Isn't that the whole point of survivalist/homesteaders, governments and religions -- figuring out those rules?

Why would dying be insane or absurd? Seems like a machine produced article once again.

> And paradoxically, this collective experience of absurdity becomes a form of tenuous meaning.

Self circular, and absurd. Yet if no other meaning exists, why not be nice and make others absurdity more pleasant.

That’s just the retirement plan for trustfundees who can’t hack it

This!

Because apparently a large portion of humanity would rather watch it burn

Blaise Pascal basically wrote the same thing 400 years earlier.

Every human is wagering their life on some religion, agnosticism or atheism.

Camus wagered his life on atheism.

They're not finding out the rules they're making rules up that kind of work or don't.

Because equality is a construct. There will always be haves and have-nots chosen by nothing more than chaos.

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I think we have discovered the rules, or rule really. Greed is devastating. The attempt to escape the collective and excel at the expense of others leads to all sin. Greed, Lust, Sloth, Envy, Pride, Wrath and Gluttony are all just different shades of greed.

But isn't the great insight of capitalism precisely that you can excel without it being at the expense of others? That wealth isn't just something static lying out there in the world, but something that can be grown? Which is why any first world nation is much wealthier now than they were 500 years ago.

Seems like just invoking the word absurd repeatedly in different contexts. Did chatgpt write the article?

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I like the absurdity that absurdism itself a form of philosophical suicide

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Ofc there are rules. You don't set yourself over the nature and abuse resources. You are the nature. You treat life on equal level as your own, so don't kill anything.

The mission in life is to recognize yourself and find back from separation to unity. The feeling of Unity comes with love, spreading positive energy trough acts and words.

Separation comes trough fight and flight mode, fear, greed, power and other egoistic characteristics.

Very well said but Capitalism seems to have a dearth of fans round these parts.

Oh wow, literal millenia of the greatest minds in philosophy debating the purpose of life and some random on Reddit finally has the answer! It's a Christmas miracle!

Life has no inherent meaning, everything we do is a construct, and here you are advocating for the status quo

You're honestly saying that people profiting from others' labor aren't excelling at the expense of others?

There is no such thing as infinite growth. The wealth of first world nations absolutely came at the expense of the resources and labor of less advantaged nations.

Now this is one hell of a take

Maybe the author is part of the longevity movement? They believe that aging is just a degenerative disease and that death will be solved in the future. Check out the Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant and r/longevity for more info.

The Torah is the first attempt at defining the rules and suggesting with great insurance that we follow them.

Because there's nothing left after you're dead. You have the whole of eternity to be dead and the smallest fraction of time to be alive. If we didnt age so much and felt such physical pain of ageing most would probably choose to live than to die.

It's like people forgot history and how literally every single Empire that existed was built on the backs of an impoverished underclass or slaves.

Now that would be hellishly absurd and enstranging.

>You're honestly saying that people profiting from others' labor aren't excelling at the expense of others?

Outside of slave societies, this never happens. Why would someone labor to profit another when they could just profit themselves? People sometimes sell their labor to others, as one component of what that other person is making, but there the trades are generally fair.

>There is no such thing as infinite growth. The wealth of first world nations absolutely came at the expense of the resources and labor of less advantaged nations.

Nonsense. There's more to wealth than just resources. If you don't believe me, just smash up your phone and try to trade it for an unbroken one - after all, it's the same amount of plastic and metal either way.

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Providing for basic needs and living a meaningful life are two different things.

I'm not advocating for anarchy or greed. I'm merely speaking on why people aren't incentivized to treat others with equality 24/7.

Ok, so let's say your are google, and you create this wonderful thing that meets an unmet need and makes you a ton of money. Then others see they could do something similar to make their own market share...you know what happens next, google/apple/coca-cola/mcdonalds etc...etc...do everything they can to annihilate the competition. They don't want to share that market, they want to own that market. Literally anything that threatens their growth will be destroyed, including politicians.

Capitalism even if you ignore its abuse of workers has to provide Profit to shareholders. The only way to continually get profits is to cut the costs that actually make your product good, healthy, useful etc... etc... So the endgame for the consumer is a shittier more dangerous product. Greed runs it all into the ground eventually.

