Kelly
Perhaps you also have noticed a relationship between 1. being seen as someone ready to look after and protect the weaker folk on this board (usually they are female), and 2. how strictly logical one's understanding of Reality is ? Have you any thoughts on it ?
Yes, there is a relationship. Thoughts on it? – well nothing
certain springs to my mind. The problem I have is that I think super-rationalisation always looses the plot at some point. For me there is nothing without feeling and super-rationalisation is not strictly logical in relation to all humans. Super-rationalisation might be a logical goal for those with autistic tendencies, but for others such a goal will always cause suffering.
Feminine care about the feelings of others is not ALWAYS a bad thing, as you seem to think it is. To me everything evolves to “moreness†in a (very loose) Two-Steps Forward, One-Step Back fashion, or devolves to “lessness†in a Two-Steps Back, One-Step Forward manner. The third option is the one-step forward, one step back process, where overall an entity as a sum of sub-processes is neither evolving or devolving to any great degree.
For an evolving entity the one-step back is “good femininityâ€, useful and necessary. One could think of this as the equivalence of our human need to sleep for one third of each day – without this sleep/one-step back process, we would go stir crazy and our overall direction would tip over from an evolving process into the devolution process.
If an entity is devolving on an overall basis however, the two feminine steps back become “bad femininityâ€, femininity that destroys, not builds, because it ties people down too strongly. We see this in the manner in which our kids are being raised at present – too much over protection for example, they are not learning how to deal with hardship and thus are not developing masculine skills for those times when hardship arises (the weaknesses displayed by individuals in the Katrina saga, for example, or the manner in which workers in society generally are succumbing to unethical business propaganda). Overly strong femininity does make masculinity ineffective – it is fighting a loosing battle by using up all its energy countermanding femininity and never gets a chance to move outside that feminine box.
An entity, forever being something transforming, begins as 2-steps forward/1-step back, then moves to 1-1, and finally devolves into 1-2 – just as we see in the physical life cycle of humans. Many mistakes are made when progressing in the 2-steps forward/1-step back cycle. This is where masculinity is dominant. At a group level an appropriate example of the mistakes of masculinity would be Muslims as a group. In living a society where masculinity is valued twice as much as femininity, they make far more mistakes (“Islam has bloody bordersâ€) than Western society. Western society which while still very much in the same 2-steps forward/1-step back cycle, is closer to moving to the 1-1 scenario, in which masculinity and femininity have been somewhat equalised.
K: It doesn't matter if others have a consensus about what is true and false, or if they don't. What matters is if one is sane and rational oneself. One can hardly decide whether truths are ultimately truths, otherwise.
J: If one is insane or irrational, then "One can decide X truths are ultimately truths" and be wrong.
K:That's right. Only a sane person truly knows for certain that they are sane.
That’s what we have been told by the QRS. It appears to make logical sense, but doesn’t really, well not fully anyway. One can be fully sane in one respect but not in another.
I am having difficulty countermanding this point of yours, but I have some certainty that an over-dependence on purely logical thinking to the extent of removing completely emotional considerations, is not true sanity. I think it distances people too far from humanity which is an organism for whom rationality is subject to subjective emotions. If one becomes too heavily rationally focused, as in “Truth†becomes the only desired emotional attachment, then they lose the ability to
effectively use the ideas stemming from this rationality to advance the human race.
I don’t think the terms sanity and insanity can really be applied with a kind of objective certainty by oneself to oneself, but rather they are terms that apply only in respect of the differences in judgements and actions between one person/group to another. It is not that
“Only a sane person truly knows for certain that they are sane†as an irrational person often thinks they are sane, but that
“Rational people are far more capable of making the most logically accurate assessment of the sanity of themselves or othersâ€.
There is much about the QRS and philosophers like Keirkegaard that is insane, in that some of their ideas springing from their ideals are completely unworkable in relation to their rational applicability to the masses and the development of the human race.
J: You know what, even your beloved QRS have decided they are sane and rational, based on consensus. It is a consensus based on their little group and the words of past philosophers (100 percent of whom are at least partially wrong in some regard), rather than some form of automatic ability to know the greatest truth for any circumstance.
K: Perhaps the trust you've implied I have in the reasoning of others is a picture of your own uncertainty about matters.
Well, you could be right. I do a lot of projecting about others based on my own uncertainties and emotional failings.
J: I've seen enough to know for certain that they are not enlightened in any way that would allow them to state absolute correctness of opinion for any specific detail in the finite world. Essentially, they are just fundies promoting their egos.
K: That's an absolutist statement about a specific detail, ie. a finite thing, that states that an enlightened person cannot possibly define a finite thing.
So by your own definition, you're not enlightened?
You are twisting my words, but anyway yes I’m not enlightened. I can’t be enlightened because I don’t believe it can be a real human condition, notwithstanding that we can maximise the productivity of our decision making about “what is best†by the tempering of self-centred emotions and the acceptance of logically reasoned knowledge (which by the way I would grant that the QRS have done more than most). “Tempering†however does not mean detachment.
