TheMaterialist:



I get your points, although there are some people
that wouldn't want to be saved.

They would probably see it as in infringement
on their freewill.

yeah I get you
But the great good supersede all

TheMaterialist:



I get your points, although there are some people
that wouldn't want to be saved.

They would probably see it as in infringement
on their freewill.

yeah I get you
But the greater good supersede all

crystalmoon:
yeah I get you
But the greater good supersede all

I agree,
#Utilitarianism.

TheMaterialist:
1. Do you think there will ever be a global government?

2. If a world government did come to power,
assuming it wasn’t particularly cruel or evil,
would it be a good or bad thing?

Well I assume you have the basics knowledge of geopolitics and global dynamics
There won't be a global government
Each power and principalities to their regions
The Western world was the global government once but now we are now in a multipolar world
... A global government won't be of benefit to Africa
I don't think governments can be amoral
Either they work for the benefits of everyone or they work for a selected few
.... Global government is bad we all have different ideas
People come together has always being a form of power play
We bow to the most deceptive member

Kobojunkie:
I don't do social media. So chat is strictly nairaland for me.

I have to speak to you this night

crystalmoon:
I have to speak to you this night

I am not a mental health professional, you know. I am just a happily unemployed individual with lots of time on hand.

crystalmoon:
I have to speak to you this night

So, tell me, what exactly is it you think I can do to help your friend cause I am at a loss here?

TheMaterialist post=126015189Fruit hich Orange came first,
the Colour or the Fruit?[/b:

The Fruit because it existed long time before the word was even coined.

Blakjewelry:

The Fruit because it existed long time before the word was even coined.

I think the colour existed before the fruit,
remember colour is part of the spectrum of light.

Since light has always existed,
the colour orange had always existed also.


I remember the seven colours of the rainbow

R - Red
O - Orange
Y - Yellow
G - Green
B - Blue
I - Indigo
V - Violet

These colours have always existed long before
life started on earth, because they come from
the Sun.

TheMaterialist:




I think the colour existed before the fruit,
remember colour is part of the spectrum of light.

Since light has always existed,
the colour orange had always existed also.


I remember the seven colours of the rainbow

R - Red
O - Orange
Y - Yellow
G - Green
B - Blue
I - Indigo
V - Violet

These colours have always existed long before
life started on earth, because they come from
the Sun.

I agree with you.

crystalmoon:
whenever you feel individualistic think In terms of the greater good
Most humans don't know the extent of the evil in them
Will it be considered evil if man is saved from himself
Basically it is an art of saving people from themselves

The issue with this "saving" is that who defines what is considered good or evil to be saved. Morality is already something that is arbitarily defined for a lot of aspects that people feel strongly about. This lobotomy of human behaviour over transient societal moral values is dystopian and indicative of a society that hasn't developed mature capabilities regarding morality and biological behavioural understanding.

It's like giving a primitive tribal village nukes! It's too early for any current day societies to be interfering with individual behaviour without setting out an amoral nihilistic framework for ethics.

TheMaterialist:
Would you want to know you are going to die beforehand or die suddenly without warning?

die suddenly without warning
I have made peace with death because I can't escape it no matter what
The only thing left to do is continue dishing out intellectual properties that will make the world a better place

Bertrand Russel on Happiness

What Makes People Unhappy?


Animals are happy so long as they have health and enough to eat.


Human beings,
one feels, ought to be,
but in the modern world they are not,
at least in a great majority of cases.


If you are unhappy yourself, you will probably be prepared to admit that you are not exceptional in this.


If you are happy, ask yourself how many of your friends are so.

And when you have reviewed your friends,
teach yourself the art of reading faces;
make yourself receptive to the moods of those whom you meet in the course of an ordinary day.

A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe,
says Blake.


Though the kinds are different, you will find that unhappiness meets you everywhere.

Perhaps the best introduction to the philosophy which I wish to advocate will be a few words of autobiography.

I was not born happy.

As a child, my favourite hymn was:
‘Weary of earth and laden with my sin.’

At the age of five,
I reflected that,
if I should live to be seventy, I had only endured, so far,
a fourteenth part of my whole life,
and I felt the long-spread-out boredom ahead of me to be almost unendurable.


