Here's what I find evil about socialization

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Shikari
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29 Sep 2013, 10:35 am

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Thanks Shikari, that's a very interesting article.

I see what they mean by cooperation being in theory the most optimal social construction. But in real life it seems like that's not exactly how things work out. People might cooperate, but only for selfish reasons, so the underlying force is not cooperation, but selfishness. It's not like people genuinely want to do well to others, just because they care about them, it's more like they want to do well to others because it eventually benefits themselves to do so. Selflessness is never truly appreciated. That's what I object to.

It doesn't pay off to do good deeds, because there are no good deeds only socially wrong actions. You should act in selfishness all the time, but that does not mean you should never help others and that you should never cooperate - but you should only do those things if they benefit yourself.

The main drive remains selfishness. It's difficult for me to accept.


I can understand where you are coming from, but out of curiosity what do consider the selfish reasons to be? There are people who genuinely wants to do well to other because they do care about them. They care a lot! Have you ever seen the movie "Pay It Forward"? It's about doing one act of kindness to three random strangers, and instead of them to something for them in return, they ask them to pay it forward and help three more random strangers with something. True selflessness is very much appreciated because we often don't expect it. Selflessness is appreciate by at least you (and you know that), and also by me. That's two people right there that you can say truly appreciate it, and there is a million more out there.



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29 Sep 2013, 11:22 am

good deeds can be done for altruistic reasons.

as a person who struggled with this for years, i absolutely believe this is true.

if it weren't, i would have died psychically decades ago.

there is a point in some people's psychological journey (as in mine) where though one is motivated by selfish desires, even to give, the selfishness falls away as a result of the giving.

i can't convince anyone of this, but having reached a point of desperation and meaninglessness where everything fell away including my self-interest, i know i experienced a transformation that changed everything. if someone else gets desperate enough, they might get there too. i'm just glad someone was there to point me in the direction of change rather than giving up.


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Verdandi
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29 Sep 2013, 11:42 am

chlov wrote:
In the nature, only the healtiest and fittiest survive. It's a natural law.
You can't change nature, because if you do, Earth will be permanently damaged.


This shows a complete misunderstanding of what "survival of the fittest" means. It doesn't mean what you said. It refers to the environment. Those fit to survive in the environment. But environments change and individuals who might have died in a different environment can thrive in the one they actually live in. This does not permanently damage the Earth. Nothing humans have done so far have permanently damaged the Earth. We may have damaged Earth's ability to support us, but that's a different concept altogether.

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Just like a herd leaves behind an injured individual, humans leave behind those who are handicapped or have issues.
I'm not saying it's right. I am just saying things are like that; if you don't like them, you'd better go live in a place where life doesn't exist.


As Adamantium said, this is not true.


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Even plants try to seek more the light of the sun, leaving in the shadow other plants.


However, note that in dense forests, life still thrives on the ground because it can survive in a low-light environment.

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Humans are part of nature, humans are animals that can speak and build cities and walk in the space, but still they are animals, and have an animal behaviour.
Nothing more, nothing less.


This statement is extremely reductive, and as such is rather inaccurate. It is accurate to say that humans are part of the animal kingdom, but it is inaccurate to draw the conclusions you have drawn, which ignore what humans have done and are capable of doing.

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Competitive behaviour makes the world go around.
If a herd decided not to leave behind the injured individual, they would all be eaten by the predators, and in no time that species would die out. If they leave one behind,all the others will be safe, and the spieces won't die out.
This instinct is what was left in the human behaviour.


This is a simplistic perspective on herds. Herds include the old, the young, the very old, the very young, the healthy, the injured, and the disabled. If what you said were true, herds would be abandoning members left and right, but does this really happen? Predators evolved behaviors that involve separating the weakest members of herds from the rest of the herd, and herds evolved behaviors that involve protecting the herd from predators.

I kind of wish people would take the time to actually study evolution and animal behavior and try to understand what all this stuff means. It seems people are overly charmed by the notion of "survival of the fittest" as meaning how strong and healthy and so on that one is, but that's not what it means at all. Evolution is a huge big picture, and understanding what it means requires understanding the details - understanding things like extinctions and mass extinctions and how animals evolve to survive in conditions - how what used to be a dominant species can vanish entirely, replaced by other species that are better adapted. Being strong didn't help dinosaurs during the Cretacious-Paleogene Extinction Event, but life did survive.

