We All Create Our Own Realities To Live In

« Are You Letting This Common Mindset Ruin Your Life? | Home | Why It’s Cool To Stop Trying To Be Cool »

May 9, 2008

Skull Note: I got this excellent e-mail about a year ago from one of my best friends, Jason Summers, describing his experiences in talking with a few people outside our normal loop where he also ends up delving into a lot of our shared core beliefs. I liked it so much I wanted to post it here.

Greg,

Everywhere I look I see bad faith. Just last night I was having a discussion on MSN with some people, and it was amazing the kind of stuff I hear. Now that I know all this philosophy and ‘the secret’, all I hear is bad basis and bad faith.

I’m truly believing that people just can’t be helped. You tell me this continually but somehow, I still want to help them.

I was talking with two friends of mine, and a girl I know said, “I’m watching Kingdom of Heaven. You guys seen that movie? I find it all really interesting.”    The other guy said, “I love history as well.” Then they asked me what I thought. I said, “I hate to be the party pooper, but I find nothing interesting in people fighting over religious superstition.”

My own views on the matter is that getting into the details of bloody battles, wars, and corruption is not much different than watching a body rot in the hot sun slowly being consumed by maggots. If you are a doctor, studying disease and how to cure it is a good thing. This analogy is bad basis, however. You cannot even technically apply it to this situation. Studying these “social diseases”, which are all created by choice by all the participants involved, is needlessly consuming your mind in arbitrary filth. It reminds me of touring a slum-lord’s set of real-estate. You see a bunch of semi-burnt down trailers, trash all in the yards, and an old half-rotted couch in the front yard. This land was chosen to be developed in this way by the slum-lord. There’s better properties to spend your time touring. Just because such things are “really out there” and “really exist in the ‘real world’” does not mean you have to study them, or that any benefit comes out of their study.

Then the guy went on to say, “Well I think it’s good that we study these wars.   We need to learn about what caused them, so we will not fight another war.”

The girl agreed.

The girl accused me of viewing men as machines, but in actuality, she is the one doing so, not me. This mindset seems to come from their high school education. I began to argue, “What a person does or does not do is up to them. People are uncaused, free beings. There is no ’cause’ to a war, war is a choice. To make a war a causal event is the deny the freedom of the participants. They chose to believe in the religion, and chose to pick up arms and fight each other. It was all choice, all free decision. As for studying the ’cause’, you end up studying mindsets people have chosen to adopt. That’s the closest thing I know of to a cause, but that is extremely arbitrary. Even so, watching Kingdom of Heaven does not show you that; only the details of people killing each other. All I find in these movies is needless killing over ‘bad basis’ thinking. I’d rather study science.”

You can imagine this didn’t go over very well, but you know I hate these discussions when people justify wars and every other atrocity imaginable as unavoidable happenings that need to recur in history perpetually, when it’s really a free-choice decision. Innocent bystanders like us are dragged into their bad basis thinking, their wars, and murmuring about the poverty and lack of success they experience. Launch another Hollywood movie with Adam Sandler, showing us ‘horrid business men’, who pursue success in life instead of the family and some elusive duty to country.   Us business men hording the money and keeping them from success due to our insatiable greed! Another big blockbuster hit pandering to their bad faith.

As always happens, everyone gets all paranoid… The social “niceness” has worn away… There’s actually a guy more concerned with truth and the greater good of the conversation than whether or not he comes across as a “nice guy”.   I stepped into what Bertrand Russell calls, “bad form”. Things were getting socially awkward. They stayed on topic for a short while longer, before they jumped away. Arguing is this god-awful thing to them. God-forbid we rationally argue against a view. People disagree? *screams* Ahhh, let’s all run in our corners and hope we calm down… It’s incredibly, and I mean incredibly hard, to find someone who will actually debate intelligently on such topics.

Then the girl said, “It’s the governments that cause the wars, not the people. You can’t blame people for what happened.”

I was thinking…again…bad basis, and said, “The people are the government. The leaders of the government only have the power given to them by the people. It is the members of that country which build the tanks, weapons, and bombs. It is their scientists devising ways to kill us all. It is the everyday citizen who pays the taxes to fund it all, and it is the young men who willingly go out on the battlefield and fight the war. It is all our responsibility, and pointing the blame to the ‘evil government’ is incorrect thinking. All the members involved in the war are responsible for the war, and this includes nearly all citizens.”

