I wish the US stood for something positive. Whether that’s freedom (and actual freedom, not the shit we’ve been peddling for the last 200 years), happiness, well-being I don’t care.
But we haven’t stood for anything, or even bothered to put on the facade that we stood for anything, at least for the last 10 years or so. At least, that’s what I’ve felt. At some point we just said “fuck it you’re right. We’re here to make money, we were only pretending to care before lol”
That’s not how I see it. I used to see it that way, but as I switched sides that coincided with me daring to hope again, and seeing the good in people.
I’m sorry all you see when you look at your country is shit. That’s a terrible place to be. I hope you can at least intellectually understand, even if you don’t feel it in your gut, that such a worldview is highly dependent on the filters in your own perception.
I think you probably know that, but my hunch is you only think of that self-deception as operating toward the positive: that goodness can be an illusion but badness must be reality because why would a person project badness onto the world.
I will propose that a person can be motivated to hallucinate badness, because a world with some good in it can hurt a lot more than a world with no good in it, because hope is painful.
It’s like trying to light a fire when you’re freezing in the middle of the woods. Moving your frozen fingers around, trying to light a match, uncurling your body to stack up the wood, it all hurts far more than just curling up in a ball and going to sleep.
Obviously there’s always going to be evil in everything, including you and me and including the entire country. But the existence of evil doesn’t make the world dark; it makes it a place of contrast.
Of the things you mentioned — freedom, happiness, well-being — which would you say is the highest one? If you had to pick one to put at the top of your own hierarchy, and have the country stand for it above all else, which of those three would be the highest ideal?
You’re putting some words into my mouth. I have a lot more hope than you think, and that’s evident if you poke around my profile and see some of the politics that I talk about. My non-profit idea comes to mind first. I have to have hope in people for ideas like that to ever work, because it relies very heavily on communal thinking.
As to your question, it’s a balance. It’s not a matter of “this is more important than that” it’s a matter of “these things affect each other and we have to prioritize them correctly at the appropriate times in order to handle the current situation”
I wish the US stood for something positive. Whether that’s freedom (and actual freedom, not the shit we’ve been peddling for the last 200 years), happiness, well-being I don’t care.
But we haven’t stood for anything, or even bothered to put on the facade that we stood for anything, at least for the last 10 years or so. At least, that’s what I’ve felt. At some point we just said “fuck it you’re right. We’re here to make money, we were only pretending to care before lol”
That’s not how I see it. I used to see it that way, but as I switched sides that coincided with me daring to hope again, and seeing the good in people.
I’m sorry all you see when you look at your country is shit. That’s a terrible place to be. I hope you can at least intellectually understand, even if you don’t feel it in your gut, that such a worldview is highly dependent on the filters in your own perception.
I think you probably know that, but my hunch is you only think of that self-deception as operating toward the positive: that goodness can be an illusion but badness must be reality because why would a person project badness onto the world.
I will propose that a person can be motivated to hallucinate badness, because a world with some good in it can hurt a lot more than a world with no good in it, because hope is painful.
It’s like trying to light a fire when you’re freezing in the middle of the woods. Moving your frozen fingers around, trying to light a match, uncurling your body to stack up the wood, it all hurts far more than just curling up in a ball and going to sleep.
Obviously there’s always going to be evil in everything, including you and me and including the entire country. But the existence of evil doesn’t make the world dark; it makes it a place of contrast.
Of the things you mentioned — freedom, happiness, well-being — which would you say is the highest one? If you had to pick one to put at the top of your own hierarchy, and have the country stand for it above all else, which of those three would be the highest ideal?
You’re putting some words into my mouth. I have a lot more hope than you think, and that’s evident if you poke around my profile and see some of the politics that I talk about. My non-profit idea comes to mind first. I have to have hope in people for ideas like that to ever work, because it relies very heavily on communal thinking.
As to your question, it’s a balance. It’s not a matter of “this is more important than that” it’s a matter of “these things affect each other and we have to prioritize them correctly at the appropriate times in order to handle the current situation”