> Providing for basic needs and living a meaningful life are two different things.

You do not require basic needs to live a meaningful life?

I mean, I'm not sure that your own examples don't disprove your point. McDonald's has plenty of competion - even within the fast food subset of restaurants. So does Coke. Even Google has a solid list of alternatives you can quickly find by using Google.

There are specific markets that tend towards natural monopolies, and these generally need some form of regulation to keep whatever company gets that monopoly in check. And of course individual actors within capitalism can behave badly, and need to be policed as humans always do. But there's a reason all the wealthiest countries use some version of regulated capitalism instead of some other system, and that's because once you understand that wealth is something to be produced and grown rather than a limited thing to be fought over, society gets a hell of a lot better.

Marcus Aurelius, Lao tzu and other philosophers already came to interesting conclusions. They all experienced pretty much the same thing. This knowledge is known for 1000s of years and you think that's some random Christmas miracle on reddit.

“Misery loves company” and all that

Idk why you're assuming I'm advocating for anything. I merely made a statement. If you want to have a discussion, that's cool. But this isn't an argument or some zero sum nonsense.

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What do you eat?

What i dont understand is, in order for you to produce wealth, someone else needs to lose that same amount of wealth. In that case how can wealth be something that can be produced infinitely?

>Why would someone labor to profit another?

>This never happens

It happens every single day. It’s called work. What benefit do I get if a store or a business succeeds? Nothing. It’s the submission of one’s own goals before that of another. It’s exploitative because the employee receives less value than is produced by their labor. People work because they have to, it’s a captive audience and there is nothing fair about these arrangements.

People tend to disapprove of their own exploitation and they ought to.

>What i dont understand is, in order for you to produce wealth, someone else needs to lose that same amount of wealth.

But that isn't true. If you sit down and write a good book, you have created something valuable that didn't exist before. The same is true if you program a videogame. Or write a hit song. And so on. There are plenty of ways to make society (and yourself) richer without someone else losing wealth. Likewise, the value of your phone lies less in the material resources that make it up and the labor put into to arranging those resources and more in the ingenuity of the idea behind how to arrange those resources. The same is true of most of the material goods we collectively would call "wealth".

>It happens every single day. It’s called work. What benefit do I get if a store or a business succeeds?

You continue to have an organization you can sell your labor to. If it fails, you won't, and then you starve.

> It’s the submission of one’s own goals before that of another. It’s exploitative because the employee receives less value than is produced by their labor.

No, they recieve exactly the value of their labor. If you were receiving less than the value of your labor, you would sell it to someone else, instead.

>People work because they have to, it’s a captive audience and there is nothing fair about these arrangements.

Yes, right, you have to work to eat, because food needs to be produced before it can be consumed, and you have to work to get shelter, because houses have to be built before they can be lived in, and you have to work to clothe yourself, because clothes have to be manufactured before they can be worn. But this isn't some terrible unfairness that only occurs under capitalism. That is the nature of reality itself, and would remain true under any economic system.

A perspective only someone who thinks life is sitting in a chair looking at screens would have; out there, in the reals, it's not a game.

But when you write a song or a movie, its not like it has some inherent value to it. You assign some value to it and if enough people agree on the value you placed, you can sell that thing to generate wealth. Just because we assigned some abstract value to these things, does not mean it creates wealth out of nowhere. If people dont agree on the value you placed, they will not give you their wealth and you will not be producing wealth.

Is there much of a difference between Camus' absurdism and Nietzsche's nihilism, or even Kierkegaard's existentialism? I know that they're basically all children of the same family with minor twists here and there, I just find it fascinating how they're all basically colloquial theories discussing and confronting the same problem/idea.

>But when you write a song or a movie, its not like it has some inherent value to it.

So? Nothing has inherent value to it. That doesn't mean you can't creste things people will find valuable.

>You assign some value to it and if enough people agree on the value you placed, you can sell that thing to generate wealth.

Yes, right.

>Just because we assigned some abstract value to these things, does not mean it creates wealth out of nowhere.

Of course it does. That is what all wealth is - stuff that people assigned an abstract value to. To create wealth you labor to create something or to do something that either a) at least a few people will put a high value on or b) that a lot of people will put a low value on.

