There are only rights and wrongs because enough of the world's population thinks in a similar way

>There are only rights and wrongs because enough of the world's population thinks in a similar way.

>As long as one person truly believes that 1+1=3, 1+1≠2.

Thoughts?

this is completely true, but for the sake of maintaining order and sanity, I'm gonna say that you're an autistic loony.

Collectivism was a mistake, yet it is simultaneously human nature

Why do we have to break our primal instincts to prosper (unlike other animals?)

I suppose Ancaps would prefer to retain our primal instincts. Now I realise how silly anarcho-capitalism is.

3 is just a symbol, you can change the symbol of 2 to 3 but you can't change the underlying meaning of it by belief. If you've got one domino and add another domino, you will always have a pair of dominoes, symbol to represent them notwithstanding.

Agree. The equations were supposed to be a metaphor for perspectives. I guess the main reason there are different perspectives is that everybody has different experiences. You're not going to vote for Trump if you're friends with an immigrant.

Picking math was probably a pretty bad example if you wanted to get into the subjectivity of experience.

Linguistically and morally yes, you're right mostly. Take for example that there are words for concepts / feelings in some languages that don't even exist in others, and are very difficult to explain.

Collectivism is the inevitable conclusion of a species which evolved specifically to live and function as part of a tribe.

It is in our primal nature to cooperate. Individualism is an aberration, the thing holding humanity back. As time goes on, humans become more social, and more complex social arrangements become possible as we find ways to incentivize the activities of those infected with the disease of individualism towards ends which benefit the greater good, rather than at the cost of the greater good

My friend is not an illegal immigrant

Your first implication is incorrect. So is your second.

There are rights and wrongs in terms of how subjective beings affect the life of other subjective beings with their decisions. It doesn't matter one bit what a poll would say about the situation, wrong was done if one subjective being chose to hurt another.

1 + 1 = 2

You have to really mess with the definitions of 1 and 2 and 3 to make it equal 3.

Individualism and collectivism are complimentary to one another

It is not the mass that invents and not the majority that organizes or thinks, but in all things only and always the individual man, the person.

in the sense that individualism is the thing worth overcoming.

Total bullshit. True creativity, whether in the arts or sciences, is always a collaborative effort, the result of many minds coming together to subject their ideas to a stress test. Even Isaac Newton once said "If I have only seen further, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants", said giants being of course the accumulated work of everyone who came before him. Giant egos only get in the way.

Or take, for example, the field of economics: everyone thinks that economics was "invented" by Adam Smith, but all he did was write a book which popularized the work being done by priests at the University of Salamanca.

All "big-men", whether they are in hunter-gatherer societies or modern industrial ones, are either show-men or gangster-tier strong men. It was only very recently in history that we started inventing things for them to invest their energies in that wasn't "pillage a bunch of wealth in order to pay for the army that's going to let you pillage even more wealth from a larger number of people", and the struggle is still ongoing.

If everyone believes the world is flat does that make the world flat? Can you prove that the world wasn't flat before Columbus?

Morality comes from the divine. It's an absolute truth.

>in the sense that individualism is the thing worth overcoming.

What use is a collective that doesn't help the individuals who are in it? Who would join it?

>Can you prove that the world wasn't flat before Columbus?
It's actually quite easy. Educated people have known since ancient Egyptian times that the world was round.

And Columbus didn't "prove" anything, he was a moron who severely underestimated the size of the planet and thought he could just sail west all the way to India. After being laughed out of every court in Europe, he finally found a financier for his bullshit scheme in the form of Queen Isabella, the teenaged queen of a young nation which was eager to prove itself. The only reason he didn't die was because there happened to be a continent between Europe and India, and when he did get there all he did was act like a raging cunt to the natives and left those places a far worse and more miserable than the way he found them

>only and always the individual man, the person
The appearance of a genius in a certain area increases the chance of the appearance of more geniuses in the same area. That's not a coincidence.

Can you prove the world was round before the Egyptians then? Maybe it's just a dream that's being made up as it goes along.

>What use is a collective that doesn't help the individuals who are in it? Who would join it?
There is no use, that is a collective which has been hijacked to serve the purpose of individuals. That is a foul parody of collectivism, a type of individualism masquerading as collectivism. True collectivism treats each individual member like the cells of the body: you want ALL the cells to be healthy and productive, privileging some at the expense of others doesn't make the body healthier, it just makes it more susceptible to disorders and reduces its ability to function or stave off foreign invaders

So who does the collective serve? Not the individuals who are in it, then who?

Sure, go stand on a cliff edge overlooking the ocean. Tell a ship with a very tall mast to start sailing towards the horizon. Watch as its lower part disappears beneath the horizon before its mast does.

>So who does the collective serve? Not the individuals who are in it, then who?
Who does a skin cell serve? Or a neuron? do either of these realize that if the host dies, they die as well?

Now it does but how do you know that in the past it didn't just get smaller and smaller?
Why can't the collective serve the truth? Cells serve the mind and the mind solves problems.

They serve me. Individual humans are the thing that needs serving.

>Now it does but how do you know that in the past it didn't just get smaller and smaller?
Because there's loads of evidence suggesting that the planet was still an oblate even when humans were too dim and short-sighted to notice.

