The Easy to be Hard problem

[onemoretime]

How can people be so heartless?
How can people be so cruel?

 

[Ginkgo]

Very easily, but hardly at all.

 

[Aleksei]

People are dicks. We are engendered by dicks, after all.

 

[Helios]

People are dicks. We are engendered by dicks, after all.

 

[Mole]

How can people be so heartless?
How can people be so cruel?

Ya gotta be cruel to be kind.

Or is that - ya gotta be cool to be kind?

 

[onemoretime]

Harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding, no more falsehoods or derisions, golden living dreams of visions, mystic crystal revelation, and the mind's true liberation

 

[Halla74]

Harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding, no more falsehoods or derisions, golden living dreams of visions, mystic crystal revelation, and the mind's true liberation

The world you describe above is the world of children, as they are pure and good, but somehow they are forced to "grow up" in a world ruled by dysfunctional adults, who ask them to check their purity at the door, do as they are told, and not question the double standards that abound around them.

 

[onemoretime]

The world you describe above is the world of children, as they are pure and good, but somehow they are forced to "grow up" in a world ruled by dysfunctional adults, who ask them to check their purity at the door, do as they are told, and not question the double standards that abound around them.

We, starved, look at one another short of breath, walking proudly in our winter coats wearing smells from laboratories, facing a dying nation: a moving-paper fantasy, listening to the new-told lies, with supreme visions of lonely tunes.

 

[Arthur Schopenhauer]

How can people be so heartless?
How can people be so cruel?

This sounds like the lyrics to a really corny 80's era song.

*snaps my fingers to the beat*

Yeah, it's got a nice rythm to it.

 

[miss fortune]

because they're human and capable of free will

 

[Polaris]

Another person is nearly an equal to you (by definition) and so a type of mirror by which you see yourself, making the things you notice in them, such as their feelings, largely your own. To cause another person to suffer, then, would be to cause suffering in yourself, for in spite of the distance that stands between us, we, and even the universe itself, are bound together by empathy, a condition of being-one that transcends gulfs. Since we can't directly cause ourselves to suffer, for reasons described below, in order for cruelty to occur, a person must make-other, over and above any similarities.

Consider your own hand; a moment ago, you were so much at one with it that you weren't even thinking of it; now that you're looking at it, it becomes possible to do something to it (rather than with it), for in spite of the empathy that still binds you to it, it's been separated from you.

Suppose it occurs to you to take advantage of your hand's objectivity and stab it with a knife. The moment you think of this, you recoil, rather as you would if a loved one were threatened with a knife. What's more, you have an almost physical sense of not being able to do it, as though a magnetic wall stands between the knife and your hand.

A will cannot act on itself, for its willing is [at one with] its willing. (Yet nothing whatsoever keeps a will from acting on itself.)

Now suppose you rest your hand on the table and stare at it until it becomes less your own and more something foreign like a lump of wax. When this happens, it becomes very easy, insofar as you preserve that state of mind, to bring the knife down on the hand, for the hand is no longer unified with your will but at a distance from it. One might say that your hand has been dehumanized, stripped of its freedom and left at the mercy of yours.

This same process occurs when we abuse our fellows; we detach from them and consider them lifeless objects to be treated like machinery. And unlike your hand, which will scream out in protest the moment you infringe on its rights (for you immediately reclaim your hand), the cries of other people are muffled by all the differences that lie between us. Class, nationality, gender, and religion--these are all barriers to our humanity, walls that turn us into lifeless objects devoid of freedom. Some labels are worse than others; with the right one, it's possible to create such a distance that you see another person as scum to be wiped from existence. For the person so disposed, their actions don't seem cruel; they're not aware of the pain they're causing any more than you and I are aware of hurting a stick of wood that we snap in half. To the person on the receiving end, the suffering is very real, and the name for what they're subjected to is cruelty. Every victim has one hope, and that hope is to become human like their oppressor, for no person in this world can harm himself.

 

[onemoretime]

Another person is nearly an equal to you (by definition) and so a type of mirror by which you see yourself, making the things you notice in them, such as their feelings, largely your own. To cause another person to suffer, then, would be to cause suffering in yourself, for in spite of the distance that stands between us, we, and even the universe itself, are bound together by empathy, a condition of being-one that transcends gulfs. Since we can't directly cause ourselves to suffer, for reasons described below, in order for cruelty to occur, a person must make-other, over and above any similarities.

Consider your own hand; a moment ago, you were so much at one with it that you weren't even thinking of it; now that you're looking at it, it becomes possible to do something to it (rather than with it), for in spite of the empathy that still binds you to it, it's been separated from you.

Suppose it occurs to you to take advantage of your hand's objectivity and stab it with a knife. The moment you think of this, you recoil, rather as you would if a loved one were threatened with a knife. What's more, you have an almost physical sense of not being able to do it, as though a magnetic wall stands between the knife and your hand.

A will cannot act on itself, for its willing is [at one with] its willing. (Yet nothing whatsoever keeps a will from acting on itself.)

Now suppose you rest your hand on the table and stare at it until it becomes less your own and more something foreign like a lump of wax. When this happens, it becomes very easy, insofar as you preserve that state of mind, to bring the knife down on the hand, for the hand is no longer unified with your will but at a distance from it. One might say that your hand has been dehumanized, stripped of its freedom and left at the mercy of yours.