In adolescence,
I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however,
I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics.

TheMaterialist:

Perhaps the best introduction to the philosophy which I wish to advocate will be a few words of autobiography.

I was not born happy.

As a child, my favourite hymn was:
‘Weary of earth and laden with my sin.’

At the age of five,
I reflected that,
if I should live to be seventy, I had only endured, so far,
a fourteenth part of my whole life,
and I felt the long-spread-out boredom ahead of me to be almost unendurable.


In adolescence,
I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however,
I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics.

continue am enjoying biography

Now,
on the contrary,
I enjoy life;



I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more.



This is due partly to having discovered what were the things that I most desired and having gradually acquired many of these things.



Partly it is due to having successfully dismissed certain objects of desire –
such as the acquisition of indubitable knowledge about something or other – as essentially unattainable.



But very largely it is due to a diminishing preoccupation with myself.



Like others who had a Puritan education,
I had the habit of meditating on my sins, follies, and shortcomings.



I seemed to myself – no doubt justly – a miserable specimen.


Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies;


I came to centre my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world,
various branches of knowledge,
individuals for whom I felt affection.

External interests, it is true,
bring each its own possibility of pain:
the world may be plunged in war,
knowledge in some direction may be hard to achieve, friends may die.



But pains of these kinds do not destroy the essential quality of life,
as do those that spring from disgust with self.




And every external interest inspires some activity which, so long as the interest remains alive, is a complete preventive of ennui.




Interest in oneself, on the contrary,
leads to no activity of a progressive kind.



It may lead to the keeping of a diary,
to getting psycho-analysed,
or perhaps to becoming a monk.



But the monk will not be happy until the routine of the monastery has made him forget his own soul.



The happiness which he attributes to religion he could have obtained from becoming a crossing-sweeper, provided he were compelled to remain one.




External discipline is the only road to happiness for those unfortunates whose self-absorption is too profound to be cured in any other way.

Continue
Am actively learning

Self-absorption is of various kinds.

We may take the sinner, the narcissist, and the megalomaniac as three very common types.



When I speak of ‘the sinner’,
I do not mean the man who commits sins:
sins are committed by everyone or no one, according to our definition of the word;



I mean the man who is absorbed in the consciousness of sin.


This man is perpetually incurring his own disapproval, which, if he is religious,
he interprets as the disapproval of God.


He has an image of himself as he thinks he ought to be, which is in continual conflict with his knowledge of himself as he is.


If, in his conscious thought,
he has long since discarded the maxims that he was taught at his mother’s knee, his sense of sin may be buried deep in his unconscious, and only emerge when he is drunk or asleep.


Nevertheless, it may suffice to take the savour out of everything.

At bottom he still accepts all the prohibitions he was taught in infancy.


Swearing is wicked;
drinking is wicked;
ordinary business shrewdness is wicked;
above all, sex is wicked.


He does not, of course, abstain from any of these pleasures, but they are all poisoned for him by the feeling that they degrade him.


The one pleasure that he desires with his whole soul is that of being approvingly caressed by his mother, which he can remember having experienced in childhood.


This pleasure being no longer open to him,
he feels that nothing matters: since he must sin, he decides to sin deeply.



When he falls in love he looks for maternal tenderness, but cannot accept it, because,
owing to the motherimage,
he feels no respect for any woman with whom he has sexual relations.


Then, in his disappointment, he becomes cruel, repents of his cruelty, and starts afresh on the dreary round of imagined sin and real remorse.


This is the psychology of very many apparently hard-boiled reprobates.


What drives them astray is devotion to an unattainable object (mother or mothersubstitute) together with the inculcation, in early years, of a ridiculous ethical code.


Liberation from the tyranny of early beliefs and affections is the first step towards happiness for these victims of maternal 'virtue'.

Narcissism is, in a sense,
the converse of an habitual sense of sin;
it consists in the habit of admiring oneself and wishing to be admired.


Up to a point it is, of course, normal, and not to be deplored; it is only in its excesses that it becomes a grave evil.


In many women, especially rich society women, the capacity for feeling love is completely dried up, and is replaced by a powerful desire that all men should love them.


When a woman of this kind is sure that a man loves her, she has no further use for him.


