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> I actually think that the whole state of affairs with > software is caused by a whole superstructure that is kept > in order to keep up a market for developers in order to > circulate money, which requires them to stack complexity > and make things 1000x harder than they should be.
That sounds about right.
Where I depart on that is I can't blame a superstructure, as though some sinister, free-willed thing. To my current way of thinking, the superstructure is an emergent property of the mathematical integral of many self-centric behaviors. There seems to be a superstructure sort in the way there seems to be a glowing circle hovering midair when rotating a hot firebrand tip in the dark. Is there a circular "thing" in the case? Not really. But it surely looks like there is, and we can say there is, and if we say it enough we can even believe it, and believing it seemingly makes it so.
In the superstructure case, I think it's the mass repetition of "I'm more important than all else, so I will almost always cut myself breaks over all others". That's what I mean by "self-centric behavior". You get enough people repeating that often enough, and next thing you know there appears to be an evil - or let's just call it an anti-societal - superstructure driving the whole thing. Except there isn't. There's just a seeming momentum to a whole lot of selfishness, and then we call it something else to avoid accepting that assessment and its inherent response-ability.
Something like that.
Things are harder than they seem to be because people are working against each other by being more for/about themselves than for/about the collective, about each other. The mathematical integral of enough seemingly infinitesimal self-centric behaviors is an economic hot firebrand tip of hell. :-)
Pondering that is how what I call "The Zeroth Commandment" came to mind. It's called that because we all know of the "Ten Commandments", and we all know practically nobody can follow them due to the self-centricity of the root of their behavior(s). But what if we started with a simpler commandment that might be thought of as underlying the rest (hence "Zeroeth"), but a better behavioral starting point?
How about: "Thou shalt not inconvenience"?
We have the power to put ourselves perhaps not last, but perhaps not first. That's all it's suggesting. Don't take shortcuts that lead to more otherwise unnecessary effort/work/frustration for others.
Something like that.
> My views on "mental illness" are more or less the same. We > make up an artificial standard of what it means to be > a normal, or at any rate functional, human being, which > actually just means supporting the same money-circulating > superstructures with inane labour, and we create a whole > artificial set of habits and alimentary patterns that > make us sick, and now we create yet another market to give > lobotomizing drugs to people so that they can keep walking > the death treadmill of money.
Continuing in the above vein, the "artificial standard" is seemingly having to be more self-centric (or "inconveniencing") to keep up with others' being more self-centric, and the *seeming* superstructure that emerges from the integral of enough self-centric, inconveniencing behaviors - *seemingly* in order to survive, if not thrive.
> We really are forced to live the worst lives possibles, > human beings have been turned into cattle these days.
'Tis definitely a vicious cycle. Moooooooooooooooooooooo! :-)
> So yeah, you don't really want to get me started on this.
Oh yes I do. It's really the only topic that matters should we wish to persist without going sufficiently crazy to annihilate ourselves and/or others.
>> That's okay. I mean, I *was* starting to think I'd ruffled >> your feathers somehow. I seem to have upper echelon skills >> in that department, you see.... > > Try me! Here's a tip: you'd have to hold on to ordinary > (some would say safe) views on a topic to really rustle > my feathers.
You don't have to worry about *that* happening. :-)
> Anyway you should know by now that (so long as you're not > actually hostile), however the guy on the other side reacts > to your words, that is their problem, not yours!
In a way. But I think it comes back to me, so to speak. Or even if there isn't something overtly karmic about it, I can't un-remember my having possibly riled someone unnecessarily, and remembering that affects me going forward.
> This is the internet, after all :-)
Truer chewed cud hasn't been uddered! ;-)
> I would really like to elaborate more but these days my > brain isn't in verbose mode. I hope you understand.
I do. My wife has me going lots of different directions. And they're not bad directions. It's just that I've been on a sort of textural quest since "local BBSes" in the early 1980's / late 1990's, and so this activity feels like something that's about to become important any minute now, even though it pretty much never has: the hope springing eternal thing, or something like that.
To my current way of thinking, the superstructure is an emergent property of the mathematical integral of many self-centric behaviors.
At first I was inclined to agree, but on second thought...
