People dont even need a personality disorder to go there. Just a perception of a between group conflict of interest.
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True.
But, at the centre of any given group, you will find somebody of the Cluster B variety (maybe not fully disordered, but strongly leaning in that direction) taking advantage and crystalizing the group-think. I'd put money on it.
I suspect that's why we have 'em. Just as Cluster C can act as the focus of group brakes and second-thoughts, given the chance.
edited 11th Feb '18 12:01:29 PM by Euodiachloris
"After that, I suppose injustice must be considered."
"Plainly."
"Mustn't it, in its turn, be a certain faction among those three—a meddling, interference, and rebellion of a part of the soul against the whole? The purpose of the rebellious part is to rule in the soul although this is not proper, since by nature it is fit to be a slave to that which belongs to the ruling class. Something of this sort I suppose we'll say, and that the confusion and wandering of these parts are injustice licentiousness, cowardice, lack of learning, and, in sum, vice entire." "Certainly," he said, "that is what they are."
"Then," I said, "as for performing unjust actions and being unjust and, again, doing just things, isn't what all of them are by now clearly manifest, if injustice and justice are also manifest?"
"How so?"
"Because," I said, "they don't differ from the healthy and the sick; what these are in a body, they are in a soul."
"In what way?" he said.
"Surely healthy things produce health and sick ones sickness."
"Yes."
"Doesn't doing just things also produce justice and unjust ones injustice?"
"Necessarily."
"To produce health is to establish the parts of the body in a relation of mastering, and being mastered by, one another that is according to nature, while to produce sickness is to establish a relation of ruling, and being ruled by, one another that is contrary to nature."
"It IS."
"Then, in its turn," I said, "isn't to produce justice to establish the parts of the soul in a relation of mastering, and being mastered by, one another that is according to nature, while to produce injustice is to establish a relation of ruling, and being ruled by, one another that is contrary to nature?"
"Entirely so," he said.
"Virtue, then, as it seems, would be a certain health, beauty and e good condition of a soul, and vice a sickness, ugliness and weakness."
Continuing with me being an uncultured swine, when I heard this I considered Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park and its talk of Chaos/Complexity Theory. No idea how legit that actually is but one of Malcolm's speeches goes like "we have convinced ourselves that order is the default and things like car crashes are just aberrations. But those "accidents" are baked into the fabric of existence. They will happen."
Justice and Health are no more "natural" than injustice or sickness. It's all part of the same system that is Life. I can't vouch for the math and scientific logic of the arguments in the novel but at least according to my tiny little brain and my tiny little view of the world, that's how I see things and understood what Malcolm was saying.
(Malcolm would probably really hate Plato as Plato is being very "scientific" in his attempts to engineer a society and make everything predictable. Then the Greeks become dinosaurs and escape. Life finds a way.)
Malcolm: "But chaos theory concerns everyday life. Do you know why computers were first built? [...] Computers were built in the late 1940s because mathematicians like John von Neumann thought that if you had a computer-a machine to handle a lot of variables simultaneously-you would be able to predict the weather. Weather would finally fall to human understanding. And men believed that dream for the next forty years. They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything. That's been a cherished scientific belief since Newton. [...] Chaos theory throws it right out the window. It says that you can never predict certain phenomena at all. You can never predict the weather more than a few days away. All the money that has been spent on long-range forecasting-about half a billion dollars in the last few decades-is money wasted. It's a fool's errand. It's as pointless as trying to turn lead into gold. We look back at the alchemists and laugh at what they were trying to do, but future generations will laugh at us the same way. We've tried the impossible-and spent a lot of money doing it. Because in fact there are great categories of phenomena that are inherently unpredictable."
I was also one of many people introduced to Chaos Theory by Jurassic Park. However, what Malcom talks about has almost nothing to do with Chaos Theory. TBF, the name is somewhat misleading. Basically, Chaos Theory states that if the initial conditions of a system are changed even a tiny amount, the conditions later on will be very different. It has nothing to do with 'accidents' or 'abberations' being 'baked into the fabric of existence'.
Also Malcom is a smug asshole
edited 12th Feb '18 2:21:55 AM by Xopher001
He does say what you just said, actually. It's been a while since my last run of the book but I definitely remember him talking about what you mentioned with regard to minor changes creating big problems later on down the road.
Maybe Crichton just embellished a bit with the part I remember. I couldn't even find the quote I was looking for anyway so maybe I'm wrong and he didn't say what I said he said.
And yes he is smug but he's smug against Scientism and therefore it is good.
edited 12th Feb '18 5:13:27 AM by Nikkolas
The technical trem for it is "Nonlinear Systems Theory." It applies primarily to cyclical systems that repeat themselves (or can be modeled as doing so). Systems have inputs, outputs, and feedback loops. Because they are self correcting, small changes at one point in time can become amplified to the point that future outputs are no longer predictable, even though they are following algorithm perfectly.
Frankly, Im not sure how any of that applies to justice.
I was talking about Plato's idea of an ordered universe and contrasting it with something else I read talking about how our conception of an ordered world is bullshit. Justice is just one area of it, which is why Plato compared it to being healthy.
Perhaps not a great or valid comparison but it's what I thought of while reading it. Win some, lose some.
edited 12th Feb '18 7:04:22 AM by Nikkolas
I guess if the universe is disordered it might make it hard for humans to set up any kind of social institutional arrangement, although obviously we cope somehow. Actually, social systems being nonlinear is not a new idea by now, and if you google it you will find hundreds of references. But all it really does is place an additional burden on policy design-don't assume the effects of a policy change will be simple and linear.
Like reflections in the glass!
