r/thinkatives

Have you ever played The Landlord’s Game?

Probably not.

Most people haven’t.

But you’ve definitely played what it turned into.

It was created in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie. And it wasn’t originally meant to be just a game. It was meant to be a demonstration, something you feel while you play. A way to show how money concentrates, how rent traps people, how ownership quietly decides who gets to keep going and who gets eliminated.

It already had the bones of what you’d recognize today. Property. Rent. Penalties. A loop of accumulation and loss.

Then something happened to it.

It got simplified. It got rebranded. It got turned into something easier to sell.

By the time Parker Brothers released it as Monopoly, most of what made it a critique had been stripped away. The system stayed the same, but now it wasn’t trying to show you anything anymore. It was just something you played on a rainy afternoon.

And that’s the part I want you to notice.

The meaning didn’t disappear.

It just changed owners.

What you call Monopoly is not the beginning of the story.

It’s the latest version you were handed.

And that pattern doesn’t stop there.

It shows up everywhere once you start looking closely.

Take music.

In 1965, The Beatles released Yesterday, one of the most covered songs in modern history. Even its melody caused quiet debate in music circles because Paul McCartney reportedly composed it subconsciously, later confirming it bore resemblance to earlier ballad structures he couldn’t initially place. It didn’t emerge in isolation, it sits inside a long tradition of pre-existing harmonic progressions that were already circulating through classical and Tin Pan Alley songwriting.

By the late 1960s, Led Zeppelin became one of the most cited examples in music plagiarism law. Their track Whole Lotta Love (1969) closely mirrors lyrics and structure from Willie Dixon’s blues song You Need Love (1962). Dixon eventually sued, and the case was settled out of court in 1985, with later releases crediting him. Many other Zeppelin tracks would also later be subject to legal scrutiny over uncredited blues adaptations.

In 1970, George Harrison released My Sweet Lord, which was taken to court in the landmark case Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music. The judge ruled that Harrison had “subconsciously” copied The Chiffons’ He’s So Fine (1963). He lost the case and was ordered to pay damages, one of the first major legal recognitions that even unconscious similarity could still count as infringement.

In 1977, The Rolling Stones released Some Girls, an album deeply rooted in American blues, country, and disco traditions. While not defined by a single lawsuit, it existed within a broader pattern of British rock bands drawing heavily from African American musical forms that had already been repackaged and commercialized across decades.

Nothing here is purely original.

Everything is recombination.

Even in more modern disputes, this pattern continues. In 1992, Radiohead released Creep, which was later involved in publishing disputes with Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood, the writers of The Air That I Breathe (1972, The Hollies). The claim wasn’t about direct copying of lyrics, but about melodic and harmonic similarity strong enough that the writers were eventually credited as co-authors and granted royalties.

So what looks like invention is often a rearrangement of inherited structure.

Borrowed rhythm. Borrowed phrasing. Borrowed emotional shape.

Not theft in the simplistic sense, but continuity that sometimes crosses the legal line once it becomes too recognizable to ignore.

And music is only the clearest example because it is easier to measure.

The same pattern appears in law, in language, in storytelling, and in religion.

Judaism preserves earlier Near Eastern covenantal traditions and reinterprets them into monotheistic form.

Christianity emerges as a reinterpretation of those same texts through the figure of Jesus of Nazareth.

Islam later repositions many of the same prophetic figures into a new theological framework.

Each one is historically traceable.

Each one is internally distinct.

And yet each one is built from shared narrative architecture.

Not copies.

Not opposites.

Successive reinterpretations of a shared source field.

Even institutions understand this instinctively.

“Either the church is true or it is a fraud. It is the church and kingdom of God, or it is nothing.” This is Gordon B. Hinckley, the 15th President of his church.

That kind of framing forces a binary choice onto something that history rarely presents in binaries.

Because systems don’t usually survive by staying unchanged.

They survive by adapting just enough to remain recognizable.

Which brings us back to the same question underneath all of this:

If ideas survive by changing, then what exactly are we evaluating when we call something “true”?

Are we judging origin?

Or are we judging the most successful version of a story that refused to stay still?

And perhaps what’s being described is also quietly doing the describing.

I am a pervert, and I fully own it. To hell with condemning my biology, the power of that vital drive that creates life, the one that appreciates a woman's breast the way it does a sunset.

A desire that praises infinite feminine beauty. In no way predatory, entirely contemplative. And if women are freeing themselves from their bras, I will free myself from the shame of feeling desire. From the shame of loving their bodies. I am neither a predator nor a creep, I am simply alive.

https://preview.redd.it/arjoi7gzq4bh1.png?width=862&format=png&auto=webp&s=3b36060b82e43b015b141b3d06a368552db90c2c

We don’t just “grow up in a preordained physical reality governed by immutable truths, natural forces and laws”; we grow up inside learned, inherited layered ancestral stories about the nature, course and meaning of life —ancestral, family, communal, and institutional—that define what life is, who we are, where we fit in the scheme of things, what we owe, and what we are entitled to do. These stories are the fabric, content and context of our daily lives and family, community, and social institutions that are the main weavers and editors of that fabric of life that we perceive and experience across our lifespan.