And that extinction is theorized to have been caused by the Chicxulub Impactor, a comet or asteroid that struck what is now the Gulf of Mexico and completely altered the global environment and apparently caused the extinction of 75% of the extant species at the time. I would say that this impact also did far more damage to the Earth than humans ever have.

I guess my point is that I am tired of people reciting pseudoscience as real evolution.



Adamantium
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29 Sep 2013, 1:28 pm

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8DDYz68kM[/youtube]

Someone forgot to tell these guys about natural law.

[Edited to add:]

wozeree wrote:
What kind of animal fights like hell to protect all members? That's an actual question, I'm curious to know


You really want me to respond to a false dichotomy based in sophomoric hyperbole?

That SOME members of every species are SOMETIMES not protected is not a valid argument for the proposition that NO group of ANY species protects ANY weak, sick or disabled members. Nor can such a false dichotomy be rationally used as the basis for an argument that human groups collectively always reward and require bullying behavior by dominant members against the weak, disabled, etc.



Last edited by Adamantium on 29 Sep 2013, 1:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

skibum
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29 Sep 2013, 1:40 pm

l.[/quote]

What kind of animal fights like hell to protect all members? That's an actual question, I'm curious to know,

.[/quote]I have seen that with some primates. I have even seen a documentary where they would gang up to protect each other from bullies within their own group. I know there are other animals who do it as well. I think some birds do too.


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wozeree
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29 Sep 2013, 1:54 pm

The thing about survival of the fittest is really about adaptation, as others have said. It's not about strong - if conditions favor the weakest member and not the strongest, the weakest is more likely to survive, unless the strong one finds a way to adapt.

But again, you're missing the point about the herd, that it's an analogy. Humans engaging in herd behavior is more social than making life and death decisions, but it can be about getting jobs or something that can lead to life and death decisions. Besides, I would bet that if 6 people were on a boat in the ocean and they had to dump one over, the Aspie would go first. Sorry, but I'm that cynical.

So my question - say we drop the herd thing altogether - do you think we are wrong in saying that society decides if you are one of them and if it finds you are not, it rejects you. Not every member of society, but you were to think about how society functions as a whole, do you disagree?



marshall
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29 Sep 2013, 2:17 pm

qawer wrote:
marshall wrote:
I can vouch that the group bullying dynamic exists. In the past I even joined in and acted like a bully. Guess what? Sick as it is, being a bully made me gain acceptance with the group. What we did was passed off as "practical jokes". Some of it was fun, I have to admit, but after a while the one member of the group who was being made the target of jokes more than his fair share of the time stopped taking it well. After a while it was clear he'd had enough and was really annoyed. At that point I stopped participating in the "fun", but the rest of my "friends" decided to escalate their jokes and teasing because in their mind the guy was "too sensitive" and "couldn't take a joke". :shrug: I was very apologetic with him in private but with the group as a whole I couldn't make myself stand up for him. I just distanced myself from the group when it started to get mean spirited. What started off as having fun escalated into truly jerky behavior.


EXACTLY Marshall. You get me. That's what I mean. You are supposed to be mean-spirited to get accepted by the group. That's why I say you are supposed to be socially mean, because you are supposed to be accepted by the group. That's the most generally accepted social behaviour - the other types of social behaviour indicates that something is "wrong" for instance autism.

That's why it's very difficult for me to find joy in "mainstream friendships". When you're a part of that kind of social group you should "make fun of" people doing less well - otherwise the group will see you as weak and will exclude you. That's a big part of the reason why I've never been a part of the friend groups in high school, college, etc. I'm supposed to care less about those doing less well survival-wise because their mating situation "should not" be promoted.

Often being a bully will make you more accepted in the group. I've felt I've had to do it if I wasn't going to be excluded in group work at the university. It was awful. It's because being a bully is a sign of dominance and that's what people in general like and care for. They just want to survive at all costs, and being dominant is an indicator of being a good survivor, like the Alphas for instance.


I think it was more like if you wanted to be part of the group you had to take being harassed, even when you weren't in the mood for their jokes. If you didn't like it after a while they tried to drive you out by harassing you even more. Making fun of each other constantly was how they entertained themselves. If you were too sensitive that was considered your fault. Only they messed with some people more than others, so it wasn't really fair. I distanced myself because I figured I was next.



wozeree
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29 Sep 2013, 2:22 pm

skibum wrote:
l.


