Sociopath Community

AliceInWonderland said:

These separations and giving into illusions now take on a hyper form when anyone and everyone is a star. The worship of the Instagram influencer or the YouTube star is a manifestation of the same phenomena except such people are far more ordinary and numerous; and as such far easier to deworld from their own being, as are we. Think of every time you may have attempted to present yourself in a way that’s not authentic on social media, this is the deworlding process in which you forfeit your material self for a more abstract form.

In the past we were deworlding ourselves for something transcendental, Christ or Buddha for example – beings arguably worth deworlding yourself for because they are a synchronicity between material and immaterial being. While now we deworld ourselves for profit or likes, hardly as worthy as something so strange the only way we can explain it is as a God being manifesting in flesh.

It’s interesting that the same force that plunges you into an existential ‘crises’ is the same force that, as you say, sculpts the human condition.

And stops people from drinking, smoking, and ODing on coffee.

Sintetika said: 

So much knowledge I find myself hungry for, but I lack this self-discipline. It's a conflicting nature.

You are lazy, almost by definition. Turncoat would make for a good role model for you to follow if you wanted to fix that.

user22212 said: 

Why is being "fake" a bad thing? Why should we strive not to be? What is so inherently wrong with this "fakeness"?

People keep justifying their unhappiness with this "It's all meaningless, why live?!?!?". Do you breathe meaning? Eat meaning? Drink meaning? NO. Meaning is not something people need fundamentally. It's a cope really. Just spiralling down a loop of fundamentally unanswerable questions to avoid the real issues that cause their unhappiness. They're unanswerable as long as you haven't set some axioms that you will have to simply believe in.

Meaning is very crucial to some people, but maybe you mean that they can live without meaning. What kind of issues are people avoiding by having meaning in their lives?

If you want meaning, you need to have faith!

If you have the courage and the discipline.

What caused this existential crisis? Stagnation in the person's life? Perhaps they're unhappy with their progress towards their ideal, and instead of doing the necessary adjustments they've given into melancholy.

I would find it fascinating if there was research into the effect of existential crisis on the psyche beyond the usual mild depression. I am not convinced that existential crisis is bad for your overall long-term psyche.

Jean Baudrillard said:

If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly [...] this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra. [...] It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own: The desert of the real itself..

Seemed relevant. Edgy deconstructionism aside, there's a lot to be said about the current state of things that you hit upon.

The transfer of social value from religious or political role models to celebrities is very recent. And the market is probably not the best place for average people to find someone worth emulating. Greed and superficial appearances have come to be more powerful than actual virtues. Michael Jordan is more easily recognized around the world than Jesus. I'm not saying that's wrong, but think about how differently those two impact people...

While I'm not religious myself, there is something to be said about another thing that you brought up, transcendental ideas. I agree there. It could even be that we don't need religion, that we can get people on a common moral framework. But it's just not there right now, and I think the chaos of our politics and communities reflects that.

When people ask what is "real," that tends to get really subjective, doesn't it? Is it real that Americans committed genocide against the Native Americans, or was that a circumstance mostly down to diseases and French and Spanish policies that we didn't deserve backlash for? It seems like what's more important is how people feel about things. That's how it's always been, in my opinion. People need a narrative, that's how humans operate.

Turncoat said: 

It's all pretense, and it's always been that way. Most of what's changed in this case is just the medium for it. 

The reason for the pretense is closer to what's real, and that can be found within hints of what they show about themselves that they think others expect out of them. They ask themselves how others see them, so naturally their response to that question is projectionary of what's going on with them behind the gesture. 

When looking towards others meanwhile, they tend to only see facets of themselves within that person, so naturally promoting a blindness that's already there naturally makes it more streamline for template-based comparison. 

Life's so much easier to people when it can be rendered down into archetypes, and the complexity of what they're dealing with can usually be found within how many camps they've split it into. 

This indeed has always been happening and I agree that the fundamental variable is medium.

I began to view Space and time, which I would consider the medium, as fundamental after reading Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West and Marc Auge’s None-places: An Introduction to Anthropology of Supermodernity.

The medium is both spatial and temporal and structured by them, as such, the connection between the spatial and temporal determines the structure of the medium. That determined structure then has its own potentiality in which events can manifest into actuality. The events that can actualize in a living room in front of the t.v. are not the same events that can actualize in a room in front of a computer.

There is overlap but fundamentally these are different spaces because of the difference between the focus of the space, one being the television with its pre-programming and the other being the computer with its hyperinformation network. Both rely on an interaction with the screen but spatially and temporally they are structured differently and as consequence we interact with them in very different ways, in one we watch highly directed programs during predetermined time slots and the other we navigate through less centralized content that we can even have a hand in making instantaneously at any time we choose. 

