frnzprf t1_j7k6bs6 wrote on February 7, 2023 at 11:36 AM

> You’re a person who gets irritated by the smallest things, things outside your control like a person loudly crunching chips in the cinema. Accept everything about this situation, your own responses included.

Personally, I'm actually not that irritable. You could say I'm more "stoic" than people are kind of "socially expected". I don't know if "socially expected" is the right term. In movies, people are easier to affect than I am in reality, for dramaturgic reasons and I feel like other people try to emulate movie-behaviour.

Just because you can talk yourself into being angry about something, doesn't mean that's your most natural and honest mental state towards it.

I'm all for honesty towards yourself. That's what I like about Nietzsche. Sometimes being honest can mean that you aren't as emotionally affected as society expects you to.

Being honest towards yourself can sometimes be tricky. For example imagine a grandma who likes to bake cake and knit sweaters for her grandchildren. People might say to her that she should listen to her own desires and she might be tempted to invest less work in others to achieve that, but in truth the might be happiest when she actually makes other people happy.

I'm not sure what Nietzsche meant by the slave-mentality. Does this grandma have a slave-mentality? I guess some people think on a surface level that they should endure and please others but a deeper, surpressed, level they know that they are sacrificing their own happiness. That doesn't apply to all altruistic people. You would expect humans to be evolved to be altruistic to the extend it benefits your genes.

I also like these "strangely satisfying" Youtube videos, like where someone pops bubble wrap. You only get to feel satisfaction from these weird things if you are very honest to yourself, because society won't suggest it to you. Weird sexual fetishes are the same. People who aren't honest to themselves would rather eat at an expensive restaurant or visit a popular tourist destination, for example. (On the other hand society very much suggested to kids to buy fidget spinners and push pop, so it's not that clear cut either. The honest option is not necessarily the less obvious option and it's not necessarily the option that goes against social pressure.)

Sometimes you can choose how you feel about something. For example when you watch a race and you don't know any of the competitors, you might choose to invest your "heart" into anyone arbitrarily and feel good when they win and bad if they loose. There is this other youtube channel where they race marbles. I guess it would be anti-stoic to feel emotions when watching a marble race.

On a darker side of that, I can choose to "dehumanize" people and then I don't feel empathy towards them anymore. I can "dehumanize" a spider when my sister asks me to kill it and I can "humanize" another spider in a terrarium that my friend asks to to care for, while they are on vacation.

In these cases you can't choose based on what is most honest.

bildramer t1_j7k9x55 wrote on February 7, 2023 at 12:17 PM

To my understanding, Nietzsche basically says that slave-morality - us loving underdog stories, the poor and pitiful, sacrifice, humility, turning the other cheek, and so on - is, at its core, an inversion of master-morality, and Christianity is to blame for its popularity in the West. The slave-morality is mostly about one's attitude towards guilt, sin, vices, etc. - negative behaviors. Are some people good and some people bad (as in: high-quality and low-quality, powerful and weak, based and cringe, etc.), or some people good and some people evil? Do you treat harm done to strangers like a neutral action or a negative one?

frnzprf t1_j7p49hi wrote on February 8, 2023 at 12:16 PM

I don't know where I stand on this. I'd have to read more.

I do have respect for "martyrs". Of course not, when they do something evil for a god that doesn't exist, but when someone sacrifices something for a good cause.

I suppose Nietzsche would regard martyrs as weak. I think when someone pays a high price for something, they are taking a risk. They are offering something that is regarded highly by many people, like time, money or health, for something else that has an even higher value to them, personally.

You know: Some people don't buy things on principle if they are expensive - that's a good rule of thumb, a heuristic - but occasionally it's more rational to pay a high price for something that is actually worth it. "I'm not buying these shoes, they cost $300!" - "Well yeah, but they last as long as four cheap shoes and they correct your bow-leggedness."

I think sometimes when evil bosses of companies accept the suffering of exploited child workers, for example, that is a sign of weakness. They might feel some empathy towards them, but they suppress it, because the rule of thumb is "money is good", "morality is too expensive", "eat or be eaten" and they don't dare to go against that rule. At their death bed, they might regret their life.

I'm making it easy for myself in assuming I'm and probably most people are altruistic at heart, so being strong and being nice is aligned but on the other hand, someone who is a sociopath would be strong if they act evil and weak if they act moral.