So you can re-label Trump as some kind of liberal? Not interested.
Vices are the perfect way to exploit and manipulate the masses.
The pleasure principle.
Adopting Schopenhauer’s stance on pleasure, the pleasure principle is a desire to stop experiencing existence; to be relieved from the costs of living.
Cultivate vices and then connect their gratification with an institutional protector/provider, and you have a lifelong minion.
More potent when the vice is unfit, or self-destructive, necessitating a high risk and a high cost, requiring support to continue unabated.
Just consider how many of man’s vices would not result in immediate death if institutions were no longer present to mitigate the costs?
Moral behaviours evolved to socially select such risky and costly behaviours out of gene-pools.
Whenever we see a rise in these behaviours, we are witnessing a symptom of something greater: systemic decline.
When a society becomes increasingly unable to prevent the expression of such behaviours the system is diseased and dying.
In time the collective can no longer absorb and disseminate the costs, and they begin to accumulate, uncontrolled - the system begins to destroy itself internally.
It gradually loses its competitive edge, relative to other groups, other systems; it’s ability to replenish the resources it requires wanes; it begins to lose cohesion.
Like rebellious cells become cancerous when they start to propagate uncontrollably, in antithesis to their original functions, relative to the body’s general welfare, the system begins to die - whether it is an organic system or a socioeconomic system
Genes to Memes.
Hahahahahaha you have no idea do you.
Just a word you read on some twatter.
For this, humanity had to pay $100,000, or whatever the total cost of his education was.
To be…
To thrive…
To bask in one’s own glory…
To experience. Discovery of your unique being and how it relates to reality. Absorbing the lessons of and from experience. Realizing one’s own divinity.
What is the meaning of life?
To be…
Is that enough, MagsJ to simply be? Many experience only that and it does not give their life much meaning.
To thrive…
How can someone thrive when they have not found what adds passion and purpose to their life - that thing which makes their life worth living, which makes them whole?
How can one be whole when they feel they are nothing but a leaf that blows in the wind, with no sense of direction, nothing that makes them want to fight and struggle for more than just a mundane existence, a real reason to evolve into who they were always meant to be.
To bask in one’s own glory…
This seems to me to be the point at which someone stops growing and evolving.
I would much rather bask in the glory of this incredible Universe and nature which God has created. Feeling at one and totally connected with Everything which surrounds us is to me, in the final analysis, what gives Life meaning.
There is life to meaning, biology is the source of all meanings, and meanings are life’s experiences. It is as Shakespeare pointed out, it is a matter of, to be or not to be, only in organic beings are there meanings. There is nothing in the world that has meaning in and of itself, but only in relation to a conscious subject which through its experiences bestows meaning upon an otherwise meaningless world.
It is, however, only beings who are not “God realized” who think this is good (or bad)… The realization is precisely that there is no God or Adi-Buddha who “subsumes” beings!
There is consciousness which subsumes all beings and immediately produces our individual phenomenal worlds. You don’t have to create meaning. It’s already there spontaneously. You’re embedded in it and it is in you. It is you. We are participating in it. It precedes your opinions and feelings about it. You can struggle against it or accept it, love it or hate it, but there it is and there you are.
…I am not ‘many’.
.
…not everyone wants/needs to be a try-hard
.
…have I. 
How did you arrive at this notion of your’s? …by way of pure speculation, it would seem.
.
…always comparing and competing, when you could have stated that^ without the/any comparison, but you can never help yourself in doing so can you?
Whatever makes you feel better about yourself I suppose…
Right… I’m off, to go bask in my own glory… because I deserve it.
Existence is full of meaning, if we define the term ‘meaning’ properly, by dislodging it from the nihilistic dis-eased western man, infected by spiritual nihilism for over two-thousand years.
A disease that linguistically disconnects the mind form existence - source of need/suffering - rewarding the addict with pleasure…the same as any other intoxicant.
Purpose, on the other hand is another issue.
Purpose is what free-will is all about.
Purpose is what directs and focuses the will - an objective - giving it an identity.
The primary purpose is survival and self-replicaiton…but men can give themselves a purpose that transcends his primal inheritance.
@Arcturus_Descending If the meaning of life is to be, what does it mean to be? Why do you think many have experienced it? What is the fullness of being?
Can you be without doing? If not, why does being end in “ing”? Can you be or do without an end(ing) or purpose(ing)?
What is the ending that is the purpose of all being and doing?
What is the greatest end(ing) that brings about the fullness of being through doing?
What is that guiding star that orders all navigation?
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Someone has already said above that meaning is something subjective, as well as purpose. Believing there is or must be a purpose for life that lies beyond life itself is to ask to be deceived or to deceive oneself- life doesn’t require an ultimate or exterior meaning, because it is an end in itself, it’s not part of a process, it itself is the whole process.
If life is the whole process, we are here, then, to live. So the most logical course of action is to try an make life liveable. I’m not talking mere hedonism, though, if you are a hedonist, good for you, I’m talking about a conciliation between life and the living, which we are. I’m talking about leaving behind the notions that the true life is waiting for us elsewhere- it’s either here, in the now, or it won’t be anywhere, life can’t be a simple promise of life. We don’t need to live perpetually waiting for life, because we already had it from the moment we first breathed. So life has always been here, but it’s been miserable, it has constituted of nothing but pain and disappointment so far, so why not wait for Christ? Why not crave for Nirvana (annihilation) instead? That’s what many do. I prefer to be a bit more humble and accept what I already have in my hands. So what is the meaning of life?- whatever meaning you choose to give it. What’s the purpose of life? This obviously depends on you and your mental disposition. Life itself aims only at replicating itself sine die. The human is the living entity who concocted the notions of meaning and purpose. So it’s the human who has to find a use for such terms, not life itself, which goes on regardless of whether the living are satisfied with it or not!
That’s a very supernatural way to look at things considering mutually assured destruction is a very real possibility.
How so? Life will go on even when the last man has disappeared from earth. We are participating in it, we are not the whole of it. If men can’t find a way to enjoy life and only see a purpose in destroying each other, that’s not life’s fault.
You’re saying that life will go on even after we’ve killed all of it. How are you defining life? Seems rather meta to me.
You will never find the meaning in life with a biased and unbalanced starting philosophy of good is bad and bad is good OR good is good and bad is bad and then reinventing a science founded upon either of these starting philosophies that’s for sure.
Reality is founded upon an unbiased and balanced starting philosophy of +/-=+/-
The question is.
What is life?
It isn’t existence or non existence that’s for sure because those words are the mere binary outputs of the lifeless biological machine body which exists because it needs to exist to compute that it doesn’t exist.