Sintetika said: 

Well, in your words, all I am is a follower of "Saint Sagan" I want to read all the religious literature, and understand it so I can destroy it. So much knowledge I find myself hungry for, but I lack this self-discipline. It's a conflicting nature.


I guess I just get really zealous and fanatical over it. I can't say I necessarily hate those who believe in a religion, but the higher ups of such organized religions I view as most likely scum, and I still dream of a non-religious mankind. 


The Universe is vast, and we are the custodians of our destiny. Through Science we can explore the universe and learn more about it. Through Science, we can achieve countless things. 

As someone who wishes to be a follower of science that doesn’t seem to be a very scientific view, and this is what I mean when I say Sagan is your ‘Saint’. If you have a predetermined goal that is to destroy all religion, then you’ve already given into bias. You should be willing to follow evidence anywhere it leads whether it be the big bang, a static universe, or God itself. You are following the conclusion of your saints just as the Christians follow the conclusion of theirs.

I encourage you to read religious works, they are not only entertaining but also will give you a far greater understanding of many of the ideas you hold dear.

user22212 said: 

Why care? And I ask this unironically. 

You already gave the answer, because meaning is subjective and is ultimately a manifestation of the self. Some people derive great meaning from contemplating such questions.

Why is being "fake" a bad thing? Why should we strive not to be? What is so inherently wrong with this "fakeness"? A lot of people are out there looking for something "real". But everything is real. The actions people take are real. The thoughts that generated those actions, conscious or subconscious are also real. Fakeness, deceit, mimicry, pretending, acting. All of those are part of being human. They are very real behaviours. 

I don't personally think its a bad thing because its inevitable manifestation in any culture. 

Also, I don't think 'fake' is really the right word though I did use it because in the conversation I was having the other person was using it so I wanted to maintain a common knowledge. 

In my view all of things are real but the nature of their realities vastly differ.  

People keep justifying their unhappiness with this "It's all meaningless, why live?!?!?". Do you breathe meaning? Eat meaning? Drink meaning? NO. Meaning is not something people need fundamentally. It's a cope really. Just spiralling down a loop of fundamentally unanswerable questions to avoid the real issues that cause their unhappiness. They're unanswerable as long as you haven't set some axioms that you will have to simply believe in.

If you want meaning, you need to have faith! Not necessarily in a religious way, you need to have faith in the thing that gives your life meaning. A set of values. A desired outcome. Faith in some axioms that you can set yourself, or take from someone else if you will. "Oh noes, but I don't have faith in anything because everything is meaningless" well, this is not exactly right. "Everything is meaningless because I don't have faith in anything" would be more accurate. Searching for meaning without having faith in some things is like trying to do math with no axioms set in place. There is no math, you're just scratching your ass with your brain on idle thinking random thoughts to which you can apply no form of logic.

"Utimately I will die and any effect I have had on the state of the universe will eventually dissipate, given that enough time has passed" is a fact. But the conclusion "thus why bother?" is wrong. There is nothing saying you need to not die, or need to have your actions have an effect on the state of the universe. So, life is a deal. Take it or leave it. Put your efforts into it. Choose what "good" is for you, and work to do that. 

So you hold the classical existential view.

What caused this existential crisis? Stagnation in the person's life? Perhaps they're unhappy with their progress towards their ideal, and instead of doing the necessary adjustments they've given into melancholy.

I don't think its a progress thing but rather something that manifested from them being sober for so long. They seemingly have a mind that wanders these directions but such thoughts have been suppressed do to the abuse of benzo's for many years.  Also, they seem sad or depressed but instead are merely making a number of connections - she actually seemed very thrilled by the conversation though I can tell it makes them anxious. 

My answer to "What is real?" thus is: whatever you think to be real, for you.

 This is a very functional view. 

tfw ur girlfriend can spend hours and hours talking about nothing with randoms but can't write a single word to defend u when u get ripped apart :(

Jabels said: 

AliceInWonderland said: 

My point here is that most of us are aware of how fake all of this is and thus how fucked everything has become. What you’ve done here is realized that x y and z are not ‘real’, and that thought implies a question if your crazy enough to ask it. What is real?

There are a couple of problems as I see it; Societies excess and the sheer number of people on this planet.

Societies excess allows people to occupy their minds with the trivial and make up insignificant problems for themselves. In their minds, small problems become large problems. If you really had to work and struggle for your next meal and survival, all this would go away.

With the population approaching 8 billion, consider the bell curve of human normality. The more people we have the more crazy off norm people out in the 5 to 6 sigma area. This may not be normally distributed, but you get my point. More people equals more crazy people by some rule of nature.

This is a major theme of post-modernism, I like Gebser and Baudrillards take hence I keep using the term hyperreal (this is a term I’ve borrowed from Baudrillard). They too view excess as one of the fundamental propagators of this phenomena as it manifests in contemporary culture and society.

