacing good and evil for ignorance and knowledge, and how that redemptive idea has influenced stuff from economics to beliefs like Transhumanism or Kurzweil's Singularity. It is a powerful idea, and it is still with us.

Its a relic from the past that you won't get rid of b/c we cannot. Christendom is at the bottom of our current society no matter how much secularist wont to deny it.

[GloryofGreece]

My grandfather was very frugal. He used to tell my dad that if everyone in America lived like his family did, the country would be in a permanent recession, because no one would spend or extend credit. There is a book called the Fable of the Bees by Bernard Mandeville which discusses how private vices can lead to public virtues. In other words, the greed of one man can lead to the prosperity for many. Kind of like Gordon Gecko in Wall Street's "Greed is good!" speech. This is conventional wisdom for many people today, but this book was published several hundred years ago and influenced many Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire.

But here is where that idea gets strange. It applies to not just economic greed, but also things like war or genocide. Whoever you are on Earth, you are living on land that was taken from indigenous people through violent conquest (the residents who got displaced displaced others before them too). Scandanavia, America, or Nigeria, it doesn't matter. This has allowed a peaceful harmonious society to spring up in many cases, but it would not have happened without a major amount of human misery and death. Its like the idea of a poor father suffering and sacrificing so his children can grow up to become richer than him, and being ignorant of what he went through.

There are various mystical traditions that do not view good and evil as being polar opposite conflicting forces, but rather as being a part of a mutual feeding cycle where one reinforces the other. In the modern west, we do not look at them that way, and we attempt to look at science and make it align itself with our morals, which in today's climate means whatever is popular on social media. But often morals that are bad in one scenario end up being very useful in another. Many national heroes would have been war criminals if their side lost. Many thieves set up companies that employ thousands today. Many financially irresponsible people who were pariahs went on to invent something that reshaped every facet of our society. Looking at things that way, how do you determine which genes are useful and moral, and which ones are harmful and immoral?

I have no idea, but I think it is pretty crazy when you think about it..

I get where you going but I don't really buy it. It leads to relativism and a lack of moral foundation. Good exist and so does evil. I'll leave it at that.

[GloryofGreece]

Intriguing. I wish I was as euradite as half this forum so I could have something to screed about more often. I would say that my limited knowledge of Gnosticism, (I'm a huge PKD fan and listen to a gnostic podcast sometimes,) has at its core a breaking of the cycle. The universe is a Matrix or "simulation" as some people would have it. Meh. Whatever. I like me some mysticism.

Are you a Christian or Gnostic? You have plenty to type about. If you listened to Myth of the 20th Century podcast with any regularity then that alone means you have tons to talk about!

[GloryofGreece]

discipline is real and joe has it. Work Ethic / Industriousness is the most important personality trait other than IQ when determining success and stability. Sad thing is that he doesn't seem to appreciate or understand that much like IQ other traits are genetic/baked into you before your an adult so good luck trying to permanently or semi permanently changing your sub traits bro

I often wonder if in the future scientists will discover a gene for industriousness. What implications (assuming such a gene exists) do you think that would have for society? I think that many people who are classified as stupid/lazy today may have thrived in a society that was not industrialized the way ours was. Perhaps there is some menial but important task in a hunter gatherer society they would have crushed without effort. However, it is also possible that even in hunter gatherer societies there is a small percentage of fuck ups and lazy idiots.


But you gotta think, in a situation where calories are scarce, and every mouth to feed has to serve a purpose, how could a lazy/useless gene have been passed on? There have been a lot of postmodern interpretations of things like mental illness, and Michael Focault's great confinement posited that madness is a disease of civilization. This has proven to be bullshit, as every civilization including primitive ones have had severely mentall ill. Shamans serve the same function as psychiatrists. We always think that the good genes are the ones that survived, but evolution has no direction beyond passing the genes, regardless of the morality of their carrier. So that means that there would have been paleolithic lazy people right? Maybe we have taken this darwinian explanation of social behavior too far. In the late nineteenth century Thomas Huxley discusses how society always assumes that only good traits would evolve. But why is that? If a thief can pass on his genes, surely this bad behavior evolves too right? Maybe our criminals and ne'er-do-wells are also evolving if these theories have any predictive value.


What are your thoughts on this?

In general I don't buy this whole reliance and myopic view on evolutionary thinking and cause / effect. Evolutionary "science" evolutionary psychology etc. etc. its all over the place and in nomenclature. Its overplayed a bit at least.

I don't think people with a below 100 IQ would "thrive" in any culture but they would generally get along and still be useful to the tribe. It doesn't take a high IQ to do a labor intensive work. That doesn't mean the work isn't important to the tribe and for your survival. Obviously lots of work in a hunter / gather situation is monotonous and also important.

I do think we usually are inclined to think only good traits or behavior or values would pass along but it simply isnt' true. Then you have will power and cultural customs that play a role as well. Who knows why some people are assholes and dumb as shit and some are super kind and even highly intelligent. I don't think there is something called an "evolutionary" reason for this though. It is at least partly just happenstance.

And while I do acknowledge the "evidence" for mental disorder in less civilized times I do not believe it was as rampant. I think numbers matter and we are around too many people for optimal well being. I also think that are electronic devices are fucking with some people more than others. And there is a harmony and a disharmony. There is an optimal and there is a shitty way to live in this world with this world etc.