I'm starting to wonder where or if people or philosophies draw the line between living and merely survival, as well as how such distinctions relates to the pursuit of happiness.
edited 12th Feb '18 10:24:45 PM by MorningStar1337
"How to live your life" is something philosophers have been talking about since forever.
The difference between just survival, living a productive life, and as to what even consttiutes "happiness" is something else entirely.
Perhaps you heard about the lady who won the lottery here in the States but she refused to disclose her identity? https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/all-she-has-to-do-to-collect-a-dollar560-million-lotto-jackpot-is-make-her-name-public-she-refuses/ar-BBIKVdQ
Another forum I'm on devolved into a topic that was less concerned with supporting her completely legitimate fear and and more concerned with condemning her and the entire Lottery process. They had no sympathy for her and said that neither she nor anyone else should possess that much money. One guy I challenged on this said he is a Virtue Ethicist and declared nobody needs that much money to be happy and thus no one should receive it.
So yeah, pretty much everyone has some ideas on mere survival vs. a fulfilling life and what constitutes happiness.
Anka Aquila
I would be more concerned with how she would spend that money than bashing her for winning the lottery, honestly, that kind of attitude is embarrassing and disgraceful.
Instead of focusing on relatives that divide us, we should find the absolutes that tie us.
I completely agree. From an ethical perspective, winning the money in a fair contest is not in any way wrong. However, if she spends all that money on golden toilets and million dollar shoes, that can be judged from a moral perspective.
I think people were just using her as a scapegoat to rant about capitalism.
Oh, bother.
My issues with the lottery system are mainly about how it's essentially a state-sanctioned form of gambling that targets people with lower incomes.
Disgusted, but not surprised
Anka Aquila
I'm kind of curious on what forum did she post that? Depending on the type of site you can more or less have an idea of the political or economical ideas of the majority of the users and have an idea of how they are going to respond to you.
edited 13th Feb '18 7:40:15 PM by raziel365
Instead of focusing on relatives that divide us, we should find the absolutes that tie us.
It's the forum in my signature. It's decisively Left-leaning but split between "Left-liberals" and more radical Leftists. (they even have threads for each, Globalist Shills for the Left-Liberals, an ironic, self-deprecating title, and the Freedom and Equality thread for the radicals.) So there's a decent mix of anti-capitalist folks and people who want strongly regulated capital.
I never expected the former group to take out their anger on an innocent woman, though. As I told them, shit on the politicians and billionaires, not some random woman who got lucky.
Anka Aquila
Ah, yeah, SV. I try to stay away from the political forums there, seeing as I am one of the few centre leaning (and right leaning by comparison) folks there.
Instead of focusing on relatives that divide us, we should find the absolutes that tie us.
Oh, bother.
You really didn't expect people like that to shit on a lotto winner?
Shin Megami Tensei IV
I still don't know where I am.
Where is "absolute order is the best type of Social order" in the polítical spectrum?, keep in mind that I don't tolerate Abusive authorities because if you can't control yourself then your control over others is fake. Basically, I apply The Evils of Free Will to everyone
Expecting something don't means that you can't be upset over it
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Oh, I see
edited 13th Feb '18 8:06:49 PM by KazuyaProta
Watch me destroying my country
Oh, bother.
Except Nikkolas specifically said he didn't expect it.
edited 13th Feb '18 8:08:01 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised
Anka Aquila
Considering that "absolute order" is something typically attributed to totalitarian governments, but taking into account your post history....enlightened despotism might be the answer you seek?
edited 13th Feb '18 8:07:08 PM by raziel365
Instead of focusing on relatives that divide us, we should find the absolutes that tie us.
Oh, bother.
The Evils of Free Will...really?
That's pretty much the justification people like Stalin and Mao used.
"Enlightened despotism" is a crock of shit.
edited 13th Feb '18 8:09:15 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised
Anka Aquila
I mentioned enlightened despotism because Kazuya doesn't strike me as the Mao/Stalin type at all.
Instead of focusing on relatives that divide us, we should find the absolutes that tie us.
Shin Megami Tensei IV
In theory? Probably, but given that Humans Are Bastards or Humans Are Flawed so... not, I'm not gonna trust a single human.
Democratic systems exist to control our worst nature, that's why we have laws and rules.
The laws are absolute and the leaders aren't free from them, that's why I support democracy, it tries to put order
edited 13th Feb '18 8:18:12 PM by KazuyaProta
Watch me destroying my country
I have associated with Far Left people for years. They don't typically go after random citizens their enmity is centered on those in power and I agree with that.
So, hating the Lottery? Sure. Hating Lottery Winners? That is illogical.
Point of order: personality disorders and delusions.
Although a distinct minority of the population have these on a regular basis for any given window of time, most do build an ethical and/or moral framework within which they interact with others socially.
However, the majority of the population wouldn't generally find those frameworks acceptable a lot of the time during those windows, whatever the cultural consensus. Yet, both germline genetics and epigenetic factors form a major aspect of the conditions that give rise to these alternative moral frameworks, however disjointed others view them to be.
In short: if you want to find a common, scientific and objective morality in the human experience — you have to wrestle with the observation that, yes, a proportion of humanity can find a way to consider acts of, say, mass murder and child abuse perfectly moral, understandable and justifiable. Regardless of what anybody else thinks. Just as, in a culture desensitized to mass murder and horrific acts of abuse that are perceived as perfectly acceptable, you get these out-there "nutters" who suggest that they are not perfectly acceptable acts (who you might find with tell-tale signs of having personality-driven... quirks).
And, this is human. Whether you want to believe it or not.
Think on the effects decades of war has on a population. From the Thirty Years war to the Bush Wars. These are not abnormal occurrences in the human experience.
edited 11th Feb '18 11:53:50 AM by Euodiachloris