I must uphold the balance between good an evil!

>degeneracy
Oh noooo! Oh noooooo! Not the bad meme word! Not things I don't like!

>Is Black Mirror any good
It's well produced but like you mentioned the plots are predictable and the themes are a bit trite/repetitive.

>The one episode I tried to watch I just dropped because in about 5 minutes I knew precisely what the plot was going to be
If you only watched 5 minutes how do you know the plot didn't take a twist?

>Peace, prosperity, no strife, no difficulties, no work.
>This is the common person's idea of utopia, and it universally results in degeneracy, nihilism, and despair
Whoa, whoa, whoa, back the fuck up. How have you come to this conclusion? What society on Earth has ever achieved this goal that you can make this claim? And I'm not even going to get into this "degeneracy" buzzword bullshit.

I read a summary later. It's the social media episode, where people get ratings. Oh, look, this episode is about a woman who wants high ratings. Here's a scene where this guy's rating keeps going down. Gee, I wonder what's going to happen. I was a bit surprised that people with 0's didn't just get executed though.

>Le 'degeneracy is a buzzword' face

>Oh noooo! Oh noooooo! Not the bad meme word! Not things I don't like!

Different user, but stagnation 'does' cause degeneracy.
People get weird when they're bored and have too much time on their hands- happens to everyone.

You might find your style of posting better received on reddit.

"degeneracy" is a vague, subjective term. The only reason to use it is in an attempt to evoke an emotional response. If you could please be more specific about your idea of "degeneracy" I may retract my earlier statement.

>People get weird when they're bored and have too much time on their hands- happens to everyone.
Have you met everyone? Or are you just projecting?

Paladin detected. Don't you have some innocent skeletons to be smiting?

My argument, simply put, is that a life without difficulty, a life without contests, a life without goals, victory and failure, a life where your actions have meaningful effects on your environment, is not worth living. It is contrary to our psychology as animals, and thats ignoring the fact that human beings are generally poor at adapting to a resource rich environment in general because we tend to over-indulge.

"Goodness" doesn't need to be balanced with outright Evil, but it does need to be amended to realize that the common utopia, the world of peace, plenty, and no work, kind of sucks.

Their Heaven is just being a NEET, and being a NEET sucks.

That's funny, I always heard people said that.
Yet in the time where I have the most free time of my life, I'm perfectly happy and I do a lot of shit.
When I'm occasionnaly bored I just search things to do, and it's really quick.

This shit sounds like people saying that you don't really need X weeks of vacations because vacations are boring anyway, it's better to work your ass off and produce things

Being a poor antisocial NEET that is NEET only because he's struggling to do anything sucks.

Being a well adjusted and well of NEET is fucking fine.

Nothing, because the idea of a necessary cosmic balance inbetween Good and Evil is complete fucking nonsense, and I want the meme to die a slow and painful death.

Seriously, how far do you have to be up your own backside to actually not want evil to disappear? There's accepting the fact that evil might always be present, either in the span of ones lifetime or eternally, but that isn't even this. Even in that mentality, less (or virtually no amount of) evil is the ideal. Keeping some arbitrarily defined equivalence in between the two means that, to some extent, you're either actively supporting Evil or passively accepting it's influence. That's just an excuse to be a duplicitous asshole.

Well that's all well and dandy except for the part where its not true.

There is no such thing as "too much good" because it is something that never happens. Evil is a powerful force that spreads its influence at all times: it sneaks its way into the hearts of men during times of peace; people succumb to it during times of despair; even the pursuit of good itself can drive the righteous into wickedness. "Preserving the balance" does not mean administering good and evil in equal measure, it means constantly striving to be good so as to beat back the ever-advancing tide of evil.

>the common utopia, the world of peace, plenty, and no work, kind of sucks.
>a life without contests, a life without goals, victory and failure
What? It's like you're getting your sci-fi worlds mixed up. How does a utopia create a world without goals, victory, or failure? OK, let's say we live in a utopia where nobody has to work. I'll never need self-defense for anything, because crime no longer exists. But I still want to study Taekwondo and become a world-class expert in it. Does that mean my goal of being an expert of Taekwondo is suddenly gone? Does it mean I can't fail at it?

Yeah, no.

I'm a well of and well adjusted NEET, and my life is great.
But come on, show me all your evidence about how life is shit when you don't work, you have friends, you can spend your time how you want, and you have the money to do it.

I mean you could always try not being an asshole

NO THE BALANCE MUST BE MAINTAINED

You're not going to become right just because you post a picture of an old statue.

Yeah. I preferred that episode when it was on Community. However, I've pretty much liked the rest of the series.

