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Worth repeating. >>>We are all connected and pretending that we are not creates situations of tension. ...among other damage. Believing you're not connected t

Worth repeating. >>>We are all connected and pretending that we are not creates situations of tension. ...among other damage. Believing you're not connected to Rest of World is a symptom of narcissism - an irrational moral blindness where you're trapped screaming with rage inside your own skull because you lack any genuine connection to the world outside, and only ever experience it through a narrow filter of opportunism and antagonism.

rayiner 3y ago
Just because you acknowledge some sort of “connection” to others doesn’t mean you want to enter into a political arrangement in which those people can vote on the laws that are binding on you.
- atoav 3y ago
  True, a necessity to form political unions does not arise. But my point was about the notion of freedom. If we look for example at freedom of speech, the naive assumption would be that people would most free in their speech if everybody ignored others and just spoke their minds. In reality however this leads to people yelling at each other. Turns out the best room for speaking freely (e.g. without having to censor yourself or without pretending you are of your ingroups opinion) is in places where you can trust the participants to both understand you and them wanting to understand you. The point here being that the goal of communication is to have others understand you, not to win against them by yelling them into submission. A similar paradox applies to the freedom to decide your own laws without having to regard others. You can of course decide to do that, but then you have to be aware that this symbolic act of freedom might in fact have a detrimental effect on your actual freedom (as in: the number of choices you can make). Most people who operate on a "I won't let them tell me what to do"-mindset don't care about actual freedom, they care about something symbolic. Brexit being a big example of the whole thing. There are whole phone-in radio shows filled with guests unable to answer the question which EU-law violates their freedom. We need to be aware that a big fraction of The Bad Stuff™ that has ever occured in the political history of the world was due to regular people being whipped into a violent frenzy over purely symbolic problems, which on closer analysis don't have any impact on people's life at all. The symbolic plane of politics is how they get you — get you to do things you thought you never would — for things that wouldn't even impact your life if you just ignored them. Stay aware of that.

rayiner 3y ago

Just because you acknowledge some sort of “connection” to others doesn’t mean you want to enter into a political arrangement in which those people can vote on the laws that are binding on you.

atoav 3y ago
True, a necessity to form political unions does not arise. But my point was about the notion of freedom. If we look for example at freedom of speech, the naive assumption would be that people would most free in their speech if everybody ignored others and just spoke their minds. In reality however this leads to people yelling at each other. Turns out the best room for speaking freely (e.g. without having to censor yourself or without pretending you are of your ingroups opinion) is in places where you can trust the participants to both understand you and them wanting to understand you. The point here being that the goal of communication is to have others understand you, not to win against them by yelling them into submission. A similar paradox applies to the freedom to decide your own laws without having to regard others. You can of course decide to do that, but then you have to be aware that this symbolic act of freedom might in fact have a detrimental effect on your actual freedom (as in: the number of choices you can make). Most people who operate on a "I won't let them tell me what to do"-mindset don't care about actual freedom, they care about something symbolic. Brexit being a big example of the whole thing. There are whole phone-in radio shows filled with guests unable to answer the question which EU-law violates their freedom. We need to be aware that a big fraction of The Bad Stuff™ that has ever occured in the political history of the world was due to regular people being whipped into a violent frenzy over purely symbolic problems, which on closer analysis don't have any impact on people's life at all. The symbolic plane of politics is how they get you — get you to do things you thought you never would — for things that wouldn't even impact your life if you just ignored them. Stay aware of that.