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Title: How To Redeem Bad People (Fate) Author: Valium Sadfemme McGirlBoss Language: en Topics: free will, philosophy, determinism, individualist anarchism, anarcho-communism, libertarian socialism, fate, struggle, estentialism, existential anarchism, nihilism, nihilistic anarchism, egoism, BreadTube Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7sYMs_n53A Notes: This is the transcription of a YouTube video from a channel about modern Anarchist theory.
As the title suggests, a main focus of this script will be Redemption
for bad people.
What is a bad person? Here is my definition: A person who, if left to
their own devices, would eventually go on to cause harm to others that
is either unnecessary, unhelpful or disproportionate to the situation,
or a conveniently incurious person unconcerned with understanding or
achieving justice.
When I say “Bad Person”, I’m not using it as many others do, to
moralize, to assert who has a good character, or who deserves to be
punished. I don’t care how moral and upstanding any of you think you
are, there is essentially nothing you couldn’t be driven to do in
desperation. As we sit here pondering ideas, many well intended people
around the world are being forced to do bad things by their
circumstances. We are lucky not to be them.
When I say “Bad Person”, I am using the term descriptively, to help us
conceive of a group of people who will cause harm, and are in need of a
specific approach, which is what this video is about.
This is your last chance to stop reading. The choice is yours.
Part 1. Free Will Isn’t Real, And You Don’t Have A Choice.
I’m going to try to convince you that you don’t have free will, and
whether it works right away or not, your future will forever be altered
by this experience. Though of course you were determined to end up on
this video, also apparently determined to hug your face into my bum, and
I was determined to try to convince you of this, and whether or not it
will work is also determined, but we’re living in the here and now,
these processes are happening now and the outcome is uncertain. right?
Sorry, I tend to get ahead of myself.
Every time you have been put in the position of making a choice in your
life, you “chose” based on these factors:
1. Genetic predisposition towards certain behaviors.
2. Learned behavior from parents, school and society.
3. What it was possible to do physically.
4. Within the conscious limitations of an ape, driven by survival
instincts, flawed perception and reasoning, physical needs and emotional
compulsions that take precedence over principled and rational action.
5. Within your knowledge of available options you had at the time.
6. The physical and emotional state of your brain the moment before you
made the choice, which made only certain choices prominent in your mind,
and made the selection of that particular choice inevitable.
These are the restrictions placed on you, the person forced to
consciously experience and witness the life of the ape you’ve been
assigned, as said ape carries out precisely the actions which a being
that had experienced the events of it’s own life, up until any point in
time, would have, endlessly, until it dies. Your life would play out the
same, no matter how many times we rewinded it. It’s cause and effect
babey.
Why does the universe exist? Why do I exist? I can’t see any reason why
existence should exist. Why was I born as this particular entity? Why do
I exist at this particular slice of time which I call “now”? The speed
limit of light isn’t arbitrary, it is the speed limit of causality. What
if we were in a universe where light traveled instantly to it’s
destination, would all of time, everything that has happened and will
ever happen in our universe, simply blip in and out of existence
instantly? Has everything already happened and I’m just a puppet of
fate? If so, why am I being forced to witness and experience it? What
could be happening in higher dimensions to manifest this reality in
ours? Everything is temporary. Everyone I know and love is going to die.
Brain hurt? It’s okay baby, this stuff isn’t easy to think about.
Anything worth knowing is inherently difficult to understand. I will try
to give you some examples.
Did you know that science has shown that your unconscious brain makes
decisions about your next action before you even consciously know what
you’re going to do?
There is a tiny goblin that lives in your brain and has its own agenda,
a whole thought process that you aren’t aware of. If any neuro
scientoz-mologists want to comment on how I’m technically correct but
blah fucking blah, do it you coward, that’s so sexy, it turns me on.
Try something for me. Think of a word at random. Got it?
Which word was it?
Was it titties?
Why that word? Why not one of the hundred thousand other words?
Who made that “choice” for you?
Where did that word come from in your mind?
The truth is, you’re more likely to choose a word related to the
vocabulary or objects you’ve experienced recently, as they are more
prominent to your mind. That makes sense, you can’t think of a word you
don’t know, and why would you think of a word you barely use? When you
look closely at our conscious process, it is predictably restricted
within the confines of our physical form, and tied to the events it has
experienced. I’d like to experience your physical form if you know what
I mean. Hehe. If your thoughts are nothing but the thoughts that a being
who had lived your life up until that point would have, then how can you
be held individually responsible for them? You never chose your
environments, or to be the person who ended up existing in them, life
happened at you over and over until you got here.
