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Define "rich". > It is unbelievable how blank and devoid of meaning, seen from the outside, and how muffled and unconscious, felt from the inside, the lives of

Define "rich". > It is unbelievable how blank and devoid of meaning, seen from the outside, and how muffled and unconscious, felt from the inside, the lives of most people flow along. It's a dull desiring and suffering, a dream-like tumbling through the four season towards death, accompanied by a series of trivial thoughts. -- Arthur Schopenhauer > [..] the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act -but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid. -- Erich Fromm, who also said > The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.

perl4ever 8y ago
How would Schopenhauer, or anyone, know what life is like for other people "felt from the inside"? I see a fine line between empathy and delusion.
- qwerty456127 8y ago
  This is why we can hardly ever know if a fish (which would care to remove the ink dot from their forhend after seeing it in a mirror) is more self-aware than a gorilla (which wouldn't) or a punk (who probably wouldn't either, and I respect punks) for sure scientifically. The matter of consciousness is outside of the domain of physical reality so we can never tell a conscious self-aware creature apart from a sufficiently complex mechanism when looking from outside of the consciousness itself.
  - PavlovsCat 8y ago
    > One day Chuang Tzu and a friend were walking by a river. "Look at the fish swimming about," said Chuang Tzu, "They are really enjoying themselves." > "You are not a fish," replied the friend, "So you can't truly know that they are enjoying themselves." > "You are not me," said Chuang Tzu. "So how do you know that I do not know that the fish are enjoying themselves?"
    - perl4ever 8y ago
      That seems to depend on the phrasing of the friend's statement, along with ambiguity in the word "know".
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  For starters, "rich" is always relative, compared to what we consider rich. It's not like we can help that, just like you are, just from a short quote, are making a call about someone being delududed rather than empathic. For me, a rich inner life, for a human, today, depends a lot on whether a person belongs to themselves, or is a collection of external opinions they just repeat. People who play tetris with exclusively pre-configured pieces instead of thinking. We all do that do a degree of course, but there's a big fat line between using shorthands and being able to reflect on them, and just using them and changing the subject whenever asked to reflect on any of it, and it's drawn with crayon. Just on HN, how often do people say "I don't necesarily think this, but it's possible to hold the view that...", or "I think you're right, but sadly the average person...", "I'm not entirely sure I'm convinced that I feel like I agree with.." and all sorts of ways to avoid having and owning a personal position? And then there's spookyness, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18102401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18102401 Look at those replies and how partycoder got greyed out a little for having some humanity and attention span left. Maybe these people generally have rich inner lives, but that wasn't one of their rich moments. And this goes for all who passed it by, too, not their best day. A person who is alive, and has a rich inner life, does not look the other way in this fashion when others get murdered. They don't have picnics on mass graves. They do not say things that are technically true but give off a really cruel smell, and then act offended when called out on that. And hardly anyone ever debates me on that; if I say it crudely in the wrong context, I get downvoted, if I say it cleverly in response to someone who said something dumb, I get upvoted, but either way I can't get no interaction. So then I'll take that as the answer: not only do many people not have rich inner lives, they know that, at least subconciously, and they carefully curate their communication to hide it, with multiple people acting as if orchestrated by their own defects, their own lack, and their commeon hostility towards those who have what they lack. > You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid... You refuse to do it because you want to live longer... You're afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you're afraid someone