Yes, this "superstructure" I talk about is an emergent property of very many individuals acting apparently on their own, but that is not to say it doesn't actually exist. I recall the materialistic position that consciousness is an emergent property of neural synapses firing here and there. Likewise with the "superstructure", which even though it is an emergent property, it is still a real thing. It exists in the form of github, AWS, electron (or whatever all that crap is called), in ECMAscript 6 (I think? I keep losing track of iterations of programming languages and hollywood films, how many pythons are there, how many perls, how many fast & furious?), all of these enforcing the current state of affairs.
I also do not think it's quite self-centered behaviour. All of this seems to be done within the cult of the money god, which people follow even though it sucks on their lives and souls and it's slowly killing them. That hardly counts as self-centered behaviour. I am selfish, I don't work "for the benefit of society" (I still have my doubts as to whether making marketing campaings for sugary drinks or adulterated tobacco really is a benefit to society, but it's my word against that of 6 billion people!), I am self-centered and that is why I don't put myself through the trouble of installing a buttload of different "frameworks" to provide me with basic functionality.
Actually I think it's often the opposite. Most of what "most people" (and by most people I mean what seems to be the mainstream as put forward by the biggest online activity hubs) seem to do is to always follow the crowd where it leads. A lot of the things people do appear to be done in order to please the crowd, rather than personal choice. Why would I use discord if IRC is good enough? "because everyone else uses it!" why would I want to join facebook which does literally nothing? "because everyone else is there", why would I want a bloated web browser that leaks memory and consumes cycles like a emaciated hog? "because every site now uses cloudflare", you see my point? why does anyone buy gucci stuff if it's expensive and fugly? "because that's what OTHER people value". And so on and so forth. You could take any example and it would be more or less the same case.
Yes, arguably, money promotes self-centeredness, well, that is the dominant narrative, that it encourages a sort of extreme individualism, yet I don't see much individualism as much as I see personality cults for the likes of Melion Husk and Mcdonald Dumb.
Ultimately the malady of money is that it forces you to hoard, but, well, that's another topic for another day! (maybe?)
Oh yes I do. It's really the only topic that matters should we wish to persist without going sufficiently crazy to annihilate ourselves and/or others.
Okay, I don't think any of us is really "mentally ill", we are thoroughly sick, from the moment of birth they toss us into a machine of sickness, and it's half done on purpose in order to, well, keep up the superstructure of medicine and the very profitable pharmaceutic industry. The other half is just that humans ABHOR nature. And we fight our own nature. As I said, we set up a completely unnatural setting for us (laboral, affectional, even in our primarly landscape) and we hold fast to structures that are set up to keep as much distance as possible between us and nature, and I don't necessarily mean "mother nature" (I do, though), but our own nature. We avoid listening to our own body and psyche as much as possible and thus we become sick.
But mental illnes as it is called is, I believe, not at all sickness, but basic human behaviour, our human nature. Take ADHD, for example. I am told that "not being able to do what I really don't want to do and which I feel deep inside is ultimately stupid and meaningless" is a symptom of a mental illness. And that wanting to make money for a guy who already has a lot of money, that is normal human behaviour. I don't give two fucks about the meaningless inane shit people put so much value into? autism. I keep having instrusive thoughts because I'm deeply dissatisfied with a sterile environment? OCD. And so on and so forth.
Furthermore, I understand I am incomplete and I need to grow, that I may have to unlearn many behavioral patterns I have picken up from a bunch of equally sick individuals and advertising campaigns designed to mislead me, but the suggestion that I need to go and pay for "therapy", in order to heal "trauma" seems to me like just another block in the superstructure designed to make me walk the treadmill of money that is slowly killing everyone on this planet. And I am supposed to do all of this for the sake of society.
So yeah, there goes a little brain dump, there's more of that where it came from, if that is what you really want.
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By the way, I know my post may come off as hostile, or at least jaded, it's just the tone that I adopt when I address what I think is a topic that is beyond hope and repair. Please don't take it personally.
Stay safe.
Oh, and
It's just that I've been on a sort of textural quest since "local BBSes" in the early 1980's / late 1990's,
I have a bit of an infatuation for that "scene", even if I am a bit youg to have lived that. One thing that I've always been fond of, though I don't use it nearly as much as I would like to, is MUDs/MOOs, but they hardly get any traffic these days. Also it dumps a lot of text sometimes: "detritus just entered from the west, detritus just went east, there is a larva here".
One personal project of mine (more like a pipe dream) is to make a MUD entirely in the only programming language I like, but I am too lazy to do... anything really :^)