coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
I don’t think Jesus should be quoted in a post* reminiscent of the prayer of the Pharisee
”God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I [do good things]”
type of person who decides society to judge you
This is every single person on earth, we are all influenced by our social ecosystems. A social ecosystem can influence families toward good or for bad. Few boomers grew up believing that they should maintain a strong community network for the express purpose of finding their child a spouse.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
This is the inevitable consequence of an individualistic society continually preyed upon in consumer capitalism. We are not organized hierarchically by wise leaders from our own in-group who have the common good in mind.
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Music and visual media companies sell narcissistic fantasies to the youth, that they will have their “break” if they continue trying regardless of evidence, that life consists in consumerism and sex.
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Scrolling social media companies show you incessant content about social competition, to get you glued to the app, but has the consequence of devaluing a modest and reasonable lifestyle.
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Companies use the illusions of feminism and freedom in order to get women to be buy their products, yet this also makes women delusional about their social obligations and their time-sensitive life choices.
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Companies want female employees because it helps them lower wages, even though this may be worse for the whole of society because of fertility and hypergamy-related reasons.
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Universities promote themselves as necessary to the young, and high schools promote universities as necessary, because this helps both of their exclusive interests — universities get more applicants, high schools look better in statistics.
You “bring it back” by forming or joining an in-group social ecosystem that is organized hierarchically according to wisdom, and disperses wisdom from top to bottom. There is no permissible way to change mainstream society at this point because the interests of lobbying groups are fundamentally at odds with the common good. These lobbying groups have more “voting power” than you, because money allows them to manipulate the voting preferences of the population.
Not only does every guy want to go to college because it is shilled to them, but our femino-promiscuous culture makes it an important factor for finding a wife, because they promote female college students and hire so many women in well-paid roles. (This is obviously controlled for looks, the very attractive are outliers for both genders so your story of a hot garbage man doesn’t matter.)
A good comparison point is, as always, the Amish. The women are not raised to believe they expect the best and are better than men, the men are not raised to take advantage of women, they work whatever job and get married early and are generally happy. The sexual ecosystem is tightly controlled to maximize the number of marriages, versus an anarchic system that doesn’t.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Not only can just 0.2% of the population be police officers at any given time, but far fewer can be officers in “wealthy parts of the US”. That might bring the number of eligible employers to be 0.015% of the population. This is too insignificant to consider in an argument
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
This is a good point: what does a white American care if recent Indian and Chinese have raised median wages? It factors in zero to their lived experience, except perhaps in a negative way. Since 2018, white wages have decreased, Hispanic and black have increased, and Asian has stayed the same (after a considerable increase since 2012).
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
We have to take on the prompt with the fullness of its details:
inexperienced
forced
A person with a knife who has never fought, and who is forced to fight, is unlikely to understand that he needs to zerg rush his opponent in order to win. He will hesitate, he will fail to commit. The only way to win against a man with a bat is to rush him and hope that he doesn’t swipe your knife away. This is possible, but not probable.
The batter, on the other hand, simply needs to stay two feet of distance away and hit his opponent. The opponent — again — would need to understand that he needs to commit to something in order to win, in this case commit to grabbing the bat all while carrying a six inch knife. This is an unreasonable level of difficulty for an inexperienced person forced to fight to the death.
In most cases, the batter will win. And the batter only needs to batter his opponent twice before he is made ineffective with a knife.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
A random selection of old moralizing history books with salient and exaggerated examples of the consequences of leadership. Start with Roman histories and go through medieval histories, only using the best anecdotes selected with wisdom. Like passages from an old book on Napoleon that specifically relates his personality deficits and biases to his campaign failures, with none of the irrelevant factoids that modern historians wrongly believe should be in history books. They must internalize the Great Man theory of history writ as large as possible. They should have an idea of which Byzantine emperors resulted in their people being overrun by Ottomans, and also which Muslims were able to conquer so much territory and with what means, etc etc.
