Yup, and this is why he wins. Human's are not wired for "rugged individualism" we are wired for community. People who can't see that and speak to that will keep losing to people who can.
A rant about it -> https://hannahmr.com/a-libertarians-guide-to-understanding-the-popularity-of-socialism/
Why is sexual assault so endemic in our culture?
Because we are obsessed with power. We have this collective unconscious view of the world as a zero-sum hierarchy and we are obsessed with being above othersā¦ obsessed with having power over others.
Grape isnāt about sex, itās about power. If you have an insatiable need to feel that you have power over someone else, what is the most brutal and intense way to prove your power over them? Grape.
Famous prolific abusers, Epstien, Diddy, Weinstein, etc. are all men obsessed with accumulating power. No coincidence there.
Countries with the lowest ages of consent or lowest ages at which marriage is allowed are also the most patriarchal, Afghanistan, Iran, etc. I doubt there is a higher rate of people with pedophilic urges in these places, it is simply that having a very young bride gives the husband much better odds at controlling his wife.
Itās not about sex, itās about power.
And this epidemic of sexual abuse will continue for as long as we keep our cultural obsession with having power over others.
My hair is getting pretty ridiculously long. It's a pain. But I'm thinking I'll keep it till summer when I'll do a dramatic chop. But until then... what are some fabulous hair styles that require super long hair?
In a strange plot twist the red pilled dudes have gotten so bizarre that when I get pulled into a debate with one of them I now spend most of that time defending men.
At this point the only way they can make their world view work is if they decide that indeed men are violent monsters and that is appropriate and necessary. ...and so I just wind up spending all my time explaining that men are actually wonderful, unique, honorable, caring people.
Itās sad to see Bitcoin framed this way, but we shouldnāt be surprised.
When we talk about the technology almost exclusively in terms of investment and profit, then thatās exactly how people will understand it.
You know what I plan to do in 2026?
Iād like to not spend time discussing NGU. Instead I'd like to spend lots of time discussing the utility of Bitcoin. Iād like to have many conversations discussing Bitcoin in itās cypherpunk freedom tech context. Please join me.
Good morning!
Happy International Hangover Day! š„³š
The Chicago color palette
Okay, so tell me you hate women without telling me you hate women...
I woke up early and went to the gym, then I ate salmon and brussel sprouts and had Ginger Tumeric juice... I guess I'm just trying to really confuse my body by spending a whole day giving it only the best stuff just to trash it this evening.
O look, I found a word for people on Twitter...
Why don't you have more respect for men?
Did Christianity get co-opted?
I often feel unseasy around Christians or those wearing crosses as my experience with Christianity is that it is a doctrine based on hierarchy, submission, and punishment. It is fueled by comparison, hate, shame, and fear.
But then I know Christians who swear to me that their experience is all about love. ...how can that be?
Well I recently learned about Gnostic Christianity. This was one of the earlier forms of Christianity and it was much more focused on inner experience and knowledge rather than institutions and punishment. But then, somewhere around 300 ce it shifted. ...it got co-opted.
And that makes perfect sense. We can see now thatās how politicians and āleadersā of all varieties function today. They take something that is very popular among āthe peopleā and twist it and turn it to fit their needs.
Perhaps the tyrants of the day co-opted what Christianity was, and made it conform to their hierarchy, submission, and punishment based structures?
...when he was not yet an adult.
...that's a rather ugly opinion of men š«¤
Right, and that is why he is immature.
You can love people more when you trust yourself to be able to walk away.
People get so scared of āfalling in loveā or having intense feelings, romantic or not, for anyone. And I get that, you can get your heart stomped on. But being really into someone, romantically or platonically, is really good for you! It makes your day better when you think about them, it fills you with happy hormones, it just makes life more worth living.
When you get a bit old, and after youāve already had your heart stomped on a few times, you can get pretty good at knowing when and how to walk away. And once you trust yourself to be able to walk away, then you can really dive into appreciating someone.
Go on and be obsessed. If they become an asshole you can say goodbye. And there is no need to feel bad about it. You gave love because you are a loving person, and they were the ones that lost that.
Sometimes I want to be stupid rich, but not so that I can go to the Met Gala or feel superior to others, but just so I can do ridiculous shit ... like buy myself and 4 friends last min tickets to China so we can try some cafe I saw on TikTok.
