[thriftwy]

The thing with obedience (which is disgustingly praised by quite some HN commenters, maybe even not just astroturfers) is that it leaves zero territory to live your actual life.

Which then will create people living completely double lives, the obedient shell one and the other one.

[dang]

Please don't post generic ideological tangents to HN. Much as we might wish otherwise, a public internet forum isn't able to have meaningful discussion about things like this. It just turns into boring slop.

[thriftwy]

Why have HN at all then? Let's close comments.

You can't discuss specific things if you never figured generic things out. We will have pointless discussions like "was is a good thing to murder this particular person, or you say it wasn't?"

[dang]

We don't close comments because some comments are good. But some are boring, particularly the generic ones and the indignant ones. To make HN discussions better we need to make them less boring, i.e. less predictable.

Nobody figures generic things out. They're too generic for that. The true things you can say are trivial and the non-trivial things are untrue.

The grander and more general a topic, the fewer interesting things there are to say about it—especially in internet threads. Those few things get said over and over, making the threads predictable and boring. The solution is to avoid such tangents. To avoid a black hole, don't go near it.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

[thriftwy]

> But some are boring

That's what you are thinking.

But you know what HN users think? They think +24.

[musage]

Furthermore, those who would demand obedience because they lack substance aren't living a life either. That is, if living a life was sitting on a porch, they're in the swamps running from their past, without even knowing a porch exists.

It's a really shitty thing to be dragged into the swamp by someone who is lost in it. But to acknowledge it's just this shitty thing, nothing more, like cancer or falling down the stairs, that just hurt and diminished you for no good reason and for no real good outcome, which kept you from what is rightfully yours -- yourself -- that is step one. It's painful and can be paralyzingly scary, yet if people could see how scarier what they're regressing into is, how it's just a dead end filled with pain, in comparison to the soundness waiting beyond that small scary threshold, they'd take it in a heartbeat.

Unfortunately, my first reaction to someone wanting to "sell" me abuse or obedience is anger. But it really should be compassion.. obedient and authoritarian people deserve better. Abused and abusive people deserve better. FWIW I didn't think much of China when I wrote this; people break in the same dozens of ways all over the world and all through history it seems. But compassion and giving it just one inch are still orthogonal, you have to balance between the feelings of those who are fucked up, and those they would hurt by virtue of being so.

[tpeo]

You mean "obedience" in general or "obedience to the current Chinese government"?

[thriftwy]

In general, when somebody asks for your obedience and you comply, they proceed with adding conditions.

First it's "no outright porn" then "no naming of private parts" then "no blurring of line between good and evil".

You can imagine their conditions as an area, and your meaningful life as an area, and the Venn diagram of those two stops intersecting. You can't write "Crime and Punishment" without blurring line between good and evil. You can't write about any problems you are having. So now you are writing something banal, bland and unconvincing (as most of communist art is)

[Ajedi32]

If you're talking about "obedience" in general though, then some equally valid examples of rules someone might ask you to obey would include "don't murder people" and "don't do drugs". "Obedience" is far too broad of a term for you to characterize it as outright good or bad entirely.

[thriftwy]

Following laws is not "obedience", as long as laws are reasonably consistent and universally enforced.

Also, "don't do drugs" is not usually a law, unless in repressive jurisdictions. You can't sell drugs and perhaps possess large quantities, but you can do drugs as an adult making choices.

[Ajedi32]

Perhaps you could clarify what you mean when you say "obedience" then, because it seems to me that you and I have very different definitions of what that is.

Google defines obedience as:

> compliance with an order, request, or law or submission to another's authority

So going by that definition, following the law is indeed "obedience". Similarly, complying with a court order would also be "obedience", as would pulling over to the side of the road when a police officer drives behind you with their lights and siren on, or listening to a lifeguard at a pool when they tell everyone to get out of the water.

In fact, if we're going by the dictionary definition of obedience, I would argue that obedience is necessary for the very existence of civilized society.

[thriftwy]

I mean trying to internalize other entity's commands as your own behaviour.

That's the idea behind Chinese "points for obedience" system, isn't it?