Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

Q3. How might we punish the wicked and redeem the upright?
A3. Thou shalt not intervene. Thou shalt not rely on thy own moral judgments. Thou art a speck on the eyelash of a pest of infinitesimally small insight. Thou must surrender to the larger workings of the automatic universal law.
Q4. I suffer pain and terror in my innermost feelings. Wherefrom is this?
A4. You are not wicked. You are actually good. What you lack are the inner formulations by which you can transmute your pain into pleasure

The spirit of the age:
Q1. Who am I? Why am I here?
A1. You are who you are, and you are where you are, because you have caused yourself.
Q2. Why do the upright suffer and the wicked flourish?
A2. The upright do not truly suffer and the wicked do not truly flourish. We must infer from glimpses the universal justice that transcends most appearances: that the rewards to the upright will be revealed to their inmost hearts, and the punishment of the wicked will be revealed to them.

The great emplotment of the 2020s, the rational relation to which all narratives appeal, is a romantic one: it is the great hope of FAFO, of karma. It is the hope that inputs match outputs, or that rules are reconciled to results. We keenly hope that reaping corresponds with sowing.

We hope perhaps more keenly than other ages because we have the unique position of renouncing both compulsion and dependence. We've renounced both our own agency to impose consequences and our own severe contingency

Condensed pragmatism:

The gimmick is to treat life as composed of gimmicks.
Thinking is a gimmick.
Beauty is a gimmick.
Justice is a gimmick.

Sometimes the gimmicks win through, yet often they don't.
Some gimmicks are simple, and some are made out of other gimmicks.

There may be other gimmicks that work better than the gimmicks we have now.

The oldest artifacts that might be beds are about 200k years old. The earliest representational narrative cave art might be about 50k years old.The oldest evidence of ploughing is roughly 5k years old. The photo in this post was taken roughly 5k years after ploughing started. And this photo at this link was taken 78 years after that: <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Himawari-8_true-color_2015-01-25_0230Z.png>.

The first ones had hair for the cold and shady trees for the heat. They killed their prey by chasing them and then ate the raw flesh.
The in-between ones had no hair and were sheltered by caves. Their dogs chased the prey and they cooked their meat. They knew enemies and hierarchy. They learned of the magic of signs.
The recent ones grew small and lived in homes. They cooked their food in pots and pans. They traded for iron. They learned to gamble.
We know our names and can number our ancestors.

It would probably be something on the order of 10s of millions of years if humans don't do a bunch of gene editing and habitat restoration.

It's amazing what you can do with a a handful of opportunities to show compassion.

"The Social Contract" meme is the first thing I've seen online that I'd consider an impressive one-shot psywar salvo. Lots of antisocial thinking in a simple diagram.

It will easily take millions of years for the biosphere to recover the biodiversity that we've lost in the past 100 years.

Incidentally I feel like this kind of Alcibiades character should have been the Peter Wiggins backstory: that he was a really gifted kid in a brainy family, a childhood without struggle messed up his prudence, and his conflicts with resentful people gave him a shit dynamic with most of humanity.
If this were the case, though, then the torturous treatment of Ender would be justified by his family history. And it's hard to see how Valentine works in this.

Oh and BTW having a lot of unearned confidence is pretty good for most socializing but there's a population that fucking hates it and will prize shoving you around a bit.

It's also really hard for me to relate to people who have grievances against institutions that are similar to schools. In my life school has just been a tree full of goodies and I've basically fed my myself by shaking the tree as much as I've wanted to. It's hard to see any other view when that's the condition that's shaped me. Just hang out under the goodie tree bro.

So far those two vices haven't collapsed into a single crisis (where I get fucked by lack of a life-skill while out-on-a-limb) buuuut each of them has separately caused crises so it's probably just a matter of time. I've got to start upskilling before I bring irrevocable disaster to the people around me. And I think I need an education on risk.

I think my weirdest characteristic comes from being really really successful at formal schooling in a family that held it as the main value. Because my experiences in education have almost exclusively been easy top-tier success, I entered adulthood with an air of effortless invincibility that has been both out-of-line with some practical life skills and has also led me to take big swing-for-the-fences risks in the course of finding my place in the world.