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I take it you mean that adversity breeds advancement and improvement – that challenges make us rise to the occassion and lift ourselves up. But isn’t life already full of challenges without us “becoming evil?” Isn’t it true that most of the earth’s population is hungry and poor?
If by “becoming evil” means to move toward a more libertarian government, your point begins to have merit. But the crass verbiage you champion is endemic of a high school mentality.
Whatever impulse directed you to write your post is probably a valid impulse. But filtered through your ignorance (we are all ignorant to varying degrees) and your lack of editorial polish, your post comes off as yet another mindless battlecry smacking of anger and ugliness.
If the advancement of the species is your goal, that’s a fine goal, but let’s not rule out the possibility of cooperation, empathy and education for all as one possible way toward advancement. Once we set high enough goals, and we decide failure is unacceptable, we will try hard.
There is something that happens in the minds of some of the privileged. Even though they have all the creature comforts, some cases still push forward toward increasing excellence - this does happen. Many iconoclasts come from privilege. If we can make this ingredient viral - and I believe we can with the proper discourse and leadership - then we can move forward as a species while leaving the baseness and vileness of the past behind. Even the comfortable bourgeoise can become heroic when vision is penetrating and impetus is clear.
Follow your initial impulse of your post, as the spirit of it is born of truth, but hone it until it shines like a diamond, and then maybe you’ll have something useful to say. A campaign of evil will, if anything, entice only psychos and monsters, those without empathy, spiritual cyclopses; it will never entreat the people who can make a difference.
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That you have not read my contribution is nothing to boast about - calcified dogmatists avoid discourse, and visionaries gladly comment on even the most simeon assertions (like I did with yours.) If you seek brethren, try the junior high school playground – simply ask which kids have dads who ignore them.
There are many cases where the non-hungry breed. Catholic families. Orthodox jewish families. Working class ethnic families in America. Nowhere will you find a larger propensity to breed, or a larger occurence of obesity. There is nothing simple about your induction, unless by simple you mean retarded. But you raise a good question: what factors make people breed more? Without researching it, I’d say:
a. desire to have kids
b. family tradition
c. ignorance of birth control
d. social folkways and mores
e. sex
f. lack of birth control
Interesting you’d place hunger at the top of the list. Or, no, hunger WAS your list. Hmm. Can someone please stop giving Corky here words like Nietzsche to play with?
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Again, what is the relation between hunger and reproduction. PLEASE spell it out because I still don’t know what you mean. Are you saying people hungry for food reproduce more? Or merely ambitious people. Or that only ambitious people should be allowed to reproduce. (At least that would be internally coherent eugenically, albeit sinister.) Speak literally for once and let’s see what we have here. Be clear, like Nietzsche.
I like you Cezar. You are odd, predictable and bellicose. Now that we’ve established that English is not your native tongue, we can continue with our discussion; I can see you have a PhD is Ambiguous Langauge and a minor (if not an MA) in Mean-Spirited Clichés. These are not my fields of expertise, however, if you know ANY German, and if you use unexplained metaphors like pigs versus monkeys, we may actually get on a bit. Stay off the Lithium, let’s have some fun. Wee.
Cezar has a cool avatar so he wins
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Lol is this guy a joke account?
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We are all joke accounts, only some of us don’t know it. Cezar may be one who knows it, but since he is not one of mine, I can’t be sure. I patterned my character Rage m3 after Cezar’s irksome breed of craniotype over a year ago, so it is a great pleasure to discover him. Regarding joy and woe, I’ve been arguing for the untethering of these concepts for a long time, as it seems to me an arbitrary dogma, often spelled out with the same conviction as the certainty of special relativity. Joy and woe are phenomenological and subjective. Essence, perspective and identity are fluid enough to allow for the conceptual possibility of joy without woe, and with a little technological imagination we can fathom a universe without woe. It is only the guilt inherent in man, and other delusions about the universe that make joy and woe two sides of a coin.
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I never said guilt is a dogma, neither are joy and woe. What I said was the TETHERING of joy and woe – the interdependency – is a dogma.
Many argue life is 50/50 pain and pleasure – that it’s universal law. While that argument is a simplification, the IMPULSE to argue it is understandable. It emanates from basic principles I agree with.
For instance: that pleasure has added dimension when contrasted with pain; that tension and release is part in the human experience; or simply that pain is inevitable and we should accept it.
It follows from none of these observations that pleasure/pain is a 50/50 proposition. Theoretically we can approach 100/0 toward joy by playing with the internal and external variables that lead to states of pleasure.
No wonder the past 3000 years, including Nietzsche’s time, are defined by pain. It speaks to our lack of mastery over mind and matter. We eliminate collective and individual pain every day and assuming we continue, life will be increasingly happy.
There is something of the superman in embracing pain, the amor fati, but it is equally Nietzschian to pursue pleasure and minimize pain, if such a thing is possible. By fundamentally following a Nietzsche soundbite you, Cezar, are defying and dishonoring the spirit of his message.
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Stop dropping names and think for a second. Have you ever had a happy minute without woe? What is the ceiling on the time limit for an unbroken happy moment? Is it a fixed ceiling? Can we, theoretically be happy for two days, ten days, two years, by regulating the forces that contribute to our moods? If the number is not fixed, it follows that it could theoretically span a lifetime. This is a secularist argument for happiness made possible through science. It would have been futile to argue for joy without woe even a few short decades ago. Go ahead, write “poems” about woe and harmony, honor it, let it define you and motivate you. But don’t call it universal law or a priori knowledge. And don’t tether it to joy. Because that’s merely religion, myth and defeatism (in the past and in your own life) rearing its ugly head against the promise of modernity.
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Happiness often does rely on preceding pain, but not always. The times that it does are sometimes so prevalent that it may be eclipsing your view of, for instance, cases where we move from one happiness to parallel or higher happiness. There seems to be a deconstructionist temptation to label ANY potential latent happiness as PAIN, but if words have any utiliy at all, we’ll agree that words like woe conjure moaning and crying, angst and ennui. Certainly not the description of a contented or happy person who goes on to discover added elation in any number of enterprises.
This doesn’t address your first post, which if I recall, had a Nazi tinge to it. It might help to know that Nietzsche was a poet first, and that his passion left little room for the real-world empathy and compassion that are hard wired into us via evolution. Perhaps we are alive, in part, for our mutation for empathy and cooperation, for sustaining the “weak.” (It’s never certain who among us is weak - and we all wind up weak when we’re old, and started weak as babies.) There’s power in our ability to compromise a measure of our brute power. Surely vestigial ambitions course through our blood, mine more than yours I’m betting – but do not mistake these impulses for wisdom. Thracymachus was wrong by a letter. Might makes might.
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You have all the time in the world, friend, but, yes, I can tell from our brief encounter that you will certainly not spend any of it listening. Good luck with that little campaign of yours. Welcome to ILP, I hope your stay will be as fruitful as mine was.
Please enlighten us on what this “Nazi tinge” was. Was it the fact that Cezar said something nasty? Nasty → Natsy → Nazi, right? Everything said in a non-gay manner has a “Nazi tinge” to it, right?