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> They must somehow find meaning in their predicament This helps you keep your sanity, but when the same thing happens on a large scale, it can also cause all
by kijin 13y ago
> They must somehow find meaning in their predicament
This helps you keep your sanity, but when the same thing happens on a large scale, it can also cause all sorts of social problems.
There are many cultures that valorize unnecessary suffering for the sake of suffering, just because it has always been a part of life. Often this takes the form of a rite of passage, such as genital mutilation, mandatory military service, and ridiculous amount of cramming in high school (especially in East Asia). Work that serves absolutely no purpose other than putting food on your table might fall into this category.
People often romanticize such activities, they think there's some profound meaning and honor in enduring them, and they even feel ashamed if they fall short of the societal norm. But in many cases, the illusion of honor is just a collective coping strategy. Koreans valorize studying 18 hours a day because they know of no other way to learn. Americans valorize full-time employment because most of them are stuck doing it. Soldiers everywhere brag about how brutal their training was because it makes them feel like their dick is bigger. In every instance, the valorization and romanticization gets in the way of progress.
If you as an individual discover meaning in something that everyone else ignores or takes for granted, that's great, you've become a better person through that experience. But if you see a bunch of people doing it together, it's usually a recipe for conservatism. The ultimate strength of humankind does not lie in our ability to endure pain. It lies in our ability to change the world so that nobody needs to endure the same kind of pain anymore.
- savv 13y agoThanks for the insights. > Work that serves absolutely no purpose other than putting food on your table might fall into this category. Have you read 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'[1]? The discussion on the concept of Value may challenge this idea that you have put forward. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_M...
- kijin 13y agoI don't have any problem with individuals finding value wherever they want to. I might disagree with them, but that's OK. I only have a problem when a certain interpretation of value becomes an oppressive social norm, i.e. when people force once another to adopt their interpretation and no other.
- zachrose 13y agoI've read ZATAOMM, but remember it as a discussion about Quality as the alignment/connection between objective and subjective worlds. Did I miss something?
- darkmighty 13y agoI agree, but this is a tricky matter. By one side, simply the best way of achieving any measure of success requires a lot of work, that's easily seen rationally; many other sacrifices we make though don't generate meaningful results. But we associate the effort required to perform all those, so to have enough morale to perform hard work by accepting sacrifice, some may need (irrationally) to perform other kinds of sacrifice. Let me clarify this in the east asian setting: sometimes just prizing the result (good grades, acceptance at university) will not actually provide good results because kids (and people in general) are not perfectly rational and can't clearly make a best strategy to their goal. So people start prizing the necessary (but not sufficient) steps to reach the goals, namely sacrifice -- which leads to the stupid biases of putting unproductively much study, working an unproductive number of hours, and so on. Another reason there may be a bias toward sacrifice is that the other side is usually much worse (i.e. major unwillingness to put up work), so society overcompensates. So even if you look at it rationally, it may make sense when you take into account our psychological quirks. Of course, it's all the best that we don't have those to begin with, and I figure a great part of our learning is simply bypassing those natural barriers, optimizing for results.
- kijin 13y agoI agree with your analysis. What I can't stand is the amount of brainwashing that goes on in every instance to make those sacrifices, overcompensations and necessary evils look like some sort of sacred duty. Please, call a spade a spade. Humans may have psychological quirks, but they're not stupid. If you keep pretending that something is even more important than it already is, sooner or later people will realize what you've been doing and take it as an insult to their intelligence. What usually follows is cynicism, which is essentially overcompensating for romanticism.