u/Competitive_Log_8910

The notion of what is true or credible is a notion ultimately which each person must determine for themselves. Throughout our long history it has been useful to cooperate on the creation of shared realities which establish within their context the rules for determining which is true or credible.

One obvious example is the shared reality in which "the scientific method" represents the rules for determining which is true or credible.

But this is far from the only way to approach this concept. Many societies have existed throughout history in which the extent to which ideas align with the contents of a particular text defines the extent to which they are true. Still others have existed in which the extent to which ideas align with the beliefs of a supreme leader defines the extent to which they are true.

In many who are young and naïve, those who have yet to learn how to operate their bowels and limbs, the most useful default state is to defer to the judgement of some other human who appears to be operating in a fashion which is consistent with that young and naïve person's own desires for themselves. Hence I would argue that deferring to the external authority of someone who seems to know what's true is actually a hardcoded biological default state in which we all begin.

For those in our world who are not convinced by the truth value of any shared worldview they are presented with, however, the ability to defer to one's own judgement on such matters is an ever-present option.

If you are tired of being lied to by your leaders and being subjected to the biases coloring our institutions, you might consider becoming your own scientist and deferring to your own judgement in terms of determining truth from falsehood.

Each of us is innately gifted with this ability; many of us have simply been encouraged not to use it.

The KKK was founded shortly after the conquest of the South by the North. While we might be able to imagine that had Abraham Lincoln lived the reintegration of the South into the Union could have proceeded with compassion and consideration, Andrew Johnson's government did something which many conquering powers have done to those they conquered at many times throughout history. Which is that he leveraged this position to alleviate the misery the North suffering succeeding in completing that conquest by dumping it on the South.

I can only imagine the terror felt by those victimized by the KKK, and undoubtedly some of what happened was a continuation of what had come before. But that particular animus they suffered was not just the result of pre-existing racial tensions - they were made to suffer the pain which had been dumped onto the South in the collective. The true fire in the eyes of the hooded devils was not hatred for people with a different skin color so much as it was hatred for being subjugated and oppressed by those who conquered them, manifesting as the intensification of pre-existing tensions.

The KKK did not exist before the Northern conquest because the animus which fueled it was a direct result of the Northern conquest, and the means by which they administered this conquered territory.

The story of the Nazis is much the same. The story of Hitler himself is much the same: the Treaty of Versailles was similarly vengeful, and his arrest resulted from opposing French incursions which sought to take advantage of their longtime rival's weakened position in order to gain territory.

In the context of philosophical worldviews, there is good cause for the notion of punitive justice. If we believe that things matter objectively, then we should also believe that punishing a wrongdoing can serve to ameliorate the harm in some fashion. Actually this was the main purpose of the sacrificial rites performed in the ancient Jewish Temple and also in many other locations worldwide. You give up something which is valuable in exchange for a favor; and oftentimes that favor is being forgiven for having done something wrong.

The Christian perspective which became popular across Europe treated Jesus as this sacrifice, and sought to satisfy the inner desire for justice by punishing not one's fellow living humans, but metaphorically this previously-living human. This perspective created a society in which vengeance was highly-contraindicated.

But this was not the original perspective on things. The perspective in the Temple was very much an eye for an eye, and the perspective of Rabbinic Judaism was very much to dream of a return to the notion of literal violence as a means of atoning for crimes. Whereas Christians were the Jews who decided to be done with vengeance and treat Jesus' death as enough penance for all sins past present and future, the Rabbis' primary purpose in contrast was to hold the torch on behalf of vengeance-enthusiasts and keep the dream alive of more violence and bloodshed as the most satisfying possible way to see a misdeed paid for, in the form of a Third Temple.

I think that this is the best explanation for why Hitler turned on these people. He like those living in the post-Reconstruction South did not much care for being on the receiving end of vengeful justice, and he identified within his midst those people representing most fervently the belief that this form of conflict resolution should never be abolished and exist in perpetuity.

I don't think his actions were any more defensible than those taken by the KKK. These were not clear-headed individuals actions with compassion. What they were however were people who had been driven mad by being subjected to the vengeful desires of others. The conclusion I have reached is that when one adopts a hardline stance in terms of punitive justice, the complex nature of human history means that the cycle of vengeance will continue forever. I want to live in a world where organizations like the KKK and the Nazi party are gone forever, never to be imagined again. And I believe that the only way to bring that about is to oppose the concept of vengeance itself. If we can forgive all who have let their desire for vengeance lead them to hurt others from the beginning of time until this very moment, maybe we can dream of a future which grievance-tallying is ended.

I have another theory which may be relevant to those on this subreddit. It's to do with the nature of the mechanism by which truth is sorted from falsehood.

