Brain O'Conner wrote: Thu Dec 04, 2025 10:08 pm
Personally, things like the purge are disgusting; it really shows people's true colors. It shows how fake people really are under their masks. As for happiness, killing someone because it feels good is not what I would personally consider happiness. I find that insulting to the concept of happiness itself. If you have to go out and do that to someone, I see that there is pain and emptiness inside that gives you a temporary fix, not happiness. Instant gratification is not happiness. Happiness is something accompanied by a sense of peace. It's kind of hard to describe, so...
-I would firmly with you disagree about happiness, which I use as an umbrella term for all pleasurable/positive emotional states. It's something else if you just have a hard time seeing how murder could make someone happy, or better yet not diminish their long-term happiness, because you can't relate to the mindset that would allow for a pleasurable response to that but feeling good is what makes 'happiness' happiness. If murder wouldn't cause you pleasure then you might have a hard time appreciating how it could for someone else. The most at peace and happiest I've ever been was when I really committed myself to the universal compassion/love mindset; music, sex (sexual fantasy I mean), etc. were all more enjoyable to me, I felt this deep connection to others, etc. (I can think of times when I was 25/26 when I felt this way but I was isolated from other people so largely protected from them; it might have been something else if I had to deal with them on a day-to-day basis, younger, had more hope for the future, etc. I don't think I will ever really be 'right' again, I have some shallow moments here and there where I can semi-put things to the back of my mind but I definitely can't have a life worth living). I remember being annoyed when some 'emotion experts' were differentiating between an 'emotion' and a 'feeling' but I can half-see where they are coming from in that an 'emotion' can involve a cognitive aspect, and possibly a physiological one as well.
The badness of grief and boredom qua emotional distress, for example, feels the same but grief involves an awareness of the loss of something valued and the mindset behind boredom is oriented toward the absence of pleasurable stimulation. Happiness is amoral, it's a feeling. The appraisal of the suffering of others as a good thing has nothing to do with that (and one can only take pleasure in the suffering or death of others because they don't value happiness consistently). The satisfaction of anger is pleasurable but one is only angry if something has caused him or her pain, so if you eliminate pain you eliminate the need for vengeance.
-This is already going to be long so I won't get into the primary reason why I think that universal compassion is one of the 'secrets to happiness,' as generally turned off as I am by the idea of universal, and even foolproof, 'secrets to happiness.'
-I am not one of those people who makes a fundamental distinction between violence and some kind of psychological abuse, I don't see violence as especially repugnant. I don't think that killing someone (out of vengeance or as an act of aggression, not for the sake of euthanasia or for the sake of a greater good in some probably silly hypothetical scenario) is fundamentally more unjust than trying to humiliate, shame or in some way psychologically damage them to the point of their committing suicide, or even if they don't attempt suicide they can't have a life worth living as a result. Since I don't think that anything other than happiness has or gives life (positive) value I can't agree with those people who see murder as the worst thing that you can do to someone (the person murdered, not the people who will suffer from their death. In practice, killing someone's loved one is among the worst things that you can possibly do to them. For the actual deceased person their problems are over with the moment they lose consciousness, they just have no chance of ever again experiencing happiness, unless there's an afterlife in which case you haven't really 'killed' them to begin with).
-My personality is such that if I were inclined toward aggression to begin with it would express through physical violence. I cannot stand passive-aggressive hinting or innuendo (not all 'passive-aggressiveness' involves the kind of intentional ambiguity I have in mind). I am not a pro-gender norms person but, speaking intuitively, there is something wildly unmasculine about it and it comes off as emotionally weak (on top of fake, corny, uncharismatic, unlikeable and
boring, to me. I'm speaking intuitively so far but I do believe that it's objectively irrational to hint at through innuendo what you would be too inhibited to communicate directly, the information is the same regardless of how it's communicated, if the other person catches on the end result; being aware of that information, is literally the exact same so why are too self-conscious to overtly admit to being a MAP but ok if other people realize this through your hinting at it, in both scenarios they now believe that you're a MAP as a result of what you've communicated). I would have an easier time sexualizing and emotionally bonding with a woman
who tried to kill me or was in some way overtly aggressive (although there are some truly unlikeable people who express their callousness overtly), it is
such a turn-off to me (and I'm not venting or speaking aggressively, I'm telling you about my personality and what I find attractive. I don't hate someone just because they're passive-aggressive in the way that I have in mind). I try to avoid giving people a reason to misinterpret what I'm saying as a passive-aggressive hint or innuendo but doing so sometimes requires sacrificing what I want to express, it's not in my nature to communicate in that way though. For the most part, I don't think I was really even aware that people actually communicated in this unofficial 'behind the lines' kind of way I have in mind until I was around 17 or so (I can remember something, not an insult, a friend said when I was 13 but I don't think I picked up on it at the time).
-A lot of human aggression in general is really 'pointless' and weak. For example, when two people get into a fight and one will say, "You're a fucking idiot, you know that?" "Oh yeah, well at least I'm not this or that like you" and they'll go back and forth, why are you trying to convince the other person that you're 'superior,' why do you need them to acknowledge that if they're just so pathetic and beneath you? What should their opinion mean to you, lol. Even the kind of physical violence I would be inclined to if pushed too far is
absolutely driven by EMOTIONAL WEAKNESS because you're just outright admitting that the other person has power over you, that they can affect you to the point where you need vengeance to feel ok with whatever they've said or done or whatever it is about them that you find threatening (which is one thing I don't understand about 'gangsters,' their displays of 'strength' and dominance seem to be rooted in deep emotional fragility; the bad ass who loses his shit over someone's opinion about him).
It really is beta, and I'm not shaming people for weakness, if 'beta male' means anything it would have to apply to me and normally I find vulnerability endearing but, speaking intuitively, when you combine beta weakness with aggression it's difficult to respect someone. You really lose a lot of who you might want to be, if you're anything like me, giving in to certain aggressive instincts. For example, when people will kind of sneer/smirk at each other other and play off their anger through humor as if, "oh you haven't hurt me anything, I just find you pathetic, ha ha." Half the time it will be people who claim to be the compassionate, decent good guys, so either they're hurt and they're too proud to admit it, or they're just natural bullies which might contradict how they normally like to self-present. It comes off as inauthentic when you mock people in ways that have nothing to do with your actual grievance with them (so instead of saying, "you're cruel to hurt people in this way" it's "look at your fat ass, who did you eat today" etc. -that's not the best example for what I have in mind), then again I probably have very poor empathy (relative to the average person) so I have no idea when people are hiding their pain or just mocking someone for the sake of superiority/pushing themselves up the social hierarchy, but that kind of inauthentic "oh I'm not hurt, I just naturally like mocking people for vulnerabilities that I don't have" is unappealing to me. I forgot to mention, I don't see how killing people on purge night would show how fake someone is, I think what I've mentioned here is better indicative of that if it's obvious that they're killing who they're killing out of vengeance, unless they're literally wearing a mask they can't use the plausible deniability that intentional ambiguity allows for to pretend that they didn't/don't want to murder someone.
-I would have to struggle not to end my cousin's life if the purge were real. Of course, if I didn't live with him I wouldn't be even remotely tempted to go hunting him down because I just don't 'care' about people like that. It's not as though he's unique and if I don't have to deal with him, he's not going to be on my mind. I don't think I can be faulted for my instincts, it's not as though I do anything to mistreat him in my day-to-day life.