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Being a nice guy is a role, like being a strong guy, or a smart guy.
The "nice guy" shield will eventually be knocked away, revealing your brutal simplicity. The goal is to accept this naked self (this monstrous ego of need).
Beyond embarrassment or shame, being revealed sheds the excess effort spent spinning convoluted illusions for defense.
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When a problem is too complicated, meaning it has more than facets but dynamics as well, it becomes a spinning circle.
To simplify this impossible conundrum and grant yourself agency in this dizzying world you can “square the circle": choose a point, ignore the motion, simplify the sides, and commit.
It in no way reflects reality, but it may help you feel better.
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"Concepts" are universalized and helpful in pointing out generalities. The danger of concepts is that they omit particularity’s complicated, messy truth.
The simplicity of an abstract idea (concept) is a handy guide. Still, we must temper our lazy compulsion to assign these attractive concepts to, or privilege them over, a concrete experience rich with intuition.
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Name-calling is labeling, which is a shortcut to feeling superior. Higher morality would require complex understanding, which leads to compassion rather than condescension.
Worse yet, once labeled (defined), we dismiss the hard work of further consideration or re-investigation.
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Our most significant flaw is binary thinking: winner-loser, zero-one, black-white. Binary categorization makes separateness and opposition fundamental.
In reality, the world is highly relationally contingent. There are no objects or fixity so much as processes over time.
The environment evokes action from an organism, yet we attribute the move as coming from the individual, using it to describe them. Yet, there is no individual without the environment and no action without interactive (shared) evocation.
~ Alan Watts
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We are taught "absolute power corrupts," but simplify the concept into a more daily reality: strength leads to abuse.
We can further simplify the concept of strength into physicality (a more Spartan view of strength). At the same time, mass consensus (The Cultural Revolution in China) leads to tyranny by "cutting down the tall poppies;" the strong or unique.
It is easy to attenuate "strength" into a physical characteristic, but the more insidious power is to erase diversity in the name of unity.
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When people say "value add," I cringe. It is like hearing a salesman say, "trust me."
If you have to convince someone of "robust bolstering effects," then the value is secondary: it is either glomming on or optimizing.
I have been "up sold" by mechanics and plumbers, but that is not a "value add." It is a simple service that does not reshape the current service.
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A computer is a processing machine. Not a thinking machine.
It subordinates all things into processed information, anything unmeasurable becomes unimportant.
"Belief" is not a function, yet we now consider what you do (measurable action) to be the equivalent of what you believe (ideological stance).
This linguistic supplantation through analogy -allowing processing to appear as thinking or belief to become simply a function- separates a complicated set of interwoven connections for simplistic measurables: provable feats aligning us to technology and away from humanity.
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Doing the "right thing" isn’t hard so much as doing the "wrong thing" is easy."Easy" pays off quicker, is more expedient, and avoids those difficult conversations with anger or disappointment directed at you… but lying (avoiding) or shortcuts (stealing) shift into betrayal over time. And, there is nothing easy about gaining forgiveness from betrayal.
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Obviously. This is known as a tautophrase: a circular (reinforcing) definition that says the same thing twice.
This phrase pretends to stoic wisdom through acceptance: "it is" beyond control therefore we should move along instead of continuing to consider "it."
The most annoying (and detrimental) aspect is the evasion of communal reflection, and subsequent deferral of responsibility, by claiming fixity through redundancy.