>If people dont agree on the value you placed, they will not give you their wealth and you will not be producing wealth.

Sure, yes, of course. You might try to write a good book and produce crap. You might try to grow a crop of potatoes and overwater them so they all die. You might dig up a bunch of shiny rocks and discover no one wants them. You might compose a song and find no one wants to listen to it.

I said wealth can be produced and grown. I never said you personally had the skill and talent necessary to produce it, or that every effort to do so would succeed. Creating wealth is difficult. It has to be, because economic value is largely a function of scarcity.

Incorrect. Workers have no attachment to a particular workplace and always have the option of working somewhere else. The success or failure of any particular business is immaterial to the workers.

If I work at a bookstore and sell 10 $10 books, I do not receive $100. That’s what it means for a worker to receive the full value of the work they do. What would the business owner get under this arrangement, don’t know, the value of whatever books they sell also.

Business owners are not entitled to one cent of the value their employees produce. Maybe take 10 percent off for upkeep of the business, other than that, the workers should be getting the same value as they produce.

There’s many other proposed economic systems. Food being produced == food having a cost. You left that part out. X being produced is the part that has to do with the nature of reality. X having a monetary cost is artificial.

Why is it a sin? By accentuating the concept of sin you are affirming the grand premise of judeo Christianity as a reality

If you're not under 25, please go work at a restaurant for a couple months or something, this is seriously detached-from-reality thinking. I was in the same boat in my teens, so believe me I understand, but this is outright incorrect and not how capitalism actually works. I'm sure this is how it's described in Atlas Shrugged or whatever, but reality has been twisted by the elites and that's the simplest way I can put it without writing an essay in response.

What im trying to say is, wealth and value are seperate things. Of course wealth can be produced and grown, im not arguing that. But to produce that wealth, first someone needs to agree on the value you placed on something, and they need to actually give you their wealth in order for you to produce it. Can you answer me how can one generate wealth, or money, without someone else giving up their own wealth?

What you call exploitation others call salvation. There has to be a system free of coercion where two or more people can freely exchange ideas and the fruits of their labour, and this I have always called Capitalism. Anything after that is something else. If you don't wish to call what I just described Capitalism, call it something else then and I shall agree, because it's that system that has brought us out of the dark ages and given us everything.

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I think causality + the existence of suffering give most animals, like humans, genuine purpose and meaning in life.

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You can learn the rules though, the point of this existence is to choose your experience though so it’s not necessary to learn the rules.

In the world where you sell ten $10 books and get paid, $100, does the store not pay the people who clean, stock the shelves, make sure the registers work, etc? Or is it just required to operate at a massive loss? What about other factors of production, like utilities?

If it were that simple, we would be in a better place by now. Everything you've said has already been articulated, and societies and movements have tried to live by those principles and failed time and time again to create life affirming communities.

The "collective" can be just as harmful as the individual, and it should not be unconditionally romanticized and glorified. People live emotionally repressed lives in collectivist, moralizing societies. This is part of Nietzsche's (imo, totally valid critique) critique of Christianity and Liberalism.

We need to move beyond objective, moralizing language and embrace vulnerability and subjectivity. I can feel the undertones of resentment in your comment - your righteousness and hatred is obvious.

People need to be able to embrace a bit of selfishness, egoism and expression. Muzzling human nature is a lost cause which leads to dysfunctional dystopias. We have to work with it, not against it. We need to build a culture in which it can find a healthy expression.

Unfortunately capitalism and Liberalism are the closest we have come to this, but they are still moralizing and soul crushing, placing a heavy burden of duty on people. They rely on ruthlessly shaming all burnout and failure and hiding suffering from public view.

But it is not greed which is the problem, it is the complex psychological trap of "duty" and a responsibility to participate in exploitative public life. All of morality is just a bunch of scared angry monkeys desperately trying to hold it all together and maintain their standard of living. That's all it is. But people objectivize it and internalize it, instead of unconditionally loving themselves like an animal should. It's really that simple - we should love ourselves in a totally selfish and uncomplicated way, like a cat would.

We don't need morality and shame - we have empathy. Obviously there are natural psychopaths, but if we really had our shit together they would not be a problem. It's only around 1% of people, they could be checked by a community of healthy people.