This. The word you're looking for is reclusive or antisocial, not NEET. NEET is just a descriptor for people that aren't working, intending to work, or in education. Not a descriptor of the kind of person that would be that.

Although antisocial also probably isn't the right word, since a real antisocial person has no problem being antisocial. So I guess use those losers at /r9k/ as an example, whatever you'd call them.

It means your goal is mostly a hobby, unless it has some real impact on your life. If you invest yourself into Taekwondo, and derive satisfaction from it, and use it to test yourself, it would be an admirable pursuit.
Yeah yes. I'm not talking about work specifically, I"m talking about a life with no difficulty or strife, where you never have to change or challenge yourself.

If you have such things in a life where you don't have to work to survive, then more power to you. But this idea that Paradise will have arrived the moment we stop all wars and make everyone rich is ridiculous. The average person in such conditions becomes physically and psychologically unhealthy. Even the relative abundance of the Western world has created a legion of overweight lunatics.

I always thought of it like temperature. If you wipe out all evil, then goodness suddenly has no meaning. It's like something is only hot because it has something cold to compare it too. Living in an all good world is like living in an all hot world; paradoxical unless everything everywhere is the exact same temperature forever.

I like this. Not sure what I think about this when applied to real life, but I at least like it in a hypothetical context.

>The average person in such conditions becomes physically and psychologically unhealthy.
Say fucking who

The only thing we know for sure is that poor people who get loads of cash spend it VERY FAST on a LOT OF SHIT and so they go back to being poor.
That doesn't even means they're unhappy, just that they spend a lot of cash.

And it's also totally unrealistic has said
People begin to write, to paint, to code and shit because they want to and that create in itself challenge because they really want to do it.

And I'm still waiting on this big evidence of yours. Most people in my situation I know are happy and content.
You also have people who over indulge and go do drugs and shit, but it's more because of a "I don't care I just want to have fun" attitude than not being forced to do anything they don't want to

>It means your goal is mostly a hobby, unless it has some real impact on your life. If you invest yourself into Taekwondo, and derive satisfaction from it, and use it to test yourself, it would be an admirable pursuit.
That's great and all, but that doesn't help me understand why you conflate a utopia with a world without goals, victory, failure, etc.

>But this idea that Paradise will have arrived the moment we stop all wars and make everyone rich is ridiculous.
And now you've decided to get onto a third topic, brilliant. Can we stick to one at a time?

>The average person in such conditions becomes physically and psychologically unhealthy.
Still waiting to see your evidence for this.

>Even the relative abundance of the Western world has created a legion of overweight lunatics.
What the fuck?

Anyway... what I'm getting from this is that you're not interested in having a logical argument, providing evidence for your beliefs, or even just clearly illustrating your own opinion. I think instead it's far more likely you're interested in spouting out your ideas in the hope that you find a guy in the thread with the same ideas as you and you get into a circlejerk.

Dumb contrarians get triggered and go out of their way to spread evil in the world to maintain balance

I don't actually understand this. Things are hot when their molecules are vibrating with a certain amount of energy. Why would this state of affairs change depending on whether or not other molecules somewhere else are vibrating with dramatically less energy? I mean, besides heat transfer, which would make the hot thing less hot because the cold thing exists.

lol dumb cat

Affordable healthcare.

Not him, but imagine everything you ever sensed was the same temperature. If it's all the same, how can you tell cold from hot? It'd kinda hard to explain though.

It's more about how relative it is to your surroundings. If you have two points in space at any given time, and one is a higher temperature than the other, then that one is the hot one while the other is the cold one. Or to put it another way, if you spend a day out in freezing weather, then come inside to a 68° room, it'll feel hot while spending time outside on a sweltering day and going in the same room it'll feel cool. An all good world can't have one thing on it more good then everything else, since that makes everything else evil by comparison, if that makes sense.

Demonstrating the obvious is difficult, but I'll still try and explain evolutionary psychology to idiots. Lets look at three basic principles of human psychology. Just three, so you can grasp this simple concept that gets people sprouting "Degeneracy" at things.

The first is the fact that primitive human beings developed in a low resource environment. This means that when placed in a high resource environment, of any kind, human beings tend to be rather poor at self-regulating. This applies to food, it applies to money, it applies to pleasures, hobbies, it applies to any potential "resource" you can conceive of. Humans are, on average, bad at maintaining steady consumption in an environment of luxury.

The second principle of psychology necessary to understand "degeneracy" is the fact that human beings tend to orient themselves around goals, and derive more satisfaction and more meaning from the fulfillment of those goals and obtaining their results, then they do from sensual pleasures. The life of cattle, of just grazing on pleasures picked from the vine, tends to mentally kill human beings [as well as many other animals]. This leads into our final principle.

