The desirability to defend aspects of status quo comes from how this produces pleasure and a kind of “fuck you” feeling able to be directed at others. The argumentative impulse is a pattern of emotional need designed to act like a knife, stabbing at anyone who gets too close.
This can also help make thinking more refined over time, since any level of intelligence will require an equal level of dissimulation in its arguments. The feeling must be encountered to produce pleasure, and the more encounter the more pleasure, but TOO MUCH encounter risks the whole situation collapsing.
Many people who rely on implicit status quo defense are psychologically motivated to see themselves as enemies of status quo.
This is a series of assertions, and fairly clearly false ones. Or at the very least, completely unprovable. Do you have any argument to back up your opening sentence?
One of the primary ways the impulse to status quo defense defends itself is to selectively mute its own cognitive faculties with respect to any field of inquiry/ideas that would act like a mirror to the impulse itself. Moving from the level of abstract conceptual thought to linear particular thinking is usually adequate for this purpose. A simple “that’s only an assertion” or “you can’t prove that!” generally suffices to close down thinking capacity to ward off contact with uncomfortable reality.
Although I have no doubt that such is the often the case amongst a specific class of people, I don’t see it as a general truth.
There is something called “Normalcy Bias” that is far more explicative of such behavior. The impulse to attack others is very strong on the Internet simply because it has so little consequence compared to real life that it is, in effect, “set free from oppression” and thus exaggerated until the mind can figure out how to better incorporate the concern into a better balance.
Frankly, I wish people could get passed the concerns of what is, so that they could get on into what to do about it such as to improve it…
… but what are the chances.
To build, let alone improve, one must first know with what materials, on what ground, with what methods, and of course the all important for what purpose.
I observe that almost ubiquitously people, here and everywhere, start building and improving without understanding their “what is” very much or even at all. The act is impulsive, a sort of cathartic need to avoid contact with (often uncomfortable) reality. After a long enough time of this, inertia takes over and thinking only exists to justify the edifice upon which thinking has become impossible.
Consciousness is not a given, quite the opposite. It runs on inertia, aggregate knowledge-base and capacities pushed forward at all times. To rest is tantamount to a death sentence. Comfort is the enemy of every philosopher, more so than being impulsive. At least impulsion produces errors that reveal novel characteristics and new powers.
One can delimit through accuracy or error, the point however is to radically engage one’s reason to the contact points of reality without bias or mercy. Psychological needs based in fear or desire are a fact of this ape body we have inherited from our genetic past, but they are not things upon which to build our reason, quite the opposite in fact. We must build our reason directly AGAINST everything utilitarian, convenient and/or pathologically-motivated.
This thread bears a strong resemblance to my new post in the religion forum, here. We are talking about the same thing, the necessity of grounding to make exaltation possible.
I happen to have a strongly occultistic bent - but I still see religion as subservient to my own early philosophy’s answer to the question “why being at all, not rather not being”, namely “because of the dwellingness of Adam”.
Heidegger spoke of the Epoch of Truth, meaning the context in which a certain moral and/or scientific truth applies, but more significantly as the type of quality that can be exalted to Godhood.
Now that such things are no longer available to us via nation-states and religious sects, we have to break down the Epoch in parallel universes, all of which are ruled by different categorizations of value.
Obviously, “wealth” would be seen as today’s God, but by itself this one always disappoints. Non-disappointing wealth is always a product of “divine work” - meaning well contextualized effort, effort grounded firmly in the knowledge of what one is.
If one doesn’t know where he really prefers to be, it is a bit difficult to know what is really required to get there.
If one doesn’t know where he really is, it is equally difficult to make merely the first step without faulting before he has even begun.
One must be aware of not only his real goal, beyond his immediate passions and urges, but also what his real situation is, that “status quo” in an honest light, void of the delusions brought on by defensive biases… in any direction.
But then who are you ever going to find to be so honest with himself about his true situation and intent?
I like this, but I’m not sure where to take it from here. You’re right about firmly grounding knowledge, this is exactly what is avoided, the effort and pain of it, via mechanisms such as I identify in the OP here.
“Epoch of truth”, yes, and the present epoch conditions its own kinds of truths which produce their own results. Philosophers are always men outside of time.
Mankind shall never be united under one God, or on one Ground.
There is no Man-kind that is not antithetical in its highest value to another Man-kind.
Whenever a Meta-God arises, two tribes have found a common Ground. But whenever there has been such a synthetic unification, there has immediately been a new antithesis.
It is not in preferable that Christianity would come to be at peace with the values Islam or vice versa, because an even greater war between this God-greater-than-god and an awakened giant further East and down in the Western gut would arise. It is rather preferable that freedom of religion is absolute, state religion is abandoned and prayer-houses are not represented in media or via sights and sounds in the streets.
God becomes private again, a sacred flame. Vesta always was Rome’s only truly crucial God, the one representing the central hearth of the city, the sacrality of its Grounds. Whoever represents Jupiter is only a matter of Circumstance, not of Foundation.
I realize that there is no universal ground to be talking about God at al - it is just atavisms. The terminology is useful in certain types of circles but these are diminishing, so these religious chants of mine can be seen as last flickerings of an ancient form. One day the word God will be forgotten.
I mean there are preferences and that from which preferences arise, these are distinct. One’s preferences are matters of contingency, there exists a large arbitrary element, a great deal of utilitarianism, and to separate desire from need, image from content is a very tricky thing to do.
“Preferences” are one way the non-rational body (instincts of automatic association, and genetic impelling forces of fear or desire factors) engages the rational consciousness so as to synthesize behavior, and what we call personality. The problem is essentially that of putting the cart before the horse.
I see preferences much like men using Science as a means to accomplish what they already decided that they want rather than using Science (just as an example) to determine what it is that is rational to want.
Science can’t really determine that level of rationality, but…
… RM…
The instincts use the cognitive mind to gain what they already decided “should be” wanted.