Hope you break out of the psychological prison of Christian morality.

>If I work at a bookstore and sell 10 $10 books, I do not receive $100. That’s what it means for a worker to receive the full value of the work they do. What would the business owner get under this arrangement, don’t know, the value of whatever books they sell also.

Then you have merely failed to understand the value of labor. The value of the labor of a clerk at a bookstore is not equal to value of the books she sells. The value of the book is precisely the sum of the values added by the author, the publisher, the distributors, the bookstore, and, yes, even the sales clerk. She gets compensated for her portion of that value.

Not just physical…

>What im trying to say is, wealth and value are seperate things. Of course wealth can be produced and grown, im not arguing that. But to produce that wealth, first someone needs to agree on the value you placed on something, and they need to actually give you their wealth in order for you to produce it.

Why? You don't normally pay the author of a book you buy for the book before you buy it, do you?

>Can you answer me how can one generate wealth, or money, without someone else giving up their own wealth?

The same way one produces anything - through their own productive effort.

Certainly I don’t want employers earning a profit off of the work of their employees. Certainly no more than they are making at maximum.

The value that each person contributes would have to be tallied and paid in full. It was a simplistic example.

Someone receives the books and someone buys new ones, I guess you have to chop the value of each book sold into pieces.

That’s kind of a coop model. Then if you want to go full socialism, the workers own the means of production so there’s no books to buy or utilities to pay.

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Okay let me ask something else, what do you think wealth is? Cause i feel like we are talking about completely different things. When i say wealth, i mean the money (or the capital) you own and i think a lot of people will agree with me on that. Also for the book example, you know preordering is a thing right?

Im sure the child workers in the vein of matchstick girl would be super enthusiastic that they had been saved from those awful dark ages.

And the ceo of the company gets their share, right? No they get significantly more.

Well I'm wagering it on ice cream

Fair enough.

Money isn't wealth - it's just a symbol for it, so you don't have to barter item for item. Wealth is what the money stands for - which is basically anything people are willing to trade you for.

You may be knowing the rules but try to hide them somewhere in your brain for sake of your convenience.

So... capital. Money is a symbol for capital. Its amazing how much of a selective reader you are. Also if you read your own comment a few more times you can see that trade is an important element of wealth. People trade their wealth with each other, so no one actually creates wealth out of thin air.

Everybody stop philosophy - this guy figured it out.

In and of itself randomized outcomes to similar situations do provide equality. It is not much of a comfort on an individual level however

The balance of probabilities makes some more equal than others, therein lies the problem we're forced to accept

The problem is for the most part those natural psychopaths are our ruling class because their behavior is rewarded by the current structure. To be clear I am not espousing communism, just a regulatory structure focused on rewarding our other virtues and penalizing greed. Heavily regulated capitalism is probably our only option at this point.

Ha! well, no but I do think most of our problems can be traced back to wanting more than we need.

Today I ate fried rice, salad with walnuts and a little bit of skyr skyr.

Sheesh, I meant sin as it relates to a it’s harm to society.

I do understand what you mean

Something I learned as I was learning about art is rules are nothing more than causal relationships between actions and consequences. Some Rules are made as an attempt at curving the behavior of the collective into a societal norm others are inherent to our biology. An example in film making is as a general rule the horizon should always be parallel with the frame as a canted horizon will make the audience uneasy. Well what about when you want the audience to feel uneasy. Then that rule becomes a tool for story telling.

Not all Rules are written but all exist none the less. Long before the laws of gravity where described by Newton people were falling down and picking things up. But the better we understood the rules the more powerful the tool became. Culminating in nuclear power and space travel. When you understand a rule and why it exists it goes from being a restriction to being a fulcrum to balance against. Suddenly the thing holding you back can catapult you beyond your peers. Rules aren't made to be broken they are discoveries to be made and understood. Rules are tools.

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There is neither anyone left to observe. It is impossible to meet death because it would require an oxymoronistic self to observe the process of dying and the post mortem status. How is nothing absurd or insane? Unless you have learned sayings by heart and now you are only repeating these mental scripts that don’t have a meaning.

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I understand what you're trying to say here but it's not what the parent was talking about. Everyone's circumstances are different and that's OK.