Large-scale history is important because an ambitious man should see that wasting his talent selling overpriced shitty sneakers will eventually — over many iteration of souls — result in the complete destruction of his nation, and means that all of the efforts of his people were for nothing, which history proves time and time again. If the people/nation do not have the right hierarchy and orientation, that’s problem #1 to solve. History teaches that well. The riches of Baghdad meant nothing when one of their leaders decided to insult the Mongols. Who remembers the wealthiest Iroquois? Where are the riches of Mansa Musa?
Great Man theory is essential because it’s the most effective method for information internalization. Man is a social creature who naturally comes equipped with disk space that is only allotted for social information. Our memory for other people is naturally superior than other memory for statistics and rules. And so what you do is you represent human nature as people, dramatized, so that a reader can store as much information as efficiently as possible, imitating and revering some examples, afraid of other examples, and so on. Great Man Theory is the only cognitively correct way to study history for a leader. Academics are too dumb to realize that. It’s something like 1000x more useful to know the narrative of Napoleon in relation to his personality and those of his advisers and foes than to know any date, or any location, or even how to spell his name. At the end of the day what we aim to take away is something that can be applied in our own lives.
So after the highest hierarchy of history, you can move down to lessons about companies and how companies thrive and fail. Because this is probably where an ambitious young man will end up, anyway. So like, essays or passages from essays on IBM, Yahoo, Google, etc. Then I’d suggest an “inoculation against liars”, so some readings about how mainstream news lies about stuff, how to glean truthful information.
Lastly, readings from the Bible and readings from psychology
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
To an extent, every subculture’s members compete over status and social dominance, even if they are at the lowest rung of society. Prisoners after all continue to compete over status. So while white liberals will compete amongst each other over who is more virtuous in relation to their ideology, it is still possible that the origin point of their ideology is informed more by actual belief rather than dominance. They belong to a subculture based upon a belief and “compete” over how well they measure up against each other. But what informs the belief first?
You see such a dynamic play out in the royal courts of kings. Those of lower rank compete against each other over approval by the higher rank. But they are not trying to dismantle the higher rank, and neither did they instantiate the higher rank themselves. In cases of extreme white progressivism, whites see themselves as eternally at a lower rank, similar to an ancient class system involving kings or nobles; they have internalized this, and now they compete for favorability. So they donate their money away, they will step down from their position if it means a minority can take their place (or they won’t accept it), they lobby against their own interests, they want their leaders to be non-white including in their own organizations.
As far as they're concerned, non-whites aren't even at the table
They believe that white racism needs to be over-corrected, possibly forever. Minorities at the table aren’t enough.
demonstration of piety and it was called out as status-seeking behavior
Right but for another Catholic example, the social competition in the religion is over humility re God. (“The least among you shall be the greatest.”) In antiquity, those who were considered the most humble were seen as holy and praiseworthy, and martyrs (the most self-denying of the community) were said to have a “crown of victory” and were immortalized forever. This is a good demonstration of the complexity at play in ideological belief and peer conpetition. Humans cannot help but to pursue status because it’s in their deepest evolutionary nature, but they can also adapt their status-seeking according to an ideological framework which actually denies them power. For early Christians, the highest status in the community was the least status in the “world” (power, riches in the world). For white progressives, the highest status is to be a self-denying white and to promote minorities. That earns them status in their peer group, but the ideological presuppositions are motivated via indoctrination rather than status seeking (similar to religious indoctrination, just with the rigorous conception of the Good).
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I don’t think this makes sense when you factor in the confession of privilege, the insulting and denigrating of the privileged, and the guilt that the white liberal possesses. If the white liberal were motivated by status seeking and dominance, they would not accept being lowered in status and denigrated for their characteristics. This literally loses them social points, opportunities, resources, accolades. You would also, then, see more men rather than women become liberal, because men more than women are motivated by the pursuit of dominance.
