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>Not to mention, look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer. It is sad, but its reality. There's a lot of helping weak members of the pack d
by fnordian_slip 3y ago
>Not to mention, look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer. It is sad, but its reality.
There's a lot of helping weak members of the pack done by social animals, don't get fooled by the reductionist understanding of "survival of the fittest" that the American education system seems to teach. I believe part of the success of social animals like humans is the support they can give each other, which doesn't mean there is no survival of the fittest anymore, but that the fitness now refers the whole group rather than individuals.
And there are examples of very early humans with disabilities that would have made their care very resource-intensive for their tribe, and still they often lived long lives. This implies that these early humans helped even the weakest members, when they could just as easily have let these individuals perish to make their own lives easier.
I'm trying to say this in the kindest way, but please seek professional help, your view of reality and your relationships seems neither healthy nor sustainable to me.
It is important that you can sometimes let your guard down and not perform at the highest level imho. After all, you are not a machine, but a real human being with feelings. If you want to perform at that level, this is of course perfectly fine, but it should be because you enjoy it, or the fruits of your labor, not because you feel like you have to.
- specproc 3y agoAbsolutely. The notion that fierce competition for survival is the state of all things in nature is reductionist at best, and incredibly harmful when applied to the human social world. Take some of the more successful species out there: there are countless species of fungi which thrive on a mutually-beneficial relationships with the root systems of plants (check out the Wood Wide Web); or lichen, which are composite organisms arising from algae or bacteria living in fungi. Competition is undeniably a big part of the natural world, but it's not something that captures a fraction of the complex relationships between and within species. Appeals to this survival of the fittest nonsense justify all sorts of terrible behaviour -- and I guess in this context, self-flagellation -- but have little a very weak relationship with modern understandings of biology, history and sociology.