I find strict atheists to be just as illogical as the very religious.
If youāve got any honesty, you gotta admit that we just have no #$#@$ idea.
Just think about it, we can barely even get ourselves off this rock floating around in the middle of nowhere, we canāt cure cancer, we canāt even stop murdering each-otherā¦ and we have the insane idea that we understand the universe? Madness!
We have no idea. And sometimes that is even more terrifying than thinking we vanish into nothingness. But itās the truth. All we got are shots in the dark.
I've probably got a whole journal entry about it.
Donāt try to spice things up.
If youāve been with someone a long time and the āsparkā is gone, donāt try to āspice things upā. It will just lead to everyone feeling pressure and frustration.
The āsparkā leaves when youāve grown apart, or become room mates, or when the both of you have just stopped trying. And deciding to do some sexual role play scene with your room mate that youāre just not that into really isnāt going to go well for anyone!
Instead, reconnect. Read a book together. Go out for long walks. Go on a trip together. Get drunk together. When you can actually see that person again, when you remember why you were so into themā¦ thatās where the āsparkā lives.
I was born into a Christian cult, I'm familiar with the doctrine.
"Five minutes after birth, they decide your name, religion, nationality and sect. And you spend the rest of your life defending what you did not choose."
āArthur Schopenhauer
I don't work within a Christian framework. I've got a solid moral compass.
100%
People saying "sooner or later you'll have to take the orange pill" gives me all sorts of rapy vibes š¬
...does only god have judgment? Do you not have discernment?
The Bitcoin vibe on Twitter is so sad. All this forcing others to take pills or bend knees š¤¢
Iām a big hippie yāall, Iām not here to ādominateā others. Iām just trying to build some cool shit that makes life a bit betterā¦ for everyone š«¶š§”āļø
You can do whatever you want... and I'll judge you for it š āļø
O so many!
I tend to follow the script in these videos:
It is a bit hilarious I'll give ya that.
Once again I'm convinced that the red pill mania and characters like Fuentes are being propped up and pushed by foreign actors, probably Russia.
This is not a natural organic movement. This is the result of intentional media manipulation.
When you finally get into the fancy room you realize that all these āaccomplishedā people are the most desperate followers that youāve ever met.
Meritocracy, its the idea that people should be in the fancy room, or not, based on their talent and effort. And in theory, Iām a huge fan of meritocracy. But in the states especially, this concept has turned into a twisted sort of status game. There is this desperation to prove oneās value by being āaboveā othersā¦ by getting into the room that others canāt.
I was born into that culture and at times embraced it. I desperately wanted to get into that room. I was convinced that only the best of people could be there. The smartest, the hardest working, the most insightful, and thatās what I wanted to be. I wanted to go to the fancy restaurants, the exclusive clubs, the biggest cities, the most expensive hotel, the VIP lounge.
And then it happened. I got my name on the list, I sat at the table at the fancy dinner, I met my heroes. And it broke my heart. At first of course it was quite exciting and fun. But it didnāt take long to start to notice the cracks in the facade. All these people werenāt the most hard working, the most intelligent, the most insightfulā¦ they were the most desperate. They were not there because āthe cream rises to the topā they were there because they were also desperate to prove themselves.
That fancy room, itās just a room full of people all desperate to prove that they too can be in the fancy room. Sad, and pretty sobering when you realize that description includes you. Now inclusion in the fancy room is of course very much a meritocracy, but the āmeritā being tested is oneās ability to follow. Itās a test of oneās ability to pick up on what the current culture values and emulate that effectively. Itās a test of your trendiness and ability to curry favor with others.
Itās one of those things where once you see it you canāt unsee it. Now when I look at the pictures from the party in the fancy room I feel a bit embarrassed for those attendees. They donāt even realize what a confession that photo they proudly posted is.
The world is really a lot messier than itās comfortable to acknowledge. There isnāt a room full of all of the smartest, the hardest working, the most insightful. The people that you will wind up having genuine respect for are scattered all around in all sorts of rooms. You are very luck when you occasionally meet those people. You might meet them in a fancy room, but you are just as likely to meet them on the bus.
Itās a big letdown to realize that āthe fancy roomā is just a fantasy. You canāt have it, because it doesnāt exist. So Iāll just be drinking with my friends at the dive bar.
You donāt understand therapy. Itās not a pity party, itās adulting.
