My point is: your wife doesn't feel responsible for your personal safety. Here's the difference between a domesticated person who expects someone else to protect them, i.e., do their violence for them, and someone that feels responsible for their own safety.
Domesticated: works for a major corporation in a big city. Has no guns, no means of personally protecting himself, lives in close proximity to strangers, and if the food stores went down, he would starve to death within a few weeks.
Undomesticated: made very anxious by every conspiracy theory because he knows the world is dangerous and no one is ultimately his buddy, lives in a bunker in some undisclosed location, has at least a year of food rations, has more guns and ammunition than a small Latin American nation, makes a plan to kill everyone he meets.
The domesticated believe the undomesticated to be insane because they don't think about their own safety and violence as the undomesticated do. How many people look at the doomsday bunker crowd as a bunch of lunatics? They aren't lunatics: they have no trust in the system and they have taken it upon themselves to secure their safety to the best of their ability.
The fact that you blithely say "we live in an odd 1984 dystopia" tells me, no offense, that you aren't aware of what that means. Perhaps intellectually you do, but because you aren't used to protecting yourself, such a statement doesn't rain down anxiety and paranoia upon your emotional register. This is the strange thing about the domesticated condition: it's a type of blindness.
I'd compare the blindness of the domesticated to the difference between an old person at a funeral versus a child at a funeral. What is death to youth? What can youth possibly know of death? On the contrary, what is death to age? Death is profound and moving to those who have enough experience to know what it is, but it is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- to those that have not developed the depth of experience that allows one to register the significance of the grim reminder of our own mortality. The same thing goes for violence and its fruits and our ability to intimately know them.
In any case, good luck out there Winston #room101.
There's probably a "domestication gradient" or something like that. I can sense it when I talk to people. Some people are like little children. They haven't thought about their own safety ever. Others are literal wild men who believe every conspiracy theory out there because they are practically traumatized and are always seeking out potential threats. And yes, there are people in between that worry about their own safety, but also have enough faith in the system to function properly.
I must admit... I have fallen in love with my own term because it really does seem to describe some of the human diversity I've encountered.
You're an interesting man, if a bit grandiose. I'm currently stoned, so I'll ask a weird question. What about us doomsayers who know in their hearts that it'll all fall apart in the end, but are cognizant that they themselves don't care enough about their safety to do anything differently?
I assume it's a reference to a James Mattis quote.
> Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.
It refers to a general concept of alertness and awareness about your surroundings, and how you can't tell who might be good or evil until they act, so just assume everyone could be malicious until proven otherwise (or, more practically, until you're out of their sphere of influence).
In a sense, I am just putting words together. Would you accept a variation of 1984 dystopia? I don't think I am wrong here, but I am willing to go over differences.
No. I don't believe in neat model of the universe where you can assign vague tag, label, whatever you want to call it and apply it to every facet of reality. Its not sensible. Worse, it is not how the world works. You won't even get appropriate approximation of reality that way. If it was a simple 1 and 0, we would have better simulations by now.
So.. no. It does not alarm me. It helps that I don't fit your model very well.
Now just imagine saying all these things as a mad man stands before you with a knife. Suddenly the world becomes more real than it ever has been and all these abstract things you say to your friends in cyberspace become utter nonsense as they offer you no assistance in navigating the mortal danger you find yourself in.
The mad mad has you by the throat, you feel his cold steel press up against your virgin neck. Your last words: "I don't believe in neat model of the universe where you can assign vague tag, label, whatever you want to call it and apply it to every facet of reality."
My ultimate point in this exchange with you is that violence has a real sobering effect on the mind. It's a great filter of sense and nonsense.
It is both good and bad that we don't seem to have more data on near death experiences. I mean actual research on mental impact and so on. I see some articles but the ones I found are relatively old.
Anecdotally, I had 3 NDEs and as the adage goes in the immortal words of Dr.House nearly dying changes everything for about three weeks. And it sounds about right in retrospect. I returned to normality fast. It sobered me enough to survive, but not enough to redefine my whole world around me in terms of domestication.
I don't want to assume, but I think you are extrapolating to a society from a single encounter. It would seem you over-corrected.
Just to further complicate this discussion, as an atheist, I do not yelp 'sweet entropy'. But it goes back to my original point. Things are complicated and you are making them more complicated by pretending they are simple:P
So... just to remind ourselves how we got here. The parent comment was a poster talking about how his wife paid no mind to the potential threats posed by the big tech surveillance state. I then made a few comments explaining my thoughts on why she is like this. "She doesn't care because she's domesticated: she isn't used to thinking about violence and danger." That was my point. Then I went on further to talk about how people are more-or-less defined by this "domesticated" property and how there are others that seem to be "undomesticated" in the sense that they are more familiar with violence. And that this property dictates what thoughts are available to one's awareness. The domesticated being more limited in what they can think because they lack an understanding of violence.
I don't think anything I've said is particularly strange. If you parse "domesticated" into slave and "undomesticated" into master...then you'd end up with a very traditional worldview in which masters operate on a different level than slaves -- the latter subordinate to the former. The latent thesis in all this is that an intimate understanding of violence is what separates master from slave.
I think I will need to think on it a little more. Since I checked your links a little, I would be mildly interested in what formed your opinion. Could you share books that are relevant from your perspective here?
"The Genealogy of Morals" by Nietzsche with the reminder that I am using "violence" in the way he uses "power." Power is just the civilized word for violence.
And this is what I consider to be a cipher from his "Thus Spoke Zarathustra:"
“But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthword, downword, into the dark, the deep - into evil.”
Also "The Golden Bough" by Frazer if you can read between the lines.
Domesticated: works for a major corporation in a big city. Has no guns, no means of personally protecting himself, lives in close proximity to strangers, and if the food stores went down, he would starve to death within a few weeks.
Undomesticated: made very anxious by every conspiracy theory because he knows the world is dangerous and no one is ultimately his buddy, lives in a bunker in some undisclosed location, has at least a year of food rations, has more guns and ammunition than a small Latin American nation, makes a plan to kill everyone he meets.
The domesticated believe the undomesticated to be insane because they don't think about their own safety and violence as the undomesticated do. How many people look at the doomsday bunker crowd as a bunch of lunatics? They aren't lunatics: they have no trust in the system and they have taken it upon themselves to secure their safety to the best of their ability.
The fact that you blithely say "we live in an odd 1984 dystopia" tells me, no offense, that you aren't aware of what that means. Perhaps intellectually you do, but because you aren't used to protecting yourself, such a statement doesn't rain down anxiety and paranoia upon your emotional register. This is the strange thing about the domesticated condition: it's a type of blindness.
I'd compare the blindness of the domesticated to the difference between an old person at a funeral versus a child at a funeral. What is death to youth? What can youth possibly know of death? On the contrary, what is death to age? Death is profound and moving to those who have enough experience to know what it is, but it is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- to those that have not developed the depth of experience that allows one to register the significance of the grim reminder of our own mortality. The same thing goes for violence and its fruits and our ability to intimately know them.
In any case, good luck out there Winston #room101.