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If you do, I think you’d benefit from Starting With Heart and Mastering Your Stories. If you do choose to reply, you could Create Safety by creating a common purpose.
You can also learn to notice your thoughts and impulses so that you can choose more freely.
Mindfulness can help. Defusion exercises can help. Acceptance exercises can help.
Let me know if you have questions!
Capitalism and imperialism
So that I can picture clearly what you’re saying, could you elaborate?
Ok… if we’re looking at this dispassionately and considering history, this meme may be accurate only in some places, but not in the rest.
Conservatism was articulated in response to liberalism. Liberalism argued for rationality, contractual social relationships, and natural rights. When liberalism proposed this, conservatives articulated a response: it argued for tradition, organicist and inherited social relationships, and traditional wisdom.
These two worldviews were so incompatible that hundreds of thousands of people died defending their views against the others’. An example is France in the 18th century.
Some conservatives recognized the power of liberalism: a bourgeois elite was burgeoning. Faced with this reality, some conservatives adapted to this change. This is what some people may take as evidence of “liberalism contains conservatism”. But that’s not the whole story.
Historical materialism may point out that both conservatism and liberalism have fought for capitalism, and that therefore they serve the same function. If that’s all we ask from an analytical framework, then that’s okay. But I want to understand why there are hundreds of thousands of dead people in the 18th century. And, luckily, historical materialism istelf can, at its best, explain the difference between liberalism and conservatism.
For example, the 18th century revolutions occurred in response to the growth of the bourgeois. Conservatives defended pre-capitalist social structures and modes of production. This was not capitalist versus capitalist. And historical materialism can explain this violence by distinguishing between these class formations, not by collapsing these class formations.
Even if both conservatives and liberals later prove capable of ruling capitalist societies, I believe we shouldn’t settle for a reductionist view of history.
There’s a further complication: America. The American Revolution is as American as the French Revolution was French. They were not the same. Americans lacked the aristocracy that the French had. Therefore, conservatism in America is not at all the same as conservatism in France. American conservatives defend a country that was born liberal.
In my view, saying that conservatism is the same as liberalism is problematic. It seems reductive and reduces the explanatory power of both concepts. For example, if someone truly believes there is no difference between liberalism and conservatism, how would they explain the hundreds of thousands of dead in the 19th century revoutions? Plus there’s the following problem: at its worst, conflating conservatism with liberalism is a way of imposing the American lens on the rest of the world.
Amazing!
Sometimes labels help. Sometimes they don’t.
Also, Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are could help!
As with many things, it’s important to ask what things mean to others.
In addition, if you trust the other person, you can also open up about your concerns.
Sometimes, others can give you reassurance. And sometimes they can’t. Both possibilities are something we need to be open to.
It’s important to accept whatever is brought to the table and, based on that, choose what kind of person you’d like to be.
It may seem as if we cannot know, but if we want to evaluate this then we see something different.
Dogs are mammals, just like us. Their brain structures are sufficiently similar to understand its mechanisms, such as its structures and electrical flows, the secretion of hormones related to pleasure, connection, stress, or panic.
If dogs were constantly itchy, we would’ve known ever since we started analyzing brains in terms of their structure, their function, and their interactions with bodies.
So no, dogs aren’t constantly itchy.
Many comments have alluded to this: people are contextual.
I’ll add to this that thoughts are very, very flexible.
In some contexts we learn to think one way and in other contexts we learn to think in other ways. Our thoughts always get activated by context, either external contexts or internal contexts. For example seeing an apple might have us think we’re hungry if we’re hungry. Or it may make us think we don’t even want to see it if we just ate a lot. Or we might think of our upcoming presentation and that may be the context for the thought “I’m not prepared enough”.
Not only are thoughts contextual, but they behave in interesting ways. Often, we transfer thoughts from one context to another context. If we think “I’m never prepared for presentations”, we might end up reinforcing ideas like “I’m never prepared [in general]”. We may end up thinking we’re never prepared for dinner with friends or for tough conversations with loved ones.
Another critical feature of thoughts is that we can even change the role thoughts have in our behavior. For example, the thought “I’m not prepared enough for my presentation” may be seen as a literal truth. Or it could be seen as a thought and just a thought. In other words, thoughts can sometimes be taken literally and we can be fused with them or we can look at them from a distance.
