Thackeraye
Well-Known Member
I think I have most of them as single editions. I think I'm missing one, maybe two? Sorry to hear about the fire.
Political Discussion
- Thread starter David A.
- Start date
Chucktshoes
Well-Known Member
Yea, you should.
That reminds me I need to order that one to add to my complete far side.
When reading about Buddhism, an author (Brad Warner) pointed out that the word in Hindi for suffering is Duhkha, and it is translated (from wiki) meaning anything that is "uneasy, uncomfortable, unpleasant, difficult, causing pain or sadness".[9][10] It is also a concept in Indian religions about the nature of life that innately includes the "unpleasant", "suffering", "pain", "sorrow", "distress", "grief" or "misery."[9][10] The term duḥkha does not have a one-word English translation, and embodies diverse aspects of unpleasant human experiences.[3][10] It is opposed to the word sukha, meaning "happiness," "comfort" or "ease.
In a way, we could translate this to any sort of unpleasantness that one encounters in life. We strive to be at sukha as a species. There's a lot to unpack when we talk about suffering in the modern world. Our bodies were made for running, swimming, hunting, climbing and walking. Anthropologically speaking, we are middling on the food chain and were incorporated into our natural environments as such. We realized that cooperation kept us alive and fed better than being solitary and thus society was created. We learned to cook our food, which made us able to eat and extract nutrients faster than our other primate cousins, which began changing the shape of our skulls, to what they are now. We, eventually, form complex emotional and societal bonds and felt the need to leave the natural world and all it's predators behind. We just wanted to not be eaten, nor did we want anyone that we cared about to be eaten.
When we decided that human lives were more important than a natural balance of predator and prey, we changed a lot of things, not just for the earth, but for us humans. There is anthropological evidence that humans had a much better sense of smell and hearing in our hunter gatherer days. We have lost this over centuries because we haven't needed it. As we continually enhance the mind, we forget to ask, "what world was my mind created for?" Our minds are just animal brains and we are happiest doing animalistic things like walking in nature, making things, and hunting and gathering. I won't say that our comforts are what bring us our maladies per se, but that we used our minds to create things that make tasks easier--things like how do we feed everyone, clothe everyone and shelter everyone--but because our minds are no longer doing what they were intended and designed to do, we get neuroses. Study after study talks about how humans need sunlight, and down time, and social connections and storytelling and plants and all the other things we find in nature, and were we hunting and gathering, we would get plenty of this sort of stuff. But when we set our minds to eliminating suffering or even just inconveniences, like everything else in this world, it comes with a trade off. And those trade offs are often seen in society's mental health. A dysfunction in "being able to cope" with the world comes when the world that we created leaves us isolated and unhappy. I think this is the most insidious thing about our modern world, the lack of true community connection because everyone is "in it for themselves" which is a fundamentally un-sapien-like way of thinking--and does cause us harm as individuals. We evolved to depend on each other. Yanking that away, even if it took 100 years, was way too short of a time for us to adapt to isolation in the modern world.
We have not forgot how to suffer. We know how to because we do it every day. What we are losing is connection to other people and to our natural world--the world our minds and bodies adapted to live in. To quote Stephen King, "We have forgotten the face of our fathers." When we are no longer able to work cooperatively, we become agents of destruction.
Chucktshoes
Well-Known Member
The more time passes, the more I think he was more right than wrong. 
Joe Mac
Well-Known Member
I don’t know. I think that Hobbes would consider that a reversion to the state of nature and the product of a tyrannical government which had broken the social contract and that there is a a right, or even almost an obligation, on citizens to overthrow it.
Hobbes is very much a product of his time having lived through the English Civil War and having seen the tyranny of monarchy being overthrown in Civil War and being the replaced by the tyranny of Cromwell.
Im surprised to see you quoting Hobbes to be honest, I’d have thought him a bit extreme for you, I’d have put you more in the camp of his student Locke who built upon the ideas and took them in a different direction.
Chucktshoes
Well-Known Member
I wouldn’t disagree with any of that really, including your read of me as likely preferring Locke. But as I think we have often found in our discussions here, just because parties may disagree on what the best solutions are doesn’t mean that they don’t recognize the same problems.
jaycee
Well-Known Member
Mostly just talking to myself here:
It strange to me to accept suffering as the native human condition. It's more understandable (to me) that suffering is imposed on individual and communities by societies and their power structures. Suffering is a perspective and a belief. While that doesn't make it any less true to those who perceive it's not universal.
I also struggle with the idea of a common or regular person. While I use those terms myself to describe people or concepts the term refers to a division, which is again perceived.
I guess where my confusion lies is the accepting of perceptions or beliefs as natural when they have nothing (or very little) to do with nature and everything to do with human manifestations.
It strange to me to accept suffering as the native human condition. It's more understandable (to me) that suffering is imposed on individual and communities by societies and their power structures. Suffering is a perspective and a belief. While that doesn't make it any less true to those who perceive it's not universal.
I also struggle with the idea of a common or regular person. While I use those terms myself to describe people or concepts the term refers to a division, which is again perceived.