Imagine a child raised in an isolated environment where they were only
taught to kill people. Would you be surprised when they killed someone?
We are each living in the isolated environment of our own life
experiences up until any given moment, just like the child who murders
because it is all they know, we act on our current information because
it is all we know. Neither the child, nor us, is responsible for what we
did, which obviously, isn’t to say that we didn’t do it, or that there
should be no consequences, that’s another conversation entirely, it’s
just that individual responsibility and moral agency are revealed to be
deeply incoherent ideas when you really start to question them.
The sense you have of making choices, and of self authorship, is an
illusion created by limited perspective. Our brain is a collection of
shortcuts in perception and processing that made survival easier, not a
rational machine. The world is sorely lacking in good education, so most
of us don’t look at everything from a birds eye view, don’t understand
who we are now as stemming from our previous selves, and don’t
understand the complicated forces acting upon us, and if we want the
world to get better, we must take on the difficult work of training
ourselves, and others, to think this way.
One objection to these ideas is to assert that human consciousness
exists outside the physical. Whoa…. Sorry, I just had flashbacks of the
New Atheism movement. Can we all just agree that our entire culture lost
in that fight? Interestingly enough, Islam seems to be having it’s own
New Atheist movement on here right now. Imagine ex-muslim fedoras.
Any ways, as with most spiritual ideas, It’s an interesting thought
exercise, but falls apart when you think about it for a moment, like, if
we have some kind of unique ability to inject outside intention into an
otherwise determined reality, who’s intention is it? What would that
look like? Is the entity who is playing you as a sim overwriting fate by
choosing gummy worms instead of doritos at the dollar store? That
doesn’t make me feel very free.
Maybe you’re going to tell me about how the mysteries of quantum
mechanics reveal a fundamental randomness or unpredictability to matter,
and therefore determinism defeated by facts and logic, but there are two
problems with that:
1. Our behavior being random doesn’t make things any better, and is an
even bigger case against free will.
And
2. We still act in predictable ways in the perceivable scale of the
universe, so your excuse has no additional explanatory power.
Psychic majors, feel free to tell me why I’m and idiot in the comments
below.
Imagine for a moment you were born in the 1920’s. More specifically,
born as a white child in 1920’s Germany, and then grew up during the
Nazi regime.
All you would know are the lies told to you by the Nazi party through
their institutions and culture. You would be kept from alternative
information, in an effort to sustain your ignorance and preserve the
system. You would internalize the rejection you experienced when going
against the grain. Every material factor of your life would be screaming
at you to conform, and you may even know that resistance is punished
severely, possibly even with death.
You would probably only speak the local languages, which would help to
form a cultural seal. Your Nazi education would leave out the language
necessary to even conceptualize an alternative society. The Nazis were
known for their book burnings, which books were allowed to be printed
and seen would’ve been strictly controlled, and along with them, the
ideas you were allowed to encounter.
Even if you were lucky, and somehow encountered some resistance
propaganda, kind of like this video script you’re reading right now.
Huhuhuhu. you might be driven by baser impulses to preserve yourself.
Maybe you vaguely heard about some resistance here and there, but always
framed negatively by the state controlled newspaper and radio, and
through the voices of people who similarly heard about it from the radio
and newspapers. Maybe you’ve seen a few people being dragged off the
streets never to return. When you speak negatively of whats happening,
you’re chastised by people who see you as a threat to the order. You
begin to internalize this as a norm.
Even if the anti-fascists of Germany tied you to a chair and made you
read their manifesto, they couldn’t necessarily make you understand it
in any reasonable period of time, or undo a lifetime of brainwashing,
Plus the allies dominated the resistance, the best you may have had to
look forward to was being “liberated” by either the Soviet Union or
Western powers. Powers whose global order led to the conditions your
fascist government arose from.
Plus as a white, so called, “aryan” person, on a superficial and short
term level, you benefit from this society, there’s a whole lot you have
to lose if you resist, it’s a lot easier to turn a blind eye to the
suffering of others, plus they’re probably bad guys any ways, right? At
least as far as you’ve heard. At least as far as you want to rationalize
to yourself. And in real Nazi Germany, a lot of German citizens lived in
this delusion about the righteousness of their government right up until
Berlin was being bombed.