Two years ago it was difficult for me to just be in a car, and driving one was a gut wrenching experience. I was struggling just to drive two blocks away to the shops via side streets and parking lots. But this morning I woke up early, made a cup of tea and decided to head out for a nice relaxing drive. I got in the car and drove to the shops 30mins away on roads going 45 mph. And it was relaxing.
How did I pull off that transition? Therapy. And this is why the chronic misunderstanding of therapy and mental health practices in general rather irks me. It is not self indulgent victim cosplay where we absolve ourselves of responsibility for the state of our lives. What kind of insanity would that be? Instead it is the intentional management of our mind and our thought processes. It is simply necessary maintenance for optimal health. You eat a decent diet, you try not to drink too much, you get good sleep, you stay close to your friends and family, and you consciously manage your mind. Thatās some proper adulting.
When I say āmindā I mean your thoughts, your ideas, your āmindsetā, your perspective on yourself and the world. Itās what happens in your brain that impacts your experience. We are only consciously aware of a small percent of whatās happening in our brain. The vast majority of what we āthinkā throughout the day we are not consciously aware of and this creates an interesting challenge. That one weird thing your uncle said to you about relationships when you were 7 might have formed some sturdy neuropathways in your headā¦ and still be there to this day without you being consciously aware of it! So letās hope your uncle was a wise and loving man otherwise that old thought pattern might be causing you some trouble.
You can think of your subconscious mind as the operating system that you are running. The issue is that updates donāt happen automatically. If you want to run a new and improved operating system, you have to painstakingly install a new one yourself. Sometimes one line of code at a time.
There is an interesting thing about humans, we are born too early. Now this has to do with complex evolutionary things like humans learning to walk upright and the size of our hip bones and whatās optimal for walking vs whatās optimal for childbearing. Long story short, we are born too soon. Most babies in the animal kingdom emerge capable of independent mobility and communication. But humans, wow are we helpless babies. And for that first year of our life, our operating system is still being installed. Our nervous system is still forming. And this brings us to a very popular therapy tropeā¦ Tell me about your mother!
Thatās the cliche right? You walk into a therapist's office, lay down on the couch, and the first thing your therapist says is ātell me about your mother.ā Then you describe in detail everything your mother has ever done wrong, your therapist absolves you of any responsibility for any of your errors and you both toast your success with some champagne! Right? Of course not.
Questions about your early childhood, or your upbringing, and questions about your mother, or whoever raised you, are indeed very common. But here your therapist isnāt looking to find the person to blame, they are asking you, āwhat operating system are you running?ā You see most of us get an operating system installed that is rather optimal for the environment that we were in during our early childhood. But decades later when we wind up on a therapist couch, or zoom meeting schedule, itās almost certainly because that operating system is wildly outdated and no longer helping us. So it may very well be that you are having a problem with workplace anxiety and your therapist asks you about your mother. But of course none of this is about your mother, itās about the operating system that your mother installed in your brain 40 years ago that desperately needs an update.
This stuff is of course complex and I donāt want to do it a disservice by over simplifying it, but, I do think itās fair to say a very big factor, and for a lot of people, the primary factor in depression and anxiety are damaging old subconscious thought patterns. Our perspective on life and ourselves, our āmindsetā, our damaging old operating system.
This is how ātherapyā helps us improve ourselves. It is the work of determining what operating system youāre running, sorting out which parts of that are now holding you back and in need of an update, and going about updating that software.
Unfortunately, most of us donāt wind up āin therapyā until something has gone very wrong in our life. Therapy is expensive, itās time consuming, itās difficult, and there is still some stigma around it. And so we donāt make that call until we are really suffering and desperate for a solution. And when we do finally make that call we generally have no idea what we are doing and have no idea what kind of help we need, and so we start with some good old fashioned talk therapy.
Talk therapy might not be what you wind up needing, but itās a great place to start to get an education. Comedian Vidura Bandara Rajapaksa has a great bit about going to therapy. He says he thought that a therapist would fix him like a mechanic fixes his car, but instead he found that therapy is much less like going to a mechanic and much more like Ikea for your emotions, āwhere you are given some tools and materials but you have to put your sh*tty table of a personality together all by yourself.ā Because talk therapy is a great place to get an understanding of which operating system you are running and in which ways itās erroring out, but you still have to do the work of updating that operating system.
