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 The Significance of Destroying Unearned Pride

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Stuart-



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PostSubject: The Significance of Destroying Unearned Pride The Significance of Destroying Unearned Pride EmptyMon Feb 02, 2015 7:52 pm

Power

Order within disorder, or the measurement of an ordering entity's ability to fight change.
Power is based on oneself and his relationship with reality.
One can have power over others, over himself, and/or over any other facet of reality.
One has power over those people and things that aid him in his power.
Fear is a common, but seemingly less direct form of power.

Deceptive Power

It may be used by an individual who fools others into falsely believing he has more power than he actually does, but it may also be used by various general cultural forces, which lead one to believe that he personally has more or less power than he actually does over society, and/or reality, in general.
Even when one has the illusion of having more power than he actually does, the illusion itself actually decreases his power.

Pride

The belief or knowledge, however accurate, of one's own power.
Pride involves a propensity to action. It's essentially a tool for deciding when to fight and when to flee or concede.
False Pride is pride based on inaccurate knowledge. It's also referred to as unearned pride or conceit.

When one loses pride one experiences regret. This is presumably to help guide one in his endeavors to avoid such loss or to regain it. Yet significant regret often turns to remorse; even so far as to be actually counter productive. When one loses false pride there is nothing substantial to regain, making regret or remorse then seem entirely counter-productive. It's unclear why remorse works in this way, but what's clear is that it can be so extreme as to actually destroy a person.

One's illusions are as much a part of one as one's close relationships, so it's easy to understand why one would cling to them. What's important to remember is that having honest close relationships is an aid to one's power, but any personal deception is not.
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Stuart-



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PostSubject: Re: The Significance of Destroying Unearned Pride The Significance of Destroying Unearned Pride EmptyWed Feb 04, 2015 10:32 pm

Some related issues Magnus spoke of several weeks ago.

Magnus Anderson wrote:
The quest for value is a disguised quest for happiness. It is a symptom of one's inability to endure one's actual value (or rather, the POSSIBILITY that one's value is such and such, or on the lowest level of abstraction, the inability to endure a wide range of possible negative consequences without resorting to self-deception of some sort.) Note that it does not matter whether you are searching for your value from without or from within since in both cases you are trying to FABRICATE or USE your value in order to escape from the pain. The master is characterized by UNCONDITIONAL love, NOT by conditional love -- it is the slave who is characterized by conditional love (if the condition comes from without, we're talking about the classic type of slave; if it comes from within, we're talking about the modern, "emancipated" type of slave.) There is a reason I dislike the word "self-love": no genuine person has an attitude towards himself, no genuine person "loves" himself., only narcissists and other degenerates do (whether they are strong or not does not matter -- the strong can degenerate as well), as a way to escape the unbearable pain by reflecting upon their awesomeness (whether it is imagined or not does not matter.)

The goal, then, is not to "search for value" but to force your brain to adapt to probable reality. The goal is to be as honest with yourself as possible. Only there is this problem that mental pain works differently than physical pain. When someone punches you in the stomach, the goddamn thing hurts, you don't have much choice about it. However, if someone hurts you mentally, you have a choice to get rid of it (to prematurely end it) or to endure it (to wait for it to gradually fade away.) The latter requires discipline/willpower/strong memory, the former requires nothing (other than, perhaps, weak memory/forgetfulness.) So with mental pain, you have to force yourself to endure it, you must be WILLING to endure it, you must actively oppose everything that makes things way too comfortable.

If you have to sugarcoat things before you can deal with them, you are not going to achieve anything.

Quote :
. . . there is absolutely nothing wrong with "seeking value", which is to say, with desiring external validation. We all want to be externally validated because that means we have allies and if we have allies that means we aren't in a serious trouble (which alleviates our worries.) The problem occurs when we end up deceiving ourselves in order to get rid of stress -- that's what's nihilistic -- and this process of self-deception, otherwise known as reaction, can be lurking behind any act. And this is why, in order to avoid confusing the two, I generally treat acts as neutral in themselves and qualify them with a modifier such as active/reactive when I want to specify the nuance -- the vocabulary we already have is simply not enough.

This is important because it is possible, and rather easy, to make a mistake of confusing what is active (honest) with what is reactive (dishonest/self-deceptive.) This creates unnecessary stress, thus risking real reaction. Such a mistake is possible because what is active is not necessarily strong/correct/the best. To be active simply means to be healthy and to be healthy does not mean to be flawless.

Active mistakes: mistakes made due to lack (i.e. ignorance, innocence.)
Reactive mistakes: mistakes made due to excess (i.e. trying to unsee what has been seen.)

Some related thoughts.

We want what increases our power. So we want aids to our power. When we have false pride, which is a form of self-deception, we try to get other to validate the deceptions that false pride is based on. If we get other to actually truly believe them, then being that they'll think we're more powerful than we are, they'll act accordingly. We may gain survival advantages by doing this, but we won't necessarily gain power.

Prolonged survival is not necessarily essential to power. Whatever cultural forces that led to our self-deception will still be in charge, and the others that are supposedly serving us, will actually be serving those forces as well.

Perhaps, if the self-deception is more internal, not based on cultural forces, then such displays of false power (as defined in the OP) could be considered to be a form of actual power- we would be beings which self-deceive in order to better deceive others.

