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Spookykou
3m ago
One wrinkle for me when trying to think about the efficacy of therapy is that the incidence of mental illness has skyrocketed in step with the wide spread adoption of therapy culture. This is supposed to be caused by increased awareness, but then you have things like Scott's Anorexia in South Korea story, that push me towards a different theory. Therapy culture is horrible, and therapy itself is mostly trash (which is why we can't make any meaningful improvements to the practice after over a hundred years), it only works in as much as it is the socially acceptably path to resolve such issues. I imagine if we could check, running amok would have been found to be an effective above placebo 'therapy' as well. Outside of a handful of mental illnesses with consistent cross cultural manifestations, everything else is either conversion disorder with people trying to fit their negative emotional states into a culturally understood framework, or increasingly, excuses for shitty behavior and to avoid accountability. The framework spawned by therapy culture in the west is particularly bad, mental health awareness is bad, stoicism is probably correct.
Baby steps. Get people over the hangup of "it's not ok to just ban things, only leftists are allowed to do that!", then work on "woah you can't just throw communists into an alligator swamp, thats only ok when communists do it!"
If they can ban dishwashers that actually wash dishes and then raid people who import ones that work, we can do the same to them. And anyone who complains needs to be reeducated.
TwiceHuman
53m ago
I don't see any puzzles here, I don't consider Nietzsche all that difficult to understand, and I don't like secondary sources at all (I do read translations, though).
Human beings cannot be rational, as they can only follow their own nature. Even if their nature leads them to attempt rational thinking, it's still their nature which is in charge. This is why Nietzsche psychoanalyzes people. He was also intelligent enough to do this to himself, no doubt. Of course his work was motivated by his suffering, if you think Nietzsche lacked self-awareness you underestimate him.
Nietzsche liked exceptional people. But everything exceptional is rare, and the rare couldn't exist without the common, so he doesn't even want to do away with the rabble. And of course his writing isn't for everone, just like this website isn't for everyone. It's not just best for you that certain people never find this website, it's also the best for them that they stay away. It's not a moral statement or a kind of discrimination, it's a matter of compatibility.
The higher man will care about aesthetics and not just about objective things. This is because he is in touch with his instincts, because he has his own values, and because the top of the hierarchy of needs is more spiritual than physical. The subjective is a luxury, as is having suboptimal preferences. But most importantly, higher type of people say "yes" to themselves and to life (they're life affirming and of good conscience).
Nietzsche liked humanity, and he seemed to have a problem with modernity and some fundemental misunderstandings that society has with human nature (mostly because slave morality forced us to lie about human nature, until the lie became how we decided things ought to be). An easy example is every belief which ruins the conscience of men. Society is filled with people who are terrified of the possibility that they aren't "good", and who tries to look for evidence that they're "good", and who try to prove to themselves and others that they're "good". They also look for ways to "become a good person", but this is nonsense, for being a good person leads to good actions, not the other way around. You can only become who you are. So society turns pathelogical over simple errors.
Look at the death of nationalism, for it can be understood as self-destructive behaviour, the preference of something other than oneself. "Humanity are a plague", "Having children is bad", "Cats are better than people", "Power/ambition/competition/discrimination is evil". It's all a hatred of elements which are essential to either life itself or to humanity. So such philosophy is ultimately the preaching of death. Nietzsche regarded this as worse than evil, and that's because evil people still prefer themselves. Evil people still enjoy life. This can be summed up with "Narrow souls hate I like the devil, Souls wherein grows nor good nor evil."
Life is hard to justify with all of its suffering and striving
Read the end of Zarathustra. It's a little hard to understand, but when you feel joy, you say yes to what is, and in that moment, everything is redeemed, including all the suffering you went through just to experience that moment. But Nietzsche considers happiness and suffering to be of secondary importance, and considers their focus to be a symptom of degeneration (just like hedonism, which is the optimization of pleasure, is a superficial and unhealthy way to live)
I don't like being rude or excessively critical, and I'm open to counter-arguments, I just... Feel like it all makes sense.
Bad Therapy is largely about that kind of thing. The premise is that there are always risks to any intervention, and when the target audience isn't suffering from debilitating mental illness, the risks outweigh the benefits.
My father experienced something similar with his sister, due to a "repressed memories" therapist.
The identity preference ratchet is something else, though, from what I've heard. Something more like Marxist class warfare, but for identity groups. Cain and Able, Kulaks, misdirected Leviathan, that kind of thing.
There might sometimes be a steel man for people to use HR scary words about discrimination and toxic environments when they really just have kind of a shitty manager who's bad at managing or something. As far as I can tell, unless it's absurdly obvious and well documented, if an employee complains that their manager is bad at their managing job, they will be met with disinterest, possibly irritation towards them, rather than the manager. Perhaps they will get in trouble for wanting clear directives or trying to enforce their own boundaries in the face of the shitty manager at some point. They will probably not get a better manager. If they go on about HR scare words, on the other hand, the company will go out of its way to protect them from reprisal, and they might actually get put under someone else. That's a win for the employee! So that's what they're incentivized to do.
Well aktshually, the sense of taste is rather gross, with the tongue only really being able to detect basic aspects of salt, sweet, bitter, sour, and umami, and the vast majority of what people would consider flavor, including all the subtleties, are from olfactory sensing. That's why if you hold your nose it's difficult to tell the difference between an apple and an onion.
It doesn't affect your point at all. I just thought it was interesting.
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