The Nazis were purposefully quite secretive, and dishonest, even they
understood that a certain level of naked brutality was in poor taste and
might not be tolerated.
Maybe you get super lucky, and through a series of reformative
experiences, you come to understand the truth, and accept that you need
to resist, now what? Well, in the real Nazi Germany, most of the
citizens who resisted died valiantly, but ineffectively. Context
determines your possibilities.
I want to put it to you, that each of us is like the white child raised
under Nazi Germany. Of course not literally, but we are similarly
operating within the invisible violence and injustice that is normal in
our own societies. Most of us do not know, nor do we really want to
know, the toll of suffering and death that upholds our “Order”, and most
of us are comfortable enough to avoid realizing what needs to be done.
Long story short, If you’re reading this in 2020, in an english speaking
so called, “developed country”, it’s likely you get to live in relative
luxury while someone else lives on $2 a day, because your forebearers
conquered and subjugated the rest of the world, exploiting their
resources and labor, and hoarding great wealth within your borders. That
history means more money in your country, less in others, so providing
for the basic needs of the global poor isn’t profitable the way that
building i-phones for you is. So, for example, you get to relax with
food in your belly, and enjoy this video, while 20000 more people starve
to death globally today, as they do every day, simply because of where
they were born within a global economic order, which is structured
largely to benefit your local elites, as well as the elites of various
countries. Still, trickle down exploited wealth, and slave produced
luxury goods are quite the aphrodisiac to make people like you turn your
eyes from the horrible costs of such a system. You’re essentially being
paid your cut to remain complicit. They think you’re stupid. I don’t say
these things to make you feel guilty, honestly guilt doesn’t really help
anyone, we have to allow ourselves to accept what is happening and
follow our hearts. I will speak more on such things later.
These ideas can be quite difficult and painful. If you’ve even managed
to make it this far in, you are already quite exceptional. You’ve
understood that our senses will often betray us, and discomfort must be
faced head on. I’m proud of you.
1945 really wasn’t that long ago. The Nazi regime lasted 10 years, they
brutalized and genocided so many innocent people, invaded and occupied
multiple countries. The effects of this still echo in the cultures of
those countries. It cost millions of lives to put them down. It is said
that Fascism can never be allowed to happen again, and yet, Fascism is
everywhere all over the globe. I will speak more on this later. Sorry to
keep having to say that, I’m trying to stick to one point at a time.
All of this being true, then every bad person who has ever existed,
every sadist, sociopath, fascist, sex offender, whatever, is the
inevitable product of their life story. They can’t do, or be anything
different, without intervention.
One of my goals in this series is to try to teach you to become a force
for intervention, because, well, if we don’t put aside our comfort and
well being to reform this world of monsters and miscreants, nothing will
get better. I will expand more on this later.
The fact that our world is structured in such a way, that some people go
through a series of life experiences that shapes them into a bad person,
is fundamentally the problem. If these bad people existed, then they
were a product of our current world, and will continue to be until it is
fixed. Pearl clutching about “choice” and “personal moral
responsibility” will not protect us from the physical consequences of
continuing this arrangement.
Everything I’m saying here should be obvious, and one of the reasons it
isn’t, is because the idea of “Choice” or “Personal Responsibility”
serves as a cover for all the social ills created by our system of
liberal capitalism, it is an excuse we use to avoid thinking about how
bad things are reproduced by the structure of our system. It is more
comforting to believe that our society is natural, the world is just,
that hard work pays off, that people get what they deserve, that those
who get a bad lot in life did something to deserve it, and that bad
people are just some kind of individual aberration, than it is to
realize the complicated reality, that bad people are a product of the
structure of our society, and the manufactured apathy and ignorance of
millions of people upholds an unjust system that destroys lives. This
mindset is also a lot easier to hold when you happen to be doing well
personally, and want to attribute that to your high moral character,
when the reality is, life just didn’t shit on you like it has to bad
people or people in bad situations.
If you’d have been born as anyone else, you would’ve become them, you’d
have been tossed around like a pinball by the same forces of their life,
right into the slot of whatever they became. If they were homeless, that
would be you right now. You could’ve been made into a Nazi, or Child
Molestor. You could’ve been me, and then you’d be commiting career
suicide by making this video!
Because this is the case, I argue that we need to design a society in
which we would have been equally happy to have been born into anyone’s
life, where the circumstances that make people bad are minimized, and if
anyone could possibly become bad, we would have people and systems ready
to intervene in a way which is compassionate to the determined nature of
their sickness.