For some people their operating system isnāt in need of that many updates and just talking to a therapist and installing a few new insights and perspectives will be enough of a solution. But for many others, a full upgrade may be needed, perhaps even some database migrations, and that requires some serious upgrade tools!
Thankfully there are many, many options these days. Deep journaling work like the Neurocycle process, Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), psychedelic assisted therapy, and many more. While all of these have their own approach, they are all essentially tools for a serious operating system upgrade.
And this upgrade is hard work! This isnāt about blaming grandpa, this is about re-wiring your mind, on a physical level, one neuropathway at a time.
You keep an eye on your blood pressure, you step on the scale to check your weight, maybe you use a sleep tracker! And, if you are being a responsible adult, you monitor your mind. When your blood pressure is too high you call your doc and take some pills and change your diet. And when your anxiety starts to kick up, you call your therapist, maybe take some pills, and update your operating system.
Therapy isnāt a pity party, itās not about who to blame, itās the conscious management of your mind. Itās hard work, and itās proper adulting.
Wait...Iāve got a new strategy! Tell me if I should actually try it!
When I meet a dude that is setting off the red pill alarms instead of waiting for him to launch into a lecture... Iāll beat him to the punch!
Iāll just uninvited, unexpectedly, launch into an epic mansplaining rant about the anthropologic study of humans and how patriarchy is just an unfortunate blip on our road map and the result of logistics after the agricultural revolution. Iāll dive into psychology and neuroscience lecturing on the gender differences in the development and activity levels of the prefrontal cortex and how womenās prefrontal development makes them great long term planners and decision makers. Iāll note the mating and child-rearing practices of āpre-historyā humans as this represents 95% of our history and describes humanās ānatural stateā. Iāll explain the significance of lots of animal studies including the famously wildly inaccurate book on wolves from biologist L. David Mech in 1970, and of course the infamous "Forest Troop" Baboon case study showing how the health outcomes for a Baboon troop improved after the aggressive males died off from a tuberculosis outbreak. ...on and on.
Iām a nerd with a big vocabulary, I can really filibuster someone in conversation. Itās an asshole move but I can do it. I can throw big words and fancy terms at someone until I exhaust them.
...what do ya think??? What might happen if I do it? š¤ š
What scares me the most isn't that some tragedy might come my way, it's that a tragedy might come my way and no one will believe me or help me. That's the part that causes the nightmares.
I have wondered this.
It's amusing when people try to tell me that Psychology, therapy, etc is just for women.
"Modern Psychology" is about 150 years old. Women have only been able to broadly participate in that study for the past ~50 years. As women have generally been excluded from medical research, women were only included in psychology studies in the past 30-50 yrs. And so most of the theories we have in psychology, PTSD, etc. were based on studies of men, done by men.
For most of it's history Psychology was a study by men, for men.
Itās the old two steps forward one step back with the mental health.
One thing thatās super annoying about having done so much work and study into psychology and the workings of my own mind, is that sometimes Iāll hit a rough patch and know exactly whatās happening. I know what sort of error in thinking Iām experiencing, I know where it comes from, I know all sort of theories about itā¦ and yet I canāt stop. Itās like watching a slow moving train wreck happening inside your own head. Good times.
But then sometimes things do get better. Just now I was hit with a wave of shamexietyā¦ you know, that lovely shame fueled anxiety! Ahh religious upbringings. And when it hits you, itās just so damn heavy. And it felt really heavy. And my prefrontal cortex knows that itās not mine to carry, and I was thinking, āI just want to put this downāā¦ and then I did. And I felt better!
I came back 5 mins later. But that was the first time Iāve been able to do that!
A Libertarian's Guide to Understanding the Popularity of Socialism
How could people support such an obviously bad idea? Itās because they are jealous. Maybe they just love to play victim! Or they are lazy and want to live off others. Itās a social mania. Or perhaps, just plain stupidity.
But here we are, after all these years of yelling at people about philosophy and economic policy, and yet the popularity of socialism still seems to be growing! How? What on earth is happening here?
All the lectures will never work, because what we are doing is fighting against human nature. ā¦donāt panic! Iām not a communist, Iāll explain.
