Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby stickdog99 » Tue Apr 13, 2021 2:50 pm

Thanks for the thoughtful posts.

All of my friends are "good liberals," and among those good liberals right now, several beliefs are sacrosanct:

1) only worst enemies are the fellow citizens who share different hyper-polarized political beliefs

2) lockdowns, social distancing, and face masks are common sense measures that nobody who "believes in science" dare ask for scientific evidence to support

3) immediate vaccination with any experimental vaccine, no questions asked (like strict adherence to lockdown, social distancing, and face masks mandates), is an inviolable litmus test of both political and moral purity.

And, yes, our compassion for others has been turned against us.as has our inherent fear of those who we judge not to share our compassion for others (as well as our fear of COVID-19, of course).

The social isolation we enforce on each other may also contribute to this effect. When people feel free to gather together for hours on end, they tend to work things out better, at least in terms of questioning obviously dicey official narratives. When you enjoy a friend's company for less than an hour over the course of an entire year, you are not very likely to spend much of this precious time questioning official narratives at the potential cost of your friendship.
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby dada » Tue Apr 13, 2021 5:11 pm

I think this idea that lonely, isolated individuals can find something resembling salvation through society is consumerism at its finest. Lonely, isolated individuals can only create a lonely, isolated society. Anxiety is just the sense of displacement, the ever-present feeling of being alone in a crowd. And the individual who isn't lonely and isolated feels a sense of belonging even when alone. Co-creates different society, one that transcends the abstract limitations of time and space imposed by the society of loneliness and isolation.
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby Blue » Tue Apr 13, 2021 7:09 pm

dada » Tue Apr 13, 2021 3:11 pm wrote:I think this idea that lonely, isolated individuals can find something resembling salvation through society is consumerism at its finest. Lonely, isolated individuals can only create a lonely, isolated society. Anxiety is just the sense of displacement, the ever-present feeling of being alone in a crowd. And the individual who isn't lonely and isolated feels a sense of belonging even when alone. Co-creates different society, one that transcends the abstract limitations of time and space imposed by the society of loneliness and isolation.


haha, I love this, dada

People are complaining about their friends wearing a mask during a pandemic....
What's next?
Your neighbor asks for help?
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby stickdog99 » Tue Apr 13, 2021 9:26 pm

Ha, ha. Forced confinement, mandated isolation. and forced vaccination are awesome!

To suggest otherwise is the height of consumerism and illustrative of both incurable loneliness and a profound lack of compassion for others!
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby dada » Wed Apr 14, 2021 12:04 am

I'm not saying it's an incurable loneliness, I'm saying the cure for it cannot be found in an incurably lonely society.

And the cured aren't part of that society, but belong to another. I'm saying we pass through your society, but aren't part of it.
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby BenDhyan » Wed Apr 14, 2021 12:48 am

Be in the world but not of it, sounds like a spiritual teaching?
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby kelley » Wed Apr 14, 2021 8:32 pm

[dubz]
Last edited by kelley on Wed Apr 14, 2021 8:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby kelley » Wed Apr 14, 2021 8:34 pm

the holographic principle

or

nothing to get hung about
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby stickdog99 » Wed Apr 14, 2021 9:48 pm

kelley » 15 Apr 2021 00:34 wrote:the holographic principle

or

nothing to get hung about


anti-de Sitter/conformal fields forever
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby Elvis » Wed Apr 14, 2021 10:09 pm

We're all going to "die anyway." :bigsmile
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby PufPuf93 » Wed Apr 14, 2021 11:07 pm

Elvis » Wed Apr 14, 2021 7:09 pm wrote:We're all going to "die anyway." :bigsmile


don't forget the pre-dead but still alive dead
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby dada » Thu Apr 15, 2021 10:19 am

Going to get my first shot in about an hour. I've been conflicted about it, but my final decision rests on the fact that I see the fear and paranoia of the global bill gates conspiracy believer types, and I want no part of it, don't want to feed that in any way. So.
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby The Bernician » Thu Apr 15, 2021 11:58 am

dada » Tue Apr 13, 2021 10:11 pm wrote:I think this idea that lonely, isolated individuals can find something resembling salvation through society is consumerism at its finest. Lonely, isolated individuals can only create a lonely, isolated society. Anxiety is just the sense of displacement, the ever-present feeling of being alone in a crowd. And the individual who isn't lonely and isolated feels a sense of belonging even when alone. Co-creates different society, one that transcends the abstract limitations of time and space imposed by the society of loneliness and isolation.


Hi dada,

I enjoy your somewhat elliptical approach to writing (I can't work out if this is a pejorative term, but it's not meant as such here). But I have to admit I'm not sure I understand you entirely (which may be part of the point, of course). I have, however, been musing on this, and what follows may or may not be a connected response.

The curse of anxiety, of course, is that even when we are able to connect it with something specific, we are not necessarily connecting it with the right something specific. Perhaps the difference here is between worry and anxiety. This seems consistent with what you're saying.

