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Really good comment. Remind us that 2 thousand years seems a lot, but isn’t that much. If you let me, I advice you to study philisophy, and you shall realise t

Really good comment. Remind us that 2 thousand years seems a lot, but isn’t that much. If you let me, I advice you to study philisophy, and you shall realise that our history is much bigger than our calendary. And if you study “The republic” os Plato, you will see that our material achivements are improved a lot,for sure, but the humanity as a whole civilization is in decay. Plato’s dialogues explain how our civilization evolves and decays in cycles, and we are currently in decay. Democracy is the system that currently rules the world, and it is one step before tirany.

deleted 9y ago
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aero-002 9y ago
Why is democracy one step before tyranny?
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  To the modern understanding of tyranny, it certainly is strange, but Plato had a very particular view of politics (he was what you might call elitist). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_five_regimes#Tyranny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_five_regimes#Tyranny Given 2,000 years of history, he'd likely have different views (I'd hope so anyway), but that's what the poster appears to be driving at. That doesn't seem to be the root cause of tyranny in Russia or China, but democracy can devolve into it.
ahelwer 9y ago
The 2400-year-old opinion of a specific philosopher, brilliant though they may be, does not necessarily reflect reality. One of the harder mental blocks I had to get through with philosophy, though it seems incredibly obvious both in retrospect and to those who haven't yet encountered it, is that philosophers write with no authority on metaphysical matters; any time a philosopher says the nature of a thing is thus, they are surely wrong. This is contrasted with technical matters, where it's possible and indeed common for our intellectual giants to describe things precisely as they are. I mean this as no slight against philosophy, nor to denigrate its utility, but as a simple observation that your mode of engagement with the material must differ; see the common interpretation that reading the philosophical corpus is more like listening in on a conversation spanning the ages rather than learning a just-so list of facts about our world.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
  I don't study philosophy, but having spent a whole lot my life depressed and having it filled with long periods of solitude I do spend a lot of time thinking. What I find really interesting is how much philosophy I've rejected over the years for various reasons, only to later interdependently come to the conclusion that it was true. The religions of the world are littered with actually very profound insight, for instance, but a lot of it is hidden behind parables and mythology, interwoven with narratives meant to maintain cultures and power structures, and generally favors the lies-to-children versions, but it's there. I am reminded of a movie, Enemy Mine, wherein a human is learning an alien language in part via a religious text. After reading a passage bearing a remarkable similarity to "turn the other cheek", he looks up to his teacher and says "I've heard all this before", to which the alien's reply is "Of course. Truth is truth". One of the lessons of empiricism is that truths are repeatable --that we can both do the experiment, take them measurement, and produce the same result--, and even though much of philosophical thought is non-empirical that pattern seems to hold. It seems to me, that one rejects a lot of these ideas because they seem wrong, are too simple, or even tautological, but once you've taken the long route and arrived at the same conclusion, you find that the universe had been screaming it at you your whole life and you just didn't really understand what it was saying because you lacked the context. And they're difficult things to talk about because of that. Communication requires a shared context for mutual understanding, but often we lack that. Take any industry or specialization, which has developed its own language. Terms like "network", "database", or "stack" have meanings within the general public awareness, but within IT have much more specific definitions. When someone who uses this language daily tries to explain things to someone who doesn't, the other person's understanding will be different than what was intended because they don't understand the package of specifics that come with them, and likewise when they attempt to communicate back we sometimes have a different understanding than intended because we understand those terms in the context of that package of related concepts. I think this is the cause of a lot of animosity between various communities. For instance, in academic feminism, the term "patriarchy" has a more nuanced meaning than it does to the general public, just like the terms "network" and "database". So when a feminist talks about the patriarchy they mean one thing, but what people often hear is something different. I think it is the same with a lot of academic, or religious, philosophy. There's this term "karma" for which the lies-to-children version is "do good things and good things will happen to you". This is provably false, so a lot of people naturally reject it. However, if you do good things the world is actually slightly better for it, right? Even if not for you specifically. And if we all do good things, as a society, then those good things will happen to more people and you have a higher chance of having good things happen to you. If you live in a society where people tend to treat each other well, you'll all be better off than if you treat each other poorly. If you put in the work now to make the world a better place, your children will get to live in that better world, as you live in a better world made by the efforts of your parents and their parents before them. And of course the reverse is also true, if you insist on making the world a worse place through your actions. And in that context, "karma" doesn't seem so ridiculous anymore does it? Of course, it's entirely possible that I am only seeing what I want to see. That I have, through my own lens of understanding, reinterpreted such things to fit reality as I see it.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

aero-002 9y ago

Why is democracy one step before tyranny?

