Re: Joy of this, Joy of that

On Sat, 7 Dec 2024, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 07/12/2024 10:50, D wrote:

  On Sat, 7 Dec 2024, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
 

On 12/6/24 4:11 AM, D wrote:

  On Fri, 6 Dec 2024, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
 

On 12/5/24 7:17 AM, D wrote:

  On Thu, 5 Dec 2024, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
 

On 05/12/2024 09:31, D wrote:

There is great good and great evil in man. That's what makes him so fascinating and why fighting is such a necessary sport to give an outlet for all that aggression.

 Only man creates the categories of good and evil.
Science does not include them

 I think you know what I mean. In order to avoid nitpicking, let's say creative and destructive energies.

  To "Nature" ... I think it's all just superstrings hummin'
  WE make of it all as we will.
  Joe Alien ... he many have entirely different ideas ...
 

 I know. Natural and I have discussed this violently and agreed to disagree. I'm a huge fan of the material world. As for the ultimate nature, laws and composition, I am agnostic, and we'll see how far science will take us. I lean towards instrumentalism/cognitive empiricism.

   IMHO, 'material' owns it - 'reality'-wise anyhow.
  However the Quality Of Life depends on what we DO with that.
 It generally stops of short agreeing to the Nietzschean extreme.
  Sci-tech will eventually take us All The Way insofar as
 power over our environment. But, again, how do we FEEL
 such power and insight be used ?
  If it was easy they'd have resolved all this 25,000
 years ago.
  The Buddha understood there was a Real World - but
 WE could never ever really see/perceive it because
 of what we were, how nature put us together, our
 native environment, our IQ range. We will always
 have a key-hole view, seeing things through
 "human-colored glasses".
  Plato's "Allegory of the cave" kinda touched on the
 same stuff - but, maybe for political reasons, left
 off the last paragraph or two.
  ANYWAY, at the cold cold root - it's just all
 superstrings hummin' ... calculating a 'reality'
 as WE can sorta perceive it. Wolfram seems to
 have grasped this.
 

 I pretty much agree with you. Not much to add. Interesting that this is your interpretation of Nietzsche. Mine is very similar. I would add, that Nietzsches philosophy is his own attempt, and that every person needs to make it "his own".
 Tying that to politics, I think it was Ludwig von Mises who wrote in his classic "Liberalism" (and this is liberalism in its original meaning, not the bastardized US meaning of the term, so think libertarianism), somethings along the lines of...
 Liberalism [libertarianism] is nothing more than the scientific view and method of how to structure society in such a way as to maximize material wealth and quality of life. Beyond maximizing material wealth, it makes no other claims or sets no other goals.
 So what you, as an individual, do with that wealth, if you use that to purchase time (work less) and what you fill that time with, is entirely up to you.
 I believe that this is why many people find libertarianism so scary. They have no inherent sense of value or goals. They need the goals pushed on them from the outside (equality, sustainability, be a cog wheel in the machine of the nation, the prosperity and success of the race, etc.) in order to feel meaning in their life.
 When they have an ism that does not push any form of value, but only wants to create time for people to flourish, since they are not self directed from within, they cannot make any sense at all of it, and it scares them at a deep level.
 That is why I think that the human psychology is not really ready for libertarianism, as long as the majority of humans are drawn to religions and isms in order for an external person to supply them with goals and values.

>
I think this hits the nail on the head. Socialism now occupies the space left by the  demise of Christianity.
>
A sharp Jewish girlfriend of mine once observed that 'the people need to be told what is right and what is wrong, and how they should behave otherwise they simply don't know what to do'
>
But they are increasingly realising that socialism too, has feet of clay.
And I do not entirely agree that people cannot accept a reality without ideology.
>
Libertarianism/pragmatism/conservatism can simply say that it deliberately restricts its activities to ensuring law, order, prosperity and social stability and is 'ultra vires' when it comes to determining moral behaviour.
>
And leave that to religion or the BBC

Yes, let's hope that people will shed socialism, just like they once shed christianity. I think it partly has already started, since socialism is running out of weak groups to fire up against the rich. The richer we become, the less of a grip socialism has on the lower classes.
That is why they are scrambling for new fronts such as the environment and immigration (import a new lower class and start again from the 1800:s).