And the explanation also doesn’t make sense because “self-aggrandizing fantasy” applies even more so to the conservative worldview. Conservatism in America boosts white status simply by not denigrating them. The only way to salvage the argument would be to claim that the white liberal is actually competing in status against the white conservative, but this is definitely not the case on college campuses where white liberalism flourishes. They are competing, in essence, against non-white liberals.
I find a much better explanation in, “they have genuinely been conditioned to dislike themselves because of incessant repeated negative association involving their characteristics”. This also explains why the “group favorability” survey shows that white liberals rate white people lower than other races. Then it explains why Jews are resilient to this, because so much of their religion is about ethnic pride and ethnic resilience.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
The 1950s and 1980s were different eras, and you haven’t argued at all why we should see them as identical to today. Americans, even the progressive ones, used to have a healthy amount of trust in white identity and white civilization. Post-2010 progressivism does not. I mean assuming we are conflating liberalism with progressivism as everyone does today, then —
Liberalism is [akin to] a hamfisted fable about Anglo-Saxons perfecting the universe by killing off fascists and commies in outer space while flying starships staffed by every race and nation in the galaxy
is incorrect. There is nothing the modern liberal hates more than the neutered ghost of WASPs and their perceived control over institutions which, statistically, does not exist. The current liberal fable is more like: Anglo-Saxons have ruined the country that black slaves mostly created, are predisposed to racism, and they will be saved by people of every race and nation unless we happen to stop liking Asians.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I think that permabans for longterm users should become 6-month and rarely year-long bans. The forum does not (yet) have the userbase numbers where permabans are favorable over longterm bans. If there were hundreds of users who ate bans and who would be expected to participate again, then permabans would be preferable, because no one wants to read one horrible comment every day from the returning exiled. But we don’t currently have that problem. Were Hylnka to be banned in 6month increments, we (1) sufficiently stave off the problem of bad content, because one bad comment every 6 months is entirely acceptable, and one bad monthly from ~6 banned longterm users is also acceptable; while importantly, (2) we benefit from the (perhaps) 20% chance that upon return the content follows the rules, especially because people generally become more pacified with age which increases the percent every iteration. If that 20% chance occurs, it’s a longterm supply of valuable contributions which are worth the few one-off bad comments you have to read before the correct dice roll. There’s also a unique benefit to forum culture for retaining those invested longterm.
An alternative punishment could be requiring a two page essay on rule-following as a costly signal of contrition and to promote salience of infraction, after some ban period. And an alternative safeguard for good content upon return would be to automatically delete every comment by the user upon hitting -2 points after 10min, for a set duration of time proportional to number of times automatic deletion of comment occurs.
This is my analysis, deontologists may disagree.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
If you have a secular ethical framework that is not utilitarianism or something utilitarian-adjacent (eg consequentialism), what is it? I’m having a difficult time imagining a system that can’t be understood through some broadly-conceived utilitarian underpinning.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
The Hasidic use technology and live in/around NYC. They have their own “kosher phones” and they force everyone to use it
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I’m not convinced by those replies. Re: 1, the early Christians themselves abstained from participating in normative Jewish life, and the Roman Christians abstained from the Pagan civic rituals which defined mainstream Roman life. They formed their own schools based on Christian teachings. Even if we didn’t have this historical example, an insular community may do a better job at securing and promoting Christianity than a lukewarm, mainstream Christianity. The Great Commission is time neutral — it took Lithuania 1400 years to become Christian. And a Christian has an obligation to love God, which means surely he has an obligation to develop a community which permits the most love of God.
Re 2A: we are lucky, because the original founding document of America recognizes that God provides the right to freedom of association and freedom of religion. What better way to practice these rights than to worship the one who provides it?