The same thing occurs, though less frequently, with men; the classic example is the hero of Liaisons Dangereuses.


When vanity is carried to this height, there is no genuine interest in any other person, and therefore no real satisfaction to be obtained from love.


Other interests fail even more disastrously.


A narcissist, for example, inspired by the homage paid to great painters, may become an art student;
but, as painting is for him a mere means to an end, the technique never becomes interesting, and no subject can be seen except in relation to self.



The result is failure and disappointment, with ridicule instead of the expected adulation.


The same thing applies to those novelists whose novels always have themselves idealised as heroines.


All serious success in work depends upon some genuine interest in the material with which the work is concerned.


The tragedy of one successful politician after another is the gradual substitution of narcissism for an interest in the community and the measures for which he stands.


The man who is only interested in himself is not admirable, and is not felt to be so.


Consequently the man whose sole concern with the world is that it shall admire him is not likely to achieve his object.


But even if he does, he will not be completely happy, since human instinct is never completely self-centred,
and the narcissist is limiting himself artificially just as truly as is the man dominated by a sense of sin.


The primitive man might be proud of being a good hunter,
but he also enjoyed the activity of the chase.


Vanity, when it passes beyond a point,
kills pleasure in every activity for its own sake,
and thus leads inevitably to listlessness and boredom.


Often its source is diffidence, and its cure lies in the growth of self-respect.


But this is only to be gained by successful activity inspired by objective interests.

The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming,
and seeks to be feared rather than loved.



To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men in history.


Love of power, like vanity, is a strong element in normal human nature,
and as such is to be accepted;
it becomes deplorable only when it is excessive or associated with an insufficient sense of reality.



Where this occurs it makes a man unhappy or foolish if not both.
The lunatic who thinks he is a crowned head may be, in a sense, happy,
but his happiness is not of a kind that any sane person would envy.



Alexander the Great was psychologically of the same type as the lunatic,
though he possessed the talent to achieve the lunatic’s dream.



He could not, however, achieve his own dream, which enlarged its scope as his achievement grew.

When it became clear that he was the greatest conqueror known to fame, he decided that he was a God.

Was he a happy man?
His drunkenness,
his furious rages,
his indifference to women,
and his claim to divinity, suggest that he was not.



There is no ultimate satisfaction in the cultivation of one element of human nature at the expense of all the others,
nor in viewing all the world as raw material for the magnificence of one’s own ego.



Usually the megalomaniac,
whether insane or nominally sane,
is the product of some excessive humiliation.



Napoleon suffered at school from inferiority to his schoolfellows, who were rich aristocrats,
while he was a penurious scholarship boy.



When he allowed the return of the émigrés,
he had the satisfaction of seeing his former schoolfellows bowing down before him.

What bliss!
Yet it led to the wish to obtain a similar satisfaction at the expense of the Czar, and this led to Saint Helena.



Since no man can be omnipotent,
a life dominated wholly by love of power can hardly fail, sooner or later, to meet with obstacles that cannot be overcome.



The knowledge that this is so,
can only be prevented from obtruding on consciousness by some form of lunacy,
though if a man is sufficiently great he can imprison or execute those who point this out to him.



Repressions in the political and in the psychoanalytic senses thus go hand in hand.


And wherever psychoanalytic repression in any marked form takes place,
there is no genuine happiness.


Power kept within its proper bounds may add greatly to happiness,
but as the sole end of life it leads to disaster, inwardly if not outwardly.



The psychological causes of unhappiness, it is clear, are many and various.



But all have something in common.

The typical unhappy man is one who,
having been deprived in youth of some normal satisfaction,
has come to value this one kind of satisfaction more than any other,
and has therefore given to his life a one-sided direction,
together with a quite undue emphasis upon the achievement,
as opposed to the activities connected with it.

There is, however, a further development which is very common in the present day.

A man may feel so completely thwarted that he seeks no form of satisfaction,
but only distraction and oblivion.


He then becomes a devotee of ‘pleasure’. That is to say he seeks to make life bearable by becoming less alive.


Drunkenness, for example, is temporary suicide; the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness.



The narcissist and the megalomaniac believe that happiness is possible, though they may adopt mistaken means of achieving it; but the man who seeks intoxication, in whatever form, has given up hope except in oblivion.