Family: first story‑factory and identity lab

From birth, the family is the primary site where ancestral narratives are learned and become the basis of our personal experience.

• Translating ancestral myths into daily scripts. Family interactions turn big inherited stories (“what our people are like,” “how life works,” “what God or fate expects”) into everyday rules, proscriptions and prescriptions: who and what we are and are not, who gets care, whose voice counts, how conflict is handled, what kinds of dreams are “realistic” for you and me.
• Writing the early “self plot.” By the naming, praise, criticism, and modeling that is the principal processes of family interaction, the family "teaches" a child stories like “I am lovable / difficult / responsible / fragile.” These become early identity scripts that shape what the child later sees as possible and impossible for him or her.
• Teaching emotional and moral dramas. Family interactions dramatize whether anger, grief, joy, and desire are acceptable, and under what conditions. The child learns not only “what to feel,” but more importantly “what story this feeling belongs to” (e.g., anger as betrayal vs. anger as protection of boundaries).

The family is the first narrative operating system installer. It doesn’t just give information; it embeds the child in specific plots about safety, worth, obligation, and his destiny.

Community: widening and contesting the inherited stories

As children move into neighborhoods, peer groups, and local cultures, community becomes the primary arena where family stories about self, self worth and place in community are reinforced, revised, tested, challenged, or forked.

• Providing alternative scripts and role models. Community settings (peers, mentors, local traditions) show other ways to live and how others live: different gender roles, work ethics, religious practices, and political stances. During the interactions of adolescent the child is in a position to see that their family’s plot may only be one possible story among many.
• Defining “who we are together.” Communities narrate belonging (“we look out for each other,” “we’re strivers,” “we don’t trust outsiders”). These collective stories shape loyalty, prejudice, and the sense of what sacrifices are normal for the group.
• Creating public rites and shared dramas. Festivals, funerals, protests, sports, and local crises become communal theater where abstract values—courage, solidarity, honor, shame—are enacted. The growing person learns which roles exist in these dramas and which ones they can realistically occupy (leader, supporter, scapegoat, healer).

Community expands the narrative menu and also polices it. Community interaction offers more possible stories for life, but it also enforces some narratives as “normal,” or within or outside of your reach and other narratives as deviant, thereby shaping the maturing person’s option‑space.

Social institutions: large‑scale story engines across the life course

Institutions—education, religion, economy, media, law, and state—are the big machinery that keeps ancestral stories running and evolving and also forge the community.

• Education. Schools embed children in community narratives about merit, intelligence, citizenship, and history: who built the nation, who counts as successful, what future paths are respectable. Community narratives strongly influences how each person writes their “career and contribution” plot. These institutions also limit what you are and are not entitled to have and be and your place and prominence in the community.
• Religion and moral orders. Religious institutions articulate cosmic stories: why there is suffering, what a good life is, what happens after death. These frame the entire arc from birth to death, including guilt, forgiveness, and hope.
• Economy and work. Labor markets and workplaces enact stories about productivity, value, and status: what kinds of labor matter, who is “worthy” of comfort or precarity. Over time, these stories define adulthood as “having a role in the economic script,” shaping identity and self‑worth.
• Media and information systems. Mass and social media create continuous dramas about danger, progress, conflict, and celebrity, which provide templates for how individuals interpret both personal events and larger social change.
• Law and government. Legal and political institutions formalize stories about rights, obligations, and justice—who is protected, who is punished, and what counts as legitimate violence or protest.

These institutions are story infrastructures. They take ancient plots (hero’s journey, chosen people, progress, purity, sacrifice) and update them into contemporary policy, curriculum, and broadcast narratives that shape maturation from childhood through old age.

Maturation as ongoing narrative negotiation (birth to death)

Human maturation is not just biological aging or skill acquisition; it is a long process of negotiating, revising, and sometimes escaping inherited ancestral stories at each stage.

• Childhood. The person largely inhabits family and local stories as given. Their main developmental task is internalizing enough of these narratives to allow you to function and belong.
• Adolescence and young adulthood. Exposure to broader communities and institutions triggers a crisis of stories: conflicting scripts about identity, love, work, and belief. Maturation here means learning to choose, combine, or rewrite these scripts into a coherent personal plot.
• Midlife. The person deals with divergence between their lived story and the ancestral scripts they inherited (success vs. failure, loyalty vs. self‑care). Many midlife crises are narrative crises: “What story am I in now? Does it still make sense?”
• Old age and death. Later life involves revising the life story under constraints of loss, limitation, and proximity to death. Ancestral and institutional narratives about legacy, redemption, and meaning heavily influence whether people experience this phase as tragic, fulfilled, or absurd.

