hodj_sl said:
Yeah, as someone who is currently majoring in three fields and paying about a 3rd the price of other people to do so because of Pell grants, someone who, by the way, dropped out of high school at 15 (16 legally but I hadn't seriously gone to school in over a year at that point) to party and get high and "experience real experiences", I can assure you, first hand, that the most real experiences I've had have been exploring my true potential, and very little to nothing has gotten in my way of doing that, exceptmyself
Stopped drugs, worked hard, all that jazz: fantastic, but that doesn't matter. Your scholarship in whatever and anthropology is great. I have lots of friends in the field, but again it doesn't matter. I'm not discussing the historical context of the beginnings of culture in a general sense or how ours in particular got to where it is today. It's a nice and interesting aside (and one that is, assuredly, needed for a full understanding), but I'm framing the problem
of the here and now, not historically why religion or norms of our culture developed generally. I don't care for the moment as it's not important for our task at hand: to realize the pathological social sickness in society today.
People aren't sheep. They're people. They very concept of calling people sheep, or sheeple, or whatever, is condescending nonsense. It literally says "Your experiences are not valid because they do not fit my conceptions of what they should be". That's unfair, and coming from a person who quotes Marx chapter and verse, really hypocritical point of view to be taking.
People do and seek what comforts them. What do you think makes them most comfortable? To belong, to fit in, to be a part of the group. The interesting part is that it doesn't much matter
what kind of group, as long as it is one: from a member of the Nazi party, to the KKK, to radical Islam, to Patriots fans. The
activityof the group doesn't matter as long as they belong to it, as with it comes social validation of that activity, and any activity, genocide, mass murder or cheering for Tom Brady's td pass.
The social psychology of people is the same regardless of the activity being done. Look at someone's brain, and the brains of the members of the group surrounding them, of say, singing at a place of worship and cheering at a sporting event.
To not identify the activity being performed and only realize the comfort in being with and as a part of a group performing itis what a sheep is, the very definition.
And this is what most people do. I hope grandpa Marx would agree.
Oh, of course. You say of course as if its just simply true because you say so [...] doesn't mean that my experiences, both real and by proxy, are invalid [...] You can't take one or two experiences which are manufactured, declare that these are the only experiences in life, and that since they are manufactured, nothing is real and everything is a lie.
I never said ALL experiences are manufactured. Listen to my words carefully. As society further develops itself, the tendency is to abstract more and more, to produce more products and commodities. The evolution of the internet, for example, is not simply an evolution of technology, but an evolution of products born of and served by that technology.
And here is where we begin to reach the limits of what our modern society can do for us. That tendency, the habit of thought to solve problems and fulfill all human needs, both physical and psychological, by no other way but producing yet another product, yet another thing to consume, has the effect of alienating us from each other and turning our lives into a series of abstractions, one after the other, of feelings that are not beget by our own activities, but by something else or someone else - again, a feeling produced by proxy, by a product.
That alienation of our lives is mentally unhealthy.
Look at Famm's example of fishing in FF versus going to dinner with family.
[...] would those children's lives be less valid because of it?
2. "And this manufacturing has a serious detrimental effect on mental health" -Citation required, and by citation I mean I want to see real, quantified, peer reviewed studies that show that manufacturing products makes people insane.
There's a difference between validity and health. I'm not going to qualify valid, as arguing whether the life of a robot is more or less valid than a human being isn't my purpose. I'm talking about how the latter experiences his or her life.
I'm also not talking clinical psychology (although Fromm did), so don't pull the non-falsifiability Popper card. There have been studies done on the effects of capitalism, the effects of money and exchange, has on psychological processes on an individual level. You're going into the age old debate of sociology as a science, and that's exhausting.
These are two unrelated events. First and foremost, that companies' stock isn't being built from fucking supernatural flying spaghetti monster powers. Everything you consume is manufactured from....natural products. But you're really off on a tangent trying to defend what is simply a naturalist fallacy. That because something isn't "natural" by your perception, it isn't real, valid, or moral. Of course, your view is extremely limited, and again, extremely Christianized. Humans are not a force separate from nature. Of course your argument implicitly asserts that humans are above, outside of, and different from the natural world, and therefore, anything we create, even if we create from materials garnered in the natural world, by some magic force, the mere fact that we altered it and touched it, makes it unnatural [...]