There’s too much food, too much entertainment, too much porn, too many posts, to many opinions, and too much information. Not only do they have spatial qualities, but they also have a temporal one in which these things literally move at the speed of light in the age of the internet. This excess and the speed in which it moves deworlds it, to use a Heideggerian term, and translates it into pure signal. In this sense once the object or event is deworlded and digitized it can be said to be hyperreal. 

Legga said: 

AliceInWonderland said:

These separations and giving into illusions now take on a hyper form when anyone and everyone is a star. The worship of the Instagram influencer or the YouTube star is a manifestation of the same phenomena except such people are far more ordinary and numerous; and as such far easier to deworld from their own being, as are we. Think of every time you may have attempted to present yourself in a way that’s not authentic on social media, this is the deworlding process in which you forfeit your material self for a more abstract form.

In the past we were deworlding ourselves for something transcendental, Christ or Buddha for example – beings arguably worth deworlding yourself for because they are a synchronicity between material and immaterial being. While now we deworld ourselves for profit or likes, hardly as worthy as something so strange the only way we can explain it is as a God being manifesting in flesh.

Whom do you follow, and what are you going to do, now that you've acknowledged/accepted that everyone follows someone? I liked your post. However, at the end of the day, all of this philosophizing seems like a waste if nothing comes out of it.

 This is not a revelation I’ve had recently though I did experience something similar roughly a decade ago when I became deathly ill from an autoimmune condition and spent long periods in the hospital, having death looming over you with too much time on your hands tends to make one think. The post itself is a text I had sent the person who’s currently having the revelation, the context is them wondering why others are not constantly inhabiting an existential state.

When I too had a similar experience, I became very motivated, that was truly where my journey into Mathematics and Physics began. I would assume the reason I chose this path is because it’s a way for me to tangibly grapple with the complexity of reality, in this sense it is a form of coping.

As for those I follow, they’re mostly Mathematicians and Physicists. I’m a mathematician by trade, I work in Optimization at a university, but a lot of my time is spent thinking about condensed matter physics (as it relates to superconductivity), gravito-electromagnetism, and counter-space.

On the Mathematics side I follow Harold Coexter, Isreal Gelfand, Vladimor Arnold, and Alexander Grothendieck. On the Physics side I follow Yanhua Shih, Martin Tajmar, Giovanni Modanese, Eugene Podkletnov, Oleg Jefimenko, and Bukhard Heim. 

Tryptamine said: 

Jean Baudrillard said:

If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly [...] this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra. [...] It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own: The desert of the real itself..

Seemed relevant. Edgy deconstructionism aside, there's a lot to be said about the current state of things that you hit upon.

I am in fact borrowing language from Baudrillard so I'm glad you brought him up.

The transfer of social value from religious or political role models to celebrities is very recent. And the market is probably not the best place for average people to find someone worth emulating. Greed and superficial appearances have come to be more powerful than actual virtues. Michael Jordan is more easily recognized around the world than Jesus. I'm not saying that's wrong, but think about how differently those two impact people...

It like isn’t good but of course it’s too late

Almost everything has been marketized and transformed into digital capital, even socialization. Facebook is a market for friendship, Instagram and Twitter are markets for influence, and Tinder is a market for sex and romance. All these social platforms are hyperreal, as Baudrillard would say, and as such have fundamentally been disconnected from the material world and have even become complete replacements as far as the younger generations are concerned. They are markets because the interactions that take place over them are monetized at light speed, each interaction being a signal that’s converted into capital which adds to the equity of the company that owns them.

While I'm not religious myself, there is something to be said about another thing that you brought up, transcendental ideas. I agree there. It could even be that we don't need religion, that we can get people on a common moral framework. But it's just not there right now, and I think the chaos of our politics and communities reflects that.

I agree traditional religion as we’ve come to learn of it is not necessarily needed. The fundamental issue is the nature of the icons and signifieds we’ve come to relate to in the west have become very shallow and as such do not equip us with the tools to deal with the complexity of reality. Michael Jordan as compared to Christ is a good one.

I think this must fix itself though, cultures are like organisms in my eyes and as such have life cycles. Much of these phenomena thus are manifestations of the lifecycle and the only way to reach the next stage is to see the current one through. There is no stopping the decay of a culture, it is as inevitable as old age.

When people ask what is "real," that tends to get really subjective, doesn't it? Is it real that Americans committed genocide against the Native Americans, or was that a circumstance mostly down to diseases and French and Spanish policies that we didn't deserve backlash for? It seems like what's more important is how people feel about things. That's how it's always been, in my opinion. People need a narrative, that's how humans operate.

 Indeed. 

What do you think the way forward is?