First we need to back up a bit and have a look at human nature and where our instincts come from. If you are from the States, you probably were not taught much about humanities āpre historyā. Most of what we are taught about humanity is from the past few thousand years. That makes some sense as we have much more of an idea about what was happening then. However, as best we can currently tell, humanity is roughly 250,000 years old. So that leaves quite a lot of time to form instincts prior to those first Mesopetamian farmers ~10,000 years ago.
Agriculture has existed for only about 4-5% of our existence, and thatās just for people with genetic roots in the Middle East, it took thousands of years to spread around the globe. And the world we live in now, with our daily commutes, and single family homes, and our mega cities, is quite an anomaly in our history. We donāt have the instincts for it.
Okay, so what do we have the instincts for? And here we are doing some guess work as we donāt have any documentary footage from the first ~249,870 years of our existence.
Itās really fascinating to read the studies on the few hunter - gatherer tribes that still exist today, or that did exist long enough for us to study them. We can make a pretty decent guess that how these people live, is roughly how all of humanity lived for the vast majority of our time on planet Earth. This is especially true when we find the same patterns in different hunter - gatherer bands on opposite sides of the world. That gives us a pretty clear indication of what is ānaturalā to humans.
Note: I am not at all suggesting that anyone return to this life. You are free to run off into the woods with your buddies if you like, but I have no intention of returning or advocating for a return to this type of life. I am suggesting here that we can learn quite a lot from looking at these studies, and that will help us continue to grow.
It pains me to skip all of the fascinating learnings from these studies, but out of deep respect for your time Iāll restrain myself and focus on just one. For at least 95% of our history, we lived in groups of about 100-150 people.
Have you heard of Dunbarās number? British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar was studying the relationship between brain size and social group size in primates and humans. Long story short, after lots of study, he concluded that the human brain can maintain stable social relationships with about 150 people max. He first proposed this theory in the 90ās and it seems to be standing the test of time.
Are you starting to see how this applies to economics? No? Well Iāll explain, but first one more mind f*ck on human nature.
Again, if you are from the States youāve probably been taught, or just absorbed from the culture, a few ideas and values about human nature that just aren't true. Us Americans tend to be very into the ārugged individualismā, and Iām still a bit of a fan of this. Iām all in on individuality, personal autonomy, etc. ā¦But, thatās not the human survival adaptation. The human survival adaptation is group formation and co-operation. One tiger vs one human, the human is lunch. One tiger vs 10 humans, the tiger is lunch. We are not bigger, we are not faster or stronger, what we are is cooperative and we come in groupsā¦ and we win! We now sit at the top of that food chain.
But we know deep in our bones that we are unlikely to survive and can not thrive without our tribeā¦ without our community. This one is such a deep survival instinct that we tend to panic when we feel that we might lose our tribe. I call this āExclusion Panicā, and it is unfortunately a heavily abused human instinct. When we get any hint of being ostracized, of being excluded from the group, we fall into a survival panic and politicians and manipulators of all varieties know this, and use it as a tool of control. Itās another fascinating topic, but for our purposes here, we need to understand that we have a deeply rooted need for our tribe, for those ~150 people in our community.
And now back to economics!
And you dear reader know a thing or two about economics. I donāt need to break out the data, and the charts, and all the theories to explain to you why socialism or communism doesnāt work. We know that these economic policies lead to shortages, dependance, starvation, just a massive humanitarian disaster.
If this is true, if we can prove this so easily with all the case studies, with that picture of North and South Korea from space! Then why on Earth are there so many people who still long for socialism?
Those socialism supporters might not want to swallow the hard pill of data, but here is your hard pill to swallowā¦ humans are communists. For ~240,000 years we lived in small bands of people practicing communism. Hunter - gatherers donāt use money, they have no need for that. They can maintain a direct relationship with everyone in the tribe. Living in that lifestyle you donāt need to pay Alice for her newly weaved basket, you just remember that you owe her some berries next week. You happily share that bit of buffalo leg with Bob knowing that heās got you next time he has a big kill. On and on. This is where our instincts still are.
The issue isnāt that communism doesnāt work, the issue is that communism doesnāt scale beyond Dunbarās number.
Okay, so if we can accept that, we are still left with the same issue. Now that we all live in these massive societies way outside Dunbarās number, socialist/communist policies still donāt work! Yes, but the way in which we have a habit of explaining ācapitalismā or free markets triggers everyone else's āExclusion Panicā.
