Are NTs/humans becoming more easily offended as time passes?

Post Reply New Topic

that a lot of NT's really love to play 'shoot the messenger' if they're hearing something that they don't want to hear or believe.

Yeah, it's almost like disparate facts are straw they're building nests out of, or perhaps more to the point of what their constructions yield it's closer to family crests where to attack inherited beliefs is to attack the nest. I almost have the takeaway that reality-testing isn't just something they aren't thinking to do, it's almost like it's not even on their radar because that's not what facts or ideas are supposed to be used for.

One of the things that separates a lot of aspies, and I think it hit me maybe worse than many, is the desire to think through an almost Platonist lens about things. I remember reading and listening to Manly P Hall (early/mid 20th century Rosicrucian / Masonic / Hermetic philosopher) and he was *very* much this way, and one of the clearest examples was him saying that the difference between honesty and integrity is that the honest person gives back something like ten cents for a ninety cent purchase from a dollar is because it's the moral thing to do whereas the person with integrity does it because $1.00 - $0.90 = $0.10. That last part, his description of integrity, is something that the Catholicism of my childhood encouraged, I didn't have the wiring to hand-waive it and figure out how I could use the semblance of that to be manipulative and beat people in zero-sum games, rather I took it quite seriously and a large part of bullying, other than just being different in any way, shape or form, comes from the naivety of thinking that 'humans' are little Greek philosophers, ever-curious and pursuing truth, and if they aren't like that someone hurt them (sometimes someone has but everyone else seems to get it too that if you think of life from a cosmologists level rather than a playground bully level that you're a moron and deserve to be mugged for your lunch money). That last sort of naivety was the late secular humanism that grade school also hammered in, and I often jokingly call it Millentology because it's almost like they took John Stuart Mill's liberalism and added L Ron Hubbard's e-meters and glassy-eyed true belief to it for good measure.

It's a bit like a lot of us are missing the Darwinian wiring and have to learn it the hard way through life, ie. we don't inherently get that the point of life is to stab each other up over genes and who cares if the world burns or if we go extinct in a generation, blessed is he or she whose the last alpha of human history.

As far as the sort of 'spergy' Platonist ethical orientation - it might be that the world ultimately needs to head in that direction for us to survive as a species but we're really early on that and, a bit like they say in the venture capital world, early is the same as wrong (though with this sadly someone has to do it first, and it's starting with those of us who do it almost involuntarily).

Hi KitLiLy.

Give me a few hours because I can't physically answer you as I would in an Italian forum.

(These are my shortcomings: and I'm sorry I can't communicate in a decent way as I would like instead! Sorry everyone: I realize how little I understand it despite myself, but here it is only due to my ignorance of the decently written English language)

I have come to the conclusion that I should avoid all remotely controversial topics in future and dumb myself down, perhaps just talk about celebrities, shopping etc.

I just had a bait and switch happen to me in the last hour. A friend was messaging about how she wanted to euthanise herself because she was unhappy (I don't want to go into details of her situation) Then we got onto the topic of euthanasia. I said if someone was very ill, in pain with no cure or whatever they should be allowed to choose euthanasia. Then she got annoyed because she said governments would start killing off the old and sick because it was more convenient.

This time however, I challenged her. I said 'oh right. Earlier you said you were in favour of euthanasia but you've changed your mind. I was just following your lead.'

No idea what she'll say to that. But I'm tired of discussing a topic then getting the rug pulled from under me and I'm turned into the bad guy.

With little to do at home, and mounting bills, women went to work, but their inborn sense of authority did not adapt to the morality of the commons very well, and this has normalized intolerance. Whenever we hear about "the Homeland" we find a movement to put part of the commons under rule of a dictator who is assumed to be benign, but who wants to discriminate between "family" and all others. Yes, there were religious and economic wars before, but the breakdown of family homes has fragmented society into far more factions.

I knew a schizophrenic girl, and we sometimes visited her mother. Her mother would make ambiguous statements. By flipping a coin, you should have been able to guess what she meant half the time. By living with her all your life, you should have been able to do better that half. My friend was getting zero. Her mother was driving her crazy.

Were just substituting one form of prudery for another. So maybe the question is 'which kind of prudery is better?".