You don't have to give away your money or possessions to be nice - all you have to do is smile at someone. Say hello. Ask the shop clerk how their day is going and mean it. Bring cookies into work. Let someone merge in front of you on the road. There is, if you look for it, always time and a way to bring a little bit of joy to the people you see in the world. If we all realize this, life becomes a lot more fun for everyone.

I am going to go with you on this. On the Why? part, not the robot part.

Rhetoric can do all kinds of things, including paradoxes and ironies, and that era of thinker used both rhetoric and philosophy quite well.

But that does not mean something can't be dated, or passe as it were.

It is one of those classic tropes in Western literature that death is somehow an insult. Theological reasons? Poetic reasons? Logical reasons? I am not confident saying why this developed as a trope, but it did. Death is an insult is how Schiller more or less described it, and that same thought is kind of implied in Kant. So death is this "categorical objection" of some kind?

In any event, I think such a notion was a creature of its time, and as time goes by is starting to appear to more people as very presumptuous. Absurdity is what happened to the Romantic notion of tragedy. But what "death is" simply can no longer be assumed. There is no consensus any more. We can use these old tropes, but the point kind of is, we are apparently moving out of their range.

Do we need to turn back?

How do you think a balanced culture between the individual and collective operate?

I appreciate your comment above.

Do you mean it is defeatist? If so, I wouldn't say that's completely true for every flavor of absurdism.

Put more simply: antisocial behavior is the reason we can’t have a proper society. I can’t believe people are arguing against this!

Empathy is not something everyone possess in sufficient amount, and it's very easy to lose. You're waging that empathy would be enough to prevent our deliberately selfish self under your ideal to not harm each other, and i think that would dangerously not work... Capitalism is basically what it is.

also a game that we play unwillingly

Humans are free to give anything meaning, even death. Life is required to give meaning.

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Suicide ends the game play pretty fast.

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“Life is a game” well you’d certainly love to believe that huh!

Probably actually, as will the hundreds of thousands that no longer die at birth or while giving birth.

There's one obvious example of why. Does it hurt more to break your leg, or see someone you love break a leg, or to see a random stranger break a leg?

How you rank those is going to determine your views on equality.

Will do what i can to live long enough to see others consider that option

Here, yet again we find the conservative, that vile creature, trying to justify their own greed and selfishness

But it does not belong to philosophy. Since philosophy is the study of the world, not study of the judgments about it as not all of them are very good. We know logically that not-life is not same as death starting after life. The meaning of life is to exist. So when it ends, the discussion about something existing ends. So we don’t even need empurical dispute about it, because it is conceptually coherent to say that after life there is nothing.

Life is every one’s viewpoint but death is the viewpoint of an outsider. But it has no value to the discussion.

It feels that as children we recognize that it's all play, and are told by the adults that it is otherwise. Then, some of us get so involved in the game that we think it is reality, that it is not a man-made system with man-made rules that purposely benefit a certain group over others. When people begin to realize that it is all play, that it is a big, pointless game so a few can live in absolute luxury and a vast majority toil until their one life is over, we are told to ignore the truth.

All of the empires, the nations, the power is illusion. The king has no clothes, we're primates on a small planet orbiting a small sun in a universe where nothing outside of paradigm changes will ultimately matter. We're dancing a dance we know the music is soon to end hoping for an encore.

I do wonder how Camus defines "meaning."

It's not as if what I'm advocating for could simply just pop into existence and become predominant. It would exist within the pre-existing context of the institutions we already have, and to me it is more of a cultural shift than a structural ideological one.

I think duty based ethical/moral systems are in practice passed down through generational trauma. It's all about what you need to do to get by, or live up to an ideal (an existing precedent.) Pretty common story across cultures:

Fail to live up to expectations -> shame and insecurity -> stress -> emotional outbursts and unhealthy coping -> rhetorical justification for unhealthy behavior, which even becomes common at the cultural level.

So the idea of right and wrong as it relates to our positive moral duties actually creates unhealthy behavior and the conditions for people to be more insecure and defensive and less empathetic. Helping people to realize this is therapeutic at the individual level. It helps people to love themselves as they are. So why not promote it at the familial level, or the communal level?

