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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3762 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 12, 2024

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With apologies to @Capital_Room (not really) I'm reposting his hypothetical:

Let us consider a hypothetical character named John. Here is what John has to say about some of his coworkers:

Alice at work keeps stealing my parking space; obviously, she wants to murder me so she can have it all to herself.

Bob bumped into me in the hall yesterday; obviously, he’s a threat to my life, since he clearly shows a willingness to inflict violence upon me.

I suggested to Carol that we use a red background on the webpage, but she used a blue one instead. I can only conclude that she wants to kill me so that I stop showing up her lousy ideas with my better ones.

Dave made a comment about the smell of fish in the break-room after I reheated my lunch in the microwave. Obviously he hates my culinary choices, because he hates me, and intends to assassinate me.

Emma in management announced the new work schedule, and the set up for Monday afternoons conflicts with one of my hobbies outside work. She obviously created that whole schedule specifically to attack me personally, because she’s plotting to destroy me.

Frank called me a “paranoid nutjob.” He’s clearly out to get me and wants me dead.

Greta says I’m constantly exaggerating how much people don’t like me to play on people’s sympathy. She’s obviously plotting my death.

Henry made a comment about how I frequently accuse everyone of wanting to kill me, which only goes to prove how much he wants to kill me.

(Cartoonish, yes, but it’s a deliberate excess for purpose of illustration.)

What’s the best explanation for why John is Like This?

John is paranoid — maybe a classmate tried to stab him on the playground as a kid, and now he views everything through the lens of that trauma, or something.

John is cynically engaging in hyperbole to win over others into taking his side — he found out that exaggerating how much hostility he encounters engendered greater sympathy, and he just kept ramping it up in intensity.

John frequently contemplates killing anyone he disagrees with or dislikes — he’s engaging in “typical-minding,” believing that everyone else shares his own murderous hate.

Disregarding that this is a metaphor for the Jews or whatever, it's how I model people. What is the best explanation?

Some blend of the three. John is a lazy thinker so he defaults to lazy explanations: He's the only thing that matters, so any obstacles he encounters are deliberate sabotage, and that sabotage is the worst possible kind, and so you should feel sorry for him because he's the only thing that matters, and if you don't you might as well be dead to him. Egocentrism, probably with some sort of neurochemical deficiency that biases his perceptions towards negative interpretation.

And maybe some people have picked up on those vibes and started actually fucking with him because why not, he's a miserable sod who already thinks everyone is out to get him anyway so they might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. At that point he's "right" but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

it's how I model people

You model people as being like John, or you model people the same way John models people?

The way he does. I don't think there's anyone in the world who under the right circumstances would not be my enemy. And I'm not talking about thought experiments and fictional scenarios like Hunger Games. Under common everyday circumstances.

If you call "briefly acted against my interests" "be my enemy", sure.

This kind of mindset looks like it either leads to finding out what it really is like to have everyone surrounding you turn on you (once you schiz out on Stacy for trying to "assassinate" you), or eventually landing in the madhouse because the cognitive dissonance between thinking Bob wants to kill you yet not acting like he wants to kill you can't be easy on the mind.

As the Putin meme goes, "if the fight is imminent, strike first. How to determine if a fight is imminent? Once you've struck first, it is."

Not what I call it, and you're forgetting the third option, preemptive suicide.

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