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>Nobody is going to make any choices for you or help define your life. You have to decide who you are and how you live. Except of course the culture and langua
by claudeganon 6y ago
>Nobody is going to make any choices for you or help define your life. You have to decide who you are and how you live.
Except of course the culture and language you’re born into, the public education and legal systems that curb and define your behavior, popular gender and sexual mores...
Modern humanity is a massively socially-constructed and mediated entity, defined by these interactions in their present and historic forms. Existentialism is largely a retreat from this reality into the fictive notion of an individuality because it shields one from engaging with the larger terrain, within and without oneself.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoMy point is that, during quarantine and isolation, a bunch of that external stuff disappeared.
- claudeganon 6y agoMy point is that it didn’t because it’s not really “external” to us, but always a part of us and we a part of it. Humans’ evolutionary advantage over other species is our capacity for imitation, which allows for us to transfer skills and abilities outside of and beyond what is inherited through biological descent. But what this also means is that we’re constantly running these imitative, collective structures within ourselves at all times, seeking more and to share our own permutations of them. The reason people go insane in isolation is not because they’re confronted with they’re “freedom,” but because they’re more disconnected from this networked collectivity from which our notion of “self” is constituted.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoThere is an element of truth in what you say, but it's not wholly true. We aren't as much a slave to conditioning as you say - especially when the stimulus disappears for an extended period.