FanonFan [comrade/them, any]

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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 10th, 2023

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  • I mean, a person’s senses aren’t supposed to be infallible, but I see no utility in elevating baseless conjecture above them. The “brain in a vat” problem is fun and all but it’s based on zero positive evidence, just a lack of negative evidence. On the other hand the senses are giving us continuous and reproducible and interactible information about the world around us, which despite its inherent subjectivity can be communicated with other people’s perspectives to approach and approximate an objective understanding of things.

    Now when you start shifting from abstract to concrete epistemology, things like symbols and language games and power structures and ideology become important facets to examine. What filters and tensions are influencing a person’s perspective? What mechanisms might be elevating or silencing their perspective socially?

    We can and should be skeptical of our senses, but in a productive or dialectical manner, testing them against reality and other perspectives in efforts to approach a more concrete understanding.



  • Selfishness may have been selected for tens of millions of years ago in our evolution, but as pre-humans became social animals it’s clear that selfless or other-centric thinking became strongly selected for as well. You otherwise couldn’t have a species that’s almost entirely other-dependent, throughout the whole life but especially for the first 10-15 years of it.

    Humans can’t sustainably exist outside of a society.




  • In the process of deconstructing work “ethics” and capitalist “productivity”, it’s important to replace it with something more meaningful than individualism or hedonism. While it’s fine to do nothing, fine to do things you enjoy regardless of whether they make profit for someone else, it’s also good to do things that better yourself, others, and society (even if that concept has been co-opted and corrupted by the profit motive). I see too many people “escape” the rat race either by finding people to exploit or sinking into escapism like [more than a reasonable amount of] video games or drugs or whatnot.



  • I mean the idea is that good urban planning would enable shorter and more frequent grocery store trips. Rather than a supercenter supplying everyone within 30 miles, requiring long drives, you’d have things distributed by need, i.e. general food stores every couple miles, more specialist places potentially farther away. Our current layout and shopping habits are contingent on car infrastructure and massive federal subsidies.

    Would also decrease waste and increase general health, since fresher, less processed food could be purchased.








  • Empathy is probably your best bet as far as a single variable goes. But otherwise we’re talking about something that’s incredibly complex on multiple levels, making it near impossible to address as a whole.

    I like to envision human behavior and consciousness as a network of tensions and influences. (Perceived) material interests are one such tension, a particularly strong one. Strong enough that I feel confident saying that in general, people will tend to drift towards approximating an ethic that aligns with their material conditions.

    The archetypes and behaviors modeled for us in our childhood and throughout our lives are a sort of structure that these forces interact with. We may have empathetic or selfish responses modeled for us by our parents, so those are the responses that spring to our minds when decisions arise. Good behavior modeling could mean the inherent tension towards self interest may be mediated or tempered by the limits of behavior we think to enact. Parents have a big impact on this early on, but so do later role models as well as media portrayals of people.

    Social cohesion can be a big tension on people, incentivizing them to not act outside of group norms out of fear of being ostracized. Or on a more subconscious level, perhaps acting out of a “self” interest that benefits the social group, because the lines between Self and Other become blurred. Extending beyond the small self to consider the well-being of the large “Self”, sometimes even at the expense of the small self.

    Critical theory may be of interest to you.