will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand. > Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you're just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. -- Martin Luther King, Jr. Any discussion about anything serious and dangerous is filled with comments saying "I can't do anything", disagreed with by people who have not given up responsibility and agency, who at best get ignored, at worst punished. And I don't mean my own comments, they're crap, but I see other people say the same thing in 3 beautiful sentences, and they too get fuck all for their efforts -- and the people they corrected just ignore them and keep repeating their bullshit in other threads. The proof is in the pudding. This shit wouldn't happen in a community where most people have rich inner lives, and such a community wouldn't happen in a world where most people have rich inner lives. I see people so dead, they outlawed the concept of deadness being discussed in earnest. We can talk about how "the average user doesn't care about privacy" (if that happens to lead to totalitarian horror, so be it, they don't know and don't care, so we're off the hook)... but pointing out how sick it is to talk about the nice landscape or even Star Wars in context of genocide being swept under the rug -- that's not cool. Being so sick is okay, calling it sick is not. > Hobbes [..] even, through sheer force of imagination, was able to outline the main psychological traits of the new type of man who would fit into such a society and its tyrannical body politic. He foresaw the necessary idolatry of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incomprehensible raison d'etat. -- Hannah Arendt Being broken in that way, which is completely accepted in polite society, is mutually exclusive with having an inner life I would consider rich. And I don't need to prove that others have a rich inner live, they need to express it. If they don't, as far as I'm concerned, there is no difference between them having a rich inner life or not. That doesn't mean I dehuamnize them, that just means when they say something, I can't take it at face value, unless I kicked their tires and they showed signs of rich aliveness. I don't auot-import and auto-update any random crap from untrusted sources just because someone might call me "deluded" for noticing the inability or unwillingness of someone to reason themselves out of a wet paperbag. If that's all, people who I don't consider to have rich inner lives being offended at that (and then being hypocrites by being so sure I'm deluded, that I can't possibly be seeing anything they don't, but otherwise offering no argument) -- that's like saying if I use an ad-blocker, you'll show me super mean ads. It's utterly moot, and kinda like pretending to burn a bridge after I burned it. I don't care about the revisionism going on behind that burned bridge, that's why I burned it. It's like a psycho SO you can't break up with because they have to twist it around so they broke up with you. Fine, whatever, as long as it's over ^^ Anywhere on the net, and "even on HN", there's so many comments that don't really parse. There's so much people talking past each other, hiding their argument in "..", and when you ask them "how so?" or "can you elaborate", there's just nothing. Most recent example for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18673428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18673428 I can't say "that's a brainfart" or "that's nonsense". No, I need to say "can you walk me through the logic here", heh. And I'll never know if the other person simply hasn't seen my question.. but I know 19 times out of 20, I get no answer. It's like certain things are just facade, and when you try to access them, the program freezes. So basically, even when a program crashes half of the time, produces broken output the rest of the time, I can't make any deductions about the quality of the code? No. I can, I did, I will again. P.S.: I'll take me, and possibly Schopenhauer, being arrogant. But you would do yourself a disfavour to hold my attitude against Erich Fromm, that dude was from a wholly different and greater caliber. He knows a lot about how unhappy and alienated people are because he actually listened to them, and it doesn't take much of his writing, or interviews, to see that he was a very kind and optimistic and loving person. He also said many things that would kinda deflate and supersede my self-righteous rants, so I never quote those parts. Read him and you shall find :D