I said above, "if we get other to actually truly believe [our deceptions]", but the fact is that generally when others validate our deceptions they do so with little belief in them. Rather than being deceived by us, those validators are deceiving themselves in other ways. They know that by validating our deceptions, we'll likely validate theirs. So basically they believe us only to the extent that we validate them, because once we validate their illusions, it's in their interest to falsely believe we're those whose esteem is worth having.
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PostSubject: Re: The Significance of Destroying Unearned Pride The Significance of Destroying Unearned Pride EmptyMon Feb 09, 2015 8:06 am

You can never be proud if you can never feel shame.
The shameless have no values to feel embarrassed towards. They place themselves as the only relevant judgment.

We live in an age of shamelessness.
Look around at how people are acting and what they are openly admitting, without a hint of shame.

Christianity used shame to produce submission.
One felt shame before God for being human.

Secular humanists replaced shame with law.
The shameless would now only curb their behavior under the penalty of law.
They remained shameless in every other regard.
Look at how openly they admit to things that exposes a decay, inferiority, decrepitude.
Without the ability to feel shame you overcome the cardinal sin, for the Christians, of pride.



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Stuart-



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PostSubject: Re: The Significance of Destroying Unearned Pride The Significance of Destroying Unearned Pride EmptyMon Feb 09, 2015 10:45 pm

They lack any shame regarding issues one would naturally or traditionally feel shame about, but it seems they still have their materialistic pursuits and ridiculous subcultures that they use to define themselves.
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PostSubject: Re: The Significance of Destroying Unearned Pride The Significance of Destroying Unearned Pride EmptyWed May 06, 2015 10:06 am

Stuart- wrote:

We want what increases our power. So we want aids to our power. When we have false pride, which is a form of self-deception, we try to get other to validate the deceptions that false pride is based on. If we get other to actually truly believe them, then being that they'll think we're more powerful than we are, they'll act accordingly. We may gain survival advantages by doing this, but we won't necessarily gain power.

Prolonged survival is not necessarily essential to power. Whatever cultural forces that led to our self-deception will still be in charge, and the others that are supposedly serving us, will actually be serving those forces as well.

Perhaps, if the self-deception is more internal, not based on cultural forces, then such displays of false power (as defined in the OP) could be considered to be a form of actual power- we would be beings which self-deceive in order to better deceive others.

I said above, "if we get other to actually truly believe [our deceptions]", but the fact is that generally when others validate our deceptions they do so with little belief in them. Rather than being deceived by us, those validators are deceiving themselves in other ways. They know that by validating our deceptions, we'll likely validate theirs. So basically they believe us only to the extent that we validate them, because once we validate their illusions, it's in their interest to falsely believe we're those whose esteem is worth having.
I assume this is the part you referred to in the other thread.   Self-deception.   False pride is certainly one kind of confusion about oneself.   In the other thread I am trying to get at the problems one has knowing what one is doing.   I would like to stress that these things are processes, more like false-priding - and when and where and how one accomplishes this.   How can one know one is evaluating correctly?  What measures does on take to move from false pride to real pride (and also acknowledging shame or distaste with what one is currently doing?  How does one change the habit of not noticing and how does one change the habit one has not been noticing?

If the main method for realizing one has false pride, for example, is introspection, I think there is a problem.  Introspection is not an independent process that happens in another department, so to speak, the same staff who have the false pride are the ones given the task of introspecting.   There is a conflict of interests.
Of course introspection is a must and one can be better at it than one was and better at it than one was - and one who prioritizes it more than others do.   But I think it insufficient.   I also think much cannot be seen (introspected), even with strong intent, unless certain other activities are also prioritized.   And I think one can run into problems when an abstract heuristic like avoiding excess in a value.   This enables secrecy.   But I think my going into that is getting ahead of the discussion.

If one adds in seeking critique from others, other issues come into play, including what processes led one to choose persons X and Y over others. Introspection and its blind spots play a huge role here also, since one can start to see things in oneself that others say are there, since one chooses X and Y due to drives that introspection likely will miss and so on.

Though I am actually heading more in the direction of modes of self-exploration. And so the mode of critique from others is critical. It is so easy for this to take place at an abstract level and certainly a primarily word centered one. Words and more words. At the very least one should be deeply enough aware of one's own consciousness to know what happens when words enter a mind - as propositions about oneself, say. Otherwise one is basing actualization on the interplay of tips of icebergs and their habits.

Another way to come at the issue is to say that people often decide this is me, this is the part of me that should rule, and this part seeks hegemony.  Which part gets this honor?  Is this part assuming that integration cannot really take place and so thinking that power over, control and suppression are the correct methods of (self) relation on poor info?  Is this part actually really a rather small part of the individual, one not so aware, as it thinks, about the real, overarching skills and interests of the organism as a whole?

Often, I have seen, individuals make one piece of themselves the king ego.   The values of that king ego are prioritized.   Let's say those values include the desire the eliminate false pride and avoid excess and so on.   Still this piece may be simply utterly incapable of knowing that the organism gave over power to this king ego because of issues the king ego simply cannot notice, since they would bring king ego and his likely values into question.    So a process taken up in good faith by the organism, led by king ego, is doomed in some critical areas of development.  In part because of the assumption that internal control and domination is simply a given, but also given the inability for this part to get at its own origins.   In many the dominance of verbal analytical values and skills, in all parts of the process, precludes the potential of for a good survey of the self.    But this, again, is cart before the horse.
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