What is wrong with our culture?

Hassknecht said:
I might take a look at Zeitgeist, but it certainly reeks of half-baked Truther stuff and weirdness.
The fact that it has (ngeative) articles on both Rational Wiki and Psiram makes me cautious to take anything in it at face value without further research.
Yeah, I know, Rational Wiki and Psiram are also NWO controlled Lamestream media outlets whose only purpose is to denounce and destroy those who found the truth...
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There are positive articles on RationalWiki?
 
I hate these types of documentaries. Even if there is a lot of truth to it (like the first video) or a little truth to it (like Zeitgesit), they never ask why. That is just poor journalism. Human beings are not intrinscally selfish or materialistic; something changed in them to make them this way. These documentaries never ask WHY we have changed.

The why, ladies and gentlemen:

 
What do you mean, why we have changed? Changed from what? It might be to strong of a word, as that implies that our behaviour or attitude was better in the past.

Is there one point in recorded human history where things have been different really? I mean, a point where humans either 1. Didn't exploit each other and/or nature. And 2. Not engaging in conflicts, wars even.



It seems to be in our very own nature. And can you really fight nature?



Samsara, pretty awesome documentary. And completely without words. Just images.
 
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If you like Samsara, check out Baraka, Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqatsi, Naqoyqatsi and Chronos, all documentaries by [roughly] the same team. All have the same themes of very powerful imagery and soundtrack/score with very little [zero] talking/commentary.
 
Crni Vuk said:
What do you mean, why we have changed? Changed from what? It might be to strong of a word, as that implies that our behaviour or attitude was better in the past.

Is there one point in recorded human history where things have been different really? I mean, a point where humans either 1. Didn't exploit each other and/or nature. And 2. Not engaging in conflicts, wars even.



It seems to be in our very own nature. And can you really fight nature?



Samsara, pretty awesome documentary. And completely without words. Just images.
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War. War never changes.

Fundamentally, I don't agree with Alan Watt's speech on a couple fundamental premises.
We're crap at adapting ourselves to our physical environment, as he puts it, because we're biological constructs bleeding energy out every orifice. So much of our struggle against nature winds up being a zero-sum game. It doesn't always have to be, but it shouldn't surprise anybody when it is. Entropy is the name of the game. We're pretty far up the ways in the food chain, so we necessarily have to inflict a lot more of it than plants do.

The "real" business of living, as he puts it, isn't our leisure time. It's a nice sentiment and it's humanizing, but it wasn't and isn't our natural state. Finding calories was and still is and it dictates everything we do. Nobody works because they want to, but that should be self-evident. If tilling the fields wasn't the real business of living, then what was?

Nina Paley did a similar cartoon with the Angel of Death serenading the Egyptians of the Moses tale using the music of Spider Suite. So it really seems she shares similar sentiments as myself. Lovecraft posited cosmicism and it's very near the truth.
 
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There's nothing wrong with anything, anywhere, anytime, ever. Everything is going exactly as it should be going. Calling nature wrong, is the only wrong there is.

*maximum philosophy*

(To be perfectly clear: By nature I mean everything, everywhere, all the time. Humans have every fucking right in the universe to consume every last bit of our planet, at the pace that goddamn pleases us. And so, that is what we do. Shit, if nobody chastized the Sauropods for collapsing the global ecology during the last of the Jurassic, why should we feel bad for doing the same??)
 
Because our brain power is a little bit higher than those Sauropods. You can't blame a creature for it's nature. The tragedy isn't that we can't change, the tragedy is that it would be actually in our power to change, and infact we have the technology and knowledge at our disposal. Maybe we are not supposed to rule this planet, and our fate is to disapear at some point and not beeing more than a trace in history. However, we really have no one else to blame than our self though. So much for sure. We might be born with our nature. But no one ever told us, that we have to die with it.
 
It's not a tragedy, dude, it's fuckin awesome. We're eating up a whole goddamn planet! U lose, sauropods, WE WIN!!! =)
 
Well, I subscribe to the idea that free will is an illusion. Or more precisely, inarticulate.
Our nature is just a bit more expansive and flexible, but it's still our nature.

Plenty of reasons why we might not make it to high space opera levels of technology.
For one, maybe that's practically and/or physically impossible. Maybe we crapped out on our RNG planet start. Or the laws of physics simply don't support that kind of technology.

Or we just aren't as smart as we flatter ourselves as being. Perhaps if you were to compare all the species that were to ever exist in this universe, then you'd find out that we fit somewhere down on the low end of the bell-curve in terms of whatever metric matters for long-term survival of a civilization. We could just be doomed to have really crappy long term judgment. Sure, we look impressive when you compare us to all the losers on Earth. But it could all be relative.

