Comment by mikelyons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikelyons | Hacker News Reader

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There's an interesting lecture from a pretty well known teacher:

He expounds in this lecture about wanting to avoid politics in his work and in his daily life but then explains the realization that not only is it foolhardy to think that you can separate any part of your life from politics but that it is every single persons duty to overcome their self-bias, their selfish desire to not engage, and to make their life a positive contribution to the direction of human political evolution, regardless of what they egoistically want for themselves.

It comes down to political apathy being rooted in selfishness, which is the very devilish drive that leads to the need for politics in the first place.

Now people are going to project a negative meaning onto selfishness in this context, especially if they perceive this as calling them selfish (ie. if they don't want to engage in politics). I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with being selfish, it's just not workable, there's no integrity in it. Integrity meaning workability, like the integrity of spokes in a wheel. I'm not saying this is some moralistic character trait that makes someone bad for lack of it, just that it doesn't work when politics is ignored. It is interwoven into every aspect of our lives. Humanity is political.

This sounds exactly like the kind of thing that people who have various other religious conversions say. They have this profound ineffable moral "awakening" and then see fit to start integrating it into every aspect of their lives up to and including trying to "awaken" other people. It's very disturbing to see people go through this process in my opinion as it's a stark reminder that even the most intelligent and thoughtful human beings can essentially have their minds hijacked. It makes me wonder if and when I'll have my mind hijacked, or if it already is (people who have been pwned this way surely don't realize it).

Zeal of the convert. Good analogy.

Do you think that it's possible to have your mind hijacked by apathy?

Do you think that it's possible to have your mind hijacked by your identity?

Morality is not what is being pointed to here, morality is relative and a projection of the mind.

It's futile to try to awaken anyone else, because people cannot see past their present level of consciousness. Skeptics in particular often cannot be skeptical of their skepticism which makes them just as ideological about rationality as any religious belief.

But I am open to the possibility that this is wrong, and that politics is just another activity that you can avoid to zero detriment, and that being maximally selfish has plenty of workability in creating a better world for the future. And also it's obviously part of human evolution.

I'm open to participating in politics being for some people and not for others.

Politics exists because we are selfish. Recognition of the fact that we are selfish and that the political civil order need not necessarily be a part of every facet of everyday life is how we ended up with such ideas like “Separation of Church and State”.

Otherwise we would be picking state religions, giving tax advantages to the favored religion, and maybe even burning heretics at the stake depending on the current political mood. Probably Jewish people would have gotten killed or exiled for one reason or another from the United States as well.

Somehow on matters of theology, while debates and biases still exist, even atheists can live life surrounded by Catholics without fear of persecution. On the time scale of history, that’s a pretty neat feat. Whatever politics exist in various churches, are by and large outside the scope of the national government.

The reason our politics is so vicious these days is because we have such a large Federal State that is substantially more than a mere national government. A government which was founded more or less to ensure the common defense, provide for bankruptcy courts and keep the the United States a free trade area back before they even had the term for it. The more functions you want to graft onto the State, Federal or your home State, the more you are inviting the political preferences of your neighbors and fellow citizens into your own life, and the more you have at stake come the next elections because the next President can always undo the entire regulatory legacy of the previous one. This is why laws originate in Congress where it takes a law to undo a law. If your rights only exist by Executive fiat that the next administration can undo with the stroke of a pen, then you don’t really have them.

Would demonizing and banning psychedelics not count as advancing one religious or spiritual tradition over another?

This is getting way off topic, but does it stand to reason that new emerging spirituality that uses substances that are not tax-advantaged/legal counts as favoring the traditional over the new? (setting aside the history of psychedelics that's older than Judaism or Christianity)

I think demonizing and banning psychedelics was part of a larger scheme to find reasons to lock more black people up. Because that’s ultimately what the drug war was and is about. Best thing we could do is wash our hands of the whole thing, and try to revert our criminal justice system back to the state it was in prior to prosecuting the Drug War. Based of today’s political atmosphere, I don’t have a whole lot of hope for it, but at least as far as weed and psychedelics go, we’re starting to see something of a correction that will remove them from the scope of the drug war in time.

I think you could make a good case, I don’t know if it would be a winning case today, but I think you could make a good case along those lines in the courts. That said, I am incredibly unfamiliar with psychedelics and either their history or culture so I don’t want to say more than that.

I will say that if a substance were banned for blatantly religious reasons, I don’t think SCOTUS in any age would have upheld the ban as Constitutional. There would have to be a non-religious reason for the substance controls.

I for one would like to get the government out of the Drug War business though. It’s done, it’s a drain on the Treasury, it’s explicitly racist, and it actively distorts our civil and political institutions.

Being highly political seems to be most concentrated in the young. Once you hit your mid 30s and have a few kids you learn to have a little perspective and not get so caught up in it. The ones that stay political are either people trying to make a career out of it, or are consumed with the virtue of their ideology. Both groups are to be looked at with skepticism and avoided.

The average age of world leaders is 60.

https://www.nairaland.com/2056155/average-age-world-leaders

Ideology is the exact opposite of what I would say is necessary.

We need to hold deep ideals loosely, and aim to not be ideological.

Political apathy, child-rearing as a primary objective of life, these things can be held ideologically.

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