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Old Mar 21, 2016, 10:40 AM
ScientiaOmnisEst's Avatar
ScientiaOmnisEst ScientiaOmnisEst is offline
Poohbah
 
Member Since: Sep 2015
Location: Upstate NY
Posts: 1,130
Quote:
Originally Posted by Onward2wards View Post
I can relate to a lot of the questions you're asking yourself, ScientiaOmnisEst. Here are my thoughts:

The concept that anyone "owes" anything to anyone else implies a mere contractual relationship. Human beings can interact simply because they choose to do so, without endless obligatory strings attached. Any "strings attached" is by mutual consent, and is not an absolute rule. If the world owes the individual nothing but the individual owes the world everything, that sounds suspiciously like indentured servitude to me. If the individual is owed everything and the world is owed nothing back, that's a demanding bully. Neither extreme sounds palatable to me.

I've seen a lot of comments online which imply (to my mind) that anyone who doesn't want to live like wild dogs fighting over scraps of meat is weak and useless. "Well," I think, "there goes collaboration, discussion, negotiation, empathy, interpersonal responsibility, and thousands of years of civilized human evolution." I see these ideas strewn around the web and other media, and can't help but think "Is sociopathy catching? When did contempt become cool?"

Have you noticed that these doubts you are having concern conditional vs unconditional social value, and that if social value is exclusively conditional, it would be devastating to believe one has no capacity to meet these conditions? It would perhaps lead to perceiving one cannot "compete at life". I'm mentioning this because I find this thread triggering for some reason, so now you have me thinking too.

I'm basically a walking disaster lately. I have too much time to think, particularly about myself. Two of those last posts were written at 3am while I was still half-wired on an ill-consumed energy drink while my browser was crashing. The last one was written a couple hours ago. I've been reading about effective altruism and being consumed with guilt for the last 20 minutes (the logic of it is flawless, but my own egoism is more important to me). I'll probably be either numbed out on Youtube, asleep, or otherwise forgotten about all of this by this afternoon.

Nice to know I made someone think, or at leat that I'm not the only freak who feels paralyzed by fear, guilt, and thought.