Re 2B: America’s lax tolerance of this is because the community is insular and skilled at politicking. When you organize 200,000 men hierarchically, who all believe the most important thing in their life is the protection of their community, they are able to accomplish great things.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Matthew 12:31 even states that blasphemy against God the Father is forgiven whereas blasphemy against the Spirit is not, which is a blow to DCT because you would expect the opposite given that the Spirit proceeds from the Father according to Trinitarians. Then 12:37 specifies the two greatest commandments on which the whole of the law rests. But you can probably make DCT compatible with some kind of ranked utilitarian ethical formulation given that the underlying meaning of “feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, visiting the poor and imprisoned” is clearly signaling that we have an obligation toward another’s Ultimate Happiness, using particularly salient examples, rather than being an exhaustive list of ethical obligations. God, perhaps, commands that we see ethics as a means of promoting the greatest feasible sum happiness in a community.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
They may not want to do that, just like the Essenes before them preferred not to secede territory to the Pharisees, and Jesus wanted his own nation to find agreement with him, and Mary didn’t want to flee to Egypt under Herod… but their wishes don’t factor in at all, only the will of God. They had to do what was necessary. Any good Christian must ultimately capitulate to reality: “yet not as I will, but as [God] wills.”
Amish … Logistics
Not Amish. I had used Amish as an example of growth, but the subculture to copy would be Hasidim. The Hasidim can live in the middle of NYC and yet retain complete cultural sovereignty. They have their own rules, their own courts, their own ambulance service, their own local police; the politicians know they blockvote and come to their communities to make a speech every election cycle; they lobby fiercely for their own issues; they hire in-group; they have the highest birth rate in America; their schools barely teach English. Rather than technological proscription, the Hasidim simply have their own phones with only certain app permissions. And having millions would make this process much easier, not more difficult; you can spread out your centers in culturally influential places.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I think Christian nationalism as a terrorial project could never happen in this century, and would also not be beneficial. You would be uniting the non-zealot Christians (nearly all) with increasingly influential Hindu and Muslim lobbies, not to mention the Jewish lobby, and influential atheist donors… while the state-worshipping intelligence community would see an obvious national security threat in such a project. And the dominant strains of Christianity in America, Catholicism and mega church evangelicalism, are ineffectual at promoting moral change or preventing consumerism/etc from seeping in. Do you really want them to have their own nation? Imagine the Christian rock radio stations they would subsidize… no thank you.
A much better solution is to create a Christian Hasidim which is, in a sense, a nation within a nation. A lot of the social technology they have developed can be grafted into a Christian setting: dress codes, mandatory prayers, mandatory (Christianized) rituals, a strong national identity as Christian Israel (this is already in the New Testament yet simply ignored in today’s theology). You can even gradually introduce Latin as a new internal language. Go back to original Christian house churches and you can reduce your community’s tax burden. Create your own kashrut which must be blessed by a priest. Etc.
This idea — creating your own insular community wholecloth — is both deeply Christian and deeply American. The American history is common knowledge. For Christian history, you have the Gospel which is easily read as a practical guide to starting a church and retaining a following. Remember that orthodoxy simply did not exist in ancient Christianity, but instead a multitude of often insular competing churches. You have the archetypal story of Noah who sees a threat and reproduces an insular culture anew (hence the animals two-by-two, and the bitumen coating the ark). You have the highly influential pre-Christian Essene community which established their own communities and possibly influenced Christianity. Lastly you have the monastic traditions, with a lot of them forming their communities in the middle of nowhere with their own regulations.
If you look at the history of insular religious movements, the Amish or the Salafists or whatever, it’s easy to forget that they started with just one dude. Then the one dude found some other dudes who agreed with him after a few years. Even with Methodism, IIRC it took a decade to bring the follower count up to a dozen. Then the dudes beget more dudes, because the world does not lack dissatisfied dudes. Now there’s, like, 80,000 Amish in Ohio alone. It’s compound interest, like a seed which multiplies 30 or 60 or 100 times what was sown. This is a more practical idea than a territorial project.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Hebrews 11:1 may lean more toward assent but I think it’s still a bit nuanced, because the word translated assurance is hypostasis, its primitive connotation being “that which underlies the visible”. Some have translated this title deed. The word “assurance” is criticized because while the Greek words means certainty / certainly-persuaded, our word “assurance” doesn’t come close to that conclusiveness except in its technical business sense. For instance, if you are “reassuring” or “giving assurance” to a friend, it’s an open question whether this results in some cognitive certainty of a reality. But in the Greek there is sense of it being conclusively held.
