Individualism is stupid

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Hmmm, interesting perspective.

I have the complete opposite view on this though.

Getting to know myself better, really digging into my self, has done nothing but benefit me. I didn't really talk to anyone until I was 20 because I was so filled with anxiety and fear. I didn't want to feel embarrassed, I didn't want to do something that could possibly cause me "harm" in some way. So I retreated within myself, into a part of my mind where I was no longer present. I would always think of the future (the consequences) or the past (what I should have done). I was not living in the moment. All I was doing was hurting myself.

But once I began to look inside myself, and understand why I was acting as I did, I began to see that what I was doing was silly. I wanted to interact with people. I wanted to be free from this fear. I was not who I should be.
I have really improved in the past 3 years. I am basically a completely different person, it is pretty fucking amazing, I think. I still have some lingering fears, but they will fall to my will before the end.

I'm sorry you have had a tough life (much tougher than mine, all things considered), but I think facing yourself is the strongest thing anyone can do. It is facing the events of your entire life, and comparing who you are now, to the person you really want to be.

Anyway, based on my subjective experience, being an individual has been nothing but a positive for me.

Take care, fellow human.

Okay, but don't you see the problem here?

In standard metaphysics we consider what is by the construction of parts or qualities that we hold to be true, even if contradictory. For example, I can't be 100% sure I live on a mostly spherical orb. After all ... the Earth and myself might be a digital being and therefore 'flat' in that it's a simulation and is about as naturally substantive as digital code running through a CPU and video card. In essence, flat and insubstantial in all aspects.

But when we look at the self we take on naturally the narrative explanation of examining your life and considering the idea that you believe you are a thing that occupies a place in space and time. You justify what you are by the things that you hold to be true, even if contradictory. And the thing is we know it is contradictory (things like false memory). After all you can never know what others truly think of you, even if you ask them they may lie or you or they misinterpret the question. Ditto even when we look at it from our own self perspective that is more or less false.

We know it's false because you know you're different even as you think back on how you think you were. This is a scientific fact, and backed by the Loftus experiments. It is an irrational belief structure to assume any other scenario.

More over, the only unique thing about you cannot fully be justified by anything more or less than your spatiotemporal uniqueness. That is the only thing you can definitively call you yourself. Nobody (else) can be said to occupy your very place in space and time.

If you could accurately describe you as you were, then you'd be no different, feel no different, than you were. The answer would require the perfection and infinite amount of time as to describe everthing of everything that you feel this very moment, as you read this ... describing everything, everywhere, perfectly.

In a way you're already an individual. You're you, the ever-present you. But you could never be as you were and you can never totally, accurately depict how you were before. Unless the pain of what you were throughout all your life becomes a self recycling living nightmare of your constant anguish, you can't accurately tell me everything of who you were because you don't know it yourself.

But the problem is that your brain (usually) actively stops you obsessing over these details. It recreates your memories based on your interactions. It blanks out much of the pain. It helps you cope and in that way it kills you.

In order to accurately question who you are you must ask; "What is the causal factors and methods of their weighting between the acknolwedgeable elimination and preservation of self through its iterations?"

You told me your new self is born from retrospection, but I posit another theory. I won't assume, I 'll siumply ask ... isn't it merely possible that you suffered enough 'personal deaths of self' (enough tears, enough pains, and enough nights of sleep) and your brain merely conceived of a slow way of escaping the measures of its instances? If you can't totally strike out this potentiality, then I posit that you are, as you are, dead to yourself and how you were. That you're merely operating on a new line of adaptive programming that your brain adequately realizes will better help you escape the pain of past lives.

To be an individual however ... as in fully feeling the weight of every strife, every feeling, every pain, every breath, and of all potential evils you may inflict and be inflicted upon you? To obsess over every little quality of your life, past, present and future? ... ask yourself if you would survive that with sanity in check, and then ask yourself if who you were before isn't dead and buried.

---------------------

To be sane is to welcome that you will mindlessly change and adapt. That this process is eternal. That it is your only means of coping. Being a beast of careful impulses.

Madness lay in trying to obsess over the details of this horrifying state. Trying to be more you than your sanity would otherwise allow. It is you remembering the exact number of tears that streak your face, it is you counting every star in the sky.