This same process occurs when we abuse our fellows; we detach from them and consider them lifeless objects to be treated like machinery. And unlike your hand, which will scream out in protest the moment you infringe on its rights (for you immediately reclaim your hand), the cries of other people are muffled by all the differences that lie between us. Class, nationality, gender, and religion--these are all barriers to our humanity, walls that turn us into lifeless objects devoid of freedom. Some labels are worse than others; with the right one, it's possible to create such a distance that you see another person as scum to be wiped from existence. For the person so disposed, their actions don't seem cruel; they're not aware of the pain they're causing any more than you and I are aware of hurting a stick of wood that we snap in half. To the person on the receiving end, the suffering is very real, and the name for what they're subjected to is cruelty. Every victim has one hope, and that hope is to become human like their oppressor, for no person in this world can harm himself.

What a piece of work is man
How noble in reason
How infinite in faculties
In form and moving
How express and admirable
In action how like an angel
In apprehension how like a god
The beauty of the world
The paragon of animals

I have of late
But wherefore I know not
Lost all my mirth
This goodly frame
The earth
Seems to me a sterile promontory
This most excellent canopy
The air-- look you!
This brave o'erhanging firmament
This majestical roof
Fretted with golden fire
Why it appears no other thing to me
Than a foul and pestilent congregation
Of vapors

What a piece of work is man
How noble in reason

How dare they try to end this beauty?

 

[Arthur Schopenhauer]

Beans beans, the musical fruit,
The more you eat, the more you toot,
The more you toot, the better you feel,
So eat your beans at every meal!

 

[Arthur Schopenhauer]

Another person is nearly an equal to you (by definition) and so a type of mirror by which you see yourself, making the things you notice in them, such as their feelings, largely your own. To cause another person to suffer, then, would be to cause suffering in yourself, for in spite of the distance that stands between us, we, and even the universe itself, are bound together by empathy, a condition of being-one that transcends gulfs. Since we can't directly cause ourselves to suffer, for reasons described below, in order for cruelty to occur, a person must make-other, over and above any similarities.

Consider your own hand; a moment ago, you were so much at one with it that you weren't even thinking of it; now that you're looking at it, it becomes possible to do something to it (rather than with it), for in spite of the empathy that still binds you to it, it's been separated from you.

Suppose it occurs to you to take advantage of your hand's objectivity and stab it with a knife. The moment you think of this, you recoil, rather as you would if a loved one were threatened with a knife. What's more, you have an almost physical sense of not being able to do it, as though a magnetic wall stands between the knife and your hand.

A will cannot act on itself, for its willing is [at one with] its willing. (Yet nothing whatsoever keeps a will from acting on itself.)

Now suppose you rest your hand on the table and stare at it until it becomes less your own and more something foreign like a lump of wax. When this happens, it becomes very easy, insofar as you preserve that state of mind, to bring the knife down on the hand, for the hand is no longer unified with your will but at a distance from it. One might say that your hand has been dehumanized, stripped of its freedom and left at the mercy of yours.

This same process occurs when we abuse our fellows; we detach from them and consider them lifeless objects to be treated like machinery. And unlike your hand, which will scream out in protest the moment you infringe on its rights (for you immediately reclaim your hand), the cries of other people are muffled by all the differences that lie between us. Class, nationality, gender, and religion--these are all barriers to our humanity, walls that turn us into lifeless objects devoid of freedom. Some labels are worse than others; with the right one, it's possible to create such a distance that you see another person as scum to be wiped from existence. For the person so disposed, their actions don't seem cruel; they're not aware of the pain they're causing any more than you and I are aware of hurting a stick of wood that we snap in half. To the person on the receiving end, the suffering is very real, and the name for what they're subjected to is cruelty. Every victim has one hope, and that hope is to become human like their oppressor, for no person in this world can harm himself.

I disagree with most of this.

 

[Polaris]

Class, nationality, gender, and religion--these are all barriers to our humanity, walls that turn us into lifeless objects devoid of freedom.

It's worth mentioning that, somewhat paradoxically, these and other labels can also provide a basis for brotherhood, as with Christians gathering together under the banner of their religion. The one deciding factor as to whether a label you use dehumanizes someone is whether you wear that label yourself; if you don't, it objectifies the person you stamp it on (and, of course, to some extent a label always objectifies--to name something is to point it out as a thing--but in many cases this objectifying factor is drowned out by the ability of a label to underline and create a sense of kinship [which, all the same, comes at the cost of making other those who fall outside your brotherhood]).

 

[INTP]

Very easily, but hardly at all.

nice

 

[JocktheMotie]

I thought this was going to be about inopportune erections.

 

[onemoretime]

I thought this was going to be about inopportune erections.

Join the holy orgy
Kama Sutra
Everyone!

 

[JocktheMotie]

Orgies aren't fun if no one wants to do it with you.

 

[Lark]

How can people be so heartless?
How can people be so cruel?

Life can make them so.

Harden not your hearts. No truer verse in the whole bible. Except perhaps be sure of this, your sins will find you out.