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Comment by WriterGuy2021 | Hacker News Reader

WriterGuy2021

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.

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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.

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