In the rest of Hebrews 11, we see the examples of “why the ancients were commended” for their faith, and this is a list of people being obedient or committing to some action based on expectation of a promised reward. This seems more than “mental assent”, as in, “I assent to the truth of this and that”. It’s more like an allegiant assent, because the focus is on how the patron deity rewards its client believer. The person fully knows (not believes) that a promised reward will occur based on the relationship between the God and the believer based upon good faith (like the business term).
But I agree with you on the primacy of the passage in Matthew. The difficulty is in establishing compatibility between Matthew and some of the more “protestant” verses, like “by faith you are saved and not works”.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Came across a philological-theological argument that the word for faith in the New Testament context (pistis) means embodied allegiance more than cognitive assent. This is interesting as it could indicate that the faith/works controversy comes from inappropriate translations and inadequate study of the original meaning for a first century audience. When I read this I immediately thought of the weird Centurion moment in the New Testament, where Jesus states that someone has the greatest faith (pistis) because he says —
“Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I too am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”
I wonder if this anecdote was included in the New Testament specifically to illustrate the meaning of pistis. Because we see the cognitive trust that is typically thought of when we think of faith (say the word and it will be done), yet we also see an emphasis on fealty (not worthy) and, significantly, an even greater emphasis on obedience and allegiance to commands.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Is it your opinion that this was causally related to the music of the 60s?
Does anyone dispute that drug use in the late 60s did not rise because of music culture? It was the access point for finding drugs, and probably the only way a middle class person learned about psychoactive drugs. If music compelled some to move to San Francisco and change their life philosophy then yes, it must have also compelled them to do drugs.
If so, why do you single out hip hop as special and different in its influence?
Because a hippie doing LSD is not morally commensurate to getting hooked on codeine or opiates. And because psychedelic rock is not shilled by large music corporations to the youth today, like Travis Scott performing in Fortnite to a crowd of tens of millions of kids (hit song titled: “drugs you should try it”). It’s a difference both in qualitative moral harm, and quantity of moral harm. Not to mention, it’s a difference in mood as well — exploring your psychology through ayahuasca is much different than plying a girl with “nose candy”.
Lennon beat his wife and wrote a song about beating or killing a woman
The popular conception of Lennon was not one of a wife-beater, and social perception involves what can be perceived. The rappers don’t just talk about their crimes, they broadcast it on instagram. Lennon did not present a public persona of beating his wife. And again, your understanding of the lyrics lacks nuance: consider that the song is spoken to the girl, not bragging to the audience about keeping his bitches in line.
publicized lifestyles of the Beatles included infidelity, heroin use, beating women
I don’t think you know what “publicized lifestyle” means. Lennon did heroin in secret around 1969, well after Beatles peak fame. The newspapers were not writing about his heroin addiction until much after, unlike their marijuana use which was actually common knowledge.
But surely the violent lyrics and "aggressive" music should be inducing suburban kids to violence too
I do believe they are, yes. That does not mean white kids get a magic pass to join the crips.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
My interest is less than existent and I am participating out of charity. You are asking for a peer-reviewed longterm study proving that a statistically significant amount of at-risk hip hop listeners will go on to try drugs relative to controls — yes, I would also like that study. But you understand that they haven’t done this study, right? There’s nothing I can do about that, which means we have to arrive at conclusions by reasoning (at least in my case).
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds are about how great LSD is. Many Harrison songs promote Hinduism like My Sweet Lord.