We as humans fundamentally are storytellers more than anything else, and the power we have is not so much to determine precisely which actions we take in any given moment but rather to determine how we contextualize those actions, which in turn allows us to influence future actions we may take. The way I look at it is that I am telling my monkey what his actions mean, trying to encourage him to take actions which are good for him, and to discourage him from taking actions which are bad for him. But at the end of the day there are limits to what storytelling alone can achieve. If I try telling myself a story in which I have completely defeated my urge to poop, I might succeed in achieving temporary constipation, but eventually my body will take over and that shit will come out of me one way or another. What I have just described for you by the way is the very concept of bowel control, an important ability to keep your clothes clean and avoid inconveniences when in the midst of another important activity, but my point is that the constraint applied to the story of bowel control is that you release your bowels before the feces backs all the way up to your mouth.

Anyway - I believe I can explain the behavioral differences between chimpanzees and bonobos in terms of a single genetic mutation. Both species possess markings on their vulvae which swell to indicate ovulation, but whereas in chimpanzees this trait works as expected, bonobos possess a mutation which causes this indicator to become inaccurate. And the behavioral outcome is that whereas chimpanzee females will refuse to mate when their lady business doesn't indicate it might lead to the conception of a child, bonobo females are pretty much DTF at any given moment. And so what happened between these two extremely closely related species who are also homo sapiens' closest relatives was that the bonobos discovered the power of making love not war and settled into a small grove by a river where they continue to freely fuck in pretty much every combination and live charmed peaceful lives to this day. Whereas the chimpanzees made war instead of love, and went on to take over quite a lot of territory across their home continent of Africa.

What this story leads me to is the idea that there is a certain transferrability between the desire to conquer land via warfare and the desire to "conquer land" meaning to the flesh of your sexy neighbor. And hence that the reason why chimps make war (they make really intense war nearly on the level of humans) is because when their fully-functional fertility indicators indicate that it's not possible to have children they cannot "conquer land" and so they instead redirect that impulse towards conquering land.

And from here I think I can explain the human impulse for knowledge as again another version of this same drive. Whereas bonobos exclusively use their penises to seek out vaginas and vice-versa (edit: and also in other combinations), and chimpanzees use them to seek out fertile lands in their external environment when they cannot seek out "fertile lands" among their kin, humans additionally use them to seek out "fertile lands" in idea-space. And the relevance of this idea is to say that the tool which we use to identify whether or not we have come upon a fertile patch of land in idea-space in which we should sow seed and invest resources is in an extremely indirect and elaborately abstracted sense our drive to reproduce. We bear children in the form of new ideas and inventions as a redirection of our desire to bear children in the form of new poop machines, and the ultimate test of an idea's truth value is whether or not it's better than sex.

One might define a "civilized society" as one in which people resolve conflicts by using the tools of that society rather than by killing one another. For much of history, the ruler of a society was the person to end warfare by winning.

The concept of nationalism discovered by the French eschews a society as defined by shared loyalty towards the family who ended the war (the monarch) in lieu of a shared sense of national identity, based on shared language and other demographic characteristics. I understand however that one of the biggest characteristics they considered was a shared memory of the Hundred Years' War, and a shared animosity towards the English.

There can be little doubt that the civilized society we are currently a part of is defined by the end of World War II. The United States as the nation responsible for tipping the scales in favor of the Allies in that conflict enjoys the honor of housing the capital of the United Nations, and has for quite some time now been in the position of world leader in many other ways. The antagonists of that conflict remain to this day hated to such an extreme that calling someone a Nazi or comparing them to Hitler is the gravest possible insult.

In this world defined by that military victory, I cannot help but reflect on the ways in which our view of that conflict as one opposing a force of pure evil has shaped the ways in which we define our current good. In the context of a D&D morality chart there are two axes, and while there can be no doubt the Nazis were evil, it is equally clear that they were lawful evil. Hence we find ourselves becoming chaotic good, rather than pure good.

The path from here towards a more neutral understanding of what is good divorced from a lawful or chaotic bent would be a path which threatens the integrity our current society, but for any who believe that our current society is unjust, it would potentially represent a path in the direction of a more just society. Those who thrive on chaos in our current world are able to take much more than what they deserve and avoid detection; those who limit themselves with lawfulness are left with much less than they would enjoy in a society where all were expected to behave the same. I share this thought because I have seen the ways in which chaos has infiltrated our legal system and turned it into a tool for the reinforcement of power by those who feel no remorse at bending its rules in order to serve their interests.

The thing about our current story which strains my immersion within it is actually the existence of a group of people who are pure evil; who attacked another group of people in response to nothing at all simply because their hearts were filled with baseless hatred. I have seen the ways in which humans can turn to evil, and while I do believe it is possible to become so corrupted as to embrace evil acts, I don't believe that corruption happens in response to nothing.

I want to understand what drove these people to do what they did. And actually I think the main thing getting in our way at this moment is the legacy of Christianity. Paul hated Jesus; he was one of his fiercest opponents; and then at the moment he was the victim of an act of cruelty he dramatically changed his perspective. Our perspective changed just as radically when we went into the death camps; and yet some have felt a similar shift upon witnessing the suffering taking place in Palestine, also for the same reason.

I believe that anger is an indicator of injustice.