> It's important not to judge the world by its effect on your internal state. The world isn't party to your internal state, although you walk around with an illusion of transparency. People are doing things for their own reasons, not for yours.
Sure, I agree. This isn't a contradiction with my post.
> Referring to the Buddha in order to make emotional regulation seem like an unachievable perfection is not really a good support, because the argument you're making is that we shouldn't always try to control our irrational emotions, not that we sometimes fail to control our irrational emotions, even when we try.
One core message of Buddhism is that we fundamentally cannot control ourselves, even when we try. You are correct that I am saying we shouldn't always try, and I stand by that, but the idea is that it isn't actually possible to achieve. Buddha is indeed an unachievable perfection, and supports my point because trying is truly futile in the end.
That is not to say we should always act however we want and treat others terribly for our own amusement, just that we are not actually in control. We can try to steer the elephant, and may have some success with that on occasion, but complete control is not possible. What I am saying, is that it's ok to let the elephant do what it wants sometimes, because ultimately it's going to do that a lot of the time anyway.
> Getting away from billions of years of reaction is the reason why we have civilization.
How would you say that experiment is going? Civilization isn't more powerful than evolution is what I would say, and we have seen a lot of man's worst impulses expressed with greater force than ever during the modern period. We haven't escaped evolution yet.
> It's a little more cowardly to interpret the world in terms of how it makes you feel rather than the complicated, messy problem of navigating the world in terms of how it may be making everyone feel.
Not sure how this relates to what I said. Sounds like you just wanted to turn my words around. I never said anything about substituting personal feelings for the act of being empathetic with others, and the topic is about not taking things personally, so this is a new goalpost. Nonetheless, I don't disagree. Part of having empathy for others is not judging their behavior from a position of assumed superiority.