So we have two issues here. Humans long for community, and want to support sharing in their community, and when we try to explain why that wonāt work, we trigger their āExclusion Panicā. In short, weāre doing it all wrong. Yelling at people about data will never work when this is what we are up against.
So, if you havenāt decided that Iām a dirty hippie communist and youāre still reading this, Iāll stop talking about problems and offer a very simple solution. We gotta change how we talk about this.
When we sell capitalism with words and phrases like ācompetitionā, āprofit motiveā, ārugged individualismā, or āsurvival of the fittestā, etc, we trigger fears of isolation. When we communicate with words used to signal distance and friction with our fellow humans rather than connection to them and care for them, we trigger concerns for well being. ...valid concerns.
If we want to counter the rise of socialism, we need a marketing overhaul. We must speak to humanityās true survival strategyācooperationāand honor it in our language. We need to acknowledge our intense longing for community and give people an economically sound path to greater community support. People are rejecting an āevery man for himselfā world, and socialism is their current tool of rejection. If we believe free markets serve communities better, we have to show it with how we talk.
Specific phrases or scripts that would be more effective here would require their own write up. But once you accept the reality of humanity, and we hold that as our base, then how we communicate on these topics will naturally evolve.
We are all starved of connection and community in the modern world. While it might be too late for the word "capitalism" we can help people to understand that āfree marketsā are actually what bring us together and are at the core of cooperative communities.
āHard timesā do not make for strong people. Not strong women or strong men. āHard timesā make for damaged people that are in need of healing. Whatās more, when someone is damaged and does not receive understanding and support from their community, if the feedback they get is more like āwalk it offā and less like āIām here to helpā, that damage is likely to continue to grow and put them in an early grave.
We know this from quite a lot of studies, but letās look at two of those.
Back in 1998 Dr Felliti gave a questionnaire to thousands of medical patients of all varieties in San Diego that asked the patient two sets of questions. The first was had they experienced any of a set of āhard timesā as a child, things like physical abuse, sexual assault, neglect, etc. (later becoming the āACE scoreā) And the second asked if they had or were suffering as an adult from things like obesity, addiction, depression, etc. The correlation was so dramatic that they had to double check the results. These āhard timesā, especially when there were multiple āhard timesā, put these patients at a 1100% increased risk of these negative health outcomes.
Whatās more, they expanded the study. When these patents would come in for their next visit the doctors were given a script that went like āI see here on your chart that you experienced [the hard time they mentioned]. Iām so sorry to hear that happened to you. That never should have happened to you. Would you like to talk about it?ā About 60% of people did want to talk about it and on average those conversations lasted 5 mins. And for those people that did talk about it, just those 5 mins led to a significant fall in depression and anxiety. And those that were randomly assigned to a therapist to talk about it further, had an even bigger decrease in depression and anxiety.
In conclusion, hard times fuck you up, and community support heals.
https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/s0749-3797(98)00017-8/pdf
And letās do one more along those lines. Of all the things you can do to increase both your life span and health span, eating well, sleeping well, working out, etc. What do you think has the biggest impact?
A supportive community.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development or āGrant Studyā started tracking 724 men in 1938(back before women were included in medical research) and out of the 10ā20 predictors used, the most impactful was community. It was the quality of relationships, and very importantly, not just relationships with immediate family, but relationships with those outside the immediate familyā¦ community.
https://www.adultdevelopmentstudy.org/
āHard timesā damage people. And unacknowledged hard times, and going through hard times without an understanding and supportive community to help you, not only fucks you up, it puts you in an early grave.
āHard timesā ā strong people.
We can add some nuance here too! Are all 'hard times' trauma?
Where do we draw the line between āhard timesā and trauma? And this is a tough one as it differs from person to person. But there is a difference. Iād define trauma an experience that so overwhelms your nervous systems ability to cope with it that it gets stored in sort of fragments in your brain and nervous system and these fragments are occasionally activated in ways that interfere with your ability to function.
Hard times arenāt necessarily ātraumaā it depends on the nervous system of the person experiencing it. Itās complex. And one thing that I find fascinating is that a situation can be traumatic or not depending on whether the person experiencing it is supported by others in their life and doesnāt feel alone. ...itās sad but fascinating stuff!
What I dislike about the āhard timesā meme is that it promotes the, very false, idea that āgood timesā are bad for the world. That is just about the most backwards thing one could think of.
