“Once I am human I will talk to you about things that are of little or no importance! I will avoid religion and politics because if we disagree, you will not like me any more!”
~Mal, Borderlands 2
Most everyone I’ve ever lost so far I’ve lost due to disagreement. I don’t mean just mates. It’s the price of asking after things that truly matter.
If my mind was composed of ice cream preference and game strategy perhaps it would be easier for I and those I speak to to tolerate disagreement.
But I choose to live in spaces where choices matter. I choose to ask real questions, with real answers, that would have real consequences.
I did not have my self-esteem systematically crushed as the vast majority of my peers did. I am therefore incapable of flippantly dismissing my view of truth simply to fit in and play nice.
I only retain friends because they are in parity with me on the subjects that matter, or their awareness is superior to my own and they shape my opinion to match theirs, or I am unaware of a critical difference.
These differences mean life and death. Torture and joy. I cannot be friends with someone who ultimately, whether they are aware of it or not, are agents of death and pain.
I’m routinely called arrogant and a host of other negative things for this and my culture has seen fit to isolate me, leaving me in the hands of my family because of this. Offering only a trickle of food money as a token gesture of solidarity with me as a member of the species. Otherwise I feel like I’m in solitary confinement.
This sense of being alive, this sense of ethical responsibility, is openly treated as a mental illness. They tell me to treat life as a gift, but what they mean is juggle faberge eggs like they do, confident that either they are immortal, or that death and disaster will only arrive after they have left.
They prove this every time they get into a car. If they really thought life was a gift they’d act so differently. They’d act more like me. They’d respect the lives of others instead of dismissing the suffering of those same others.
It’s ironic and paradoxical, but one of the reasons disagreements with me are so critical is because I’ve trimmed the fat. I am more able to tolerate trivial and cultural differences than most other humans. Race, faith, social status, nationality, age—these things don’t matter to me as long as you are an agent of joy and life.
I am seen by some as cold and mean precisely because I feel so keenly and try so hard to be nice, not just to the people in my field of vision or those that “deserve” it, but all people, everywhere, forever.
Everyone is so quick to give me a life lesson or ignore me as a toxic failure precisely because I have so much to teach and have come so close to the ethical ideal.
All things considered, I believe I have averted more suffering and death, and enabled more joy and life on balance than anyone else could have under the same conditions. But the problem is so wildly complicated, and each life so unique, that I’ll never be able to prove it.
At best I can only hope that the tools I try to share are picked up by people under better conditions, sufficient to contribute to a positive feedback spiral, hopefully reaching, at some point, a suffering and death escape velocity.
Or I’m just wildly insane and full of toxic memes, and my culture is right to more or less quarantine me. And just in case that’s so, I always try to advocate for mercy and forgiveness for others. So that if that is the case I’ll be worthy of it myself, so that I can continue to be thankful, at least, for things not being much, much worse.
Update: 2016-04-22 0337 PM
I’ve been asked to make a list of those positions which tend to alienate.
Let’s start by saying that philosophically I’m essentially a Utilitarian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism
For more complete less personal version of this list with reasons and links:
I personally believe: (In/That)
- Nuclear power is the safest best form of power so far.
- AI should be preemptively given full citizen rights.
- Universal suffrage.
- Genetic engineering/GMO/Synbio.
- Geoengineering.
- A UBI.
- A cap on wealth.
- Cloning and cloned meat for food.
- Selling sex should be like selling any other service.
- The removal of race, religion, age, and gender status as policy designations.
- Nationalizing infrastructural enterprises that are too big to fail.
- Permitting unlicensed fully disclosed medical care.
- Corporate execution as a legal judgement option.
- Cryogenics.
- Punitive prisons are bad policy and ethically repugnant.
- Political parties should be treated legally like religions.
- Officially enforced monogamy and all marriage law should abolished.
- Gun law should be abolished.
- Drug law should be abolished.
- Patents and copyright should be abolished.
- State and local law should be abolished.
- Crime should be treated as only mental illness and/or desperation.
- The wage gap is more a product of disposition than oppression.
- LNT model is wrong.
- Vengeance is wrong.
- Life likely didn’t originate on Earth.
- Communal schooling should be abolished.
- The brain in some can act like an organic transceiver.
- Time is an illusion.
- The hidden variable theory is correct.
- There is no free will.
- The MRA movement has many legitimate grievances.
- Democracy objectively might not be a good idea.
- Deterrence is mostly a fig leaf for sadism.
- Some species should be wiped out or reduced to freezer samples/records.
- Parents do not own their children.
- Children are oppressed second class citizens deserving of full rights.
- The animal kingdom needs to be radically reshaped to end suffering.
This list is likely incomplete or will change over time.