perl4ever 8y ago

How would Schopenhauer, or anyone, know what life is like for other people "felt from the inside"? I see a fine line between empathy and delusion.

qwerty456127 8y ago
This is why we can hardly ever know if a fish (which would care to remove the ink dot from their forhend after seeing it in a mirror) is more self-aware than a gorilla (which wouldn't) or a punk (who probably wouldn't either, and I respect punks) for sure scientifically. The matter of consciousness is outside of the domain of physical reality so we can never tell a conscious self-aware creature apart from a sufficiently complex mechanism when looking from outside of the consciousness itself.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  > One day Chuang Tzu and a friend were walking by a river. "Look at the fish swimming about," said Chuang Tzu, "They are really enjoying themselves." > "You are not a fish," replied the friend, "So you can't truly know that they are enjoying themselves." > "You are not me," said Chuang Tzu. "So how do you know that I do not know that the fish are enjoying themselves?"
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    That seems to depend on the phrasing of the friend's statement, along with ambiguity in the word "know".
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
PavlovsCat 8y ago
For starters, "rich" is always relative, compared to what we consider rich. It's not like we can help that, just like you are, just from a short quote, are making a call about someone being delududed rather than empathic. For me, a rich inner life, for a human, today, depends a lot on whether a person belongs to themselves, or is a collection of external opinions they just repeat. People who play tetris with exclusively pre-configured pieces instead of thinking. We all do that do a degree of course, but there's a big fat line between using shorthands and being able to reflect on them, and just using them and changing the subject whenever asked to reflect on any of it, and it's drawn with crayon. Just on HN, how often do people say "I don't necesarily think this, but it's possible to hold the view that...", or "I think you're right, but sadly the average person...", "I'm not entirely sure I'm convinced that I feel like I agree with.." and all sorts of ways to avoid having and owning a personal position? And then there's spookyness, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18102401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18102401 Look at those replies and how partycoder got greyed out a little for having some humanity and attention span left. Maybe these people generally have rich inner lives, but that wasn't one of their rich moments. And this goes for all who passed it by, too, not their best day. A person who is alive, and has a rich inner life, does not look the other way in this fashion when others get murdered. They don't have picnics on mass graves. They do not say things that are technically true but give off a really cruel smell, and then act offended when called out on that. And hardly anyone ever debates me on that; if I say it crudely in the wrong context, I get downvoted, if I say it cleverly in response to someone who said something dumb, I get upvoted, but either way I can't get no interaction. So then I'll take that as the answer: not only do many people not have rich inner lives, they know that, at least subconciously, and they carefully curate their communication to hide it, with multiple people acting as if orchestrated by their own defects, their own lack, and their commeon hostility towards those who have what they lack. > You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid... You refuse to do it because you want to live longer... You're afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you're afraid someone will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand. > Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you're just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. -- Martin Luther King, Jr. Any discussion about anything serious and dangerous is filled with comments saying "I can't do anything", disagreed with by people who have not given up responsibility and agency, who at best get ignored, at worst punished. And I don't mean my own comments, they're crap, but I see other people say the same thing in 3 beautiful sentences, and they too get fuck all for their efforts -- and the people they corrected just ignore them and keep repeating their bullshit in other threads. The proof is in the pudding. This shit wouldn't happen in a community where most people have rich inner lives, and such a community wouldn't happen in a world where most people have rich inner lives. I see people so dead, they outlawed the concept of deadness being discussed in earnest. We can talk about how "the average user doesn't care about privacy" (if that happens to lead to totalitarian horror, so be it, they don't know and don't care, so we're off the hook)... but pointing out how sick it is to talk about the nice landscape or even Star Wars in context of genocide being swept under the rug -- that's not cool. Being so sick is okay, calling it sick is not. > Hobbes [..] even, through sheer force of imagination, was able to outline the main psychological traits of the new type of man who would fit into such a society and its tyrannical body politic. He foresaw the necessary idolatry of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incomprehensible raison d'etat. -- Hannah Arendt Being broken in that way, which is completely accepted in polite society, is mutually exclusive with having an inner life I would consider rich. And I don't need to prove that others have a rich inner live, they need to express it. If they don't, as far as I'm concerned, there is no difference between them having a rich inner life or not. That doesn't mean I dehuamnize them, that just means when they say something, I can't take it at face value, unless I kicked their tires and they showed signs of rich aliveness. I don't auot-import and auto-update any random crap from untrusted sources just because someone might call me "deluded" for noticing the inability or unwillingness of someone to reason themselves out of a wet paperbag. If that's all, people who I don't consider to have rich inner lives being offended at that (and then being hypocrites by being so sure I'm deluded, that I can't possibly be seeing anything they don't, but otherwise offering no argument) -- that's like saying if I use an ad-blocker, you'll show me super mean ads. It's utterly moot, and kinda like pretending to burn a bridge after I burned it. I don't care about the revisionism going on behind that burned bridge, that's why I burned it. It's like a psycho SO you can't break up with because they have to twist it around so they broke up with you. Fine, whatever, as long as it's over ^^ Anywhere on the net, and "even on HN", there's so many comments that don't really parse. There's so much people talking past each other, hiding their argument in "..", and when you ask them "how so?" or "can you elaborate", there's just nothing. Most recent example for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18673428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18673428 I can't say "that's a brainfart" or "that's nonsense". No, I need to say "can you walk me through the logic here", heh. And I'll never know if the other person simply hasn't seen my question.. but I know 19 times out of 20, I get no answer. It's like certain things are just facade, and when you try to access them, the program freezes. So basically, even when a program crashes half of the time, produces broken output the rest of the time, I can't make any deductions about the quality of the code? No. I can, I did, I will again. P.S.: I'll take me, and possibly Schopenhauer, being arrogant. But you would do yourself a disfavour to hold my attitude against Erich Fromm, that dude was from a wholly different and greater caliber. He knows a lot about how unhappy and alienated people are because he actually listened to them, and it doesn't take much of his writing, or interviews, to see that he was a very kind and optimistic and loving person. He also said many things that would kinda deflate and supersede my self-righteous rants, so I never quote those parts. Read him and you shall find :D