And being that way is not worth it.

Actively inuring yourself to this terror... that is how you can maintain this maddening existence so that you can regard another being, a figment of phantasmic brilliance, and not rend the clothes on your back. Huddled in the corner of the room, crying and gnashing your teeth.

Careful beasts don't suffer like that. You might if you're not cautious. From your story you might have even done so once and fortunately you stopped.

Just food for thought ^_^

 

[pookie101]

people want to be different, special and totally unique.. as long as its in a different, special and totally unique way as everyone else

 

[Glongpre]

That you're merely operating on a new line of adaptive programming that your brain adequately realizes will better help you escape the pain of past lives..........
To be sane is to welcome that you will mindlessly change and adapt. That this process is eternal. That it is your only means of coping.

I can agree to these thoughts above. You are definitely changing all the time. I believe we are products of our experiences. The body and mind are actively trying to avoid pain and suffering. But I am a glass half full kinda guy, so I think my body and brain aren't trying to just cope, but to become stronger!.

And I don't know about the memory stuff, because my memory is pretty good. Though I can't feel the exact emotions as I remember because I have grown past that. I felt whatever I was feeling because of an anxiety and fear that I no longer feel in that kind of situation.

And I try to live in the present, because stressing over what did happen, or what could happen, only provides fuel for anxiety. To live in the present is to be you, to make choices based on what you want right now, and not based on who you were, or what might happen. Because if you are true to yourself, then your choices will ultimately bring you happiness.
I like being an optimist!

Your thoughts are so out there. It is cool to think about, haha.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

I can agree to these thoughts above. You are definitely changing all the time. I believe we are products of our experiences. The body and mind are actively trying to avoid pain and suffering. But I am a glass half full kinda guy, so I think my body and brain aren't trying to just cope, but to become stronger!.

And I don't know about the memory stuff, because my memory is pretty good. Though I can't feel the exact emotions as I remember because I have grown past that. I felt whatever I was feeling because of an anxiety and fear that I no longer feel in that kind of situation.

And I try to live in the present, because stressing over what did happen, or what could happen, only provides fuel for anxiety. To live in the present is to be you, to make choices based on what you want right now, and not based on who you were, or what might happen. Because if you are true to yourself, then your choices will ultimately bring you happiness.
I like being an optimist!

If you're interested, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus' works and experiments are fun (if very, very scary if you think about them) ...

If you're interested in the idea that what we are is less sapient and more merely narrators of self, and examining the incidental split between 'central' and 'accidental' ideas of communicating selfhood experience from the only truly, expressly 'unique' thing about you being no one else can have shared your space-time... you should look up the historiographer and anthropologist, John D. Niles' Homo Narrans.

The big problem I have with Niles is that it's teleological. It only explores the importance of lives, not the importance of self (plotpoints of life, arbitrary and inferred delineations between passions and circumstances as being different). Unless you're awesomely brilliant, wonderful, and genius like Joseph Heller ala Catch 22 ... narrative structures lead to arbitrary descriptions in the pursuit of being self. Not actually accurately charting the self.

Niles does adequately explain why we all feel about certain instances in a certain way. Like for instance the VA student becomes a longterm, largely routine visual arts teacher in high school. And how them just deciding to go to a studio and paint after leaving a long, routine, make-rent career is a feel good thing if it ends on a somewhat adventurous end note. The central premise is; "Art is core to themselves" ... and teaching is merely a thing of accident and necessity in the horror that is life.

If the story (as if you're that former teacher) end on this idea of; "But I just threw it in! ... have a tiny studio, now!" Many of us automatically think positively on this because of the inferred delineation of a preconceived separation of core and accidental self. We don't think; "That's horrible!" Also proof why all humans are miserable and will never truly be 'happy' ... we'll just pretend hard enough to be so.

Also read Catch 22. But everyone should read Catch 22.

Your thoughts are so out there. It is cool to think about, haha.

I have to think about this stuff. I want a hand in the neuroprosthetics industry. And while neuroscience is obviously a science, as a burgeoning industry and field of interdisciplinary focus which is already diving into things like sense data and replicating it to cure illness or (hopefully) linking humanity together on the most intimate of levels to achieve an evolution of thought ... we still have to look at this in terms of ethical considerations of what the mind is, where it meets the brain, and we also need to justify research into it.

