I have been unsatisfied with my exchanges so far with promethean75, so I decided to write my own:
Pedro: You keep complaining about how corrupt and/or hypocritical that judge was, the state is in general, capitalism and so on and so forth, but you yourself smoke weed and do all sorts of illegal things.
promethean75: And that somehow excuses them?
Pedro: I’m not saying it excuses them. I’m saying you are looking at the problem the wrong way.
being a savage, an animal, a criminally minded person, has always been my natural state… even since i was a wee lad. but i indirectly agreed with man and his state, to subdue that part of me and keep it under control… under one condition; man and his state had to uphold his end of the bargain or that contract would be canceled. well, he dropped the ball in 2007, dropped it again in 2010, then again in 2016. now part of me is disappointed that this happened; i could have easily lived the patriotic life of the law abiding citizen… got me a wife, good job, mortgage, golden retriever, gas grill, hung the flag from my front porch, the whole nine yards. but there is another part of me that is glad this happened, because that part is able to be set free again. in a sense i needed this to happen… was watching for it, waiting for the man to do something stupid and fuck it up. and that’s precisely what he did. and to add insult to injury, he will not fix what he fucked up, will not un-fuck it up. he got his shot, and struck out. what can i say?
so there you have it. and what all this means is something very easily misunderstood by people. the philosophy i’ve built around my circumstances is very unique because the circumstances are unique. mine is not some philosophy embraced while sitting in a lazy boy recliner reading a book. mine is a philosophy embraced standing inside the gaping jaws of experience. and those who have never stood in these jaws would not understand my reasoning. i am incommunicable in that respect… not because i don’t want to be understood, but because i cannot be understood by the company i keep. lol, and this really amounts to folks online because i have zero friends in real life.
soooooo, i prefer to keep my interactions with such folks on a casual level. if someone invites me to do ‘philosophy’, i find myself wanting to say ‘trust me buddy, you don’t wanna go there.’ and this is because my circumstances are so unique; i simply have nothing in common with others aside from a few basic truisms. but these are trivial. what i am interested is what has become true for me, and more so, if these truths are also true for others like myself.
and this is why my philosophy always tends toward a very specific direction. it’s always ‘headed that way’, headed down a road others are unexperienced at traveling and find unfamiliar. all this stuff about nihilism and anarchism is not just myself talking to hear myself talk, see. these are very carefully thought-through conclusions that have been developed over the course of a decade. and when i approach any given philosophical subject, it is always within the context of this rubric, or, will inevitably end up there.
i think it was kierkegaard who said ‘when one is misunderstood as a whole, it is impossible to remove even a single misunderstanding.’ or was it schopenahuer. can’t remember.
but do i have to be understood to enjoy interaction with others on a philosophy forum? shirley not… as long as i’m not asked to ‘go there’. no, let’s not go there.
“being a savage, an animal, a criminally minded person, has always been my natural state… even since i was a wee lad. but i indirectly agreed with man and his state, to subdue that part of me and keep it under control… under one condition; man and his state had to uphold his end of the bargain or that contract would be canceled. well, he dropped the ball in 2007, dropped it again in 2010, then again in 2016. now part of me is disappointed that this happened; i could have easily lived the patriotic life of the law abiding citizen… got me a wife, good job, mortgage, golden retriever, gas grill, hung the flag from my front porch, the whole nine yards. but there is another part of me that is glad this happened, because that part is able to be set free again. in a sense i needed this to happen… was watching for it, waiting for the man to do something stupid and fuck it up. and that’s precisely what he did. and to add insult to injury, he will not fix what he fucked up, will not un-fuck it up. he got his shot, and struck out.”
Right, this is what I’m saying. This whole reasoning, you’re approaching it the wrong way.
Like I feel you wanting to put me in the position of agreeing with what you are disagreeing with. I’m not. I’m saying the whole way you posit the thing is wrong.
By the way, I slept on the downtown benches of the most dangerous city on this planet. Your shit doesn’t impress me.
something tells me you spent your money on something else (elbow nudge) rather than rent?
no but check this out. i came back into the dorm after the afternoon yard call was over, and the fucking COs are mopping blood up beside my bunk. fuckin’ bunk mate got stabbed because he was selling clips (cuts of cigarette) to some other dude’s clientele. you believe that shit? can’t even get to my own locker without wading through a puddle of blood.
