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I agree completely! It is my experience also that things just happen without anybody being in control. Given the same circumstances, all individuals would act

I agree completely! It is my experience also that things just happen without anybody being in control. Given the same circumstances, all individuals would act in exactly the same way. Of course, "the circumstances" include a lot of hard-to-describe factors, like the mental model of an individual, as it was created during their life so far. Naturally, this point of view attracts a lot of criticism, most of all from people who think they would achieve better results in the same situation, e.g. not resorting to crime when faced with social exclusion and hardship. The assumption, in my experience, comes from lack of reflection, though. What enables one individual to perform "better" than the other? I would say, it's their mental model, created solely by their previous experiences. The "you" that allegedly makes all those "right" decisions is merely an automaton that was programmed by past experiences. So you are performing better because you learned to perform better or, in other words, you were lucky to live in an environment that fostered those traits. Indeed, there is no achievement and no guilt. They are both purely social constructs without any substance, and all they do is create a gap between those people who were lucky and those who were not.

derrikcurran 8y ago
Achievement and guilt help regulate those environments. A person who is successful because they live in a place that has plenty of food might work to bring food to places that don't in order to feel a sense of achievement. That would improve the environment of others. Likewise, someone destroying a place's food stores would damage that environment but guilt makes it less likely for that to happen. The exact things that cause feelings of achievement and guilt are defined by consensus (like you said, social construct). Also, if there's a genetic factor in how we come to that consensus, those genes are more likely to survive multiple iterations if the consensus results in more survivable environments, so there is substance in the sense that these rules are well tested and proven.

derrikcurran 8y ago

Achievement and guilt help regulate those environments. A person who is successful because they live in a place that has plenty of food might work to bring food to places that don't in order to feel a sense of achievement. That would improve the environment of others. Likewise, someone destroying a place's food stores would damage that environment but guilt makes it less likely for that to happen. The exact things that cause feelings of achievement and guilt are defined by consensus (like you said, social construct). Also, if there's a genetic factor in how we come to that consensus, those genes are more likely to survive multiple iterations if the consensus results in more survivable environments, so there is substance in the sense that these rules are well tested and proven.