I am not against a punitive justice system which enforces common negative moral prohibitions, don't kill people, don't steal, etc. I am mainly focused on critiquing positive moral obligations which in practice restrict peoples freedom more than negative ones, because they obligate you to use large portions of your time in a certain way, and they create people with an insecure sense of self worth. Which does not help them function. And we learn this all from a very young age when we are taking all our cues from our parents.

Now, at the end of the day, even if we are not morally obligated to make a living, we would much rather be financially stable than financially insecure or homeless. But wouldn't you rather live in a family and culture which was not full of finger pointing, shame, and inability to cope with things like sickness, mental illness or bad fortune? Our ideas about "duty" break down in the face of the complexity of life, but that doesn't stop people from guilting and berating each other in moments of weakness and vulnerability.

So what you're saying is, Be Excellent to Each Other 🎸

And that can be traced back to survival instincts. Storing extra food and supplies for the coming winter.

At this point I don't even know what you are saying. Meaning is just as made up as 1+1=2. You can't put meaning on a table and physically examine it to be true. Human language is all metaphoric, none of it actually exists except in one place, your mind. Anything we accept as truth has meaning because life grants it. Death kills meaning. Life does the opposite.

God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

I can't help but think of this comment as downright silly, unless you have an ounce of reasoning behind what you've said?

operate at a loss? no the boss just pays themself the same amount as they pay their employees.

its how i run my business, im not doing any extra work and im not the one risking homelessness so why i do i deserve all the rewards and the employees a pittance?

ever heard of Mondragon? largest worker coop is fucking Huawei, you dont need a traditional top-down ruled corporate structure to succeed, at all (as much as the Americans here would like to claim otherwise, they routinely try to claim huawei isnt a worker owned coop cause 'muh ccp')

>operate at a loss? no the boss just pays themself the same amount as they pay their employees.

Their hypothetical involved every cent of revenue going to paying sales employees, leaving nothing left for paying other employees/expenses, let alone profits. As they acknowledged in their reply to me.

>I mean, I'm not sure that your own examples don't disprove your point. McDonald's has plenty of competion - even within the fast food subset of restaurants. So does Coke. Even Google has a solid list of alternatives you can quickly find by using Google.

you realise that half those examples own the competition right? the companies that own coke also own some 50% of global beverages (the other global player being the owners of suntory).

all markets tend toward monopoly, its the entire inevitable end point of capitalistic growth. all wealthy people want more wealth and the easiest way to get it is not innovation or competition but bribery, nepotism and corruption. as a class they bribe gov (hence why its so slow and inefficient, its paid to be) to give them access to captive markets and grant them regulatory capture to crush actual competition.

wealth is less produced and grown and more gamified and almost purely speculative (massive growth in the most captive markets ie food, housing, healthcare, energy and gov keeps letting the wealthy have more and more of it because both sides work for the investment class)

>If you don't wish to call what I just described Capitalism, call it something else then and I shall agree, because it's that system that has brought us out of the dark ages and given us everything.

how? it didnt reduce global poverty by 1 billion, fucking China did using the money we paid them.

did capitalism achieve that? if it did then it has also achieved the highest death toll of any system, belief or ideology in human history.

(using the highest possible figures ie including the nazis the ussr killed communism killed 100 million, capitalism has it beaten by several times over easily)

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Lots of animals do that, I don't see any squirrels out there destroying the planet to maximize quarterly profits.

I mean in a certain sense, isn’t alot of philosophy trying to answer the unanswerable or unknown so it makes sense it is similar?

You probably would if they evolved to the point of extensive tool use and creative abilities. And then gave them another half a million years.

That’s technically a little false though right? One could argue some people are greedy lustful etc etc and still get everything they want. How does that make this rule true?

When you break it down, I think philosophy is mostly metacognition. Psychology is still just as much philosophical as it is scientific.

There aren’t really huge difference between the three thinkers. Kierkegaard kind of needed Christianity as a coping mechanism.

Nietzsche genuinely did kind of break himself with stress. I don’t necessarily buy that he “went crazy.” I really feel like you can’t fully separate his alienation from German culture and Germany’s drift into fascism.

Camus forwards romanticism as a coping mechanism. He better understood science because of the time period he came from.