This life, just existing here, in a body, subject to the confines of time and space, is a difficult life. Nothing additional is needed for character building. In this limited existence we all have a lot of decisions to make on how we spend our limited time and energy.
When we venture into saying that competing with one another, or fighting to get to the top of hierarchy, etc is good for us in some fashionā¦ this is very easy to prove as false. You can checkout the Forest Troop study by Dr. Robert Sapolsky. TLDR: He was studying a troop of Baboons in the 70ās. Via a fluke, all the āalpha malesā died off and were never replaced. The troop became more cooperative and stayed that way. And health outcomes for the troop members improved.
Human strength, the human survival strategy is cooperation. One tiger vs one human, the human is lunch. One tiger vs 10 humans, the tiger is lunch. And all that we have as humans, we gained through cooperation.
We really are not wired to hurt one another, we are wired for connection. Violence and hatred, working against one another instead of with each other, damages everyone involved. Ugly behavior damages everyone, not just the victims but the perpetrators as well. Our minds and bodies do not function properly when we are in ugly situations. Our minds and bodies are not built for that. We are built for love, connection, and cooperation. That is how we thrive.
...you think I vowed to obey someone?
If your first move is racial hypotheticals, youāve already shown the system has colonized your mind.
nostr:nevent1qqsdvemdn4jvnlaqwt3fyyemq8q5vfg6xj78cm8qfrtq3f4metyd04gppemhxue69uh5qmn0wvhxcmmvgrw2j9
If it takes someone with white skin and blonde hair to get you to care, then ya, you have a colonized mind.
biological drives exist. But also so do hundreds of other motivating factors. Humans are complex!
We have this narrative that men only want young women and that they just arenāt attracted to older women and a man with options will always prefer a younger woman. But then we have the richest man in the world marrying a woman his age.
We have this narrative that women only want men that are built like comic book superheros and that a woman with options will always chose the man with the biggest biceps. But then we have the existence of Pete Davidson.
Maybe, people are actually pretty complex and attraction is an individual, and complex thing???
I'm not talking about an active abuser. Just someone who isn't doing the work. some one who needs help but won't go get it. I'm sure you know the type. So no, it doesn't make sense to rearrange your life to avoid being in the same room with them.
Ya the question is how? If it someone who you are going to be in the same room with regularly, you can know intellectually that you need to 'let them go', but how do you do so emotionally?
I just spent 5 weeks in Chicago, I went for a walk nearly every day. I didnāt experience even one incident of street harassment. That is wildly unusual! And given that this was consistent over 5 weeks, I donāt think it was chance, I think something is different now. The question is what?
I donāt think I suddenly became unattractive. I got lots of smiles and nods, and āgood morningā greetings. Maybe itās because Iām a bit older? Maybe itās in the way that I carry myself or in the way I dress these days? Or maybeā¦ just maybe, the culture has changed. Or is that wishful thinking on my part?
And this goes again to the 'submission' and 'dominant' thing that the Red Pill crew loves. I think they see women being 'bottoms' as them being submissive during sex.
But that doesn't line up with me. And when someone tells me that I ask them "are you submitting to the masseuse when you get a massage?"
You could see that situation as the 'bottom' submitting, or you could see it as the 'top' servicing the 'bottom'.
(I prefer to imagine sex as simply play time. No need for hierarchies in the bedroom.)
Iāve been thinking about the intersection of patriarchy, hierarchy, and sex.
I think there is a ācollective unconsciousā sense in our culture that being āon topā during the act means that you are āaboveā your partner in some sort of relationship hierarchy and thus better than them. And of course the reverse for being āa bottomā. Would you agree?
Just look at the language we use around this stuff. āwho f***ed who?ā, āO he got f***edā. etc, etc. Itās really kinda disturbing and sad. We say someone ābent overā as a term for them being abused.
My daughter is talking in her sleep and apparently she is dreaming of having existential debates with people... yup, that kid is mine lol
Men are not robots. they are full humans.
Are you suggesting that men need to be robots to be good hunters? We have this weird obsession in our culture with thinking that emotion and logic are incompatible things. That is tragically inaccurate.
There is a line from an episode of Star Trek that I love "Emotional considerations to no impede my logic, they inform my logic." Feelings are simply messages from your subconscious, it is very unwise to suppress or ignore them.