Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.

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When people say the phrase "Don't hate the player, hate the game", it removes responsibility from the player (lemmy.world)

submitted 10 months ago by ViscloReader@lemmy.world to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world

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I'm talking in the context of the "capitalist rules". If you say the aforementioned sentence, you remove the responsibility of the player by dismissing the fact that the winner makes the rules.

PS: Doesn't work for every context: if the player aims to change the rules because he doesn't like them, he might see winning as a way to change them. "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain" I guess...

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[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

So if you could get away with it, would you kill your granny?!

Or is there something inside of you which makes you feel uncomfortable about just the idea, even though in purelly logical terms the old lady is probably just a useless consumer of resources well past her breeding age so serves no useful purpose?

If there is that something inside of you (i.e. you're neither a psychopath nor a sociopath) that too is Moral.

I agree with your point about externally defined and imposed "Moral" (which is really Morality or Moralizing), it's just that most people also have their own internal Right-Wrong Compass (I suspect derived from one's empathy) and that too is Moral and it's not under external control.

[–] novibe@lemmy.ml 0 points 10 months ago

What you suppose is your “internal” morality compass is an “internalised” one.

I wouldn’t kill my grandma because I love her, not because it’s “wrong”. I won’t kill anyone, I guess, because I don’t like seeing living beings suffer. Not because it’s “wrong”.

Morality is always an internalised “system”. It can’t be “natural”, it’s always ideological.

But that doesn’t mean that being materialistic in analysis of our existence as humans would make you do “evil” things. If you try to analyse us as a species scientifically, we realise that we literally evolved to cooperate and be nice to each other. Our chemistry makes that necessary. We hate being alone and seeing those around us suffer, because those things produce “feel bad” chemicals. We love helping each other because that produces “feel good” chemicals. On average of course (as you mention psychopaths do exist).

In fact, a purely material analysis of us would show that greed, individualism, destroying the planet, killing all animals on it, making large portions of our species to suffer in poverty etc. are counterproductive. Those things all make us individually feel worse and have worse lives. We would have the best lives if everyone around us had access to all amazing developments of the past centuries freely, if the animals and ecosystems of the world were protected, if the people around us cared about us and lived with us, not despite us. And none of that is moral, or based on morality. Just science and materialism.