Throughout life, family, community, and institutions keep offering new episodes and rewrites: a child becomes a parent, a worker becomes retired, a believer becomes doubter or elder. Each role shift involves stepping into or out of certain plots, and the health of that transition depends on whether the available stories allow dignity, continuity, and agency.

Putting it together

• Family weaves the first, thick layer of life‑stories that define basic identity, belonging, and worth.
• Community broadens and contests those stories, giving people more roles and plots to inhabit while also enforcing norms.
• Institutions supply large, durable narratives about education, work, morality, and history that structure the whole lifespan.

Maturation from birth to death is the process of learning the scripts and plots of ancestral stories about the nature, course and meaning of life and our place in them and how to live inside these narratives, then to see them, and—if things go well—to consciously participate in re‑authoring them so one’s own life and the lives of others can unfold with greater honesty, justice, and option‑space.

Has anybody ever analysed Clavicular's life? Like what led him to being who he is now? I see all the hate on him and all I see is people proving his point. He literally is ahead of his time. There should be a philosophy book written by him. Do anybody has some philosophy advices that aligns with Clav's mentality. I would like to think more like him, even tho I know he has autism and I cannot create my own autism but I want to have a closer mindset to his.

I've seen lots of headlines about how, independently, the militaries of the USA, Russia and China are all lower quality than one would expect. Especially the USA, due to how little output we get for the amount of money spent.

In your view, why has it become so hard to build a workable military? Is it a societal problem? How should we fix it?

Let's set aside whether any military should exist at all. That's a valuable discussion, but a separate topic than I would like to discuss. I'd like to specifically discuss how to make militaries function in a modern world.

🌿 Question for the Community 🌿

What's one belief about yourself that you've outgrown, and what helped you let it go?

Sometimes the stories we've carried for years no longer fit who we're becoming.

I'd love to hear what you've released and what you've learned along the way.

💜 Share as much or as little as you feel comfortable with.

Let’s talk about the dynamic between consciousness and the subconscious, and how this relationship isn’t what it looks like

Here is a situation which can help reveal the relationship between consciousness and the subconscious:

Someone asks for your top 5 songs on the spot, without warning - no matter how hard you consciously try, you struggle to remember even one song. But, if you were deep in the flow of a passionate conversation about music, songs would just be popping up in your consciousness without even asking, you could hear their tune, you could sing their lyrics, see the album cover

Both situations you might consciously want to recall something, but they are different outcomes. Your conscious effort made no difference, because “you”, your favourite songs, your life experiences, memories, passions, are all part of the subconscious

First, this tells us consciousness is at most on a need to know basis with the subconscious - it cannot freely delve into the subconscious, retrieving what it likes

And second, it tells the opposite is true, the subconscious has free access to consciousness - how else does it recall relevant information, or store it, how else do the deepest parts of you manifest in your decisions and actions?

This is a one sided power dynamic, if your consciousness and subconscious were coworkers, consciousness would find this alarming - it isn’t privy to the subconscious, but the subconscious sees everything it does!

It’s undeniable that conscious experience feels like we are the one in control, the observer - we experience our environment and react accordingly, it makes perfect sense at a glance

But we aren’t even experiencing all the weighing, consideration, cross referencing of our deeper subconscious…
consciousness is only privy to this intersection where subconscious and environment meet - it only experiences the “need to know” which subconscious projects to the surface, and it only experiences the environment from this one singular point - as vivid as it feels, consciousness IS a 2d, flat intersection of a 3d, deeper reality

Think about that parallel - we experience the world, but only our slice of it, while we can’t really imagine it we can understand there is a wider, objective reality behind our subjective reality. We just have a snapshot of the whole picture!

Considering this limited experience of reality, would you identify as the wider reality? Of course not, even those of us who believe in a form of nonduality can’t just identify as it at the flick of a switch

Well it is the exact same concept for “you”, you experience “you” but only a slice of it. There is a deeper “you”, the subconscious, which exists in the void outside of conscious experience

we only get a slice…do you see the parallel?

It’s undeniable that we feel like we are the consciousness, though!

For explanations sake, my name is Sam, and even though I believe in some kind of universal oneness, it’s hard not to shake the feeling that “Sam” is the consciousness I am currently experiencing.

But when we look closer like we have, it’s clear “Sam” actually exists outside of consciousness. Consciousness may contain a 2d slice of Sam, but that’s all it is. The Sam which is present in consciousness is just the bubbling surface, a flat reflection of a 3d image.

Another way of looking at it: Sam, the subconscious, has mistaken the mirror it is reflected in (consciousness) as itself. Sam cannot truly know itself because it exists outside of consciousness, it can only know its reflection.

Conscious experience is as much the world as it is “you”, it is an intersection of both, the meeting point where each can interact and know themselves.

You know those visitation booths in prisons, with the glass to see through and the phone to talk through it? Consciousness is that booth, it isn’t the human on one side, or the world on the other, it’s the intersection that BOTH can know themselves through, which I always feel points towards oneness. ❤️

I doubt this is easy to understand, it is manic and stupid, but thanks if you read