The Art of Negativity
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You can't go through life either distrusting everyone and everything, nor can you do the opposite and live a good life. People don't like negativity because it ruins their mood, but you sometimes have to be critical. People also don't like positivity because they feel it sets too high of a standard, but to do anything you need a little hubris.
This is a great little line, thanks.
On the subject matter, all of the thinking around this stuff is very all-or-nothing. I know it’s popular to say that you need to be balanced in your considerations too but I find the idea of balance to suggest a stillness and inaction, set and forget.
I think you need to hold the different conflicting ideas in your head, at the same time and push them into conflict with each other to find a pragmatic mix of them.
There's a third (and possibly many more) variation(s). People don't like positivity because it often triggers a prejudgement of naivety, which in turn leads to defeatism (since you can't connect with someone; you feel disconnected from them due to their positivity and your inability to empathise with their perspective).
That's a trickier one to overcome with pure hubris, and imo a much more common one than some may think.
Being negative about how you reacted to something, how you did something, or how something was done (without pointing fingers) is extremely helpful for me, it push me to improve or change where needed.
I disagree strongly with the first paragraph and agree vehemently with the second.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_in_God_and_keep_your_pow...
This means that acting with irrational optimism is often the rational choice when you consider social factors, and that is what managers are looking for when the job ad says it wants an optimistic person.
However that kind of irrational social based optimism isn't what entrepreneurs means when they talk about optimism. Their kind of optimism is that you need to see yourself as better than others so you wont conclude that since most others fail you too will fail, which is kind of the opposite kind of optimism managers are looking for in their reports.
When I am in the depths of a project where I have a lot of things that I need to fail at to understand, a negative mindset is more useful.
Maintaining a positive mindset in the face of a multitude of assured failures is possible, but draining. However, a negative mindset, is more engine-like and muddles along, unsurprised by the failures.
Again, this is a purely personal anecdote and I would not recommend adopting a negative mindset to other people.
I distrust everything and can make a convincing case for it.
Where is the trust to be found? In societal structures? In people who have been indoctrinated into a society and think its perfectly normal to spend time in an office looking at screens and in their downtime look at screens too?
And what is a good life? Is it having the money and the goodies, or is it having the truth? This is a decision for everyone to make, whether they realise it or not!
This is just one minor example. There's several other things that you have to trust that work. In any exchange or trade you are providing some level of trust. If you didn't trust at all you wouldn't do the trade. You trust that whoever you are meeting up with won't kill you.
So you can't really say that you "distrust everything". That's a meaningless statement. Even you who says that they distrust everything has some level of trust in some items.
If you are in a relationship do you go there with complete distrust, once again demanding to see their messages and location at all times because otherwise you distrust them not to cheat on you?
If you are living in a house you trust that whoever built the house built it well enough for it to not collapse on you randomly.
I don't think most people are nefarious. Most are incredibly ignorant though. Despite apparent intellectual abilities, most people are unable to think for themselves - they have been programmed. They have received their values and behaviours, etc and believe them to be their own, even though they have never considered them deeply for themselves. They believe its perfectly normal to spend their whole lives working at screens for money. Unbelievable! This is 'normal'. Wearing masks is now normal too, and no travel, ever greater government management of one's life is also normal. Etc.
So yes, there is the day-to-day trust - but what I'm thinking is that trust requires that 2 agents have freewill and a similar reasoned understanding. But we don't. I live in different universes to most, I think.
When I'm talking about trust, there is a relation to truth. Most people accept the truth they are provided without question. There is no debate - the TV doesn't lie, the government has your best interests, corporations aim to make profit but in a 'ethical' way, the law is independent, etc, etc. In dealing with people who accept all that uncritically, we cannot have trust. We do not have individuals interacting according to a common understanding. We have a herd that acts in a predetermined way. It looks like its made up of individuals, but its not. In fact the only thinking that's occurring is small, and relates to personal preferences (I prefer the taste of chocolate, I like watching sport, I will work hard for money to get the house, etc). The behaviour is hardwired, there is no element of free will there. No more trust to be had there, that you could have with a door or wall.