In his case, the first thing to be done is to persuade him that happiness is desirable.



Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

Perhaps their pride is like that of the fox who had lost his tail;
if so,
the way to cure it is to point out to them how they can grow a new tail.


Very few men, I believe,
will deliberately choose unhappiness if they see a way of being happy.



I do not deny that such men exist,
but they are not sufficiently numerous to be important.


I shall therefore assume that the reader would rather be happy than unhappy.


Whether I can help him to realise this wish,
I do not know;
but at any rate the attempt can do no harm.

Boredom and Excitement



Boredom as a factor in human behaviour has received,
in my opinion,
far less attention than it deserves.



It has been,
I believe, one of the great motive powers throughout the historical epoch,
and is so at the present day more than ever.



Boredom would seem to be a distinctively human emotion.
Animals in captivity, it is true, become listless, pace up and down, and yawn,
but in a state of nature I do not believe that they experience anything analogous to boredom.



Most of the time they are on the lookout for enemies,
or food, or both;
sometimes they are mating,
sometimes they are trying to keep warm.



But even when they are unhappy,
I do not think that they are bored.



Possibly anthropoid apes may resemble us in this respect, as in so many others,
but having never lived with them I have not had the opportunity to make the experiment.



One of the essentials of boredom consists in the contrast between present circumstances and some other more agreeable circumstances which force themselves irresistibly upon the imagination.




It is also one of the essentials of boredom that one’s faculties must not be fully occupied.



Running away from enemies who are trying to take one’s life is, I imagine, unpleasant,
but certainly not boring.




A man would not feel bored while he was being executed, unless he had almost superhuman courage.



In like manner no one has ever yawned during his maiden speech in the House of Lords, with the exception of the late Duke of Devonshire, who was reverenced by their Lordships in consequence.




Boredom is essentially a thwarted desire for events,
not necessarily pleasant ones,
but just occurrences such as will enable the victim of ennui to know one day from another.




The opposite of boredom, in a word,
is not pleasure, but excitement.

The desire for excitement is very deep-seated in human beings,
especially in males.



I suppose that in the hunting stage it was more easily gratified than it has been since.



The chase was exciting,
war was exciting,
courtship was exciting.




A savage will manage to commit adultery with a woman while her husband is asleep beside her, knowing that it is instant death if the husband wakes.



This situation, I imagine, is not boring.



But with the coming of agriculture,
life began to grow dull, except, of course, for the aristocrats, who remained, and still remain, in the hunting stage.




We hear a great deal about the tedium of machine-minding,
but I think the tedium of agriculture by old-fashioned methods is at least as great.




Indeed, contrary to what most philanthropists maintain,
I should say that the machine age has enormously diminished the sum of boredom in the world.




Among wage-earners the working hours are not solitary,
while the evening hours can be given over to a variety of amusements that were impossible in an old-fashioned country village.




Consider again the change in lower middle-class life.


In old days, after supper,
when the wife and daughters had cleared away the things,
everybody sat round and had what was called
‘a happy family time’.




This meant that paterfamilias went to sleep,
his wife knitted, and the daughters wished they were dead or at Timbuktu.



They were not allowed to read,
or to leave the room,
because the theory was that at that period their father conversed with them,
which must be a pleasure to all concerned.




With luck they ultimately married and had a chance to inflict upon their children a youth as dismal as their own had been.



If they did not have luck, they developed into old maids, perhaps ultimately into decayed gentlewomen – a fate as horrible as any that savages have bestowed upon their victims.





All this weight of boredom should be borne in mind in estimating the world of a hundred years ago,
and when one goes further into the past the boredom becomes still worse.




Imagine the monotony of winter in a mediaeval village.


People could not read or write,
they had only candles to give them light after dark,
the smoke of their one fire filled the only room that was not bitterly cold.



Roads were practically impassable,
so that one hardly ever saw anybody from another village.



It must have been boredom as much as anything, that led to the practice of witch-hunts as the sole sport by which winter evenings could be enlivened.

TheMaterialist:

I agree,
#Utilitarianism.