Yes. Actually, I can believe it.
Lol, you reminded me of that time when I was selling joints at one of Caracas’ most central downtown plazas. Yes, that part of town is poor enough that it is profitable to sell joints. We had to be super careful about the national guard because, get this, a few weeks before some fucking kids, two of em, got really high on xanax and went and stabbed themselves a national guard. Then they came back to the plaza all glowy and proud. You can imagine the reprecussions. Didn’t end well for those kids.
Funny thing about that plaza, the national guard was actually stationed across the street. We really had to be ultra-stealth. And my fucking partner was sneaking off every half hour to smoke some heroine. But that’s life, right?
Enough stories though. I’m not into it. Just, your shit doesn’t impress me dog.
But… but, I haven’t even gotten started! That was nothing. Lemme tell you what happened when the PERT team was…
Oh nevermind.
So can you get good and high from smoking heroin? I thought it’d be wasteful, but I dunno. Snorted it three times and shot it once. Not for me. Made me nauseas. I’m an ‘upper’ guy, though I haven’t done a drug in over three years… much to my chagrin.
Lol, me too. About opiates and about the three years. People don’t get it when I say that about opiates, they have this idea that it’s just a kind of platonic perfect bliss. I guess it is for some people.
But um, yeah. You can smoke it.
Anyway prometheus, let’s get down to it.
What are you going to do with all that resentment?
Fuck, your good cheer saves you. We got nowhere, the initial dialogue I wrote is still the best interaction we’ve had.
the system screwed me over man… you don’t even know…
Fuck outta here.
“I’m saying you’re looking at the problem the wrong way.”
What way could I mean?
And then some intense spiel about “they created me!” The intensity of the spiel betrays that you know there is something dar.
i will become the frizzle fry.
though i wouldn’t call it ‘resentment’. that’s too naive, too easy. there is nothing here that i envy; no power, privilege or property of ‘theirs’ that i want. the feeling is more of disgust… like what one would feel toward a lower life form such as an insect.
ah but nobody ‘creates’ anyone else. there is no freewill, and as such we’d have to trace everything that has become back to god. but since there is no god, there is nothing to blame.
“though i wouldn’t call it ‘resentment’. that’s too naive, too easy. there is nothing here that i envy; no power, privilege or property of ‘theirs’ that i want. the feeling is more of disgust… like what one would feel toward a lower life form such as an insect.”
Yeah, no, that’s what resentment is. Envy is a different thing.
Ironically it was resentful feelings that with time have attempted to shift the meaning of the word to envy, like resentful people are just envious. They are not, they are like you describe.
“ah but nobody ‘creates’ anyone else. there is no freewill, and as such we’d have to trace everything that has become back to god. but since there is no god, there is nothing to blame.”
Don’t try to wiggle yourself out of it. Stand by the shit you said.
lol, but it was you who surmised such a thing was deserving of resentment… and i’ll tell you why. you’re still thinking in moral terms, still thinking judgments reflect anything more than one’s own measure of strength to resist what is external to it. so for example, if you were to say ‘what x did was bad for/to me’, we ask ‘is the cause of this feeling his strength, or your weakness.’
to be even able to conceive of this in terms of a problem of ‘resentment’ means that you, yourself, would be morally offended by such events… which would mean two things: you still believe there is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ objectively, and that the degree of the feeling of offense is proportionate to the strength of the offender rather that the weakness of the offended.
would a giant resent a mouse that bit his toe, or merely shake it off with a chuckle? ‘resentment’ is not some state that exists out there in the world ready to be experienced. it is a feeling generated internally by the degree of strength one has. if something hurts, one immediately seeks an external cause for that pain… one wants to blame and hold something responsible for it. if something does not hurt, there is no occasion to feel resentment… to need to feel it to excuse one’s own weakness.
No, resentment isn’t about morality either. It is eminently pre-moral.
I didn’t say what you described was deserving of resentment. What you describe IS resentment. You don’t even notice that the judge is a sidenote in your discourse, you mostly talk about yourself. You saying I’m saying you’re saying your description of yourself is deserving of resentment?