Human beings take more satisfaction in things they worked for or obtained through difficulty, then things they were given. They tend to value things higher if they paid a cost for them, whether in hours, sweat, difficulty, etc.

My point is NOT that an environment of luxury, peace, and happiness cannot be had, my point is that any devised utopia that does not take these psychological truths and similar into account is doomed from the start to creating an overindulgment, listless, bored, and probably nihilistic population.

You can adapt these truths to high resource, low-conflict conditions to stay psychologically healthy, but it isn't something you just automatically get or understand. I could also go into locus of control and its effect on our psychology and may do so next.

>evolutionary psychology
You lost it there.
If you believe in that shit, you're retarded, and go read some real papers on psychology.

"Somewhat less good in comparison" doesn't really say "evil" to me, but whatever.

If anything I posted below that is remotely inaccurate, by all means correct me. Otherwise stfu.

There's no good or evil as easily discernible categories, at least not for mortals. Every life is a mesh of decisions that subtly tilt the cosmic balance one way or the other, back and forth. Trying to eliminate all X just leads to a more imbalanced state, and more suffering all around hth

Your logic is backwards. Good and evil are exclusively discernible categories to mortals. On a cosmic scheme of things, the universe doesn't give a fuck about what certain strings of shaking molecules are wobbling about.

>Depends on your setting

Isn't that Daoism?

Neither post I replied to or the OP specific some setting, so I'm just speaking generally using this setting. The one you're in.

First, I need links, and evidence. If you think I'm going to take any of this on just your say-so, you have you head stuck up even further up your ass than I thought.

>pic
>"Some dude said something about another dude. That means he's right and so am I."
I hate it when people bring up quotations in arguments.

>Demonstrating the obvious is difficult, but I'll still try and explain evolutionary psychology to idiots.
Translation: It might look like I've been tripping all over myself and making myself look like a buffoon, but it's actually your fault for not getting it.

>The first is the fact that primitive human beings developed in a low resource environment.
This is very vague and doesn't explain which primitive human beings we're talking about, what period of development, or what exactly constitutes a "low resource environment."

>This means that when placed in a high resource environment, of any kind, human beings tend to be rather poor at self-regulating.
How does this follow from what you just said? Let's say I do take your word that humans developed in a low resource environment. How do you draw from that how they would act in a high resource environment?

>The second principle of psychology necessary to understand "degeneracy" is the fact that human beings tend to orient themselves around goals, and derive more satisfaction and more meaning from the fulfillment of those goals and obtaining their results, then they do from sensual pleasures.
I don't understand why you're bringing up goals and sensual pleasures at the same time. But are you saying degeneracy means people don't have goals and only follow pleasure? Well, again, I don't understand how a utopia means people can't have goals, but I find it weirder that you don't discuss morality for a term so heavily tied to opinions on morality. I mean, this makes it sound like you think people with goals can't be degenerate, no matter how fucked up those goals might be.

>Human beings take more satisfaction in things they worked for or obtained through difficulty, then things they were given. They tend to value things higher if they paid a cost for them, whether in hours, sweat, difficulty, etc.
This sounds like you're just repeating part of the last point about deriving satisfaction from goals and working for them. But none of this clears up what we were first asking you about, namely your use of "degeneracy," and your insistence that a utopia would lead to it. OK, people in a utopia can still have goals, like, say, being a metalworker, but it's easier because they don't have to physically mine the metal themselves, and they have better tools than the people who came before them. OK. And?

>My point is NOT that an environment of luxury, peace, and happiness cannot be had,
Then why did you bring up how feasible a utopia is?

>my point is that any devised utopia that does not take these psychological truths and similar into account is doomed from the start to creating an overindulgment, listless, bored, and probably nihilistic population.
You began by asserting that humans in a high resource environment are poor at self-regulation, humans orient themselves around goals, and humans get more satisfaction out of working for things rather than being given them, and this is your conclusion? Taking all these claims into account for a utopia, people aren't so great at regulation, they don't get quite as much satisfaction out of what they do, but they still orient themselves around goals. You're still acting like goals simply wouldn't exist in a utopia for whatever reason.

"Good" and "evil" are simply monikers used to explain existing concepts to mortal beings. On a fundamental level, the world is a chaotic place. Creation cannot continue without destruction to wipe away the past. The tallest trees must fall so that others can grow beneath it. Every creature has a right to survive and nothing can live off good will and prayers alone. Indeed, those that have not tasted evil and sworn off it can attest to being good men.

