Truth

Well, it must be harder for others I guess…

When truth causes harm, a lie is preferable.

Preferable to whom?

Their is no such thing as truth. What is true to one, might be false to another and vice versa. This is because perception, perspective and bias shape our “truth”.

What you’re talking about is honesty. The ability to be aware of yourself and your surroundings, to the point that you no longer have the desire to hide/deceive/delude yourself and others. You accept reality for what it is and what it isn’t. You shed your coping mechanisms and actually deal with your issues.

People are deceitful because they cannot understand reality for what it is and what it isn’t. We all seek to make sense of the world around us. When we cannot find meaning, we create it via perspective. Just like I was trying to create meaning behind some of my Ex’s behaviors that I didn’t understand (i.e. the things that were contradictory). We end up deluding ourselves, because we formulate expectations and ideals that do not coincide with the reality we exist in. When reality doesn’t align with our expectations/ideals, we do whatever is necessary to keep our perspective intact… the typical method invoked is deceit. We’re not intellectually honest with ourselves, because we’re not willing to sacrifice what is required to be so… our Ego, our sense of self, our emotional security.

Warlock,

" We end up deluding ourselves, because we formulate expectations and ideals that do not coincide with the reality we exist in."-Warlock

What of sacrificing innocence in the process of being honest with one’s self? Is innocence worth hanging onto? I equate hope with innocence. Isn’t hope built into our expectations and ideals?

Hope is an irrational concept. It is part of those expectations/ideals that I’m speaking of. Hope is denial of reality, a delusion to comfort us.

These expectations/ideals create a disconnection between reality and our perspectives. This disconnect is responsible for our psychosis of denial and delusion. Which in-turn makes us stressed to the point of inducing our fight or flight response… manifesting in escapism or irrational rage. This is easily observable in people, you just have to look around. Drugs and alcohol, video games, workaholics, social media addicts, etc… all forms of the flight response. religious conflicts, gangs, contact sports, domestic abuse, etc… all forms of the fight response.

So there is no lost innocence? No lost hope for it is non-existent? So everything is predetermined by a hopeless reality?

What-Tha-…

…talk about a nihilist.

“Best way to cure death is to get rid of life!!”

Hope, by it’s very definition, is a concept that is counter to reality. It is a delusion… not the thing you’re hoping for, the hope itself. If you subscribe to the concept of hope, you’re inflicting damage to yourself.

You cannot control reality, you can only control yourself. This isn’t to say that we cannot try to influence reality, we can and sometimes we’re successful in achieving our desires/goals. Placing expectations and ideals on reality and others, only leads to either denial or delusion. When these expectations and ideals aren’t met, we have to make sense of it… which manifests in the fight or flight response, as our Ego tries to protect itself. Therefore, we either blame others or we attempt to hide. Neither is healthy for our psyches.

I don’t know where you got “predetermined” from my statements, but I don’t believe in fate or the like. We can affect change in reality, we can influence positive and/or negative around us, we cannot control reality though… there’s too many factors that are beyond our immediate influence for us to actually have control over it.

You do not need hope to have motivation, you need purpose and through purpose you will find fulfillment and through fulfillment you will find happiness. These are natural to us as people. We hope because we’re not allowed to find purpose, fulfillment or happiness… hope is a coping mechanism, it’s not natural, it’s merely a way that we try to make sense of the dysfunctional world we live in.

I’m not a nihilist. I believe that we have purpose in life, to live as well as we can (i.e. fulfillment and happiness). I just do not believe that there is a deeper meaning to our existence, no higher power or higher form of existence. The problem, is that I see fulfillment and happiness as nature, rather than nurture. We possess all these things that we’re told is supposed to make us fulfilled and happy, but the opposite is true, we’re lacking and miserable. I feel this is because we’ve become disconnected from reality and as a result, our nature. We have all this conditioning, acculturation, indoctrination and rules; training us to be something that we’re not. Thus, we begin to develop coping mechanisms, ways to deal with these underlying feelings… eventually we become so heavily trained, our perception of the cage, limiting and oppressing us changes to that of securing and comforting us.

Warlock,

I’m not able to make sense of your logic. For instance, “You cannot control reality, you can only control yourself.” You lost me in your contradiction.

“I don’t know where you got “predetermined” from my statements, but I don’t believe in fate or the like.” If the factors of reality are out of your control, hence “you cannot control reality,” you become a predetermined pawn of reality in a constant state of reactionary effort, which may be your goal/purpose/desire. Is it?

My goal/purpose/desire is to remain as innocent as possible by breathing hope rendering my intentions honest in an effort to know truth. What you call a delusion, I smile upon as a blessing.

