Quote Originally Posted by lkdhf qkb View Post
Interesting. I agree that the responsability for understanding his reasons to believe weights on the believer. But isn't the real issue with most believers, whether they have understood their beliefs or not, that they can't step out of their own beliefs? Shouldn't it be a bigger responsabilty for believers to try to thouroughly understand why others believe what they do? Otherwise, a beliver turns into his shadow; an ignorer. An ignorer has turned away from truth to dedicate himself wholly to his fetish; his knowledge is dead, and his truth is just some videotape he plays over and over in his mind. Real enlightenment has then just turned into some light at the end of the tunnel; paradise is for the dead.
Well, this begs the question of to whom, or to what, it is one's responsibility to step outside of a belief. I think that reason is the servant of the passions, and that all truths beneath me, not above me, are to my liking. All of my truth-seeking is done in service of my will to life; if a truth refutes my will to life, I should oppose it. The idea of "The Truth" (capital T) is itself a bit of a phantom; that Truth is a good-in-itself, that the good in pursuing it at all costs must be self-evident, and not conditional; and that, even if the Truth ever could refute one's will to life, one should be willing to relinquish everything in its service.

But I will make no such sacrifice for the selfish god of Truth! Nothing is above my will to life! If this selfish god, this "greater good," draws blood of any of its own children, then it proves that nature is indeed wrought in strife! And if all is wrought in strife, then let me be the cruelest. For as long as any power in the world dares impinge upon my will to life, then let my own Power be the highest good in all the world!


But, you may ask, is nature truly wrought in strife? You may ask, is not the notion of life as a War of All Against All a construct of the power-hungry in order to cement their rule? And, were their rule dismantled, would not a more cooperative and less competitive field be left in their wake? I think the question itself betrays lines the asker has already drawn in the sand. For who are the "power-hungry," and how were they able to convince us that life is a war of all against all, if it was them who did such? How did they herd us all into an arena, if that is where we are? Was it a one-time anomaly that the most sociopathic of people once and forever ascended to the highest echelons, persisted their power for eternity, and from there, created all the strife of Modernity? I wouldn't think. Such a one-off malicious omnipotence, leaching out into everything that has a name, is almost equivalent to an actual Devil, a fantastical thought. And, I wouldn't accept that probability would allow this error to happen only once and never again, as if any revolution could correct it for all time. Why should this single event in human history be framed as artificial, but all the others accepted as emergent?
I think the rise of the cruelest people to high places was an emergent phenomenon. Easily repeated, if disrupted. Bound to have happened in the past timeline. Even given that the "War of All Against All" is truly a spook conditioned onto us by the mighty, the inevitability of their rule would mean we would all be conditioned into this mentality at one point or another. Which, in a sense, demonstrates the War of All Against All as a true principle.

The common rebuttal to this is that humans have collective agency, by which we've altered the cruel forces of nature in past times, and mayhaps may alter ourselves out of our own cruelty. I doubt this. Modern humans have diverted a few rivers, but the rivers we end up diverting depends upon where we spawned, which depends upon where the rivers were to begin with. Our ability to alter the map depends upon the starting state of the map. People neglect that the scale and complexity of the present world is needed to keep the machinery running, but this complexity makes individuals mostly powerless to move us towards more sustainable paradigms, let alone the impossibility of collective organization.

Any fine-tuning of the system for greater efficiency that does not come from the system itself is dead-end fantasy. So no, I would say the human race does not have real agency. Our own success will continue to undermine the foundations that allow us to exist. The philosophy of Modernism, the power of human greatness to improve upon the world in which we live, was a blind alley.
So there is no Enlightenment. "Enlightenment" began when we started injecting religious fervor into scientific progress. But nothing guarantees that progress can endure forever. In the end, all that matters is to become the slaver and not the enslaved, just as the ancients did. Thus then, thus now.


If the world's a shark tank, let me be biggest.