If there is too much "good", the world remains the same. We wash our hands of those that perish beneath us and the good men remain perched on their thrones for eternity.Each day idyllic, yet each day predictable. Life doesn't change, nor does conflict arise. So we dream of a world where something happens and we don't know what it will be. And eventually we create that world, as Gods in our own right, where evil begins again.

Short sighted meme said by people who don't want to think.

It's awesome.

The only people who think otherwise are those who are too lazy to become better people.

>He hasn't heard of the mice experiment.

>Weak men create bad times.
>Bad times create strong men
>Strong men create good times

Is this why Africa is still split in tribes that never do anything worthwhile but battle each other and shit?

...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink

>hasn't looked at a map anytime in the last 75 years

I can't accept these as counterarguments: Africa's been having bad times for thousands of years. I don't hear any news about any african presidents doing anything worthwhile or getting half as much attention as other countries' presidents.

If a nation was truly good, that doesn't mean that automatically the ones who are born in that country will be weak.

Because "Good" and "Evil" are inconsistent subjective moral ideals created by imperfect minds. Nobody can agree on the specifics of either, and the extreme of most interpretations of either would be broken. Still, good usually comes out on top, even in "balance" stories, the grey side is usually just a more ruthless good.
Balance of order vs chaos, that is actually interesting, because they're both very neutral concepts.

Not really, the more good there is, the easier it is for the bad to set in and be assholes. Usually this will result in the good simply letting things slide because their self image of goodness prevents action.

for real life examples: modern sweden.

or before certain folks screech at you and tell you you're wrong I'll put it in terms that more gels with their world view.
Nazis and America

Some of the good people will become bored and turn to evil, thus maintaining the balance.

you know how standard fiscal policy of the world is very slight inflation to encourage spending and therefore growth?

evil is inflation, you need a very specific amount to drive the world, but its a terrible thing that goes out of control if you give it more than a tap

>Africa's been having bad times for thousands of years.

They broke the world economy once and they colonized the whole planet.

>I don't hear any news about...

Ignorance is strength!

>they colonized the whole planet
telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/05/22/europe-birthplace-mankind-not-africa-scientists-find/
no, just europeans again

The hero fails to notice and continues his lifelong purge of evil, becoming corrupt in the process and eventually restoring the balance unintentionally by going all Judge Dredd.

When there's no evil, the hero loses his job.

Fredrik Knudsen fan detected

The light becomes too powerful, life grows without end and it becomesbsummer where there is no pain or strife, then the world sublimates in a flash of light as it becomes one with the light. This grants a massive amount of power to gods of the light to use in other worlds and weakens the darkness, the evil. Should evil win over all and no good last at all then the opposite will happen, turning into a world of shadow and death, a cold lifeless rock.

Or so I have read in a couple of my old fantasy books.

>counterarguments
But you have no arguments to begin with. You don't even have a coherent discourse. Spouting nonsense to troll is not argumenting. What is even your point ?

There's never been a time where a utopia or anywhere close to a utopia has been created.

What has traditionally happened is this:

Strong Men create Good Times for Their Children
Children Fuck Around Lots
Poor People Oppressed By Degenerate Children Hold Revolution (or barbarians take rome)
Revolution Falls Apart And Strong Men Take Opportunity To Take Charge

It's never been that not needing to strive has created stagnancy, it's always been the case that people who have not got what the other person has creates a desire to take his shit, normally by beating his shit in.

The people living in luxury were perfectly fine being degenerate, fucking each other and so on - the people who were listless, bored and nihilistic were the people who DIDN'T get to fuck around and be degenerate.

The issue there is that their strong men keep leaving the country because they are strong enough to do so. I knew a family of African immigrants in Baltimore, about 10 years ago, they came with nothing, the husband and wife started out cleaning for the hospital, two years later the guy owned a professional janitorial services company and bought a laundromat, then moved out of the building into his new house in the suburbs.

Hard times made them strong, their strength made their family have good times.

>He thinks that it applies to humans.

I was interested so I googled it.

>His team created a comfortable environment ideal for the mice. This was achieved by fitting a pen (box-shaped enclosure) with unlimited food and water.

This is not a comfortable environment. This is a prison. We already know people in prisons go crazy.

A better experiment would be the one with the heroin rats and its repeat with the rat-topia.

If you're in the Outer Planes, your universe ascends to a different position in the cosmos. Where all "good" is stronger and "evil" is weaker. You'd better hope it's not lawful good or some specific religion you don't agree with, or you're going to be screwed.