Until stronger evidence presents itself which forces us to rethink our previous assumptions, anything else is an exercise in solipsism, mere rhetorical wordplay with little concrete application that yields virtually no predictive power.

>Why can't the collective serve the truth? Cells serve the mind and the mind solves problems.
They should. Serving the truth becomes virtually impossible when truth is something that individuals can purchase at auction, and there is no longer a collective pool of facts from which consensus about a particular issue can be reached.

And in turn, individual humans serve the tribe. Individual humans come and go, it is the tribe that perseveres

>And in turn, individual humans serve the tribe. Individual humans come and go, it is the tribe that perseveres

Not if the tribe is mistreating the individuals who are in it. Tribes that help the members survive will survive, tribes that screw members over in favor of other members won't.

>anything else is an exercise in solipsism, mere rhetorical wordplay with little concrete application that yields virtually no predictive power.
If everyone believes that they have to sacrifice people in a fire there is the predictive power of people getting sacrificed in a fire.

>Serving the truth becomes virtually impossible when truth is something that individuals can purchase at auction
Truth is arrived at independently, two different parties are not going to find two different answers to the shape of the world.

These sorts of toxic social arrangements are caused by individuals suffering from the disease of individualism, who stops seeing the tribe as something worth contributing towards, and starts to see it as a spoil, to be exploited and pilfered for personal gain without regard for the health of the host.

In the vast majority of hunter-gatherer societies, all men share their hunts with each other. A single hunter might have caught a small pig or monkey in after a whole week of hunting, but he still has meat every day because on all the days he didn't catch something, he was eating the meat of somebody else's catch, and in turn he shares his catch with them on the days that he did bring home something worth eating. Everybody contributes to the common wealth in proportion to their ability, and they are given back in proportion to their need.

It was only during the agricultural era when humans could stockpile enough food to devote themselves to other pursuits, which for thousands of years was ritualized warfare with other tribes, during which the disease of individualism could truly flourish as it never could when everybody was preoccupied with the survival of everybody else.

Just so long as the overall effect of joining the tribe is that every member benefits, that's fine.

You seem to be saying some individuals need to lose out for others to win, while also saying this very thing is toxic.

>If everyone believes that they have to sacrifice people in a fire there is the predictive power of people getting sacrificed in a fire.
nonsense, at best its an exercise in mass confirmation bias. If it works it was because the fire god wills it, and if it doesn't well, the fire god words in mysterious ways. Sacrificing people to a fire doesn't increase the chance of crops growing, using prudent agricultural techniques makes the crops grow.

>Truth is arrived at independently,
But language is not, and language is the vehicle used to deliver the truth.
>two different parties are not going to find two different answers to the shape of the world.
Only if they agree that determining the shape of the world is an end in itself, and not in service to some socio-politico-religious interest. Otherwise people will vociferously defend even the most cockamime idea if they believe that they will benefit from people being deluded by it. The only reason they'll treat knowledge as an end in itself is if they belong to a community which prizes this, such as a monastery or a university, and they have a social incentive to discover and share the objective truth

>Sacrificing people to a fire doesn't increase the chance of crops growing, using prudent agricultural techniques makes the crops grow.
People work a lot harder if they think they're at risk of being sacrificed.

>such as a monastery or a university, and they have a social incentive to discover and share the objective truth
Or AA where people get tired of being crazy.

"So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?"

— "It is what human beings say that is true and false, and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.”

>You seem to be saying some individuals need to lose out for others to win,
of course not, when the host benefits, so do the individual cells. The only individuals who "lose out" were the ones seeking to harm the collective whole in the first place, those suffering from the disease of individualism who would see the many suffer so that they can enjoy a life of prestige and comfort.

Great. Then we can join tribes that provide benefits and leave those that no longer benefit us.

>People work a lot harder if they think they're at risk of being sacrificed.
negative reinforcement is good for short-term gain, when you need to change somebody's behavior immediately. But when used consistently and without a proportionately larger dose of positive reinforcement, all it does is breed resentment. Even babies have a sense of fairness and if they do not believe themselves to be treated fairly, eventually they will lash out.

>Or AA where people get tired of being crazy.
Well, before they were monasteries they were hermitages, who were people escaping the pressures of civilized living to do just that.

Germs strengthen the immune system and the herd needs culling.

In a perfect world, yes, we should be able to just hop from one tribe to the next when we do not feel that it is representing our interests.

In the one we live in, however, we have things like national borders which keep people from moving too freely

>Germs strengthen the immune system
unless they overpower and kill the host.

> the herd needs culling.
Humans are unique among the animals in that we are not bound to a single biome, we can live and function in basically any of them, and exercise discretion which is absent among animals like deer, who need predators to keep them in check. The human drive for ever greater levels of efficiency also include food production, which is what allows us to grow our numbers to evolutionarily unprecedented numbers, which will allow for a whole host of new behaviors and insights to evolve.

>Even babies have a sense of fairness and if they do not believe themselves to be treated fairly, eventually they will lash out.
Keep a cheery attitude or you're going to be fired.

>Well, before they were monasteries they were hermitages
Isolation also makes people crazy.

war huh...