Of course, each one of us must wage a war in our own mind to become
better people, but our ability to even do that is determined by all the
factors I noted before. Whether we are ready to individually change at
any point, depends on the mind we have to work with, as well as external
factors. Interventions.
As a species, we can continue to hope for the magic free will fairies to
imbue everyone with the mind strength to deny their genetics, emotional
landscape, learned behavior, material conditions and life story, or we
can recognize the social causation for the current state of human ill
and advocate the planned intervention into people’s collective
ignorance, and a systemic solution. I advocate the latter.
How are you feeling? Try to be present in your body for a moment.
Maybe you feel fine, and if that’s you, this is your empathy time.
Try to connect with your body, the physical entity that you have been
ripped out of the void and forced to occupy. I know that you have to
dissociate from it to get through day by day. This society has placed
you in an environment where the natural functions of your body, your
emotions, behaviors, kindness, do not serve you, and feel foreign and
disruptive to your given place in this world.
For just this moment, try to remember your true nature. please allow
yourself to feel your difficult emotions.
Each of us lives in the illusion of this world constructed in the jello
computer in our heads. As animals, we do not parse reality in a 1 to 1
ratio, we form a serviceable model of reality in our consciousness that
is convenient for our purposes as biological beings, and understand the
world through the representative images and ideas compiled by our sense
data. Many of the mechanisms of our own feelings and thoughts are
obscured to ourselves, our brain fills in the gaps in our cognition, and
naturalizes any dysfunctional thought processes to ourselves, so we
struggle to recognize the flaws in our own thinking. We are irrational,
and suffer from many cognitive biases, and will settle for a comforting
lie over a hurtful truth. Without education, or centuries of accumulated
philosophical and scientific knowledge, we lack the complex models of
thought necessary to conceptualize life outside of our own experiences
with much depth, or understand the abstract social, economic and
political forces that shape the conditions of our immediate day to day
life, and that makes it difficult to hold principled beliefs that don’t
bend to our convenience.
No matter how well educated or how intelligent you are, you’ll always be
fighting against these forces of our nature, you have to learn to be
okay with that. Fighting your nature will only cause problems, working
with it can produce solutions.
If we try to understand the world accurately, try to believe only what
is true, and we act based on our best approximation of truth, even when
things aren’t going well, as they often won’t in this world, we can at
least take comfort in the knowledge that we did our best. If I didn’t
rationalize that I should believe whatever is true no matter how
painful, it would be difficult to maintain my worldview, since the
implications of many of my beliefs are discomforting. I wish that in the
process of imparting this knowledge to you, I didn’t have to inflict you
with the same realizations I have had, because I know how painful they
can be.
Discomfort can be the first step in a necessary positive change, but I
wish it wasn’t. Please know that I don’t intend for you to hurt, and
that whatever you’re feeling right now is valid.
You’re not alone in feeling that way. Most of us went through similar
feelings when we learned about this as well. Personally, I felt
helpless, like I was caught up in a giant whirlpool being spun around
sucked into the centre over billions of years, a slave to forces larger
than myself. Actually, that is the literal situation. It is kind of
terrifying. I’m not going to lie and say something cheesy like, oh but
it’s so beautiful, and vast, or whatever. It just sucks. But also, I
guess it is comforting in some sense, to know that everything that has
ever occurred to, or mattered to me, is my own, that only I can decide
for myself what it all means, it is freeing to know that none of this
means anything in the scale of the universe. It frees me up to focus on
the physical world in the here and now, and to see plainly that my fate
is tied up with every other human, so I might as well co-operate with
them for a better future.
Why yes I have watched Rick and Morty and also I have 10000 IQ points.
You won’t always struggle to accept this, you will develop new ways of
thinking that bring you greater peace, and which allow you to navigate
our strange shared reality.
It can be difficult to confront ourselves with concepts like this. Many
of us, before we understood that bad people are fated to act how they
will without intervention, we treated them as if they truly understood
how awful they were being but “chose” to do it any ways, we acted as if
they could have, at any moment, “chose” not to do the bad thing. We were
happy to imagine that others should just know better, and discounted the
various cumulative factors that produce people’s decisions. We mistook
our understanding for theirs. We absolved ourselves of responsibility to
nudge them, or anyone else, towards a better way of being. When we
question this logic, we have to re-evaluate many of the events from our
lives, because if this is correct, then many of us have scapegoated
individuals for societal problems, and have collaborated with systems of
power, to hurt and punish them ineffectively, out of a need for revenge,
obscuring the reality that said systems are the origin point for this
bad behavior. It is scary to realize that the real enemy is so much
larger than the individuals who hurt us, there’s no easy target for our
rage, we have to think abstractly about it.