This is exactly what independent thinkers will be diagnosed with. If you don't go along with what consensus calls true, you are mentally ill - its obvious! That person doesn't believe x or y - despite being taught it at school. He or she wants to know and understand for themselves! My, my - that's definitely a crime.
Knowing is when you verify facts for yourself. By not checking information, but just accepting whatever is handed to you, you are applying no filter to your reality. You filter only what has been deemed acceptable for you to filter - did Trump say that, did google do that, etc. The basic 'facts' are accepted without contention. Or any verified evidence. All that's needed is for someone to make a claim or show it on TV and that's basically right, right?
Have you ever looked at the replication crisis - where 70% of science studies cannot be reproduced? Or the nature of science funding - its corporations, the government and the military. If we are living in a fascist dictatorship, as I believe is evident, then that is a closed loop. Only what is deemed valuable to those stakeholders is investigated and presented as true.
>The basic 'facts' are accepted without contention. Or any verified evidence.
>All that's needed is for someone to make a claim or show it on TV and that's basically right, right?
Who exactly are you speaking about here? What gives you the right to presume -- without any evidence -- that others don't verify and critically examine what they read and hear? Do you actually believe that you're the only person who does this?
Your attitude is blatantly condescending and supercilious.
Exact proof of something simple as 2+2 is laborious and hilariously disproportionate but one can work with approximations well enough and handle the vast majority of cases in the same way friction and time dillation are often omitted from equations.
Started in 1945, it's to the Polish culture what New Yorker is to the American one.
“Everything is awesome,” in this context, is alienating, or if you prefer, gaslighting.
And self damaging. Nobody wants to talk to them about real problems because there is no safe space for candor. So people talk to the pessimists, creating a rift. “I haven’t heard anything about this,” has been uttered more than a couple times. No shit Sherlock. Who would talk to you about problems like this?
Pessimists I have seen generally as more secure from planning for the worst perhaps to overkill extents but less happy.
The snarky summary is "An optimist is a million dollars in debt, losing money every day and thinks it will get better. A pessimist will eventually have a million dollars, feel precariously worried about pending disaster while their true greatest risk is their urge to commit suicide."
How do you know the casual relationship?
I can imagine if all you have is positive feed back loop, you will see everything will just keep improving endlessly.
Which is why these perspectives are what they are perspectives. They are not real world models you should live your life by.
In real life you must deal with the situations as they are.
For me, it is about stoic/Zen acceptance of things we cannot change.
Contrast it with "American optimism", which is for me close to gaslighting, or at best - a "flight" reaction from suffering.
For example, if you join a company and tell the manager in the first meeting "If we reorganized the working groups like this it will greatly increase productivity due to reasons, it will be great!", he wont see you as an optimist, even though you have plenty of optimism, what he wants is optimism towards his ideas and not your own optimistic ideas.
-- Michael Leuning
https://cruciality.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/stone-age.jpg
securely a pinko
ocular pinkeyes
sneakily recoup
epicurean yolks
cakey repulsion
late capitalism
21st century capitalism
wellness capitalism
white patriarchal capitalism
Late capitalist as a bonus is essentially equivalent to a doomsday prophecy of the downfall of infidels. Complete with ignoring all of the past times it was predicted and never came to pass.
The negative methodology in this article seems to explicitly renounce the concept of emotions being destructive.
I tend to agree with the second view/philosophy more. Negative emotions like anger and grief are not destructive on their own. However, an individual's response to negative emotions can easily become destructive and foster harmful habits.
Stoicism aims to free one from anger, envy and jealousy, thus averting the negative responses which is an absolutely valid approach. The negative methodology in the article is about experiencing the emotion to its fullest and building resilience, which in turn reduces destructive responses.
Just dropping all of the communist bits and stating /how/ and /why/ capitalism pushes optimism would give it some intergration. It would at least fit in as a "novel or less commonly listed flaw of capitalism" instead of just including the list of top down beliefs as articles of faith.
I really doubt what you are saying here. Eastern Europeans are just as capable of logical trains of thought supported by compelling writing and evidence as anyone else in the world - which is very different from this article.