“How impressed everybody is” is the basis of money, law, self-worth and our models of reality. But that’s a pretty shabby basis if you ask me.
“How impressed everybody is” is the basis of money, law, self-worth and our models of reality. But that’s a pretty shabby basis if you ask me.
Is it? I don’t try to impress anybody with money I do or don’t have. If you do, consider not doing so. You might find your finances in a better state.
Don’t, I repeat, do not base your self worth on what other people think. Listen to their input and make yourself the best person you can be. But if you only have self-worth due to how impressed your neighbors are, you are going to have a very poor life as you make a continued bad decisions.
There are vanishingly few laws that are centered around impressing anybody. The core theme to is to create laws that best allow for the functioning of society. For some easy examples, lack of criminalizing murder, lack of property rights, or lack of a tax code all fuck up modern society pretty quick.
I’m not sure how ‘impressing others’ is part of this at all? Our model of reality, ie physics, chemistry, math, have nothing to do with impressing others?
Excellent. An opportunity to elaborate my thingy.
By impress I mean that the thing looks big. People are impressed by big strong stuff.
Stuff that has big value is worth a lot of money. Thus money is based on people being impressed.
For good and ill, one’s self-worth is generally based on how much attention you get and how much nice things people say about you. Thus self-worth is based on people being impressed.
Law is based on impressive arguments, impressive authorities, impressive force, impressive majorities.
Models of reality are likewise. Arguments, axioms, authorities, experiments, observations.Somebody is impressed and the hypothesis gets promoted to theory or whatever.
That’s where I’m going with that. People are being impressed. Majorities are getting impressed. Impressive people are being impressed.
Reality is unfathomably complex. We can use our pre frontal cortex and think everything critically or we can learn patterns that are good enough.
Why is white sinonimous with purity and peace? Why we can have a somewhat coherent consensus on beauty? Why rockstars fabricate ludicrous stories to be seen as bad boys?
Telling an archetypical story impresses and dazzles other people. Again, reality is too complex.
What I have been learning to do, since I struggled with what you are asking a lot. How can I have substance and at the same time tell a compelling story?
Why do we like being fooled by magicians? Why do we like being fooled by some branding or propaganda? It is our nature, you realized that. Now how do you not suffer internally with that fact? How can you turn this knowledge into wisdom? By using it for good