Read the article.
>place the last common ancestor of both chimpanzees and humans - the so-called Missing Link - in the Mediterranean region.

>ancestor of both chimpanzees and humans

That's not a man. That's not even a hominid. That's a pre-bipedal ape.

So far, it doesn’t look like that’s the case.

Improvements in living conditions don’t seem to have any sort of stultifying effect on humanity, from the comparisons we can make across time and space. They certainly don’t seem to have made anyone miserable. Happiness and income are strongly correlated up to about $70,000/yr; if we regard money as a proxy for material well-being, then it looks as if we’ve got a pretty long stretch ahead of us wherein improving living conditions translates to increased happiness for most people.

If we look at the people who genuinely don’t face any meaningful hardship, the rich, we don’t find them collapsing into WALL-E blobs. Their lives aren’t perfect, but that’s primarily because they’ve mentally adjusted to being absurdly wealthy and regard it as normal.

So... where are you getting this contention about human psychology?

He's just projecting his own insecurities.

First post, as usual, best post.

>On top of that, the smallest slight suddenly becomes some egregious world shaking terror.
So... the world is a "safe space" and when something goes wrong they get triggered?

...

How do study times and men independently?

That’s the basic requirement for testing this hypothesis, isn’t it? You want to test the degree to which some measure of the goodness or badness of times correlates with the strength of men, right?

What a stupid meme.

It's really not. It's a vapid slogan thrown around by /pol/, so they can masturbate about bad things happening to other people.

While I'd argue that every human being on this planet says they are the ultimate good and the ones that don't are deep in depression or suicidal, I'd point out that both nazi germany and america has some unconventional morals.
For instance, in america thanks to the cancerous corporate culture, ethics is seen as degenerate and your good value is based on what you got, money, weight and family.

And thats even less autofellatio than nazi germany, where ones measure in good is only inherited or when you sacrifice to your master. This is why so many germans and even unwanteds such as (((jews))) ratted out on each other and why the ss was so kill happy.

its amazing that people also delude themselves with that evil is the new good and vice versa. It really goes to show how people are desperate for self validation.

It was wrong when Herodotus came up with it and only got further from reality as time went on

>What happens when there's "too much good" in the world?
No one ever gets fucking anywhere because literally every person at a goddamn stop sign is waving each other through and none of them are going because they're waiting for the other three.

>/pol/tard preemptively triggers himself

Funny to me how the people who like to use this quote always think they're the strong men

It's how people justify their own powerlessness and inability to effect a real change upon the world but in games and in real life

>I could be super popular and fuck all the girls if I wanted to, but that would upset nature's balance so I'll stay a virgin

>If I actually tried I could be more powerful and wealthy than bull gates, but I'll remain poor in order to protect the balance.

>We could destroy N. Korea, but that would upset the balance between good and evil in the real world

You know who doesn't give a shit about the balance? People with power.

I don't think so. Usually it's used by those who identify as weak men who lived in good times turning bad.

i think you're overthinking this, it's just the ying/yang trope applied to D&D's nonsensical metaphysics.

it works (in a shallow way) in most settings because they don't literally have GOOD and EVIL, but usually more like LIGHT and DARK or whatever.

I tend to wonder if those surveys aren't putting the cart before the horse. Better adjusted people who'd be considered more happy probably tend to find work in jobs that aren't bottom wage because they have a healthy understanding of themselves, care for themselves, and can muster a drive to do a better than the bottom. The other user though is just pointing out that a strictly material happiness will never be wholly satisfying and yet that's the kind of happiness people focus on because it's the simplest to arrange and understand. Why is this a point of contention? We know full well that if man has his every material need satisfied, he can still be unhappy with the world just because there is suffering in it, because some men have a rebellious nature, or because he's bound to experience death: a man who is aware of this cannot be happy just by the food in his belly or the women in his bed. Men who aren't aware of this are distracting themselves from it.

Strife, difficulty, competition, and the like aren't evils. Avoiding them at all costs isn't healthy: you're never going to find a supply of socially well adjusted NEETs: if they were adjusted they'd be doing something with their lives, and even the rich have high expectations on them in most cases. Few if any of those happy people in that study are lacking in strife, difficulty or competition, and none of them are living on the pure animal subsistence the user you're responding to is stating isn't good. There's also the problem that you're implying that emotional happiness is goodness. It's very much not: men may be perfectly happy committing themselves to propagating evil, and evil can be quite a fun role to play. You're not confronting what he's talking about at all.

Fascism.

>I must uphold the balance between good an evil!
Guess it means I gotta go do Evil. Y'know... to balance it all out.
I admit, this doesn't seem right but how else can you interpret that oath?