Everyone has a different reaction to philosophy, to the argument.
Some people, like yours truly, take to it like a fish and never look back.
Some people struggle, meander, and eventually hit escape velocity.
Some people try their hardest to block it out, accrue a bunch of negative consequences, and when the dust has settled, live with tremendous regret and self-loathing.
Knowing that you can’t exactly control your reaction to philosophy is supremely helpful for learning to appreciate the variance in people’s responses. You will have your own varied responses, at times, as well. Learning to become open to criticism, having an ear for cogent, accurate feedback, and striking up a healthy balance of ego vs. humility are all hard-won skills relating to receiving philosophy.
I was listening to Stefan Molyneux’s live show, as I often do, and he got on to this long form tweet from CoffeeBlackMD. It begins:
The tweet is rather long and there’s a lot to unpack there, more than any one person could do justice in a half hour or hour of livestreaming, let alone this Substack post.
Stefan asked people what their experience was of doctors and there was a lot of negativity, which, I agree, has been earned by the profession. The prompt was: on a scale of +10 to -10, what would you rate your experience of doctors? He went on to say, and this a rough paraphrase, that he sympathizes with these people to some extent. I got a bit busy with the family, so I missed the exact details, but he did say (another rough paraphrase) that when you’ve completely re-engineered your life with the truth, you know that it is a hard ask to expect someone else to just throw their entire life structure away, owing to circumstances.
I can get personally invested in someone’s success, philosophically, but at the end of the day, all I can do is make the arguments and see what happens.
You can’t help who really chooses philosophy deep down in their bones.
There are circumstances that can perhaps aid a person going far down that road:
-bad parenting in childhood but just good enough to not snuff out the spark
-higher intelligence
-aversion to authority somehow surviving childhood
-being good looking enough to get positive attention but not so good looking that you are swamped out by admirers
The reason CoffeeBlackMD gives for doctors not being skeptical of the rushed and highly toxic MRNA injections is that they have high pressure, harried work conditions that do not lend themselves to circumspection. Fair play. I think Molyneux said as much or would agree.
Doctors and nurses have earned their ire but they do also take the heat for all of the useless administrators and Obama-anointed pencil pushers in the background. Doctors and nurses are figureheads of a swamp creature that arose when the “war on quackery” was undertaken by the Rockefeller Foundation and other unsavory types.
Lots of doctors and nurses found themselves in a double-bind: press forward and keep my job and easily-taken-away credentials but earn the ire of reasoning people or scale back, earn “respect”, but lose my ability to feed myself and my own.
That’s the double-bind of philosophy, so often.
If you really get into the truth, so many falsehoods are torn away and your life destabilizes.
This is why I say, do massive work as early into your awareness as possible. That way, if you hit a fork in the road, it perhaps won’t be so massively destructive to your life “in the world” as if you were to be negligent, tell yourself you’ll get around to it later, and then be staring down the barrel of a normie gun you can’t possible dodge. Does that make sense? If not, read it again!
Doctors are 12 years and a minimum $250k in tuition invested into a life of servitude where medical boards, back by the force of the State, can take away their livelihoods at the drop of a dime. This is a sick, twisted arrangement. Yet plenty of noble souls forge ahead in the hopes of saving lives, making a difference, and making good money in countries that have dispossessed themselves of their manufacturing bases.
If they choose to stick their heads in the sand, it shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Our world, as it is comprised, is so far and away from any sort of freedom of economic mobility.
It is people’s common response to social problems of picking up the gun of the state that drives people into binary thinking (“all or nothing”). Abolishing licensing boards isn’t the end of the world. But it is, to insurance companies who are coerced by the state into requiring licensure for coverage – let alone all the professionals out there heavily invested into conferences and committees legitimizing the notion of licensing boards. No independent verification is permitted. All legitimacy must flow from the power of the state. Problem? Morally club it. Binary thinking. No negotiation permitted.
This attitude springs out of the average childhood, where normie parenting means greeting all child “misbehavior” as cause for aggression and limitations at the expense of cognition and negotiation.
Some people are going to hold on to their livelihoods, their mythologies, and their illusions – if only for the sake of paying bills and not experiencing ostracism from other normies. Those with a conscience will struggle, in their own private way, with breaking out of the prisons their emotional programming.
There is a lot more to say here but let’s leave it for a livestream, whenever I pick that up again. Probably sometime next year.
Enjoy the write-up? Here’s a piece on challenging comfort in order to stimulate growth.
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