I believe, however, that humans are fundamentally social beings, and that anxiety is perhaps best understood as a social phenomenon. I happen to know a bit about poverty in wealthy nations, from different angles. And I think the fundamental feature of poverty is anxiety: status anxiety is paramount, and turns into shame when it's chronic; but being poor often means being anxious at a kind of existential level - perhaps it's experienced proximately as a fear of material want, but really it's the social anxiety that is predominating there, too. I didn't think the term 'social exclusion', that took off here at least in the 1990s, was a bad one. Anyhow, neoliberalism creates and extends this anxiety so effectively that this is probably a feature rather than a bug. (And the language of 'incentives' and supposed economic rationality doesn't really hide that.)

More broadly, I'm not sure it's so much about finding salvation through society as society - or community, more relatably - being core to our self-realisation. I'm thinking of how infants look first to the faces of others (especially caregivers) to make sense of what is happening. How I instinctively turned to look at the faces of my fellow passengers to gauge whether that noise on my Air India flight was normal. Of the way we share looks, jokes, comments, stories, moments. Not having any of that strikes at our humanity. Solitary confinement is a recognised form of torture.

Now, I also see truth in what you say about an individual who isn't lonely and isolated feeling a sense of belonging even when alone. As a parent, I'm trying to layer my child's sense of security such that she internalises that. Many of us (most of us?), though, haven't. Or perhaps many have partially, but renew it daily through the relationships we develop, nurture or maintain. Very occasionally, I have a day when I am somehow a super-empath. I can feel the anxiety emanating from people, and it's widespread. It feels particularly prominent in the UK and the US, but I haven't spent long enough anywhere else to see things with non-touristic eyes. This past year has certainly increased it the world I am experiencing, and it has also palpably increased fear of and hostility towards the other. Now, of course this correlation doesn't prove a causal relationship, but I think there's plenty of reason to suppose that there is one.

So I'd suggest that lonely, isolated individuals collectively form a lonely, isolated... conglomeration of people, I guess, and society, if that's a synonym for that. But I think that in coming together and socialising, those people become less lonely, less isolated, and form a happier, less anxious, more fulfilled conglomeration of people - a community, perhaps? (These words - society, community, etc.- are all a bit debased these days.) I believe a connection has been established between levels of trust in a society and levels of happiness, and trust in turn grows with connection. Conversely, breaking social bonds can surely only increase anxiety. (And, sure, simply being in the same crowd as people doesn't create that connection, but I'm assuming you're claiming a bit more than that.)
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby The Bernician » Thu Apr 15, 2021 12:06 pm

stickdog99 » Tue Apr 13, 2021 7:50 pm wrote:Thanks for the thoughtful posts.

All of my friends are "good liberals," and among those good liberals right now, several beliefs are sacrosanct:

1) only worst enemies are the fellow citizens who share different hyper-polarized political beliefs

2) lockdowns, social distancing, and face masks are common sense measures that nobody who "believes in science" dare ask for scientific evidence to support

3) immediate vaccination with any experimental vaccine, no questions asked (like strict adherence to lockdown, social distancing, and face masks mandates), is an inviolable litmus test of both political and moral purity.

And, yes, our compassion for others has been turned against us.as has our inherent fear of those who we judge not to share our compassion for others (as well as our fear of COVID-19, of course).

The social isolation we enforce on each other may also contribute to this effect. When people feel free to gather together for hours on end, they tend to work things out better, at least in terms of questioning obviously dicey official narratives. When you enjoy a friend's company for less than an hour over the course of an entire year, you are not very likely to spend much of this precious time questioning official narratives at the potential cost of your friendship.


That's an interesting last point, especially. This enforced isolation will have so many surprising (and 'surprising') consequences that new ones will keep on occurring to us. But yeah, increasing polarisation makes a lot of sense. And the ground has been very well prepared for that. (I've been reading a lot more right-wing stuff this last year, given that's where so much of the scepticism is coming from, but I suspect that this may not be typical. I have had an intelligent, super-rational, left-wing friend attacking me for agreeing with Nigel Farage, though.)
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby dada » Thu Apr 15, 2021 12:58 pm

The people around me have their own society, though, that I'm not part of. Like a hasidic Jew, I may live in close proximity to your society, interact with it, enter into relationship with it, but it isn't my society.

I guess it may be difficult for some in your society to grasp. I mean, there's no official way to leave your society, there's no change of citizenship form to fill out at an embassy, or a boilerplate announcment to be made in the legal notices section of the local paper.

I'm not sure what holograms have to do with it, though, or the fact that we're all going to die someday. But I'll chalk up any misunderstandings to my own failure to communicate.

I'm wondering if anxiety is at root the fear that the society one has chosen to identify with is exactly the cause of planetary destruction. The old cognitive dissonance creating tension in the individual. When you don't see yourself reflected in that society, the anxiety becomes excitement. Feels nice, like the bottomless pit in the stomach is now filled with butterflies.

edited to change "I guess it may be difficult for those in your society to grasp" to "I guess it may be difficult for some in your society to grasp." I think the generalization sounded too combative.
Last edited by dada on Thu Apr 15, 2021 3:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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