He was skilled at incorporating his philosophy into political and artistic results. I’d argue Camus had slightly more similarities with Doestoevsky than Kierkegaard.

There has been increasing information that he might have been politically assassinated by the KGB: https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/05/albert-camus-murdered-by-the-kgb-giovanni-catelli

A lot of political assassinations happened in the 1960s.

Great question! I wrote my college thesis on this!

Kierkegaard saw the absurd(the inherently ridiculous relationship between the ambivalence of the universe and humanity's desire to find meaning) and thought that faith(in god specifically) was a way to reconcile these opposing ideas.

Camus on the other hand feels that faith is a sort of "easy way out"(grossly oversimplifying) and that in his mind, the best way to approach the absurd is with a full throated utter and complete acceptance of it. Face the absurdity with your head held high and laugh in its face, and then just try and be a good person. Realize that we're all in this together and really other people is what we have to make it all worth it.

Happy to answer other questions on this topic! Hope it helps!

It's very obviously and clearly not. Camus was, despite all appearances, an optimist and a humanist.

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we have to make it all worth it

You exist. Not your fault. Now that youre here, whatta ya do?

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Don't reproduce. Be nice to the people around you and try your best to live a simple and satisfying life. Your life won't matter beyond the ages anyway.

“Because of personal freedom at all costs” -Sartre, the individual

Sartre would argue that the instabilities that arise in human relationships are a form of inter-subjective bad faith.

In more seriousness, because people are sick as all get out. With the invention of psychotronics we are getting back to torture, now just like coward rapists.

Life is life , games is recreation of life with imagination with specific rules to keep it inline or from breaking .

Sure, but who cares? You're missing the point of basically all nihilist based philosophy. Why is Greed bad, what is "bad" why do we care if we do something "bad". There is no "good" or "evil" is the fundamental argument of nihilists, sure it hurts someone, who cares? If that someone doesn't matter why do we care that it hurt someone. Why is causing pain "evil" why do we even care if it is "evil" you're 1 step to high on the ethics chain.

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I suppose I think of life as a partial battle against entropy, but human nature goes into play with the structures of society and it’s expectations which turn people into self-selecting assholes instead of the harder route of being a good human being, because it goes against the game that life proves as best for many groups of humans. Capitalism and individualism goes against the humanity we all want to be but actively discourages. Edit: and to add to this to explain my understanding of this post and create more connection to the article in question, I was just discussing the Mandela Effect with my partner and how pop culture and group collusion affects our understanding of reality which in turn is affected by pop culture, a more intentional/unintended affect of satire AND group collusion.

Nothing brings people together like hate!

And party on, dudes!

I don't think all of it needs to be purged, just all of Louisiana, half of Mississippi, and maybe parts of San Bernadino. Etch-A-Sketch that shit and start over.

is that your argument against being pleasant? i'm not sure i understand your 'because'.

They can be both tools and limits. If you only have a certain collection of tools at your disposal, there are certain things you won't be able to do no matter your level of mastery with what's available.

If your argument revolves around maximizing the depth and breadth of what you can accomplish, it seems like mastery is the thing, and rules are indeed limiting factors. One's lack of mastery is what imposes the extra limits on top of those imposed by the rules.

Well, right out of the gate, nihilism is what Nietzsche warned against, not what he espoused or encouraged. The better question is if his idea of becoming an overman is similar.

I'd argue it's more similar to Kierkegaard, because striving is, ultimately, an attempt to impose order on chaos. Both of them recognize that that's not really, truly happening at the highest mortal levels (though Kierkegaard obviously posits that the highest level, God, has it all figured out.)

If Kierkegaard is proposing a way to help you make sense of absurdity even if it can never truly make sense to a mortal, Nieztsche is telling you to go out there and make the absurdity make sense - like, with a sword. Be your own boss, and everybody else's. God is dead, so there's a vacuum. Fill it. Be awesome.

One could rightly criticize Kierkegaard's philosophy by suggesting that he's just telling people to be weak and follow what some other man - maybe even an overman - laid out as The Truth by the sword. Of course, Nieztsche's philosophy involves running forever and never stopping, lest everything catch up with you. It's exhausting, and it gels far too well with the general bent of high-functioning narcissistic psychopaths (and even some low-functioning ones, if enough people in a given realm are profoundly dumb and gullible already, cough cough.)

