Sure, there have been countless “self-help” narratives/remedies that have been broached and peddled over the years. They pop up on the best seller lists all the time. And they have certainly helped any number of folks out of their own particular holes. Or they wouldn’t be best sellers.
And, yes, I could spend the rest of my days trying them all one by one.
But how many of them have you come across that actually engage the hole that I am in? How many holes revolve around this:
If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.
“Feeling better” here is one thing. And, as I noted above, I already have plently of distractions for that. But I still feel no less embedded in an is/ought world that I construe to be embedded in turn in an essesntially absurd and meaningless No God world that ends for “I” in oblivion.
And the crucial part here in this forum is that my frame of mind revolves not only around circumstances but around a philosophical contraption such that I have managed to think myself into believing what I do.
So, I go in search of those who do not believe what I do.
But, out in the world of actual conflicting human behaviors, why don’t they?
And here they will either bring the components of their own philosophical contraptions down to earth or they won’t.
Instead I often get “general descriptions”/“intellectual contraptions” like this:
You have couched the issue as one between facing the epistemological truth, which will lead to discomfort which objectivists avoid. Some of the suggestions are clearly aimed at reducing suffering while at the same time could not possibly answer your question. IOW they will not make you this or that objectivist. They will not make you an objectivist, they might however reduce the suffering in the hole.
Let’s explore this as it pertains to your own life. Or to a context “in the news” that clearly divides folks into either the “one of us” or the “one of them” camps. Human interactions that clearly precipitate and then sustain all manner of human suffering.
Further the situation is more complicated than you present it. There are other people here, there is at least one thread in fact, where people are asserting that morals do not exist. There are people like me who do not think there are objective morals, though I feel no urge to claim there are none. And yet I do not experience that as a hole.
Morality need not exist for those who are, say, castaways on a deserted island; or for those who choose to separate themselves from all others by living in survival mode out in the wilderness somewhere. Here only their belief in the existence of God would create the need for a moral path.
But once we choose to interact with others, wants and needs come into conflict. And then “rules of behavior” need to be established. And, when push comes to shove, isn’t that really what traditions/customs/folkways/mores/laws/constitutions etc., revolve around?
It just comes down then to how any particular human community configures and ceaselessly reconfigures all of the components embedded in the interaction of genes and memes.
Of course if you ask the objectivists to shift the discussion from the points that I make to them to the points that they make to each other, all hell breaks loose.
For them the only thing worse than not being an objectivist is in being the wrong objectivist.
Yes, and you think objectivists are worse than you.
And you think that you understand my motivations and intentions here better than I do myself. Meanwhile, I make it abundantly clear that given the pofoundly problematic manner in which “I” construe even my own capacity to understand that, “I” can never really be wholly in touch with it myself!
And, again, in my view, it is precisely this ambiguous frame of mind that others wish to avoid themselves. And, in order to do so, they must come to believe that there really does exist one or another rendition of a “real me” able to discover and/or invent rules of behavior said to be the optimal or the only rational way in which to interact with others.
Why does your model generally head towards binary conclusions and psychic reading of others made by someone who models his beliefs on dasein-based critiques of objectivism.
What if discomfort is not the root of some of the reactions to what you write?
Why do you think the hole and non-objectivism must go together?
This is part of the reason some people assume you are attached to the hole for reasons you do not say or perhaps do not know.[/
Again, what on earth are you suggesting here? Note a context, note a set of conflicting behaviors. We can then engage the respective components of our arguments as they pertain to actual human interactions revolving around identity, value judgments and political power.