Back when we thought it was enough to hurt and punish individuals for
their bad deeds, the solution seemed so simple.. But what can be done
about a gigantic complicated system? So many terrible things are going
to continue to happen because of society. It’s enough to make you want
to give up, but you can’t give up, you’re not alone. There are many of
us in this world, trying to imagine a new effective form of justice, and
fighting for a world worth living in. Please continue to join me in this
video series, as I lay out the framework for what we can do to make the
world a better place.
These ideas, they’re painful for some, because they have us questioning
our internal images of ourselves as good people. When we have to
re-evaluate ourselves, it is in moments like these that we can
understand how bad people feel, when they have to come to terms with
what they have done, we can see how difficult it is to face negative
realizations about yourself. Remember this experience when you go
forward helping to reform others, feelings like these will be your new
barrier to overcome in others, as you try to spread conscience. Though
of course, some part of you already knew this. If you have good values
and politics now, it’s because you have hurt a long line of people in
the past to get to where you are now. You haven’t always been the person
you are now, your life put you through the trials of your circumstances,
and somehow that led to you now. There’s still so many trials ahead, and
I believe in you.
Anything anybody has ever done throughout history made sense to them
from their perspective, we have to make it stop making sense to them.
As humanity begins to collectively awaken to the problem, to understand
the world as made up of abused and misinformed people hurting each other
in an endless cycle, for which the only coherent solution is a
recognition of the problem outside our personal indignation, advocacy
for a better political and economic system, and a targeted compassionate
intervention into the life paths of bad people, we are faced with
another problem, even the most effective action we can start now, will
still only pay off way later, and that no matter how good we do, it will
be a difficult process that will claim many people’s lives. In my
opinion, realizations like this are just part of growing up, but liberal
capitalist societies have tried to obscure these realizations from us
because when the masses are too busy judging each other as individuals,
blaming each other for the symptoms of the system, they are easier to
distract, pit up against one another, and control.
If you don’t know anything about me or my views, you could be forgiven
for thinking I must be some kind of bad person. In my experience, this
is a belief of convenience: If I am a bad person, then you have
self-permission not to engage with any of the implications of my words,
but even if I was a bad person it wouldn’t change whether what I’m
saying is true or not.
Take a moment to think about the selection bias in your experiences on
the internet. Most people in the world are too poor to have a device or
access the internet, and don’t have time to be online or treat politics
as a hobby. Even if they did, they probably don’t speak English. So when
you go online, you’re surrounded mostly by voices of people in a similar
position to you, you’re entering a space where most of the victims of
your hegemony are silent, this can give you the perception that things
are fine, and that things can keep carrying on like this, but they
can’t. Sooner or later the consequences of what imperialist nations are
doing to the rest of the world will come for us, and when they do, those
who refused to listen to people like me, will become Fascists to protect
their countries stolen wealth, and a great toll of casualties will be
paid again to stop it. It is up to us to help people see outside their
limited perspectives and step outside the story of the rise of Fascism,
before it’s too late.
If you’re doing the right thing, challenging people in the right ways to
provoke necessary change, a lot of people aren’t going to like you.
You’re challenging them to examine this world and their place in it, and
they aren’t going to like what they see. If it hurts, it’s working.
With this reality in mind, we all have to contend with a world where the
truth hurts, where we must accept sacrifice and pain to move forward, we
have to learn and develop healthy methods within our organizations and
within ourselves, to deal with these feelings, and we must teach them to
the people who we are burdening with this knowledge as well.
If you didn’t know these things, please don’t feel badly, your ignorance
isn’t your fault, it is the product of a society that has failed all of
us. Nobody should have to run into an obscure YouTube video to figure
this stuff out, so it’s up to us to change things so that this is common
knowledge. I encourage you to continue seeking knowledge from various
sources.
I’m sorry to have to ask you a favor like this, but, YouTube does not
like showing radical videos like this to people, it’s a miracle that I’m
even allowed to exist on this platform. If you could share them around
to people, it could really help me do what I do. Thank you so much, I
really appreciate it.