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PaperclipPerfector
8mo ago
(text post)
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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What’s your favorite holiday? I’m especially curious about non American ones. Doesn’t even have to be an extant holiday.
Saturnalia is mine, for instance. Having servants and masters switch place for a day is just such a wild concept, sounds like a blast.
No favorite holiday. I do not care for any of them.
I feel a bit sad that I'm almost entirely isolated from 'society' on this. The only thing I have in common with plurality of population is that I appreciate law & order and being polite. I deeply value groups and friendships, but I have no tribal feelings, it's like that instinctual part of humanity is missing from me entirely.
As I love fireworks, close-hitting thunder and artillery fire. Holidays don't feature these. I consider every great storm directly overhead a minor holiday and always enjoy listening to it.
So I care for no holidays, I have no religion, I feel little kinship with my fellow Slovaks, even less for Czechs among whom I hide, there are no communities I could work to join. Were I to get a stroke and find God I'd probably end up in some serious orthodox church as I'm in a 95% agreement with them on behavioral norms. Very much enjoyed talking to a priest from such a group while signing a petition against the Istanbul treaty. He seemed a lot like me. Mindful of the gravity of the problem, serious yet also had a sense of humor. But, Christians aren't my people. God doesn't know me, I don't know God. ....
There is no God but Evolution and she cares nothing at all for us and ťhat is how it is and probably must be for our own good, for we are imperfect rationalising, not rational animals and can't function without getting periodically brutalised by reality. I know I can't, I observe empires can't do, companies can't manage either. Seems like a law of nature, no?
We always fight against the cold cruelty of nature and every victory of ours leaves us weaker and worse off. Few seem to understand this at the meta level, so in modernity we go from blunder to blunder and become ever more cringe with each generation.
What holidays could someone like me appreciate?
I've examined my soul and found out I'd not care at all had Germans won the war and replaced Slovak with German, or had Hungarians succeeded in extirpating Slovak language. Why should I feel anything there? Tribal identity is an essentially meaningless marker here, the cultural differences between Germans, Hungarians and Slovaks are rather small. Would the world be worse off for missing one tiny slavic language 90% of whose speakers were usually alcoholic, frequently wife-beating and typically petty subsistence farmers ?
Can you explain more of what you mean in this section? [We always fight against its cold cruelty and every victory of ours leaves us weaker and worse off. Few seem to understand this at the meta level, so in modernity we go from blunder to blunder and become ever more cringe with each generation.]
Are you talking about a 'fight' against evolution? Can you explain what you mean by 'cringe'? I understand this word to mean social awkwardness but it is always viewed relatively.
We are animals whose sense of drive fulfillment evolved to be derived from sustaining our material needs, war, tribal belonging and pursuing power. Yet now we perform abstruse specialist tasks which are usually far less satisfying, we are exposed to too little violence, commercial services allow us to eschew community and the judgement of others, to our own detriment.
Pursuit of agency and power typically involves people selling their soul and time to some corporate shoggoth. The traditional way of having a war band and stabbing more or less distant neighbors or maybe even tearing off some territory to claim your own is now a distant memory echoing only in certain computer games.
Pretty much every historically basically inevitable societal advance has removed us further away from direct fulfilment of most of those goals and having to resort to replacement activities.
E.g. So I'm exposed to the spectacle of my highly paid (for the region, $5k a month is chump change in the US) specialist ancestor spending a lot of her scant free time at desultory attempts at growing some salad and beans. People cheer and care for absurd sports, it forms their identities. And so on.
Eliminative materialism is a false path my friend. It’s not too late to turn back.
I'm not an eliminative materialist. I believe mental phenomena are, however, arising from the processes in the underlying physical matter. Maybe the thought processes themselves matter, and aren't purely an 'experience', maybe not, but they of course exist.
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