[iamskeptic]

You could have written something about how Arnold's behavior in interviews/debates is bad because of $reasons. You could have explained that while it's what's expected of high-ranking personalities/candidates, the outcomes of such debates are poor compared to $something.

But you decided to call the person you're replying to a coward and conformist. Yeah...

[projektir]

If that's what you wanted written, you could write it yourself. I deemed this more important.

I didn't call the person I replied to any of these things.

It's not about conformism, but about how much a person is driven by the system they accepted, or the perception of the system. A lot of things get propagated because they have always been this way, and often it's not even necessary, but nobody questions it. Then someone does and it falls apart. Most people who understand the system stay within it, it's essentially admitting defeat.

To understand a system is to give it credit, to accept it, to make it valid. Poor systems should not be made valid, they should be rejected as the nonsense that they are. I expect more from people who claim they are extremely hard working and successful.

[crististm]

I don't feel like understanding a system automatically makes one part of it. Why not see it as giving power to over-through it?

[projektir]

Because the system is not a given in the first place. The error is made so early that it's quickly skipped over and unnoticed. Once you are in the state of understanding a system, it's already too late: the system has already won, because it convinced you of the existence of rules that don't actually exist.

How the social system is isn't a given. It's not a solid framework of hard rules like the laws of physics. It's rather amorphous, and, in large part, it's driven by what people believe it to be. We can favor the loud. We could have just as much chosen the quiet. It's a bit more complex than this but the statements aren't false. There's a path to both.

One doesn't have the capacity to look at a system and claim they understand it, because the internal system is always affected more by the larger external system, which has not been understood. Understanding it would imply to fully know all the effects. Yet people claim to understand systems all the time, and then the system is swept under by a new wave that didn't care about your understanding. Really, the system wasn't truly understood, and it's too big to be understood, which seems obvious: if we really understood these systems all that well, we'd be free to guide them where we want, and we'd make perfect predictions, and the waves wouldn't surprise us. In reality, we don't understand the system; time and time again I see people treat a system as a bastion of stability and then it falls apart.

What we're doing, really, when we say that we understand the system, is that we piggyback on what someone else has claimed to be true of the system, which tends to be heuristical. Someone who is, interestingly enough, known to be experienced in navigating the very rules they state to be true.

It's like a metagame. The metagame always seems true when you look at it, and moving away from it is very painful. People who know the metagame are often very good at it. But it's often that the metagame is a shallow assessment, that gives the fastest results with the least amount of time spent, and little else. The metagame often doesn't actually give the absolute best result, but rather the most simple to reach good enough result, especially for those for whom rediscovering is difficult and takes too much time. Little surprise that metagames are unstable, fickle, and easily disrupted. Someone who truly understands the game will beat the metagame and will often not reveal their results and keep opponents in the dark for a long, long time. The opponents are then unable to find the new metagame since they're loyal to the old one. But there was never a hard rule, never a promise that the metagame was true. The metagame never replaces true understanding.

So when someone looks at a system that has obvious bad effects, and says: "I will function within this system and its bad effects, because that's just how it is", they're doing the worst thing: feeding the system and giving it the very thing it draws its power from. The more influential a person does this, the worse, for who can oppose the political system if even the great Arnold had to stoop down to such a low level? Of course, the real answer is that Arnold probably never understood the system and just adapted the metagame that was available to him to play it safe.

In that, he did harmful things, and that is how it should be analyzed. It doesn't, ultimately, matter why he did them, because then we'd play into the rules of the system that don't exist. It is only the end effects that we can analyze. Arnold losing in a political system because he was not hostile enough is going to be impossible to prove. He could as well have been more effective if he did something unusual and did it right. But him having a negative influence, and reinforcing an already bad system, are very visible effects, and those are the ones we should look at.

Anything else is Machiavellianism and the claim that doing harmful things is OK, as long as they make YOU personally more powerful because you think you will have enough agency and forward-thinking and power to change the world for the better while obviously making it worse for the people you touch. I think we can find a more effective way to function as a society than promoting Illidans.

[crististm]

I think I know what you mean.

But all I can do is infer from your words. That is "understand" you. Now I can "understand" you and still disagree and fight you with all my might, guile, wisdom etc.