The Reaper comes for all of us. I just wonder when.
 
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CFvJUeF.jpg
 
I don't really like the alpha/beta construct. It's really kind juvenile, subjective and greedily reductionist.

You may have seen me rage about it one of the other threads here. Suffice it to say, the guy who tried to apply the term to me, seemed in retrospect, a little nervous and did a really good job of convincing me his abilities lay far beneath what his confidence could justify. And he had no status over me. I would've been perfectly content to ignore him for my own company, if he hadn't bothered trying to "project confidence" by making small talk or whatever it was. We had equal status. The guy interviewing us? Yeah, a kinda geeky "beta" guy who had more power over our fates than we had on each other. It's a stupid waste of time trying to fake confidence when you're stuck in the same damn enclosure.

And a maddeningly simple alpha-beta-omega hierarchy is supposed to make sense here? Even wolves don't act this way. It's a gross generalization. It only makes sense if you completely ignore stuff like familial ties and so on.

Ravens are posited to be about as intelligent as wolves and they all seem uniformly inclined to play with larger animals and predators out of boredom -- it looks exactly like trolling. And then spend a lot of time hiding food from each other, cheating on their mates and stealing from one another. It is not for nothing they have a reputation as tricksters. The entire species seems entirely unimpressed by how weak they're supposed to be. I have a hard time believing the whole alpha-beta thing applies to these creatures either.

But, I digress.
By definition, you don't really escape nature. It just seems that you can because you grossly misunderstood where your limits were in the first place.
You're talking on a scale of 20 years for this particular troop. And for all we know, this happens all the time and we just never had our assumptions about it challenged. Humans also have pretty awful cultures, not as a general rule, but they're obviously there. And nobody is claiming those societies are inevitable in all times and places.

It's pretty easy to be impressed by your own mind when you have no method of actually gauging it or understanding it. Your own personal intuition about it is nearly worthless. Your own agency is only valuable to you, because quite frankly, your animal nature compels you to find value in it. But with sufficient knowledge, it could really just look extremely infantile and predictable. And a lot of the time, choices just give you the illusion of control. Sometimes the things you think are so important are just meaningless rituals and superstitions.
 
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Crni, we allready do that though - but localized. Subcultures do exactly this - they exclude unwanted behaviors from their group, and foster only wanted behaviors. The difference is that human subcultures are not isolated from the rest of society, so sooner or later, they will be mixed out (also, subcultures tend to draw mostly younger, more idealistic people, who will later leave and assimilate with "the norm")
 
Everyone wants to be better in some form than other people. It's a good thing, helps drive people's development. But it can also lead to a mindset where it's all about being the first to find out why this new or old thing is bad. To be recognized for being able to find out before other people did.

There's a ton of fucked up things in this world. Political and economical ineptitude and corruption being the foremost, at least in the first world. Or this: https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

I think asking what is wrong in general is a flawed question and leads only to flawed and useless philosophizing. You need an actual direct question about a focused topic, I would say.

And if you come in here not with the intent of flying the flag of this thing you're into, and drop all pretense of having an argument once people disagree, you missed the point of this very medium of discussion, I think.
 
Illuminati Confirmed! said:
In short, the only way to make women not choose to breed with the assholes is to exterminate the assholes.

I can't wait for human cloning.
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Those who control modern forms of media [TV, radio, print, internet] are doing this for us subconsciously - the attentive might notice in most broadcasts, Male lead roles that depict strong alpha status are being reversed: Women are now being portrayed as the stronger alpha leaders, while men are portrayed as being weak and need to be rescued more often by the females [if you go back and watch older movies, the opposite is true]. Nearly every movie from Hollywood from the last 10-15 years is doing this, or something similar. Even computer games are doing it. What happens when you consistently promote a lie as truth? It will eventually be believed as truth.

BTW, not all alpha males are assholes.
 
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kraag said:
Those who control modern forms of media [TV, radio, print, internet] are doing this for us subconsciously - the attentive might notice in most broadcasts, Male lead roles that depict strong alpha status are being reversed: Women are now being portrayed as the stronger alpha leaders, while men are portrayed as being weak and need to be rescued more often by the females [if you go back and watch older movies, the opposite is true]. Nearly every movie from Hollywood from the last 10-15 years is doing this, or something similar. Even computer games are doing it. What happens when you consistently promote a lie as truth? It will eventually be believed as truth.

BTW, not all alpha males are assholes.
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Literally not even remotely fucking true in any possible sense.

How about you take your red pill elsewhere?
 
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