off with the lizard

The vast majority of actions and institutions all around me are out of fear. Be it as it may, fear is not freedom.

Fear is stable. Fear is predictable. To chose non-fear is hard. Difficult. Fear sells. Fear convinces. It is easy to make fear look like “just human”, to make it compassion-worthy. Be it as it may, fear is not freedom.

It is not ideology that ties us to fear (nor Enlightenment, nor Logics, nor Neo-Liberalism/Neo-Socialism). It is not immorality (nor naughty, nor corrupt, nor ignorant). And, in any way, it is not an enemy to be fought.

overrating happiness

It is sometimes said that happiness is the goal of human life.

It does seem to make some sense. After all, everybody avoids unhappiness when they can. But it is also extremely common to have people doing things that will not maximise their happiness. Like the girl who insists on dating the boy who will dump her in the worst possible terms, again and again. Or the man who takes the job that makes him miserable 90% of the time to have 20% higher pay.

Sure, you can just take happiness to be everything people want, but then it means to some people happiness is tearing their own wounds open.

Or maybe you can assume everything that goes against happiness maximisation to be a mistake, just a dumb error from someone less capable than you are. But those mistakes are too numerous and are too close to the core of our society.

get rid of a yoke

Having to choose between freedom or a yoke, the untrained person will choose the yoke, every single time.

Usually, the brain will not recognize that the world is the same, with or without a restraint. It will treat the option as two different, unrelated, places. Thus the option for the yoke is the triggering of squiggle in the brain in charge of searching for caves.

Incidentally, that’s why often people will claim to believe in ideas that they continuously act in opposition to: Understanding has not kicked in, just pathfinding.

The risk of that is that every regularity can be exploited.

against self-control

So, she said, have i got a little story for you…

People are generally bad at self-control. They do what they want instead of what they should do (and supposedly they know they should) because they can’t hold themselves. Their whims or desires or whatever it is gets hold of ‘em and off they go.

That’s the standard blurb, but to me it just doesn’t make any sense.

Precisely, i can’t accept that people have this kind of daemon inside themselves, a piece of themselves that somehow wants something different than they. If someone does something they don’t want to, to me it just means they want and also have a reason to pretend they don’t.