The girl says, “We can’t resolve all conflicts peacefully. Very few conflicts have been prevented through simple negotiation.”

Here comes the excuses why free-will beings “can’t” do something that is simple. I started to get mad. I can’t stand this talk. What part of “free will” do they not understand? They make a simple problem convoluted. I answered, “Can’t this. Can’t that. People are free to do what they want to do. It’s not valid to say a person “can not” do an action which is quite simple for them to do. What’s so difficult for a free-will being not to pick up a gun, and not shoot one another? Peacefully or non-peacefully it’s all every individual’s choice.”

Then they said I’m “too optimistic”… The “real world” isn’t so nice. They started saying I have an over-idealized view of mankind… I was thinking… “too optimistic”… Bad basis!

I’m beginning to think that if history is not studied properly, with a good mindset and good philosophy behind it beforehand, it seems to lead people to just point fingers. Very dangerous. Whether or not it’d be better if they hadn’t heard any of it at all is equally hard to say.

I said, “A person can do anything they set their mind to doing. Initial circumstances are irrelevant. If they make up their mind they want something out of life, and are willing to put muscle behind their faith, they will have whatever they ask out of life.”

The guy said, “There are people who work hard in life and never succeed.”

Once again, BAD BASIS! I hate seeing people in confusion. If we look at this problem from a true intellectual standpoint, whether a person will or will not succeed when they set out on their life goals is UNKNOWABLE. They may succeed, and I suppose they may not… But question is… Why are they DEFAULTING to FAILURE? It’s like… “People have failed in the past, therefore we ALL fail in the future.”   If this mindset is truly held, then why is he pursuing a girlfriend? After all, some people have failed with relationships… He is confused. With his logic, it becomes the case that every single other person must neccessarily fail in their relationships, because someone botched a relationship back somewhere in the past. This is incredible bad basis.

As for “too optimistic”… when do you become “too optimistic”… Believing you can accomplish something, when there is no evidence and it has not been done before is “too optimistic”? If this is the case, then we might as well tell all scientists pioneering new frontiers to pack up and go home. Every new business man, wanting to bring a new product or valuable service to the common man must stop what he’s working toward. The young architect wishing to build the next wonder of the world must give up. If it hasn’t been done before, thinking you can do it is “too optimistic”. This is a ridculous bad basis. The full culimation of this “too optimistic” mindset is a complete hault of all new knowledge and new things.

Failure and success are distinct concepts, and based on individual decisions which are our decision to make.   You have insanely high probability of succeeding business wise if you know the laws of marketing, management, and the individual business specific knowledge to what business you’re in. You have insanely low probability of success if you do not have all three of these components.

The girl says, “There are businesses that try really hard, and never succeed. Even when they advertise!”

I’ll cut her some slack, as she doesn’t know business.   I’d hate to see what look you would have had upon hearing what she said! They just don’t understand how the business world works. This is all bad basis, as we know. No need for details on bad advertising and wasting money.

I said, “Any business can succeed, as long as they follow the principles and laws of business. It’s like physics, you have to do it right or you will not succeed, but with proper business wisdom you succeed. Wisdom is everything! Wisdom! Wisdom! Wisdom!”

He says, “Maybe in the United States. It doesn’t work that way here.” (He’s from Scotland).

Doesn’t work that way!?… It always works that way.. That’s how life works. Blame the country, blame the government, blame the others around you. They all just point fingers all day long and say, “Oh… how terrible. Look at these awful people all around me. My terrible country, and these terrible wars. They’re all keeping me from the life and society I want”, when really they are the reason for their own failure, and all these nasty events we see.

Maybe they don’t see it. I know I used to not understand these things. Bad faith, or maybe just ignorance, either way, bad news and this needs to be corrected.

I see why Sartre makes bad faith a core ethical principle behind mankind’s problems, and authenticity as a way out of it.   It’s always the same story: I can’t succeed because [fill in excuse].   Genetics, social upbringing, country you live in… Always something to point the finger at. All of this is bad faith. I can’t stand it.

