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Title: How To Redeem Bad People (Fate) Subtitle: An exploration of what Anarchism looks like without free will, and a reflective guide on having greater compassion for the fated clashes in trying to realize our ideals. Source: [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7sYMs_n53A][youtube.com/watch?v=q7sYMs_n53A]] Notes: This is the transcription of a YouTube video from a channel about modern Anarchist theory. Authors: Valium Sadfemme Mc Girl Boss Topics: Philosophy, Libertarian socialism, Nihilism, Struggle, Anarcho communism, Egoism, Individualist anarchism, Breadtube, Nihilistic anarchism, Free will, Determinism, Fate, Estentialism, Existential anarchism Published: 2022-04-03 08:07:54Z
This is an adapted transcript of a more indepth YouTube video that you may want to watch instead. Link in source and here: [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7sYMs_n53A][www.youtube.com]]
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.
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