Arbiter:
Do I have to define every single word I use? What happened to lateral thinking? How do you read philosophers such as Nietzsche and Baudrillard?
You made a mistake. You misunderstood what I said.
You have to be careful when reading my posts. Not because I want to hide behind the vague, but because I don’t want you to misinterpret me and force me to analyze the mechanism by which you misinterpret me. It’s not very fun because I gain very little and you lose pretty much everything.
I want to retain the right to be “vague” because I cannot afford to speak in very precise terms. I do not have the time to do so. It’s too much of a limit.
Force me to be too exact and you censor me – I can no longer say anything.
The concept of “want” I used in that post isn’t as broad as you make it out to be. For example, it does not include those wants that lead to denial (those wants that go counter to other wants.)
When I say “do what you want” I do not say “do anything”. What I say is “do what is in tune with your drives”.
Depending on how you use language, you can say that many slaves do what they want to do, which is to be slaves. They are happy to deny themselves. But this is not what I mean when I say “do what you want”. Slaves do not do what they want to do, no matter how happy they are.
A want is always an indicator of some sort of strength. It is a momentum and momentum is strength. However, you have to know what kind of strength lies beneath it.
Just because someone says “I want to be a cop” does not mean he is capable of being a cop. What he might be trying to say is “I want to be an imitation of cop”. His strength might be lying in imitating cops, not in being one.
Now, let’s look at the context in which I wrote my post.
We have a man who wants to decide between two choices toward which he has no natural inclination.
Of course, I may be wrong. He might be inclined toward both, in which case my post is inappropriate. But I think he has no inclination towards any. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have to read “serious books on quantum physics and economics” (because if he is naturally inclined toward these subjects, he must have read these books already.)
The OP is happy to study something he does not want to do study simply because it makes his life secure.
I used the word “want” to oppose this sentiment.
I never said that you should base your decisions on a single want. That is hedonism, but that is not what I said. We have multiple wants, not a single want, so we have to relate every want to every other want in order to make a quality desicion.
But you cannot transcend your wants without becoming a slave.
Adaptation is a minor thing. It’s about taking what you already have and then tweaking it a little. It’s about making the smallest possible change. Big changes are a no no.
Making big changes is what it means to be a slave. People try to change too much when they become uncomfortable with themselves. Take Christianity for example.
A man who wants a 10 and nothing but a 10 is another example.
Not because wanting a 10 is a bad thing (we all want the best, don’t we?) but because it means he is uncomfortable with himself.
I am speaking of female looks, of course.
A man can settle for less if he can balance it somewhere else. But he cannot settle for any because he cannot balance any.
In certain situations, he cannot find any balance and so he will either die without reproducing or reproduce as a slave.
We should not conflate such a man with a man who is uncomfortable with himself.
