As is my habit, I abruptly ceased engaging with all math and programming at about 1AM "last night." A couple nights ago I had been up until nearly 5AM working on a "Complex Numbers" program using C++ <complex>, but having completed that code yesterday, which even includes an option for finding the N roots of the Nth root of a complex number, I spontaneously jumped back into the "notes" distributed in the form of a [free] Kindle book on A M A Z O N dot COM.
I swear, it was like reading posts from this message board. This Jack Ernest, a regular non-academic individual, shares many of our gripes and fears, and encourages us to be very critical of our societies.
I want to add some excerpts here as I may later send them to my adult nephew in an email. He might benefit from these at this juncture of his life.
All material below the double lines are excerpts from
Remarks On NihilismI do this so that I can quote his quotes.
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_________Jack Ernest writes:___________________________________What education does is it makes us oblivious to perceiving people as threats. We become so used to knowing people that it becomes second nature to us to meet people. Instead of seeing people as threats to one’s security, we see them as a necessity. In other words, one instinctively says that they need to know people in order to be happy. The reality is (and I allude to it throughout these notes) that you need to be less known to be more secure. You need to be anonymous to be truly free. I admit that it sounds so absurd and alien to the current model of existence but that is only because of the extent of the brainwashing you are subjected to when young. Capitalism is a conglomerate of insecurity. You make people insecure. You have parents who tell you how to behave; you then are educated and again told how to behave; you then must work and again are told how to behave. You make people interact with each other, which in turn makes them fear each other, which in turn makes them insecure, which in turn makes them conform, which in turn is the crankshaft of the economic world as we know it to be.
The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.
When the insecure individual thinks of solitude they think of a negative interpretation from the herd.
Think about it. No one ever comes out and tells their parents they are going to live alone. There is an onus on the individual that they will get married or at least try to. This is how the system sustains itself. You condition children to want to live a certain way and when they grow up they do their all to realize this.
Normative Social Influence says part of the reason we conform is to be liked. In other words, we conform to be labelled positively. Sartre called it Bad Faith. We are so afraid of being negatively labelled by society should we choose to deviate from conformity, that we are condemned to conform. This is particularly the case of the narcissist. They are so afraid of negative labels that they play the role of a husband/wife or father/mother. They are not authentic to themselves. They wilt to societal pressures purely so they can be idolized.
We are all mad; but madness practiced by a majority is considered normality. Conformity is a madness. An organized delusion is a normalized delusion. Psychiatric illness is relative.
Why doesn’t psychiatry declare religion a madness?
Remember what Arthur Schopenhauer said: "We take the limits of our field of vision to be the limits of the world."
In that spirit, being in a relationship and working are things we have come to accept as normal. The schizophrenic is labelled insane; the individual who conforms implicitly is regarded as a valued member of society. We cannot fathom the insanity of being in love or working because we are conditioned to it. What we define as madness is relative. There are no rules in this nihilistic universe. What we call schizophrenia could be euphoria in another world. A relationship involving two people is neither right nor wrong, but it is convenient.
If intelligent life from another galaxy were to observe mankind, they would deduce a few things. They would see an animal that has learned to reason but yet attests to himself that he cannot be happy unless he is loved by another person. This is macro-scale insanity. That we exclaim to ourselves we cannot be happy until we are loved is a form of madness.
Normality is statistically relative. It depends on the perception of the herd and how many of the herd think that way. If only one in a hundred fell in love, then love would be the psychosis.
To believe in god is to be religious; to hear voices from that same god is to be schizophrenic. If I feel the presence of god I am a saint; if I listen to what god says to me I am sent to the asylum. One loses faith with psychiatry when they fail to diagnose the belief in the divine as a psychiatric illness. And what of love? Should the individual who refuses to be happy until they are in love not be classified as psychiatrically ill? The law-abiding member of society is classed as an esteemed man or woman. In a parallel-world he or she is deemed a psychological heretic. What we determine to be healthy behaviour is not a fundamental constant of nature. It depends on what the herd decides is acceptable.
The free world as we understand it is the asylum. The lie is that you have to “live” in order to live.
[
I have to wonder, did Senor Raul write this book?]
There is a contradiction with regards money. We need it to pay for our health insurance, but in earning money we neglect our health. Then when we are awash with lots of money but our health is declining we pour all our earned money into our health to try and prolong it. But it is too late to tend to ourselves.
Imagine a foreign world in another galaxy, where there is a cultural phenomenon that makes its inhabitants obsess with being in the company of another person and being approved by the person to be happy. Thus, their whole life is built around finding this other person and one cannot be happy until they have found this said person. Us humans, analysing this world would think it is a terrible system. Yet this is precisely what happens on earth. Insecure men and especially women remark to themselves that they cannot be happy in this universe until they are in love and have found this special person. It is a narcissistic disease that infects the individual when young and consequently is arguably the prime source of unhappiness within the individual.
Take an impromptu hike through a busy city street and you will discern madness all around you. They criminalize prostitution but why don’t they criminalize marriage? We take what we see for granted. No one ever questions why an attractive woman is lauded for her appearance. Why not castigate her for being attractive? Why don’t we live in a world where love was a crime and working was capital-punishment? The power of conformity (the will to conform) casts an enormous shadow over society.
The economic system does not directly tell people how to behave. That would be authoritarian. What it does is suggest, rather sneakily, how to become happy. Low and behold, this being happy benefits the economic system.
What did psychiatrists like RD Laing, Rollo May and Erich Fromm say? They said just because billions of people do or want the same things, doesn’t make those billions of people sane. What we come to regard as life, is in ways an illusion, but one that benefits the economic system. In the vastness of the universe, where else will you find
love and work?
The shrewdest component is not the lie but rather who tells it. The government does not have to brainwash society because it gets parents, doctors, teachers, celebrities, films, books, music and so on, to brainwash the next generation.
The propaganda pertaining towards relationships is relentless. Parents, friends, doctors, psychologists, magazines, books, films all show or emphasize people in love. The individual is drowned in so much propaganda that they believe it unconditionally. It becomes familiar to them instinctively through the Mere Exposure Theory. In other words, they become brainwashed. In order to be labelled correctly by the herd, they must conform.
This material or commoditized happiness destroys man. This symbol of happiness through relationships, families, work, friendship, commodities etc. ultimately prevents man from being happy.
Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.
You never hear the powers that be state that if only you avoided interaction you could live a simple life.
We have more money but less wealth; more food but less comfort; more friends but less friendship.
How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8.30 am by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shiiT, piisSS, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?
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I will run this through a translator to Spanish.
Senor Raul,
Please advise me if you have the option to translate this entire page to Spanish with the click of a button on your web browser. If so, I will no longer translate important "transmissions."