The rules are actually quite clear

I misread you the first time. Duty to me is not really something that is prevalent in our western culture, however, the culture of positive do's you call positive moral duties still revolves around what society deems valuable, which is money. So anything that gets money is seen as good, and the reverse bad, the rest, indifferent. And indeed, we learn this gradually, however there must be some overlap between our moral instincts such as doing good work, and preserving the status quo, avoiding conflicts.

I did not realize that positive moral obligations could also be self limiting, yet we are striving towards it, because they are what we should be or do, culturally.

One would require basically therapy on a global scale to change something.

But yes, I agree with your premises. I do think it is gradually shifting already, the last generation understands the flaws of our current system and strives to behave otherwise. One very obvious thing is the openness of discussion of mental illness and the struggles of life.

I find this not to be amongst those that embrace absurdism. Rather, I feel like this is the response of either one unable to accept it or one fighting hard to place order upon it.

I think the author could have easily said “why birth?”

The cross from non-existence to existence or vice versa is absurd. Actually any existence is absurd to begin with. Buy if we except that we are here. And there is something happening here. Then why phase in and out of it?

That’s how I took it.

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Yeah but apart from mathematics, symbols must have a concrete target it is connected to. If death is nothing then it cannot cause even any feelings, unless we have conditioned and suggested ourselves with that particular word, "death" so it causes for example fear. Of course the culture does this for us.

I think we have a similar lack of enchantment on this train of thought lol. Yes, I agree.

Death why not birth? After all, I can potentially consent to death, but I cannot consent to birth. It seems to me "violation of consent" is what badgers 19th and 1st half 20th century philosophy, in essence.

Well birth is far more an outrage than death then.

As to the here and now, and how it tends to not have room for such thoughts, I guess we can modify the saying: there are no absurdists in foxholes.

edit: "Then why phase in and out of it?" -- excellent way of putting the issue.

Yum. Just want to let you know all those things were alive.

Life favors life or it would be dead.

The people they harm to get what they want has a negative impact on society as a whole. I am not talking about one person. One person can be greedy their entirely life and be rewarded the whole way, that is a problem for us as a whole.

Again I am just thinking of a "Sin" as something that negatively impacts our society, not as good or evil. Greed is very interesting in this regard. Greed started civilization. After all the first farmer was tired of gathering, and wanted a reliable source of food that would actually be end up being more than he needed. This success just reinforced the behavior and led the hypothetical farmer to seek power over others with his wealth and make them farm for him...and on and on and on, until we ended up where we are now. Was it wrong for the farmer to seek a reliable source of food? No, but it lead us to where we are now and if we continue on this trend, we will literally destroy our ecosystem completely.

So while not "wrong" ethically, greed inevitably leads to negative consequences for humanity. If our culture or biology had some brake on greed (some cultures have...see the Hawaiian tradition of Kapu (Taboo) as an example, maybe we would have slowed our technological advance, but prospered none the less. Instead we went with "quick and dirty" and it is now costing us dearly.

Right, but then greed would still be the problem, it would just be squirrel greed instead. I am not saying that only human greed would be a problem.

The Universe is alive. If you doubt, zoom out.

Yes, and THIS is the purpose of life: To create meaning.

That’s still missing the point of existentialist thought(which Camus falls under), Camus’s most important work on absurdism posits a singular question, “Should I kill myself” and argues that’s the most important philosophical question. Ethics in the face of this question are completely meaningless, as it’s a question that comes prior to questions of ethics.

Prospering, societal harm, destroying the ecosystem, none of that matters if we can’t answer the fundamental question of whether life is meaningless. That’s why greed doesn’t matter here and is irrelevant to absurdism. Negative consequences don’t matter if fundamentally life is meaningless. Absurdism is the seeking of meaning in a meaningless universe.

I have a feeling you’ve never read Camus? Or any Absurdist authors? Your making arguments, or observations that come after, which are essentially meaningless in the face of the Absurd condition.

Did you even read the article?

Edit: used a term incorrectly

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> and payed in

Did you mean to say "paid"?
Explanation: Payed means to seal something with wax, while paid means to give money.
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