Silhouette wrote:To an extent, this is the case when it comes to spectacles of violence - fake and real and everything in between, insofar as they attract a lot of revenue. Of course fighters aren't the richest class of people in the world, but perhaps they are being nothing more than appropriately compensated to the extent of what they would realistically be giving up if they were to lead a lesser society where competence in violence is power. "Weaklings" (when it comes to violence) being at the top appears to yield a richer society, hence why everyone wins so much more, justifying why it's dumb to carry weapons.
But of course strength and weakness doesn't only occur along the scale of violence. Strengths occur in a wide variety of scales in many dimensions. There is no such things as "strong" and "weak" in general, but there are certainly people who have more of one than the other, and there are people who have more of one than the other in more or less relevant ways to what their society currently values.
But to those who have more strengths than weaknesses, yet their strengths are less relevant, they're welcome to try and push their strengths and make them relevant. But to the extent that they fail, they only prove that they aren't worthy.
It seems to me that you either have a naive idea of what violence is, or you think I have. When I say violence I don't mean fighters like MMA or such. I mean those who possess the highest capacity for violence, and are at the top of the hierarchy in their respective domains - police and military. Furthermore, violence capacity includes not only the foot soldiers, but also those who plan and coordinate violence, creating superior strategies and tools for it. Therefore by implication, also those who create and maintain the industry and the kind of social order which supports all of that. And yeah, ultimately violence, which is to say physical conflict, is exactly how strength and weakness are measured.
The other strengths and weakness are all ultimately linked to violence, no matter how indirectly. F.e. one of the most important aspects of industrial productivity is the tools for violence it produces. If one group neglected that, they would make of themselves an easy target for a group which doesn't.
Violence is an effective counter to almost everything. The only thing that is effective against violence is violence.
You seem to have re-worded my point as to why organisations don't feel fear, in order to conclude that they do. Dubious.
I guess you can look at anything blurrily enough and conclude that there's no distinction, sure, I'm just saying that if you look at it closely there's a clear distinction.
There is a distinction, yes, but also similarity. Whatever, I made my point. Not interested in semantics.
Yeah, that's exactly what I would say if I was talking about myself.
If you were honest for a change. But then, if you were the kind of person who is honest, all those things would be much less likely to apply to you in the first place.
If I didn't know any better I'd suspect you're trying to shame adaptation? Adaptation is the single most important strength to possess. You don't bring boxing gloves to a chess match, and you don't bring chess pieces to a boxing match, you adapt to whatever strengths are needed, and letting yourself be weak in irrelevant areas is inconsequential - if anything it is desirable in that it gives you more time to focus on being strong in relevant areas.
If anything, the exact opposite is true, I try to shame non-adaptation, I just point out the wider scale of adaptation.
In the short-term, it may be possible to make a lot of behaviors adaptive. F.e. a group of people could aim guns at your head and order you to kill every healthy newborn infant and rape and butcher its corpse, only allowing those with down syndrome and similar retardations to survive. In that scenario, the adaptive behavior is to do as they say, or you will get killed. But it's not as simple as that. Natural selection happens at a group level too. So one can ask - is this strategy of killing all newborn infants except the retarded that this group is applying itself a good, adaptive strategy? Does it lead to our group becoming more powerful and thus better prepared to compete with other groups when it comes to conflict? Or does it weaken us? Is it sustainable in the long-term, or does it parasite on the past successes of previous, different strategies? Because through conflict, natural selection determines which group is superior, and which is inferior.
Take the guns these people are using to enforce this strategy. Will the next generations, the retards, be capable of maintaining the production of these guns, and use them just as effectively? Or will there be degeneration?
Obviously this is an extreme example, but there are many other, less extreme (and thus less obvious) things which are maladaptive, yet society adopts them anyway. Allowing retarded children to live instead of euthanizing them is one.
Some dude said: "It is no measure of health to be well adjust to a sick society", this is a correct statement.
Nature (natural selection) is the ultimate standard against which not only individual competences and strategies are judged, but those of societies too.
But of course, those who thrive on lies and parasitism and have no capacity or no desire to think about the long-term consequences, will never admit this. If a leech could talk, would it not try to convince the one whose blood it is sucking that it isn't harmful? Why would it tell the truth, when its success depends on lies and parasitism?
So believe what you want. Since reality is objective, those who are honest and share similar predispositions tend to arrive at similar conclusions anyway.
A good thread on this made by some AutSider guy:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=192780#p2663500Right/left is a stupid dichotomy. The real dichotomy is: productive/adaptive/evolutionarily optimal strategy (that which leads to a net increase of a system's power), parasitic (leading to a net decrease of a system's power)
There is a large but not complete overlap between what is usually considered right and productive, and left and parasitic though.
