endless misery

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^^^thank you for mentioning this truth.

explain your last sentence, how does that relate to progress or lack thereof?

do you mean that so far as people believe that "empathy" and "truth" exist then moral values are taken for granted and
supersede the need for legal structures that coordinate human livelihoods in their best interests taking a realistic view of human nature?

I agree. The problem is that people BELIEVE and belief, I argue, is the real disease of human civilisations!! !! !! taking things for granted just because THEY ARE is the definition of madness. but because we notice this we are given "mental illness" labels so that the status quo can be preserved and "normal" people can remain comfortable in their illusions. It is an in-group conflict.

It is like Huxley said:

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal."

I mean something like... all pre agricultural languages that I know of do not contain "to be" because "is, be, am," etc. inaccurately depict an inginite dynamic world.. I'll go through each one of the illusions I mentioned and try to explain what I mean...

freedom - the idea that things can be independent of other things. this gives a false perception of the world which obviously allows for people to feel that they are the origin of their behavior. In reality, we are all who we are because of our context, including ancestral context through time leading all the way to whatever the "first" moment of this universe was or, if there was no beginning, then it would likely loop back around and be yet another example of infinity expressed by the churning sea of all things. we are variations on a theme, but we are not independent.

empathy - the idea that people can share and understand the feelings of others. this one is crazy to me because it seems so obvious that this is not something anyone can do. people can of course try to understand each other and can experience similar feelings and sympathize with each other and relate, but to believe that you can, for even a moment, know truly what someone else experiences, has huge implications on morality and decision making in general. I think empathy actually functions to push people apart because it gives unrealistic view of how they "should" be able to relate to one another. really, we can only relate through contonually updating our familiarity of other people's behavioral sequences and how they respond to various things in relation to what they've described of their associations of the world. Knowing people is like a deep difficult spelunking expidition, you don't get to just know what's up with other people. this very often leads to dismissing other people's actual feelings and severe misunderstandings.

intention - the idea that things are supposed to be a certain way. we can obviously have opinions about how things should be, but most people I've talked to seem to suggest that the universe itself or some greater entity that controls it has a specific desire of how the universe should be. that purpose comes from somewhere other than associative memory.. obviously if you believe this, it's pretty easy to start doing stuff in the name of some higher power... easy to corrupt that because the purpose becomes surrendering to imagined external direction, I thinyj intention is often used as an escape route from working through things that you don't understand.

truth - this goes back to the idea of "to be" rather than "to seem"... I'm losing energy to keep writing but I hope that this one can be somewhat understood by the contrast between be and seem..

I feel like freedom and empathy are kind of swapped for a lot of people.. because people think we are independent but connected. and it would seem that freedom is how we are independent and empathy is how we are connected. but I would argue that this is sort of flipped. it is because we do not have freedom that we are connected and it is because we do not have empathy that our wills are distinct.. it seems to me that we are wholly interrelated with everything else but that consciousness allows the limited experience of this to add even more variation to movement...

I definitely do not believe in the use of legal structures to shape behavior. this also seems backwards to me. laws are a description of patterns, not a doctrine to be enforced requiring the centralization of socioeconomic power.. it is communities and the ways they dorectly interact with each other that determine the progression of culture. laws only work if the people who would not follow them are scared into submission, already agree, or accept with blind faith in an external source of direction.

it's hard to constantly update yourself and craft the best direction for yourself that you can, and even harder to implement that direction. so I understand why so many people seem to feel the need to submit to an external authority. but it seems to me this is bad for everyone.

The way that these things relate to progress is largely in the development of values stemming from how people perceive the nature of reality (to be clear, I don't mean a static objective nature of reality, I mean a dynamic subjective nature of reality).. It is only my opinion that working towards individual happiness by submitting part or all of your decisions to the external authority of domestic culture keeps people from progress and that we are currently only working to undo our mistakes, not to progress. I think it's necessary for people to understand themselves as infinitely connected to the rest of the world as a bubble of life in the bubbling life-layer of this planet, to recognize that we are not free, we cannot experience anything outside our own experience, things just exist and we develop our own purposes through associative memory, and every experience takes place in potential reality not objective reality.

but of course in practice to make things better since we don't originate change inside us, these thoughts would have to lead to the development of an alternative culture and alternative cultural narratives of what it means to be a human in the world.

I obviously don't know anything and I still don't think I'm ever going to be able to have a life that I would think is worth living, so...... *shrug*