What kind of animal fights like hell to protect all members? That's an actual question, I'm curious to know,

.[/quote]I have seen that with some primates. I have even seen a documentary where they would gang up to protect each other from bullies within their own group. I know there are other animals who do it as well. I think some birds do too.[/quote]

I think if they fight to protect another member, that member is considered a member of the group. For instance, the wolves would not protect the wolf they had kicked out, they were attacking it to make it leave.



skibum
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29 Sep 2013, 2:22 pm

qawer wrote:
Codyrules37 wrote:
yes and i can be pretty logical too but i dont like doing it all the time
.


Me neither.

I don't know why it's so hard for me to just "put on a blindfold a live my life unknowingly with satisfaction".

Likely due to social barriers. I feel like you are supposed to be rather "mean-spirited", which I'm not bu nature. The social world is contrary to who I am. I believe that's why I feel the way I do.
Maybe you can just practice little bits at a time. Like maybe say for an hour or two just try to do something you enjoy and try not t think too much about society at all but just enjoy what you are actually doing. Like when I ski or bike, I really love it because I just enjoy skiing and biking. And I meet people on the chairlift a lot because you share the chair and I usually just say hi and ask how they are enjoying their day and we just talk about skiing and every now and then I find someone who ends up skiing with me. And instead of focusing on life maybe you can just give yourself a little break and enjoy the activity at hand. And it could just be for a little while at a time. Maybe that would help.


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29 Sep 2013, 2:26 pm

wozeree wrote:
skibum wrote:
l.


What kind of animal fights like hell to protect all members? That's an actual question, I'm curious to know,

.
I have seen that with some primates. I have even seen a documentary where they would gang up to protect each other from bullies within their own group. I know there are other animals who do it as well. I think some birds do too.[/quote]

I think if they fight to protect another member, that member is considered a member of the group. For instance, the wolves would not protect the wolf they had kicked out, they were attacking it to make it leave.[/quote]Yes, that would be true.


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29 Sep 2013, 2:29 pm

wozeree wrote:
The thing about survival of the fittest is really about adaptation, as others have said. It's not about strong - if conditions favor the weakest member and not the strongest, the weakest is more likely to survive, unless the strong one finds a way to adapt.

But again, you're missing the point about the herd, that it's an analogy. Humans engaging in herd behavior is more social than making life and death decisions, but it can be about getting jobs or something that can lead to life and death decisions. Besides, I would bet that if 6 people were on a boat in the ocean and they had to dump one over, the Aspie would go first. Sorry, but I'm that cynical.

So my question - say we drop the herd thing altogether - do you think we are wrong in saying that society decides if you are one of them and if it finds you are not, it rejects you. Not every member of society, but you were to think about how society functions as a whole, do you disagree?


The problem is that it's a false analogy. It's doubly wrong because it draws an analogy between a falsely described human situation with an imaginary natural property of mythical herds. It's akin to arguing that people are like planets and therefore sometimes must have retrograde motion.

The 6 people on a boat thing is typical. If the one Aspie was Daryl Hannah they would very likely not throw her over. But that probably wasn't the fantasy scenario you were imagining, was it? But that's the thing about these hypotheticals: they don't have the quality of actual situations. If the one aspie on your imaginary boat is with 4 loving relatives and one total stranger, how then do you think it would work out. Everything in reality is always more complicated than these simple models.

In human groups there is no such monolithic thing as "society" it's a shorthand for a simplification and generalization but the thing we call "society" is actually the product of individuals and their specific behavior. Society doesn't function "as a whole" ever. Groups decide if you are one of them, yes. The decision that has been made by most of the large social groups which determine laws, etc. for us, despite the instinctive prejudice of many individuals, is to grant us the rights, privileges and obligations of citizenship. In some cases all three of these are modified by the concept of disability. In most cases if you are wronged by other citizens you can pursue criminal and legal redress. This is far from being thrown from the boat mid-ocean.



wozeree
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29 Sep 2013, 2:35 pm

skibum wrote:
qawer wrote:
Codyrules37 wrote:
yes and i can be pretty logical too but i dont like doing it all the time
.


Me neither.

I don't know why it's so hard for me to just "put on a blindfold a live my life unknowingly with satisfaction".