It’s not a contradiction. You cannot control the stuff around you, i.e. reality. The only thing that you can control, is how you interact with the stuff around you, i.e. matters of self. Imagine being a fish in an aquarium, you cannot exert control of what goes on in the aquarium, but your actions can influence what goes on in the aquarium. Let’s say that a bigger fish wants to eat you, you cannot control the bigger fish, but your actions could influence the other fish to find an easier target… unfortunately though, this doesn’t mean that it will happen that way and the bigger fish could still decide to eat you, even if the prospect is more difficult for it. Therefore, you cannot control the bigger fish, just as you cannot control the owner of the aquarium from placing you in that situation to begin with.

I’m only a predetermined pawn if I allow myself to be one. Such as not being conscious of why I act, feel and/or think the way I do. I become a puppet to my conditioning, acculturation and indoctrination. At which point, I have zero freedom to act consciously, instead I act re-actively.

I cannot control you, so I must accept how you see things. Whether I agree or not is irrelevant, I can only control matters of self… if I let myself get caught up in placing expectations of you and/or reality, it will only consume me with disappointment, frustration and resentment… I will either blame you for not living up to my own perspective of the world or I will seek delude myself into viewing things in way that rationalizes your failure to live up to my perspective. Either outcome is only affecting me though, making me unhealthy.

Ummm…

How can you possibly coherently justify both of those?
What do you image the concept of “hope” to be such that it is defined to be unreal?

What were you saying?

Well, I “feel” that in philosophy, you need to do more thinking and less feeling. There is a hell of a lot of thought awaiting your awareness.

By believing in a purpose to life, I do not fit the criteria of existential nihilism, i.e. the most common definition of the term. If you want to get into semantics, many people would be nihilists to an extent, since I’m pretty sure there’s many meaningful aspects of life and not everyone adheres to the concept of them all.

Hope is a desire for something to be as it currently isn’t, therefore, conceptually it’s a delusion. Reality is what it is, not as we wish it to be. We are unable to control reality, even if we can influence it. The only control we possess is how we, as individuals, interact with reality. Many people alter their perception and perspective, they do this to build a bridge between reality and their delusions of how they believe things should be. This is unhealthy (i.e. unnatural) and it creates all manner of psychosis in us as individuals. We don’t want to accept reality, because we’ve been indoctrinated into what we’re supposed to believe. From our concepts of love to our concepts of family to our concepts of fulfillment and happiness… We’re marionettes, being influenced/manipulated/controlled at every turn.

You’re reaching here. It’s a figure of speech, not derived from my emotions or feelings, but my beliefs. I could have said “I believe”, but I didn’t think a rational person would seek to attack my literal words instead of the context of what I was saying. To be perfectly honest with you, I have been suppressing my emotions since I can remember, so the vast majority of the time… my words are spoken with no emotional basis at all.

Hope is the desire that it will become what it currently isn’t. And that is always true, although most often not in the particular direction hope for.

Quite the contrary.

Didn’t you say specifically that life is without meaning or purpose?
And that “There is no such thing as truth”? - A quintessential element aspect in life.

And of course, with there being no truth, you could hardly be telling it with your proclamations.

The most that you could claim is to be a “positive nihilist” (despite that being an oxymoron).

… and realizing that “enjoying life” was the objective purpose and incentive for accepting that dogma.

The more precise truth is that life is ALWAYS in the pursuit of sustaining itself (else it isn’t life). Enjoyment is a large part of its compass in that endeavor (although obviously flawed). Thus there actually IS an “objective purpose” whether known or preferred.

I never claimed that life has no purpose, in fact, I specifically stated that I believed it did. My reasoning was basically your point of life seeking to sustain itself (e.g. to live and live well). I do not however subscribe to some deeper meaning and/or different levels of existence.

A nihilist must possess all said beliefs of the doctrine to actually be a nihilist. How about we stop trying to label one another… I come to my own conclusions, I do not read manifestos. I didn’t even know what exactly a nihilist was until You called me one and I looked it up. Therefore, how can I subscribe to a doctrine that I have never read? Logical consequence and all that, right? Just on that basis alone, makes me not a nihilist, whether or not you perceive me as sharing some of that philosophy’s viewpoints.

I mean should I label you as a Muslim, just because you believe in a higher power? Would that not be a drastic oversimplication of your views/beliefs?

Also, for fuck’s sake, can we please stop citing things out of context to try and make a point. It’s not intellectually honest, it’s a technique used by people attempting to win an argument, not by people having a rational discussion.

Generally speaking, yes.

Hope can be irrational yes, but we must also remember that human beings are largely irrational where hopeful irrationalities are useful in terms of survival.

Beyond a child there isn’t any innocence in this world.

Interesting, I like how you tied hope to dysfunction. There are however limits to things even like self control.