These three examples illustrate my point: thoughts are ridiculously flexible.
This flexibility is what explains the phenomena you notice. That is how we end up with a capitalist who may have strong thoughts about family and may stop focusing on profit-maximization when their employee’s daughter die. That is how we end up with a worker who could have strong thoughts about profits and may stop focusing on solidarity with his peers when a promotion is offered.
My perspective comes from contextual behavioral science and relational frame theory.
This is part of the idea of “freedom as development”, where development is the expansion of your capabilities! This was put into words by Amartya Sen over the last century. Check out human development!
In your experience, does fighting the feelings help? Answer not using your logic, but your felt experience.
Odds are, fighting doesn’t help. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here asking for help.
You hurt because you care. You care about belonging, about contributing, about being open to others. And, since you care about this and you’ve experienced their opposites, you hurt.
We can’t get rid of this kind of hurt. Would you even want to? Would you want to be indifferent to other people?
I’m not trying to be mean or brutal. I’m just trying to get to a place where this hurt is a meaningful part of your life and not something you keep fighting (and failing to defeat).
So what can you do? You could notice your thoughts as thoughts. You can try giving your brain a name and thanking it for informing you about the things it informs you throughout the day. This doesn’t make thoughts disappear, but it helps seeing them as thoughts and not reality.
You can also imagine that you carry your sensations, memories, moods, thoughts, images, etc. in your hands, as if you were carrying a delicate flower. This is a way to honor your life without running a way from it and also without being entirely determined by it.
Finally, you can ask yourself what kind of person you want to be, what you stand for. What are the qualities of being that you would like to adopt in your life? You can discover this intuitively by wondering what you care for. If rejection hurts, you likely value inclusion. If abandonment hurts, you likely value consistency and kindness.
The task the becomes accepting our current reality (thanking our brain for its suggestions and holding our whole life experience preciously) and taking our next step with the qualities of being that we value.
If you’re curious about this perspective, let me know and I can tell you more about it :)
Made a bet with a friend that the UK would be back before 2035. So I’m happy when I see a picture like this one. I need those tacos.
Totally.
Also, it’s kinda funny to strictly follow this logic, because it means that the rich still struggle to get justice if the criminals are the rich.
These are amazing!
I’ve met Christians who have explained their train of thought.
Their strongest argument, in my mind, is that the Christian god created the universe for humans to choose to live well. This god is not intervening and simply created the universe’s initial conditions, much like a clock-maker. In this view, Christians simply choose what kind of life they want and they hope it will get them closer to their god.
It would seem that the choice of being progressive does not stop many Christians from meeting their god. In fact, I’ve met people who say that progressive causes are the way we build heaven on Earth.
Another argument I’ve heard is that the Christian god has said lots of things to lots of people over long spans of time. These utterings have not always been exactly the same. Sometimes the Christian god says some things to some people and some other things to other people. Therefore it is a good Christian’s duty to dutifully reinterpret the Christian god’s words.
I don’t particularly like this second argument because it seems unnecessarily complicated.
But the first one seems more coherent and with less moving pieces.
Depression has lots of ways of manifesting.
One way of describing depression is an unwillingness to engage with life and to feel, because the person has learned that engaging or feeling will lead to pain. This is the functional contextual definition.
Another one comes from Martin Seligman, who defines it as an unwillingness to try things because the person has learned that engaging in something will lead to failure.
In either definition, the unwillingness is contextual. In other words, someone might be depressed regarding work but not their partner. Or someone might be depressed regarding their family but not their partner.
Not ruminating about it + time + having stuff to look forward to in life + paying attention to my present
I am assuming you’re 95% trolling.
You want a generation of young men committing suicide because of not feeling enough? Then emphasize being the best. Don’t value people’s way of being. Don’t value what kind of person people are.
If, however, you care about people living good lives, focus on building capabilities. The single most important capability is being resilient in the face of failure and rejection.
You will be shocked by learning that there is a thing called science that has consistently found a set of robust findings. One of them is that accepting your life is a pre-requisite for resilience. Another is finding how important it is to infuse your current reality with purpose and meaning so that you can take steps toward the life you want.
You know what stops people from accepting their reality and infusing their current steps with purpose? Telling them they’re unacceptable.
Love it.
And the opposite is true of zero. It turns nothing into something.