I guess where my confusion lies is the accepting of perceptions or beliefs as natural when they have nothing (or very little) to do with nature and everything to do with human manifestations.
But people often suffer due to things that happen in the natural world. If I implied that nature makes man suffer, this was not my intention. Humans suffer loss when the natural world is applied, for as much as it gives, it also can be cruel and take things and people away. Suffering like all concepts is nothing more than a human construct--as is society and their power structures.
But that being said, have you ever known of anyone that was completely free of suffering? Have you ever met that human? I have not. Regardless of how it's defined, you can ask anyone on the earth what's going wrong, and they will tell you. To say that suffering is all in our heads, still doesn't stop people from misery and malady.
Dtknuckles
Well-Known Member
Human beings have a need for stimulus (like most living organisms) and we are self aware. That paring crests suffering.
jaycee
Well-Known Member
Sure, but loss and cruelty are also perceptions and I'm not arguing that other animals don't feel those things. There are plenty of examples of what we call mourning in the animal kingdom.
I'm not saying suffering isn't real. I think what I find challenging is calling it natural. Nature doesn't impose suffering. Suffering is something humans (and maybe other creatures) perceive and maybe base choices on. It's no more or less of a perception than happiness.
I also think it's accurate to point out that governments or societies impose suffering, but again describing suffering as the natural course excuses (to me) that people chose to impose suffering on other humans and the natural world if you believe it suffers as well.
Isn't enlightenment, again a state of being based on belief and perception, about perceiving suffering in another way?
Maybe on both accounts. Humans may be conditioned to need stimulus and perhaps much of the suffering we experience is because we are not fully self aware.
Okay, point taken but you must agree that regardless of where the feeling comes from (be it from interactions with others or feeling the full force of the natural world), humans seem to react negatively to loss. And no human is free from loss. That if there is one thing that is universal about humans, we all tend to feel bad sometimes. To negate someone's suffering as a perception that needs changing is a hard concept for me lately, even as a student of the Buddha.
jaycee
Well-Known Member
I'm not trying to negate anyone's suffering. I'm just trying to work out if it makes sense to me to use suffering as reasoning for why societal structures behave in the ways that have been observed for millenia. I'm not so sure it does.
Why did we form tribes? Safety and cooperation. My guess is that the tribal structure was some sort of hold over from our primate days. I think that every time we solved one problem--like how to get enough for everyone to eat--we create another problem--like someone got injured helping bring down a Mammoth and now we need to fix them. I don't see that society happened because of suffering, but instead because we were attempting to solve problems and created all new problems for ourselves. When we decided to plant plants to make food because we wanted to feed everyone, we made a fundamental shift away from a place that our brains understood and had evolved to live in, to a world where we could feed vast numbers of people via land manipulation and farming. We wanted to keep our crops and people safe, so we created towns and eventually cities. Safety and food are huge motivators, and I would argue it's a combo of both that helps define why societal structures behave the way they do.
My point is that we, as humans, often suffer because we are trying to put a square peg into a round hole. We often don't understand our biology, which leads us to think that we are defective, when it's our environment that's defective for us.
On twitter this morning I saw a tweet of a McDonalds arch with a now hiring message on their sign below it. It listed $15 an hour.
They guy who took the picture was absolutely dumbfounded that people get paid $15 an hour today to flip burgers. He said back when he flipped burgers he was paid $3.25 an hour.
They pay so good to flip burgers in fact he picked up a job application for his 20 something year old college graduate of a son who is unemployed / lost his job due to covid and is tempted to fill it out for him.
It's sad when we have people who think $15 an hour is such great pay. Because that means it will be even harder to get living wages is older generations just compare to what they made back in the day and think it's great pay. I'm sure much is the same for many of our policy makers. Some even think $15 an hour is paying them too much.
They guy who took the picture was absolutely dumbfounded that people get paid $15 an hour today to flip burgers. He said back when he flipped burgers he was paid $3.25 an hour.
They pay so good to flip burgers in fact he picked up a job application for his 20 something year old college graduate of a son who is unemployed / lost his job due to covid and is tempted to fill it out for him.
It's sad when we have people who think $15 an hour is such great pay. Because that means it will be even harder to get living wages is older generations just compare to what they made back in the day and think it's great pay. I'm sure much is the same for many of our policy makers. Some even think $15 an hour is paying them too much.
jaycee
Well-Known Member
I think this is part of my thinking. Our environment is only defective for us because we make it so.
Resource scarcity is also a perception that drives competition, cooperation, and suffering. Resource sustainability is something that's understood. In the past, it wasn't. So why are we continuing to promote and perceive resource limitation when we have the knowledge to live in ways that maintain resources for the present and the future? Why are we continuing to impose the suffering associated with that? Is it because we naturally suffer or is it because of something else?
Chucktshoes
Well-Known Member
I didn’t take it as bait.
Dtknuckles
Well-Known Member
I made 70$ a night working from 4PM-2am busing tables at a jazz club all through HS. It was the best job I could have had. I wonder what the wage would have been if it kept up with inflation.