Frankly, thinking of this stuff even outside an academic setting is beneficial ... because inevitably we have to sell neuroprosthetics research to an ethics committee. It's also deeply important to think about this stuff now, because we're blundering ahead with neural networks and autonomous A.I. all while we have to talk to dickheads on the purse strings about the good of MMI, shared sense data, etc.

These idiots seem to have no problem with creating a viable competitor to the human species, but apparently we're the ones potentially 'playing God' by looking at things such as directly shared sense data and transcendence of the body ...

You can kind of see how we're between a rock and a hard place here.

And the sad thing is most people would be on our side. We're guaranteeing the future of humanity while the other is guaranteeing that humanity is no longer the master of its domain. Who are you going to side with? Everyone romanticises the Deus Ex idea of transhumanist movement towards an ideal ... but who amongst us truly wishes for something as alien to comprehension as a recursively learning computer mimicking humanity and simply 'doing what's best for us'?

And it's not just me being a 'kook' about this stuff, many intellectuals in the aspects of science and technology are also urging a ban against autonomous A.I. Demanding it. Don't listen to me, listen to them ...

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

It all boils down to this: Choice. Your choice depends on your perception of things and you're free to do (and choose) what you want to as long as your decision doesn't hurt/harm someone. That said, just like there are two faces to a coin, every argument has two sides. You'll find people who'll agree or disagree with you depending on their beliefs and experiences.

I really dislike freedom of choice as well.

Agreed. Freedom of choice has never really culminated into "freedom to do whatever you want."

I tried it once. I'm independently wealthy so I stocked up on goods for three weeks, paid my utilities in advance, paid my rent in advance, and simply shut down mains power, locked myself in my apartment and shut the curtains. No books. No gadgets. Just me and my thoughts.

Experiment didn't work out so well. After 4 days I started crying without some form of connectivity no matter how forced, corporately modelled and socially hamfisted with rules and regulations.

Being free to suffer yourself isn't much fun.

It's garbage when people say 'be yourself' ... it's horrible. It's the same as saying 'go fuck yourself'. Being yourself is a terrible idea. It's not self fulfilling. It doesn't increase your wisdom. It doesn't lead to any other epiphany than you being alone and having no distractions from your own brain is a fate worse than death. There's a reason why solitary confinement is now being seriously reviewed as torture.

(Edit) Oh... and you know what is the best cure for hikikomori they're finding? Labour programs. Forcing people outside and doing part time work. Forcing people to live by collective rules of uniform social engagement. Unless people want to boil down 'individualism' as to mean 'wearing the clothes you like' or some other weak, baseline consumerist garbage ... 'being yourself' is a bad idea.

Also why I think people should have an inalienable right to productive labour.

There is no shortage of public works we can have paid to be done. Anywhere in the world. We can even have group houses where you have communal sitting rooms with individual apartments for public housibg. Make it a decent place to congregate... discuss... chat... exchange ideas ... help people foment... plan things like fixing up old vehicles for private sale, or public lectures by touring teachers that might influence young people to look into further studies.

It's better than sticking them in estate coffins.

 

[Erttheking]

In my experience, people are more than willing to talk about why individualism is bad overall, but rarely willing to give up their own.

 

[Pyrian]

Individualism is bad because other people have it. Everyone should just do what I think. Unfortunately, everybody, secretly or overtly, seems to believe the same thing! It's almost as if people are biased towards believing the things they think are true. Since we're all alike in this regard, clearly there is no individualism in humanity, just a soupy chaos of the same ingredients.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Individualism is bad because other people have it. Everyone should just do what I think. Unfortunately, everybody, secretly or overtly, seems to believe the same thing! It's almost as if people are biased towards believing the things they think are true. Since we're all alike in this regard, clearly there is no individualism in humanity, just a soupy chaos of the same ingredients.

Can you actually define it, however? Beyond you just experiencing a singular space-time bubble nobody else will have? (---yet, we're working on this... don't you worry) For example, I'm utterly fine with the idea of being trans as no different as being lefthanded. As long as everyobe else treated it as if nothing, all I've ever asked for.

