Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah... but also from the other perspective (the victim / target) - bitterness about the past is poison and for your own good, forgive. https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/evolution-the-self/2...
I think millions of years of natural selection are a better advisor than a stranger on the internet, or teachings of the status quo. We have the innate capacity to love and hate, to feel attracted or repulsed etc. If the capacity to be bitter has survived millions of years of natural selection, perhaps it serves a function, however hard we tell each other to look down on it.
The past is not true
341–350 of 362 posts
Re: The past is not true
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s simply an example, though a somewhat extreme one, of the problem with the GP’s generalization. I think it actually relates to the original article. There’s a difference between mere interpretation and what actually happened. “You should forgive your parents, because one day you’ll be older and see their perspective” collapses “interpretations develop and mature” with “some events are a problem”. Both can be forg…
Thank you. This is important to say, seriously. This kind of "pop psych" notion that you should just "forgive your parents" even if they abused you, definitely is retraumatizing and works to try diminish the impact of the abuse and your feelings about it. Which shouldn't be minimized, but processed, I think. Especially because, it seems a lot of times, people coming from that situation don't see how fucked up it was,…
So typically there's a lot of exposure, facilitation, and processing work FIRST. There's not really a route to forgiveness in my opinion until someone is pretty deeply in touch with all the feelings associated with how they were treated. I take a mindful self-compassion approach to experiencing and reprocessing memories and emotions drawing a lot from Paul Gilbert, a self-compassion researcher and advocate in the UK.
Once a lot of the feelings have been processed, including anger and resentment, we often get to a point where the anger doesn't seem to serve much purpose for the person anymore. It's not covering up something they didn't want to feel (guilt, shame, sadness, fear, etc) and it's not "punishing their parents" in a way that many people hold on to. More often than not, the client just spontaneously forgives at that point, and forgiveness looks like seeing the situation as a bad one that everyone involved was stuck in and no longer having a need for the perpetrator to suffer or take responsibility.
So acceptance and compassion then processing and reprocessing with self-compassion. Sometimes a discussion of blame and forgiveness and what they do and don't mean.
Re: The past is not true
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has nothing to do with fiction. Roughly speaking, if you are some kind of wave function realist, then the implication that the past has a similar kind of uncertainty as the future is a simple consequence of the time reversibility of quantum mechanics (without the measurement postulate). Read a book.
I do read, history books for example. Using quantum physics to argue some meta-physic view on life is, well, it is I guess... I think it is loughable.
Re: The past is not true
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, even if you kill someone while driving, if you're not drunk and don't leave the scene then you don't get more than a traffic ticket. https://www.vice.com/en/article/9bzdpv/you-can-kill-anyone-y...
> What makes Cann’s story notable among the 700 or so bicyclists who are hit and killed in America each year is that San Hamel faces charges in Cann’s death. In the end he got 10 days in jail, 4 years probation, and had to pay the cyclist's funeral expenses - for plowing him over from behind while driving home drunk from a bar. So apparently even if you hit someone while DUI nothing really happens.
It's appalling.
Re: The past is not true
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think millions of years of natural selection are a better advisor than a stranger on the internet, or teachings of the status quo. We have the innate capacity to love and hate, to feel attracted or repulsed etc. If the capacity to be bitter has survived millions of years of natural selection, perhaps it serves a function, however hard we tell each other to look down on it.
Evolution has also produced fatal cancer in infants, among other miserable horrors. The existence of a property in evolved creatures does not imply that it is adaptive.
Clearly natural selection has selected for this capacity.
You pretend to disprove the adaptive nature of a trait by trotting forth "fatal cancer in infants" which clearly natural selection would not systematically select for without good reason. Perhaps artificial human doctrines have the capacity to selectively advantage "fatal cancer in infants" but brutal natural selection wouldn't. Natural selection is the abacus of the grim reaper.
You may call it a dark calculation, but do you know whats worse than a "fatal infant cancer"?
Two or more cases of this "fatal infant cancer"!
I know almost no one who has "fatal infant cancer", yet I have never met a person without the capacity for bitterness.
Your argument is devoid of logic.
Re: The past is not true
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for sharing what you found there! I don't know, I get if you take that from it, but it just seems a narrow interpretation. And there's a wider view, that's a very useful one, that I think you've missed too.
> , but it just seems a narrow interpretation. And there's a wider view, that's a very useful one, that I think you've missed too. This is why I didn’t elaborate in a follow-up reply. I knew I was going to get a reiteration of the first reply (“wider view”, who the hell knows what that means).
What if people understand you, but just think there's more than one way to read it? Do you really think the only way to read that story is the way you did?
Re: The past is not true
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think we need some social mechanism where you can do your best to make amends and get some measure of closure. It's called prison. > This probably should follow you around forever, but maybe it shouldn't dominate every moment of the rest of your life. Prison (and convictions generally) shouldn't follow folks forever because it disincentivizes rehabilitation, it incentivizes recidivism, it labels someone based upo…
> > I think we need some social mechanism where you can do your best to make amends and get some measure of closure. > It's called prison. No. Prison (and the threat of it) accomplishes a few things: It's punitive, which allows people who enjoy retribution to feel some satisfaction at their idea of justice being carried out. The threat of prison theoretically prevents some people from inflicting some societal harms o…
Re: The past is not true
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
Evolution has also produced fatal cancer in infants, among other miserable horrors. The existence of a property in evolved creatures does not imply that it is adaptive.
Clearly everyone possesses the capacity for bitterness, as they are able to agree on its meaning. Otherwise they couldn't possibly know what the word means. Clearly natural selection has selected for this capacity. You pretend to disprove the adaptive nature of a trait by trotting forth "fatal cancer in infants" which clearly natural selection would not systematically select for without good reason. Perhaps artificia…
Me neither. Perhaps you and I don’t hang out in the same places as those who died in infancy.
Re: The past is not true
#349"What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of…
Re: The past is not true
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
careful about what, that he makes shit up? I think you'd be surprised how many people operate at that level by default.
Backing up your point by making up a bullshit story is called "lying" and "disinformation" and should be rejected outright by anyone who wants a high trust society. We should not build policy, intentions, or any ideologies based on a single lie from some dude trying to push a "nobody is ever guilty of anything" agenda. This post adds nothing to the world, especially with the horrific conclusion it is encouraging you…