Likely due to social barriers. I feel like you are supposed to be rather "mean-spirited", which I'm not bu nature. The social world is contrary to who I am. I believe that's why I feel the way I do.
Maybe you can just practice little bits at a time. Like maybe say for an hour or two just try to do something you enjoy and try not t think too much about society at all but just enjoy what you are actually doing. Like when I ski or bike, I really love it because I just enjoy skiing and biking. And I meet people on the chairlift a lot because you share the chair and I usually just say hi and ask how they are enjoying their day and we just talk about skiing and every now and then I find someone who ends up skiing with me. And instead of focusing on life maybe you can just give yourself a little break and enjoy the activity at hand. And it could just be for a little while at a time. Maybe that would help.


I think skibum has a really good point here. I probably sound like the doom and gloom from the depths darkness, but I have just been struggling with these issues a lot lately. But the truth is, it's not just us, people can be generally unkind to one another, and doing things that you love doing can make a difference. I still try to do little kindnesses if I think they are appropriate even to people I know would never return them to me. I should probably stop trying to figure it out (ever since I read that stupid Dr Oz quote, I've been twisting it and turning it around in my head). Not good.

And besides, I don't subscribe to that notion that Aspies are "better" than non-Aspies. I'm sure we can all be unkind at times too (we just don't have the whole group behind us when when we do it). BUT I do believe that because of some of the things that are done to us and the way we are often treated, that we have a unique perspective on the world. And maybe we can use that for good. I'm not sure how, but i think it's possible.



marshall
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29 Sep 2013, 2:41 pm

Shikari wrote:
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Thanks Shikari, that's a very interesting article.

I see what they mean by cooperation being in theory the most optimal social construction. But in real life it seems like that's not exactly how things work out. People might cooperate, but only for selfish reasons, so the underlying force is not cooperation, but selfishness. It's not like people genuinely want to do well to others, just because they care about them, it's more like they want to do well to others because it eventually benefits themselves to do so. Selflessness is never truly appreciated. That's what I object to.

It doesn't pay off to do good deeds, because there are no good deeds only socially wrong actions. You should act in selfishness all the time, but that does not mean you should never help others and that you should never cooperate - but you should only do those things if they benefit yourself.

The main drive remains selfishness. It's difficult for me to accept.


I can understand where you are coming from, but out of curiosity what do consider the selfish reasons to be? There are people who genuinely wants to do well to other because they do care about them. They care a lot! Have you ever seen the movie "Pay It Forward"? It's about doing one act of kindness to three random strangers, and instead of them to something for them in return, they ask them to pay it forward and help three more random strangers with something. True selflessness is very much appreciated because we often don't expect it. Selflessness is appreciate by at least you (and you know that), and also by me. That's two people right there that you can say truly appreciate it, and there is a million more out there.


The problem is capitalism encourages passive selfishness. People are polite and civilized, but don't go out on a limb to help those who are struggling. If you have trouble finding work and have to apply for SSI/SSDI you're treated like you're a leach trying to scam the system. In general, nobody is going to help you financially if you can't pull yourself up by your own bootstraps or rely on family. Some people don't have family that cares. Many people have family that tell them they are losers. Mental barriers to survival aren't treated the same as physical barriers. The lucky ones who don't have trouble surviving don't like to own up to the fact that they aren't actually all that generous. They aren't interested in actually changing the system so people get the help they need. Instead people commit suicide every day. Maybe if those that were struggling to survive committed homicide rather than suicide society would wake up.



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29 Sep 2013, 2:44 pm

I don't think committing homicide would help, all that ever does is make people think the whole group is bad.

besides, it causes people to die.



marshall
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29 Sep 2013, 2:51 pm

wozeree wrote:
I don't think committing homicide would help, all that ever does is make people think the whole group is bad.

besides, it causes people to die.

Well, if being a member of society has no benefit to you, the only thing left is to cut yourself off from society. People who grow up abused and neglected tend to see others as the enemy by default. They grow up to become f****d up people. Capitalism is abusive and neglectful towards people with mental disabilities. Then is it any wonder that people with mental disabilities begin to see "normal" people as the enemy by default?



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29 Sep 2013, 3:05 pm

Yes, but it just causes more problems for more people creating more pain.
And who had the right to decide to take someone elses' life? I understand that some people lose sight of everything but their pain but that's not a good plan.
Even if you could take the moral issue of killing people out of it, IT JUST NEVER WORKS, If an autistic person went on a killing spree, many people would start to assume "all autistic people want to do that," or some other nonsense.