They probably feel like I did a long while back when Little John blew up on me at the restaurant and I didn’t understand why. He’s studied too many books and can’t stand to even hear normal people and their confused, weak, thinking. He’s working on nuclear power generators, and designing aircraft… He doesn’t have time to listen to people say “[something extremely simple] can’t be done”.

You try to help them, but they just fight back… They literally start having to make up excuses. They want the lie to be true, because the truth makes them responsible for what’s going on. The thought of acknowledging that they are the reason behind the wars, that they are supporting future wars, and that they are doing something unethical, right now, as we were conversing, by giving support and taxes to their goverment (according to Bertrand Russell, a historic average of 85% of all tax dollars going to war and killing)… They refuse to accept that fact. They don’t want to hear it.

I had an old worry where I concerned myself over losing friends with this sort of thing, but nowadays, I don’t mind it. I seriously can’t spend much time with these people, as their weakness is too unbearable for me. By definition of their own mindset, they cannot succeed. They do not want to succeed. They want to fail, as they believe failure is inevitable, and so it will be. They would never say that they “want” to fail, but when you trace their mindset out to what they actually end up doing and thinking, they inevitably will fail because they feel they have no control over the matter. No control over the matter?   This reminds me of Sartre’s conception of fear. They view themselves as objects and not in control of the world around them. They are by definition, living in fear.

They are scared of the world and the others around them. It’s as simple as that. Only knowledge conquers fear.

These crap mindsets are everywhere. I can hardly find anyone out there who believes in themselves.   Confusion is forgiveable, but not believing in yourself, and not believing you can accomplish your goals in life is not. They have no confidence. There’s no inner strength. No “eye of the tiger”. They don’t want the strength. They don’t want the confidence.   That would give them responsibility for life and create some work. They’d rather spend their conversations talking about worthless “i perceived” subjects (with no depth or analysis whatsoever)… Their conversations can never be applied to the future. Once you leave a several hour conversation with them, you have learned nothing new, outside of things they have immediately perceived. You hear about some feeling they were having when some event happened, or some person they saw and had small talk with in the store.

I used to wonder why this was so, but this is because they don’t even think in terms of the future. They have some strange mindset of “enjoying the moment”, but their moments are…shallow. They’ll send you a youtube video… That’s a main highlight of their day… A dancing midget. They can do better, if they would only believe there is more to life, and that this abundance can be theirs. This sort of “youtube”, “I experienced”, etc, should be a small supplemental side thing. Your main projects should be what you’re talking about. I want to hear a talented writer talk about a story he’s working on. I want to hear a dedicated scientist talk about his research. I want to hear psychologist providing deep insight into the minds of people I’m seeing in my everyday life.

Where are the dreamers? Where are the innovative writers? Where are the intellectuals? I keep searching, but they’re not easily found.

I’m going to get back to Sartre. I’m about to read about ‘temporality’, which is how the for-itself (human reality) starts off as nothing, but then by decision, chooses a possibility for a definition of the self.   They have to choose their identity, and he says that this identity is seperated from a person by time.   This is exactly what we talk about all the time. I really think existentialism and Sartre are right on mark.

That girl argued against me, “If all things were possible to him that believed, everyone would be content.”    How many bad basis thoughts run through that one? Possible identities (the choices available as to what a person wants to be) is seperated from a person by time. It takes time to get from where you are to where you want to be! Next off… Contentment? This is terrible bad basis. It’d be good if this girl read my journal entry on contentment, and learned a better conception of contentment. Contentment is being thankful and appreciating the reality around you… You find it’s the same thing as knowledge. Knowledge brings contentment, as a person is thankful and appreciates the things he understands. Contentment is an ongoing process of acquiring new knowledge and learning new things.   Contentment is an ongoing bliss that grows greater and greater with time as you acquire new knowledge. You become more content with life as you learn more about it, as you learn it’s actually a wonderful place to live in. You learn about all your possibilities and how many options are available to you, and how vivid and enjoyable life can be. It’s not a static state of being.

Why am I telling you all this? You know these things. Haha. I’ll give you a call a little later.

- Jason