aaron-lebo 9y ago
To the modern understanding of tyranny, it certainly is strange, but Plato had a very particular view of politics (he was what you might call elitist). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_five_regimes#Tyranny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_five_regimes#Tyranny Given 2,000 years of history, he'd likely have different views (I'd hope so anyway), but that's what the poster appears to be driving at. That doesn't seem to be the root cause of tyranny in Russia or China, but democracy can devolve into it.

ahelwer 9y ago

The 2400-year-old opinion of a specific philosopher, brilliant though they may be, does not necessarily reflect reality. One of the harder mental blocks I had to get through with philosophy, though it seems incredibly obvious both in retrospect and to those who haven't yet encountered it, is that philosophers write with no authority on metaphysical matters; any time a philosopher says the nature of a thing is thus, they are surely wrong. This is contrasted with technical matters, where it's possible and indeed common for our intellectual giants to describe things precisely as they are. I mean this as no slight against philosophy, nor to denigrate its utility, but as a simple observation that your mode of engagement with the material must differ; see the common interpretation that reading the philosophical corpus is more like listening in on a conversation spanning the ages rather than learning a just-so list of facts about our world.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
I don't study philosophy, but having spent a whole lot my life depressed and having it filled with long periods of solitude I do spend a lot of time thinking. What I find really interesting is how much philosophy I've rejected over the years for various reasons, only to later interdependently come to the conclusion that it was true. The religions of the world are littered with actually very profound insight, for instance, but a lot of it is hidden behind parables and mythology, interwoven with narratives meant to maintain cultures and power structures, and generally favors the lies-to-children versions, but it's there. I am reminded of a movie, Enemy Mine, wherein a human is learning an alien language in part via a religious text. After reading a passage bearing a remarkable similarity to "turn the other cheek", he looks up to his teacher and says "I've heard all this before", to which the alien's reply is "Of course. Truth is truth". One of the lessons of empiricism is that truths are repeatable --that we can both do the experiment, take them measurement, and produce the same result--, and even though much of philosophical thought is non-empirical that pattern seems to hold. It seems to me, that one rejects a lot of these ideas because they seem wrong, are too simple, or even tautological, but once you've taken the long route and arrived at the same conclusion, you find that the universe had been screaming it at you your whole life and you just didn't really understand what it was saying because you lacked the context. And they're difficult things to talk about because of that. Communication requires a shared context for mutual understanding, but often we lack that. Take any industry or specialization, which has developed its own language. Terms like "network", "database", or "stack" have meanings within the general public awareness, but within IT have much more specific definitions. When someone who uses this language daily tries to explain things to someone who doesn't, the other person's understanding will be different than what was intended because they don't understand the package of specifics that come with them, and likewise when they attempt to communicate back we sometimes have a different understanding than intended because we understand those terms in the context of that package of related concepts. I think this is the cause of a lot of animosity between various communities. For instance, in academic feminism, the term "patriarchy" has a more nuanced meaning than it does to the general public, just like the terms "network" and "database". So when a feminist talks about the patriarchy they mean one thing, but what people often hear is something different. I think it is the same with a lot of academic, or religious, philosophy. There's this term "karma" for which the lies-to-children version is "do good things and good things will happen to you". This is provably false, so a lot of people naturally reject it. However, if you do good things the world is actually slightly better for it, right? Even if not for you specifically. And if we all do good things, as a society, then those good things will happen to more people and you have a higher chance of having good things happen to you. If you live in a society where people tend to treat each other well, you'll all be better off than if you treat each other poorly. If you put in the work now to make the world a better place, your children will get to live in that better world, as you live in a better world made by the efforts of your parents and their parents before them. And of course the reverse is also true, if you insist on making the world a worse place through your actions. And in that context, "karma" doesn't seem so ridiculous anymore does it? Of course, it's entirely possible that I am only seeing what I want to see. That I have, through my own lens of understanding, reinterpreted such things to fit reality as I see it.