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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35460 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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First, I agree there is some value in putting in effort into something. It demonstrates a virtue in the person, the ability to delay gratification, to work towards a purpose. The reason we like this is probably evolutionarily determined, as such people are useful allies in bad times. Admiring people for the effort they put into climbing a mountain etc. is alright, it pushes us to become better and apply effort in smaller scale things. It's a symbolic distillation of our everyday struggles and shortcomings. That's all fine.

What I don't see as virtuous though is the other half of the attitude you show, namely that you want to feel that the stuff around you was done with a lot of human effort. Essentially this is the opposite of striving for efficiency, which we have been doing as humans since time immemorial. It would take more effort to swim to the other shore, but instead we build ships. It would take more effort to walk, but at some point people decided to ride horses instead and then invented cars.

Things that are made in an inefficient way for the purpose of demonstrating extra human effort are luxuries. Probably it would feel nice to be carried around town in a litter but why do that if there are cars? Understandably, it is a way to signal status if you can get many people to do inefficient work for you. Essentially it's a way for you to show that you can boss people around, having amassed (perhaps over generations) enough effort-tokens (presumably through some efficient method, using leverage, not by the sweat of your brow) to do this. It makes one feel important. I, however, think that the enjoyment of other people's senseless labor for showing off one's own status is a vice.

We should continue to use our brainpower to achieve more with less effort. This is not an argument to be lazy, but to work smart and get more done. Putting up artificial constraints makes no sense in general. Now if the constraints allow for the exploration of something interesting, that's another things. For example it could be a way to hone one's wits, eg the limitation of size in demo scene demos etc., to see novel ideas and creative solutions. That's all fine. It's also all fine if the actual hand made product is better. Furniture made of solid wood, designed to fit your rooms is better than the cheap stuff you buy at IKEA. But the reason to want it is that it's better. Also if you want lots of stuff done for you manually, how do you justify that? What makes you think that you deserve the fruits of all that effort? And independent of the answer, can you understand that many people can't afford having so many people jump around to their whim, and for them increases in efficiency can bring more improvement in quality of life?

Essentially this is the opposite of striving for efficiency

It most certainly is!

So I sat there and smoked my cigar until I fell into a reverie. Among others I recall these thoughts. You are getting on, I said to myself, and are becoming an old man without being anything, and without really taking on anything. Wherever you look about you on the other hand, in literature or in life, you see the names and figures of the celebrities, the prized and acclaimed making their appearances or being talked about, the many benefactors of the age who know how to do favours to mankind by making life more and more easy, some with railways, others with omnibuses and steamships, others with the telegraph, others through easily grasped surveys and brief reports on everything worth knowing, and finally the true benefactors of the age, who by virtue of thought make spiritual existence systematically easier and yet more and more important. And what are you doing? Here my soliloquy was interrupted, for my cigar was finished and a new one had to be lit. So I smoked again, and then suddenly this thought flashed through my mind: You must do something, but since with your limited abilities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, take it upon yourself to make something more difficult. This notion pleased me immensely, and at the same time it flattered me to think that I would be loved and esteemed for this effort by the whole community, as well as any. For when all join together in making everything easier in every way, there remains only one possible danger, namely, that the ease becomes so great that it becomes altogether too easy; then there will be only one lack remaining, if not yet felt, when people come to miss the difficulty. Out of love for humankind, and from despair over my embarrassing situation, having accomplished nothing, and being unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and out of a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task everywhere to create difficulties. I was also especially struck by the curious reflection as to whether it was not really my indolence I had to thank for the fact that this task became mine. For far from having found it like an Aladdin, by a stroke of luck, I must rather suppose that by preventing me from intervening in good time to make things easy, my indolence has thrust on me the only thing that was left.

-- Søren Kierkegaard, "Concluding Unscientific Postscript"

"It's too difficult to meaningfully contribute to this society" vs "there is no difficulty any more, we must artificially make things difficult"?

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