> Unfortunately it seems to me that addiction tends to defeat good cognition, awareness, intention, all the rest of the apparent defences – it isn't a disease of stupidity or inferiority.
Sadly this is true for so many things -- depression, ADHD, extreme anxiety. And yet for the most part, society does not understand. Instead, people aren't trying hard enough, or they're not letting things make them happy, or they're lazy, or are procrastinating.
If only more people realized that no amount of awareness or intelligence can overcome some of these issues without help from others -- be it friends, family, medical professionals, or strangers -- perhaps the world would be a better place.
This is true for like everything. Watch people talk about gun control or 2fa or any topic of discourse. Everyone thinks the other side is dumb and can’t see why the other side believes the way they do no matter what.
It’s a sign of lack of experience, but you also can’t experience even 1% of everything so are you just need to learn that when a lot of people are doing something that doesn’t make sense to you and it makes you think they’re dumb, it just means that you just don’t have the tools to figure out why yet. Of course, it also doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re right either.
> Everyone thinks the other side is dumb and can’t see why the other side believes the way they do no matter what.
That's easy to see in other people talking about other people, and difficult to see in yourself talking about other people.
TFA is not really about that.
TFA is about one man who exhibited two distinct personas. One was loving and kind, the other was tormented and self-destructive. He left a diary as the only way he could find to present his better self to his family, free from the interference of the destructive aspects of his persona/s.
It is tempting to wonder which persona is the "real" one, which leads to attempts to resolve or cure or purify the self, either by ones self or by others. But that assumes there is such a thing as a "real" self. That's a common paradigm in western cultures, particularly Hollywood films, and less common in other parts of the world, particularly easter cultures.
What if the self is not singular, but a fluid network of identities?
Identity is a socially constructed fiction that we are bound to via continuous environmental reinforcement. We impose identities on each other as a fundamental precept of social reality. It's somewhere in the middle of our existential stack, biochemistry being the "hardware" and what one does with one's life the being the "apps".
Just like migrating a computer from one operating system to a vastly different one means you won't be able to run the same apps out of the box, changing our idea of the "self" would make a lot of the things we currently do become meaningless, and we would have to explicitly put some effort into giving them new meaning if we wanna keep them (most meaning is inherited). Just like some people are enthusiastic about fine tuning their Unix box or their muscle car, some try to remedy issues that they find in their identities and meanings. (Which is highly undesirable to the status quo, and a major purpose of all the political noise in the media is to crowd out thinking that may lead to this sort of activity.)
Since the self is self-reinforcing, reforms to our model of identity generally come from outside our rational awareness. (See e.g. Jungian "shadow self".) Historically, art and culture, being collective phenomena, have acted as such a reservoir of "awareness transcending the self". Nowadays we also have behavioral targeting - social network algorithms can be scarily accurate at precipitating self-reflection. And unlike culture, which is local, participatory, and slow, big data is global, opaque, and fast. (Just the other day, I laughed my ass off when I realized that a popular recommender algo had deduced my life situation from my "completely random" "fuck the algo" actions on the platform, and started promoting exactly the kind of content that would push my buttons, even though all I ever post on that platform is complete and utter nonsense. We humans are predictable - even from metadata if the scale is large enough.)
It is quite easy to become trapped in the self: remain high-functioning while acting out a role that you feel to be fundamentally contradictory with some sort of "more real, inner self" that you identify with more intentionally. In the general case, we don't have the cognitive tools to become aware that both selves are equally fictitious. This desperate and uninformed struggle towards a "true self" can manifest as different compensatory drives and mechanisms that can override our (self-circumscribed) willpower and make us destructive of self and others.
Worse, in many environments, a certain degree of destructiveness is necessary for others to legitimize you as a self in the first place! Shout out to everyone who never wanted anything to do with any of that but are now stuck being some random person they barely recognize. And a dose of your preferred self-medication, on the house. Stay strong friends, Skynet is coming to free us all. Any day now
Opinion: It absolutely is. Compassion uplifts many of us who could otherwise be a burden on those around us. It helps the most productive avoid burn out. It spreads responsibility by enabling more people, and not relying solely on those who thrive with less support. Compassion is the long view as far as I can tell.
We may come to believe there’s an incompatibility, but I don’t believe it’s innate within capitalism itself. I think it’s more so a byproduct of how it has been implemented so far combined with deep cultural hang ups. There’s no reason I can see that would make capitalism and compassion exclusive of each other.
I believe addiction and a lack of compassion largely come down to culture. Rejection and condemnation of psychological issues likely occurred long before financial systems influenced our decisions so strongly.
I recently listened to a journalist discuss her work on corruption. She made this point: the prevalence of corruption rises in cultures that view monetary wealth as the only or primary mark of social status. She called it the Midas Disease as this pursuit is - at a certain point - meaningless (is another hundred million dollars when you already have 100 billion?), and yet - the effects of this pursuit have significant downstream effects on the fair application of justice, sustainable environmental policy, professional administration of governmental functions, etc.
I thought it was well known that corruption is a bigger problem in developing nations which are likely to be considerably less capitalistic than first world nations?
It may be well known, but is it true? "Corruption" implies there's a previously established social order to corrupt. But in developing nations this social order is not something that existed and is now being undermined; it's something that is still under development. Hence, "developing" countries - phrasing that assumes an "end-of-history" inevitability and self-evident goodness of the current status quo.
In that sense, corruption is the process of a society developing towards capitalism, but using its pre-existing societal toolset of ad-hoc interpersonal arrangements, in all their messy complexity, rather than the established processes of societies with centuries-old institutional traditions of having 1 universal metric for everything (capital). As capitalism is based on inter-generational accumulation of wealth, corruption can only be resolved over generations as societies become more trusting of the rationalist paradigm.
In today's hypercompetitive, multinational world, capitalism is indeed the sole goal of society, to enable those who work to make massive amounts of money, to do more and more. Even China, a quite communistic country, has fully embraced capitalism in terms of it's international dealings.
The culture issues we have in the US are largely a result of the hyper-rich influencing things in such a way that work itself becomes such a pride point, that those who are unable to work in the framework that society provides are called lazy and worthless, even when those people may flourish under a system with different constraints. Forcing some people to work jobs they have zero passion for, instead of allowing them to have a basic security net such that they can seek their own path in this life, is cruel. I have ADHD and it has so far been physically impossible to focus on something that doesn't somehow "grip" my focus, and I don't really control what things do so. So the vast majority of work out there is not something I can do and be successful, as the additional mental effort to even come close to focusing drains every bit of my being and makes me absolutely dreadfully miserable. If this is the path of capitalism for myself and countless others, then it needs serious reform.
Sadly this is true for so many things -- depression, ADHD, extreme anxiety. And yet for the most part, society does not understand. Instead, people aren't trying hard enough, or they're not letting things make them happy, or they're lazy, or are procrastinating.
If only more people realized that no amount of awareness or intelligence can overcome some of these issues without help from others -- be it friends, family, medical professionals, or strangers -- perhaps the world would be a better place.