It
isless real. The
qualificationof the thing as good or bad is naturalist, but the statement of reality being reality is not. A company's stock is
lessreal, being non-existent, than the bark of a tree. Whether it's good or bad for company stock to exist is apart from the reality of it not existing naturally. This is dumb and I won't comment on it further.
And again you're totally missing the point: the argument is not natural vs. unnatural - it doesn't make a difference. The
effect or intentof most of the unnatural (per above) things that we create, the products we produce in modern society, is one in which our feelings and experiences are generated for us and not by us. You want to talk about depression, loneliness, a feeling of emptiness? A feeling like your life is worthless? The whys of a sportswriter committing suicide? Those are true in an objective sense, not incorrect thoughts or feelings because of messed up brain chemistry - and the choice of suicide was probably a sane one (didn't read all his blog). It's because your life, our lives, are more and more experienced not by activities that are done by us directly, but by products used to service the creation of those feelings and emotions.
Yes, climbing a mountain or cutting your baby's cord is probably an authentic experience, but the more society 'advances' in terms of this product-commodity psychology of solving our problems, the more we'll feel empty and alone. It's wrong, unhealthy, and fucked up.
Of course, your view is extremely limited, and again, extremely Christianized
A Luddite, Christian Marxist naturalist humanist. That's me! Or you could just say someone looking at reality for what it is, much easier.
You should take some chemistry classes to understand why this is. And read the first like twenty chapters of Genesis in the Bible, to understand where the idea that humans are separate and above nature comes from, because that is what you are arguing. We are part of nature. The ants aren't separate from nature because they built an ant hill, and we aren't separate from nature because we built skyscrapers and went to the Moon.
I was raised an engineer bro, albeit a bad one, and I don't wanna go to church, thanks. The moon? sure.
So? This is literally all humans are and do. They make tools, and ascribe meaning to things. If it wasn't our TV shows, it would be our cave paintings. Take away ascribed meaning, take away culture, all you're left with is, at best, taller, balder Chimpanzees. You're lamenting ourHUMANNESSDumar.
I'm not saying the creation of tools is all bad. Please listen. I'm saying the further our society goes along, the more abstractifying we do, in all spheres of life, from having babies, to climbing mountains, to feelings such as love, to fucking, to fishing in a videogame.
The
solutionour society proposes to solve ALL human need is the creation of an abstraction of the real medicine, of genuine relatedness to the world and to each other through direct experience. To more and more product-ize and commoditize every single thing that can be. This norm is a
defectof our modern culture, our modern society. And a consequence of this defect is a form of social pathology: 'My life is empty.' Yes, it is. But it's not your fault - it's society's.
I think it was Plato who played this sort of game you're playing, when writing was becoming common place in Greece, some philosopher, maybe not Plato but one of them, argued that this was a terrible thing, if everyone wrote everything down, no one would ever need to remember anything any more, and our entire species would become dumber as a result. We're at the point technologically where memory is virtually not even necessary anymore, we simply use computers to do it for us, and yet we're infinitely smarter as a species even if individually we're slightly dumber, because we offload large portions of our thinking capacity to machines now. This is the Singularity. The future. And its not unhealthy at all. In fact, its evolution at its most succinct and powerful.
Thanks for comparing me to Plato, but hardly. Again I'm not making a naturalist argument. Why didn't you mention how we'd all
feel or experiencein the Singularity?
You don't feel this way if you do not have a serious mental illness, no. Most people do not lie to themselves on a daily basis and do not live in a world where they feel their every human interaction is superficial bullshit. The ones that do are either attention whoring women, or people with serious mental illnesses, paranoia strikes deep. Into your life it will creep.
It mostly is superficial bullshit, whether you want to use Famm's rationalization filters is up to you, but most interactions, most things you feel or experience in modern life, are constructed, artificial, and meaningless. I dunno what to say, sorry?
Also a false premise. There are not objective healthy physical states for the body. Its all relative. If you're 550 pounds and bed ridden, it is objectively unhealthy for you to get up and try and run a mile, you won't make it, and you'll probably die. Health in every context is subjective and relative to the situation and circumstances at hand in the individual subject under observation.
Nope.
There are objective states of mental health just as physical, yet maybe the prescription to get there is different. Some may require more running than others, but the goal is the same for both of them: an objective level of physical health and mental health, the same for each of us, for each individual in this modern insane society.