Is it your opinion that the 60s and 70s did not see an increase in both LSD and eastern spirituality? If you asked a poll of teens who tried LSD in ‘69, how many of their favorite musicians would be Stevie Wonder versus Janis Joplin? Don’t we know that the teens all went to Woodstock to see their favorite musicians, then did the drugs of their favorite musicians?
Run for your Life
“If you cheat on me I kill you” is not exhorting people to beat their wives, it’s a song from the perspective of an obsessive male partner that should be interpreted with exaggeration in mind. “If I catch you with another girl you’re a dead man” is an age-old exaggeration that a woman might tell a man, vice versa. That’s this song.
why your critique of hip hop wouldn't apply equally to the Beatles
Qualitatively different as I explained in my last comment. You’ve ignored everything from the publicized lifestyles of the artists, to the visual culture (guns), to the aggression embedded in the actual musicality.
Beatles songs are harmful
If Lucy in the Sky was about fentanyl, that would be horrible and the song should probably be banned. I would prefer that they not sing about drugs, yeah. Unlike hip hop, they actually sing about things unrelated to vice and pride, which redeems them. And do I blame them for getting impressionable teens to do LSD? Yes!
people "outside the ghetto" joining gangs because of hip hop
Youve misunderstood thr metaphor. Black gangs don’t recruit white suburban kids, they just sell them drugs
Manson
Manson was motivated by a bizarro eschatological race war ideology that he retcon’d into the Beatles. Where do you think the Beatles sang about that, the while album?
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
let me clarify as much as possible, just using the song I included in my original reply. We have:
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Memorable music with memorable lyrics, which teens will lip-sync on tik tok,
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paired with an emotional state of urgency, pleasure, and power (this is communicated via the music, lyrics aside),
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with lyrics designed to be catchy that extol drug use in a non-satirical, non-sarcastic, non-fantastical way,
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associated together with the imagery of high status symbols, both within the song and in the culture of the rapper — you see teens with posters of their favorite rappers whom they idolize on their walls
Now, what motivates all teen behavior is the prospect of status and sex. (No, you will not get a source for that, don’t ask). This is mediated by looking upward toward those of high status. Hip hop is prepackaged odes to status and its rewards. We already know that fans of hip hop will imitate their favorite rappers, sometimes how they speak but also how they dress. If Kanye comes out with a new shoe, a fan will buy it to imitate who they see as high status. Given that we know fans will imitate rappers already, it is rational to conclude that they are also imitating what the rapper extols in their lyrics — like drugs. All of the fans? No one has ever alleged that. Rap is harmful if even 1% of the fans are more likely to do drugs after hearing a literal ode to drug use by their literal idol.
It sounds like you think Maxwell's Silver Hammer is fine because if you intellectually analyze it you realize it's not pro-murder
You should actually be able to understand this intuitively, no intellectualizing required. On the one hand, you have an upbeat narrative song about someone else, sung by some hippie British guys, and the musical feeling is entirely non-aggressive. On the other hand, you have an aggressive song written by a rapper who sings about his own life, who is gang affiliated, whose peers are murderers and who has probably spoken out against snitching.
But if it's just a hypnotic
It is the adolescent imitation of idols believed to have high status, not hypnotism. If you’re a kid in the ghetto, and you see a guy getting respect and women and money and later learn he runs a gang, will this make you more likely to join a gang? Common sense says yes, and hip hop is merely the packaging of this experience into a commodity to be sold to those outside the ghetto.
I can tell a just-so story about how pairing an "upbeat and devoid of anger" melody with lyrics about serial killing actually conditions people to thinking killing isn't a big deal
The emotion of anger leads to murder, and this emotion isn’t in the song. It’s peaceful, frolicking, almost joyful in musicality. You literally have a “doo doo doo doo, doo” background vocal. No one is entering into a murderous mood listening to this song and no one with a modicum of social intelligence would mistake the Beatles for promoting serial killing. In contrast, rappers are known to go to jail for killings and to carry guns.