And I don't feel that I need to become one with you to understand you. Because I can't. You and I are two different people. I would need exactly your experiences from exactly your perspective: to be you - exactly you. But I am different and all I can do is infer an approximation of these experiences. Are these proxy experiences "enough" to understand you? I don't know.

---

What are your choices? Admit defeat? Not functioning within a defective system at all? Go live in the woods or in the desert? Put your head in the sand and refuse to understand a system because of _fear_ of corruption?

There is a middle ground though. Why not understand enough of its potential for good and enough to avoid its weaknesses and maybe (_maybe_) have a chance to fix them?

[projektir]

> What are your choices? Admit defeat? Not functioning within a defective system at all? Go live in the woods or in the desert? Put your head in the sand and refuse to understand a system because of _fear_ of corruption?

I think you missed the point a bit. You're still giving credence to the system when you frame other options as admitting defeat or sticking the head in the sand. I'm saying there isn't actually a solid system that we're trying to give all this credence to. It's artificially simulated to drive people to accept it so that they don't go outside the imaginary bubble the system tries to create. If anything, staying within it is keeping one's head in the sand because it's saying the true system is far too complex, let's not try to comprehend it and buy the simple one we were given.

It's similar to how a lot of scientific beliefs used to be. It may have been believed and claimed that the Earth was flat. But how could someone possibly know such a thing? And now imagine various things were built around this idea, and decisions were made with this idea in mind. And maybe if you said the Earth wasn't flat, you'd get shot. But if you are aware that the Earth isn't flat, or even that there's no evidence that it is, you should never believe that it's flat. Once you believe it's flat, it's already too late, you have now limited yourself by made up physical laws.

A person saying: "Only X kind of people can do this or win here, only Y kind of things work in this system" is limiting themselves by made up laws. Often these are said with nearly 0 evidence, except that a lot of people believe it. Most people believe it, so success is usually achieved by ones holding such belief, as well, simple statistics. Such claims are completely preposterous and the amount of times I've seen them fall apart and also watch people cling to them and defend them with all their might is insane. But people only seem to notice when it happens in a culture they don't like, yet it's a regular pattern pretty much everywhere. Sports, gaming, political propaganda, philosophies, religions, you name it. Football player of height X is not viable. You can't win games unless certain positions on your team are a certain type. This weapon is complete garbage and nobody should use it. This system will totally work/fail because all people are lazy/hardworking. And the one we all started out with, long ago: might makes right and there's no reason to share.

And it will often take someone new, someone who perhaps hasn't even heard the lie before, and someone who has no prior investment in the old system, to suggest that maybe earth is round, maybe that weapon does work, maybe you can run a football game with a player at a certain position under a certain height, maybe you can sum up baseball stats. Because whether or not the Earth is flat is not determined by how many people think it's flat, yet people may bully you over this, and they may design whole systems that make you think you can't leave because the Earth is flat, and do all sorts of things, but as soon as you realize it's round, you can do things that are not possible if you thought it was flat. Like end up on a continent on its other side by looping around.

You can break the rules, because the rules you need to break are not real. Real rules hold, forever and always, and in all places. If a proclaimed most awesome human being since sliced bread can't do it, or is too afraid to do it, and instead does negative, harmful things and then tries to hide behind unverified false beliefs to justify his actions, perhaps we should reevaluate what our usage of such terms even means.

[crististm]

Yes. I agree with not hearing the lie. It's like breaking the 4 minute mile. I've heard that after the first record break, tens other followed in the first year. I am sure this was so because of a new mindset and had nothing to do with groundbreaking new physical abilities.

---

But now I've heard the lie. I can't 'unhear' it. That horse is out of the barn. This is my position. What are my options considering I hear these lies all the time?

The best thing I've got is asking myself and others 'why is this so?'. I'm doing this enough times and find a lot of BS and made up 'laws'. Mind you, it aggravates people when they realize their firm beliefs are on quicksand. And they project this onto you. One has to be careful.

Yes, maybe I do give credit to a system. But just enough to get ammo against it if necessary. Going meta, I just gave you some credit, enough to deflect/defuse your argument.

How about what you say may be a lie? That is, the thing about having no chance of doing anything once you hear the 'lie'. That you always need a fresh/uncorrupted approach to find that the earth is in fact round.

What if you don't need to believe it? What if all you need is changing it slightly and questioning its veracity?

The best answer I've got about this is this: "if it helps you - go on and accept/do/etc it".