> greed, deciet, violence, and other negative traits are (essential) factors in life and human survival. The day everyone becomes "righteous" (loose our negative traits) our existence is in danger.

crystalmoon:
yeah I get you
But the great good supersede all

~ there is no actual "great good". what you see as "the greater good" may be evil. i believe the "greater good" has a different meaning to each person. Every action(even actions taken with fear or regret) a person takes deep down he believes somehow is for the greater good, the "greater good" can be a moment (even if its a short moment), a feeling or a reward.

reXurrectionZA:
~ there is no actual "great good". what you see as "the greater good" may be evil. i believe the "greater good" has a different meaning to each person. Every action(even actions taken with fear or regret) a person takes deep down he believes somehow is for the greater good, the "greater good" can be a moment (even if its a short moment), a feeling or a reward.

Hmm another angle

We are less bored than our ancestors were,
but we are more afraid of boredom.



We have come to know,
or rather to believe,
that boredom is not part of the natural lot of man, but can be avoided by a sufficiently vigorous pursuit of excitement.



Girls nowadays earn their own living, very largely because this enables them to seek excitement in the evening and to escape ‘the happy family time’ that their grandmothers had to endure.



Everybody who can lives in a town;
in America, those who cannot, have a car, or at the least a motor-bicycle, to take them to the movies.
And of course they have the radio in their houses.



Young men and young women meet each other with much less difficulty than was formerly the case, and every housemaid expects at least once a week as much excitement as would have lasted a Jane Austen heroine throughout a whole novel.




As we rise in the social scale the pursuit of excitement becomes more and more intense.



Those who can afford it are perpetually moving from place to place,
carrying with them as they go gaiety, dancing and drinking,
but for some reason always expecting to enjoy these more in a new place.



Those who have to earn a living get their share of boredom, of necessity, in working hours,
but those who have enough money to be freed from the need of work have as their ideal a life completely freed from boredom.




It is a noble ideal, and far be it from me to decry it, but I am afraid that like other ideals it is more difficult to achievement than the idealists suppose.




After all,
the mornings are boring in proportion as the previous evenings were amusing.




There will be middle age, possibly even old age.
At twenty men think that life will be over at thirty. I, at the age of fifty-eight, can no longer take that view.

Perhaps it is as unwise to spend one’s vital capital as one’s financial capital.


Perhaps some element of boredom is a necessary ingredient in life.



A wish to escape from boredom is natural; indeed, all races of mankind have displayed it as opportunity occurred.



When savages have first tasted liquor at the hands of the white men,
they have found at last an escape from age-old tedium, and, except when the Government has interfered, they have drunk themselves into a riotous death.



Wars, pogroms, and persecutions have all been part of the flight from boredom;
even quarrels with neighbours have been found better than nothing.




Boredom is therefore a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

Boredom, however,
is not to be regarded as wholly evil.




There are two sorts, of which one is fructifying, while the other is stultifying.



The fructifying kind arises from the absence of drugs,
and the stultifying kind from the absence of vital activities.



I am not prepared to say that drugs can play no good part in life whatsoever.

There are moments, for example, when an opiate will be prescribed by a wise physician,
and I think these moments more frequent than prohibitionists suppose.




But the craving for drugs is certainly something which cannot be left to the unfettered operation of natural impulse.




And the kind of boredom which the person accustomed to drugs experiences when deprived of them is something for which I can suggest no remedy except time.




Now what applies to drugs applies also,
within limits, to every kind of excitement.




A life too full of excitement is an exhausting life,
in which continually stronger stimuli are needed to give the thrill that has come to be thought an essential part of pleasure.




A person accustomed to too much excitement is like a person with a morbid craving for pepper, who comes at last to be unable even to taste a quantity of pepper which would cause anyone else to choke.





There is an element of boredom which is inseparable from the avoidance of too much excitement,
and too much excitement not only undermines the health,
but dulls the palate for every kind of pleasure, substituting titillations for profound organic satisfactions,
cleverness for wisdom,
and jagged surprises for beauty.




I do not want to push to extremes the objection to excitement.



A certain amount of it is wholesome,
but, like almost everything else, the matter is quantitative.




Too little may produce morbid cravings,
too much will produce exhaustion.




A certain power of enduring boredom is therefore essential to a happy life,
and is one of the things that ought to be taught to the young.