No.
on the contrary, it’s a post-moral concept. prior to social contracts between language using people who share a community, anger amounted only to being expressed through instinctual violence. so for instance, if you came into my cave and took my favorite shiny rock, i’d try to bash you over the head with my club… but i wouldn’t think you were treating me unfairly or that you were violating some kind of agreement between us. here, i wouldn’t be able to feel resentment, because the structures of the civil contract that define such concepts as ‘fairness’ and ‘rights’ and ‘obligations’ would not exist.
so anger and resentment are qualitatively different feelings, the former involving moral presuppositions that have to be in place before it can be experienced. so when i say you are still thinking morally when you conceive of the things that happened to me as being something that would/could be ‘resented’, you’re assuming that i’d feel some moral offense at these things. but i don’t, because i cannot blame anyone or anything for being treated ‘unfairly’, for two reasons. first, there is no freewill, and second, these modes of deception and corruption are built into the legal system… something that is characteristic of human nature in general, and the criminal justice system in particular.
my objection is not about the transparency of the sham morality that is believed to be the basis of law, nor about the hipocrisy, deception, incompetence, and corruption that runs rampant throughout it. these things are to be expected (since man is an inherently despicable creature). my objection is to something a bit more subtle and profound; that the system is not strong enough to not need to hide behind this facade of morality. what disgusts me is that these insects (prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges) are not faithful to their own principles and codes of conduct. not that they are opportunistic liars - for this is human nature - but that they are still pretending not to be.
be that as it may, being subjected to this political travesty at the highest level possible within the social contract fundamentally changes my relationship to the state. and it is a change that affects and influences every facet of my philosophy. this betrayal is a cornerstone of my thought. i am not interested in fiddling with the tedious, inconsequential philosophical ‘problems’ others occupy themselves with. my problems are of a different rank.
if i were to involve myself in trying to find a solution to this problem, this effort would consists of trying to locate and isolate the source of the problem and change the circumstances that allow it to happen. incidentally, i have traced nearly every detail back to a set of systemic characteristics that are intrinsic to the capitalist system. here i am not drawing attention to the inherent nature of man as an opportunistic deceiver and exploiter (this i accept), but rather the system that greatly augments these things rather than trying to subdue them.
you could say that this is the basic thesis, the basic premise, of my anarchism. and you might misunderstand me if your only experience with self proclaimed anarchists consists of hanging out with a few rebellious pot heads in sex pistols t-shirts at the local coffee shop. this is not anarchism. these irrelevant clowns do not speak for me.
tldr
But I mean that philosophically. You said on the contrary, to a thing that is evidently true, so obviously a hefty text needed to follow. The content is irrelevant.
With the outmost respect.
If you think resentmet is about morality, you fundamentally missunderstand what morality is and, as is anyhow evident in your writings otherwise, have a supersticious belief in it.
It is a contraption, a creation. True morality is cold, it is like science, about checking balances and such. It does want to make you believe that it is not, that it is rooted to reality and has fundamental, pre-linguistic links to emotions. Although I am not even sure you can imagine what pre-linguistic means.
Resentment. A caveman beats another caveman down and comandeers his cave. Caveman 1 feels resentment. Good and Evil have not been invented. Caveman 1 does not envy caveman 2 or give a shit about the cave at this point.
Resentment. It is an instinct. It comes from sentiment, re-sentiment, in a context (remember, this word was invented in the glorious sons of Rome and not designed for English) where sentiment, feeling refers to pain, feeling pain. So resentment is wallowing in the pain, making it about that pain. And having the image of the perpetrator ever-present. No morality involved, no morality needed. Related to revenge and such, but not intrinsically.
The thing about resentment, also the reason Nietzsche said it took so much nervous energy, is that it can only work as a raison d’être, when it is indulged in life becomes about it, it is the primary reason.
There is no logic to this. No morality or ulterior explanation. It is just an instinct, far predating any such thing as logic or morality.
People really do overestimate the power, as well as correspondence with reality, of logic (never to mention morality). You have gone as far as noticing it does not live up to the claims of the logicians, but then you go into a sad Wittgensteinean loop. Just come out with it already, reality hurts, the wind is cold. But it is full of the real stuff, the riches. Say hello to the world.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6WD7B_I_9c[/youtube]
Wittgenstein / promethean75 and logical consistency of reality.