Deep in our pre-verbal, hard-wired brains, we have two separate and distinct moral codes that can make us "feel right" when applied, whatever the evidence says. One code is for use within the home, which is a sheltered facility for raising children, who start off almost helpless, and a danger to themselves and others. A home needs a benign dictator, not a democracy. If the lady of the house declares that Santa and the Bogey man are real, other adults know not to contradict her. She also gets to dictate who is the official father, with a remarkably consistent error rate of 10%. That is low enough to keep the fathers involved, and high enough to keep the gene pool healthy and improving overall.
Out in the commons, we have to deal with our peers, and with adamant nature. Fairy tales don't help, and deception can backfire badly. Observation and experimentation led to agriculture. To deal with conflict, we developed fair trials and standard measures, which led to science and then technology.
Technology then reduced the power of housewives. They no longer produced both food and clothing from a garden. The children were taken away to school. Housework and cooking were simplified so anyone could do them. However, it also raised expenses. With little to do at home, and mounting bills, women went to work, but their inborn sense of authority did not adapt to the morality of the commons very well, and this has normalized intolerance. Whenever we hear about "the Homeland" we find a movement to put part of the commons under rule of a dictator who is assumed to be benign, but who wants to discriminate between "family" and all others. Yes, there were religious and economic wars before, but the breakdown of family homes has fragmented society into far more factions.

I have come to the conclusion that I should avoid all remotely controversial topics in future and dumb myself down, perhaps just talk about celebrities, shopping etc.

I just had a bait and switch happen to me in the last hour. A friend was messaging about how she wanted to euthanise herself because she was unhappy (I don't want to go into details of her situation) Then we got onto the topic of euthanasia. I said if someone was very ill, in pain with no cure or whatever they should be allowed to choose euthanasia. Then she got annoyed because she said governments would start killing off the old and sick because it was more convenient.

This time however, I challenged her. I said 'oh right. Earlier you said you were in favour of euthanasia but you've changed your mind. I was just following your lead.'

No idea what she'll say to that. But I'm tired of discussing a topic then getting the rug pulled from under me and I'm turned into the bad guy.

In this case ...gosh...you were being SO autistic than even we fellow autistics would be offended.

1)Your friend was probably speaking in hyperbole. Didnt literally mean that she wanted to off herself.

2)She wanted to talk about her life and problems. NOT get into a intellectual and philosophical discussion on the topic of assisted suicide.

3) It's your 'fault' for connecting her statement (which was an exaggerated expression about emotional stresses) with an actual philosophical statement on her postion the issue of euthanasia. So you pulled 'the rug' out from under yourself.

It would be as if after a hard day at work I were to say to you "I wish I could kick my boss's ass". And you were to say "I only believe in physical violence in self defense". To which I would reply "WTF are you talking about?". To which you would reply "you just advocated physical violence against your boss for dissing you". Forcing me to have to talk to you like you're a child and walk you through the fact that I was "exaggerating" in order to emotionally vent.

Conversation is a two way street. You have to get into the other person's head sometimes, and figure out what they are REALLY saying to you.

Carryover from domestic leader to 'boss babe' is an interesting concept, there could be something there.

One of the most interesting displays of norm differences I saw on this site was when, back at the time when Sudan was quite war-torn, someone posted a thread which was something along the lines of 'Where would you rather live if given only two choices - South Sudan or North Korea?', and I remember this bifurcating by gender rather clearly - ie. in North Korea you might be starving under a dictator with no freedom but it was perceived at least that you'd be less likely to be human trafficked. The men said they'd rather choose war-torn South Sudan because sure, while it was hard and violent, they weren't emasculated by a totalitarian state which would be the worse of the two worlds. I do think the need for safety in a wider variety of ways has come up a lot more over the course of my lifetime. I don't know all of the factors but I get the impression that at least part of it is in line with the timing you mentioned above.

Outside of that though I think Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, with 'Coddling of the American Mind', nailed the helicopter parenting, the illegality of having 'free-range' children, and social media before puberty.

Correction.

It wasnt "South Sudan". It was "Somalia". Same general idea.

Got it. Yeah, they might have picked that instead worrying that people would ask 'What's Sudan?'.

That's a very interesting viewpoint. I don't think housewives have ever had any power. Maybe long ago in the past before the Romans appeared (that would be about 100BC I think?)...but women have generally always belonged to men. They belonged to their fathers from birth, then they were married off to their husbands, then if their husbands died, they belonged to their eldest son. Or they had to quickly marry another man because women weren't allowed to be head of the household.

Women couldn't divorce their husbands because they had no legal or financial power. If they left an abusive husband, they'd be cast out of society. The men dictated who would be the mother of their children, I don't think women had as much choice.

When women went to work, they found they weren't paid as well as the men and weren't allowed to do the highest, best paid jobs. Then if mothers went to work, they were mocked for being selfish and not caring about their children enough to stay at home. But if they stayed at home to look after their children, they were mocked for being lazy and not contributing to the economy. Women cannot win this competition between working and stay at home mothers, whatever we do is wrong.

I agree that it's a pity the family home doesn't really exist anymore, but the attitude of society to mothers who stay at home is so disrespectful that I'm not sure the family home would be seen as important.