I can't think of anything worse than people persisting right past the day I die that it's as if meaningful to my totsl being, and whether thry think it's bad or me being """ill""". And I would love if everyone else I associated with gave me the chance where I don't feel I need to defend myself. Just get on with life.

There's been plenty of times in my life where I would flat out prefer if "the State/the Corporation" just printed out a list of objectives and we all filed out, did them together, and then socialized or studied or played games, all without artificial boundaries becsuse of inherent qualities I can't willfully surrender.

Some days that cold, ruthless state of efficiency would seem a *dream*.

At worst it's what we have already, at best it's what we have already, but without an equally arbitrary system of privilege, poverty, and religiously motivated suffering. Can you actually prove your individuality beyond your spatiotemporal uniqueness?

Beyond flowery words.

(Edit)I mean the only real reason I have money is because most people put money into a bank, take out loans or leave it there. I don't. I can afford not to. If everybody did what I did, I'd have no real claim to wealth and neither would they. If my entire existence is shaped so much by this technicality of an economic system that rewards fucking others over simply because I could, why else should the majority of people give a damn about my ability to do so?

And if the system or yourself is going to tell me that I'm wrong when given opportunity (and people will inevitably have to tell people like me we're wrong to do this and stop us)... then how are you any different?

...and that's just the socioeconomic concerns... all well and naive to say; 'Individualism is good' ... but you might not be so charitable if like in Australia your country imported our laws where banks can force you into bankruptcy on spurious, all too loosely regulated lending practices if you don't fulfill their requirements.

Suddenly laissez faire attitudes, or not even bothering to draw a line in the sand, is #VeryBad. You might end up with a populace crippled by 226% private debt to GDP and growing wage disparity at the likely tail end of the longest boom period any country has ever had ... and as we clearly learned from the 20s, the 30s was a fantastic place for 'individualism'. Nothing can go wrong in the Wild West of Australian finance... nothing could possibly go wrong with this blatant pursuit of mindless consumerism, reducing regulations and naked profiteering in an effort to fill the void you think matters.

Nothing wrong at all...

Whatever. Only so many times you can point to the reef and say the ship will run aground. At least with my "individualism" I can flee before then and live out my days in a resort outside Phuket. Apparently the interwebz has given me special licence not to give a fuck.

While we're at it, I wonder just how long do you think it will take before Los Angeles looks like Beijing? Especially now that Trump has heroically mandated the EPA can't stop the wondrous "individualism" on the responsibilities to meet pollution targets? Let's not forget the majestic individualism he has granted to oil companies to regulate their own transport of oil over key water catchment.

But why stop there, folks?! In his magnificent love of individuality he's even pushed through the key leadership of your children's education to someone who meets no common sense requirements of the station she's been given. Total individualism. Can't beat it. Can you imagine what majestic, wonderful individuality might be replaced by if the system was strong enough to say; "This is insane. No. No way in hell..." and at least forced a president to live up to some common standard of decency!?

Whatever.

Seriously, fuck humanity. Oh... sorry, homo individuus.

 

[Delicious Anathema]

If I don't care about someone or some issue, I don't try to force myself. I like what I like and I care about what I want.

A healthy balance of focusing and being yourself with some awareness of the outside world is needed, but I don't try to go out of my way.

Don't let people police you about anything, not even if it's "good".

 

[TakerFoxx]

The way I look at it is this: everyone is different. We all have different genetic makeups, personalities, quirks, preferences, triggers, experiences, values, and beliefs. And as such, there is no single social system that will work for everyone, or even the majority of people. So for some people, a communal society is far preferable to an individual one. And that's fine! And for others, independence rocks and communal life sounds horrid. And that's also fine! And apparently some people want to get plugged into the Borg hivemind or something. Okay, that sounds really weird, but hey. If you can make it happen and it works for you, more power to you.

For me, individualism works great. The fewer people I have sharing my life, the happier and more productive I am. It's just the way I am. But I acknowledge that not everyone shares my viewpoint so I have no issue with other lifestyles, social values, and whatnot, so long as they don't try to force it on me.