Charles Mansion
Well I suppose it’s funny to know that he is still successfully trolling after all these decades
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
In American history, the people who struggled materially organized to accomplish things by force. Sometimes 100,000 strong, forcing half of the supply chain to shut down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_violence_in_the_United_States
I’m not much of an historian but I have it on good authority that such events also transpired in Russia and China. Even in Ancient Rome, even in the European Middle Ages. So I think that is a big difference between today and, as you say, 100 years ago. They did believe the sky was falling, because it was for them and their family, and then they did the things that they felt rectified the situation. It doesn’t appear that America has anything close to the labor movements we used to have, partially IMO because of the distracting infusion of progressive social identity politics.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
There is an element of behavior and not just emotion because dance is universal. The music can literally compel us to perform a repetitive physical action. And there are clearly natural physical responses, like if you were to slow dance to techno you’d actually be doing something wrong, and if you were to jumpstyle to an slow piano etude you’d be responding unnaturally. I don’t mean that music is going to make you want to do specific behaviors like fold your laundry, but that it infects our physical bodies and begs us to respond with our bodies. And music can then be seen to promote urgency and low-impulse via quick actions, or longmindedness and thoughtfulness. So when you pair pro-drug visual media/lyricism with a low-impulse rhythm, that’s a recipe for immorality.
Maxwell’s Silver Hammer
That’s because you have the social intelligence to understand that the Beatles are not extolling murder. The music behind the lyrics is upbeat and devoid of anger. The juxtaposition was chosen to make a humorous and interesting song. This is different from hip hop, with some of the artists having genuinely murdered people and then gaining respect from other artists in the genre.
Music changes something more significant than beliefs, it changes a person’s focal emotions. What emotions they can more readily access, appreciate, and pursue. This may be temporary or it may be lasting depending on how often the music is consumed. Psychology tells us that repeating the same neurological patterns creates a mental habit, leading to easier and access / recall. This is why you might hear a phrase and suddenly remember a song, or might have a song stuck in your head due to some emotional problem you are dealing with.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I’m being subjective now, but I think what people like most about that song is the melody line where the vocalist yearns for Barbara Ann. There is a yearning, crying plea, which connotes the emotional space of youthful puppy love rather than lust. Remember that we can’t trust the text exclusively for what a song is about, the actual music comes first. Radiohead’s True Love Waits may be titled as such but its music paints a deep, despair-ful sadness.
For an example of pure lust in rock, see “hungry like the wolf”. There’s no element of any romance, just the lustful chase for a woman. (Yet even then, it’s not as prideful or low-impulse as lots of hip hop). Then you have examples of forceful love but which are not lustful, like the Proclaimer’s I’m Gonna Be…
Gratitude is obviously good, but the gratitude should not be in comparison to the perceived immorality of your neighbors. Even if someone “deserves” some poor circumstance, it is still a bad idea to situate yourself as superior to your neighbor whose inner life you don’t know. The reason the Pharisee is unjust whereas the Publican is made just, is that the Pharisee is only grateful in relation to those he feels are inferior, and he judges a random neighbor as inferior even when that very man is crying out to his same God! And then, the next omitted part of the Pharisee’s prayer, is that he congratulates himself on his superiority because he pays tithes and fasts twice a week, which are really of secondary importance in the moral life. Those external, ritual-based details are criticized by Jesus on many occasions, because they should not be one’s focus in comparison to love for God and neighbor. (Sometimes online I see Muslim content about how farting disrupts their ritual purity and requires washing with prayer, or I see Jewish content about purifying one’s oven for dairy after it was used for meat, or even Christian content about the theologically correct minutiae of the Trinity, and I can’t help but see this all as identical to Pharisseeism, a completely false spiritual focus).
An alternative righteous Pharisee’s prayer would be to thank God for His delivery from evil and health and any sort of progress without bringing down others; to thank God and then to ask God to deliver the Publican; then perhaps to ask forgiveness for having the wrong moral focus, to recognize one’s mistakes (which every person on earth makes), and to seek what more can be done to please God.
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