See, this is why I’ll never graduate - I just can’t write like that. All my papers have been concise, to the point, easy to understand and no longer than five pages. I have to learn how to be opaque and long-winded so academics can take me seriously.
Does anyone give courses?
Then please explain to me how you would realistically test this theory, having first stated your falsifiable expected result. Simple language for those of us (like me) who have trouble following the jargon, please. No “self-referentials”, no “suicide tensions.” What actions would you take if you had the money to run a study, and what measurable (and therefore falsifiable) results would you be looking at? With what assumptions would you begin (that’s a hard one, because one is not always aware of one’s own assumptions)?
I was, btw, using “religion” in the sense of belief without either proof or falsifiability, not in the sense of belief in a deity or purpose-of-the-universe sort of thing.
Ok, but you went too far with the rest of that post. I could not even read it. Please stick to this one thing. The definition of suicidal tension. You need to fix this so that it is understandable. Perhaps an example? But only if the example is less than 2 sentences. Take it as an article of faith that any example longer than that will not be understood.
You are postulating that some thing, inanimate object, could be introduced to the environment in which a person lives that would, simply by its presence, cause that person to commit suicide? Can you please give a single real world example? <Please remember 2 sentences or less>
If you are serious about asking for help, olanv, you might start with a more determined effort to define your phrases in everyday language. Remember that if a thing exists, it should be discoverable in reality. That is, if you are suggesting a real world motivation for behavior then it should be discoverable in the real world. You should not have to postulate a ward full of suicidal patients half of whom are straped to beds. You should be able to point to some society or group into which was introduced some object which resulted in mass suicides.
I’m not sure how you talk to people in person. But perhaps it would help if you imagined telling this definition to someone you know, your boss or girlfriend, perhaps, and then writing it that way.
Possible examples of ‘suicidal tension catalysts’ as defined by olanv:
A ‘stock market ticker’ showing that the markets had just crashed. It’s inanimate. It has been proven to have made people commit suicide before. It’s probably a bit hard to find a stock ticker these days, but an e-mail on a PDA would probably suffice in 2004.
A televison reporting an impending thermonuclear holocaust, approaching raping and pillaging army etc. These sorts of things have prompted suicide before.
A photograph of everyone a person loves dead an mutilated, or a photograph of everything they care for destroyed by an asteroid strike.
A medical report confirming that a person has an incurable, chronic, untreatable, unbearably painful disease that will progress for decades and yet strip the person of dignity and the capacity to care for themselves within months. An attached bill shows that the person has no health insurance and thus will be a financial and emotional burden on their family throughout that period.
I think that with a bit of thought anyone could produce a near endless list of such catalysts. I also believe that everyone would have such a catalyst, some breaking point at which they have nothing to live for and the pain involved in continuing would be too high.
Agreed.
Except that based on what olanv said earlier, while he’s saying “cause,” the term I think he really means is “allow.” THe impression I got (and maybe I’m mistaken or he’s changed his mind) is that the motivation to commit suicide is already there - what needs to be provided is a ready means. Thus, the impression I got was that the suicide tension he refers to is the tension between the widespread (if not universal) desire to commit suicide, and the things other than fear of death itself that prevent us from doing so.
olanv, we need you in here to answer some simple questions, rather than to confuse us further with esoteric ‘explanations’ that none of us can follow.
I can’t undertand what he means by any damn thing he posts, so I really couldn’t comment.
I think what the OP is saying is this:
*Life sucks.
People who say “Life doesn’t suck” are lying or stupid.
In fact life sucks so much that most people would kill themselves, but are afraid of death and pain.
We could prove this by making it easier and easier for people to kill themselves and see how many do so.*
but I could be wrong.
That’s what I was thinking as I read the OP too (“Justhink is working for a sucide hotline?” Silly me, I thought the thread title meant it was about a job…) But it probably isn’t ole Hink, though. There’s another person on 2 different message boards I go to (the boards are related) whose threads almost always get more " what the hell are you talking about?" responses than anything else because she uses such bizarre syntax and word choices. Amusingly, her profile claims she’s an English professor, yet she can’t communicate with people.
Even if this isn’t Justhink, you could try putting the OP through language translators and converting them back into English. I seem to recall that made his posts somewhat more coherent.
Hey. Olanv. Something just occurred to me, here. I’ve been trying to make sense of what you’re saying, and it’s been pretty heavy going.
You know what might help?
CITES!
Where are you getting this from?
Another way of explaining this, and what is being proposed, is that it solves the semantics problem. In order to survive, a person must do something that allows them to survive. If a person does not do something that allows them to survive, they will not survive.
An applied problem that comes up quite a bit, is with respect to capitalism.
There are charges, that effectively state that the only way capitalists get “ahead”, is when they lie, cheat, steal, kill and suicide. The part capitalists don’t get is that the others charges can be recursively proven by grounding the the suicide into something that must be made accountable for in their life span, so that they are responsible for, accountable for and able to observe the suggested impact of what is meant by a behavior or purpose or excuse as being suicidal. It’s the suicidal part that is most abstract to them; that they have a choice to not commit suicide. To suggest that what this stuff is representing is pessimism and hopelessness and other associated linguistic tokens, is to miss the point entirely. Pessimism, is in fact, what occurs when people continue to avoid accountability because they fear truth.
I am in no way stating that everyone wants to die, everything is ultimately pessimistic, or even necessarily that anyone wants to die; I am stating, that with zero suicidal tension, inherency of purpose is being calculated at all moments by removing self refutation immediately, instead of letting it straggle and work its vice upon the entire population who is not trying to self refute.
In this manner, only people and/or behavior that is doing something for their survival will survive. This solves the linguistic token problem (the semantics problem, if you will), by proxy. What I mean, is, it gives you total freedom of everything, to do anything, that enables behavior that is not zero sum… If you can be an elated billionairre in an economically stratified society and/or highly successful gossip networker, with zero suicidal tension, all power to you! If you can walk around and only yap gibberish, all power to you!
With zero suicidal tension, if any behavior gets re-enforced, there is no longer any semantic argument or ambiguity with respect to what that re-enforcement represents. Case closed. This is what I mean, when I suggest it’s relationship to law; particularly law that is hypocritical, and only supports hypocrisy in all instances with it’s decisions. That the law has a manner to be accountable to itself and doesn’t is an indictment of the system and all people within.
If people are curious as to how a person can be here and state, “all these people are full of it”, and PROVE it – actually be correct, this is how their statements can be falsified. Instead of arguing that something is or is not this or that way… you can get off you duff and prove it… or, if you sufficiently understand what will and will not survive in your life (maybe including your life), when you only are rewarded for doing something for your survival, maybe you’ll know which ones are and aren’t “full of it”.
I’ve spent the last 3 years of my life studying a field that flies in the very face of that statement. The concepts of altruism and philanthropy seem to completely prove you incorrect.
Now maybe *you * could actually “get off your duff” and prove your statements.
These are more or less animate examples that only subsist because the inanimate suicidal tension is so high. Also, the ONLY reason, everyone has a catalyst, is
a.) Because they don’t have the options to choose survival
b.) Because these options are with held from everyone by residual systems that survive as a result of high suicidal tension. If you have no inanimate suicidal tension, the population will eventually be invulnerable to inanimate suicidal tension, as only people working towards survival will eventually remain and have reproductive value.
What you see as altruism and philanthropy is part of the manufacturing cost of social stratification. In the sense that there is an inequitable distribution of wealth that will not survive zero suicidal tension, it is, in a larger picture, only behavior that intentionally murders other people by proxy in a zero sum formulation. It’s like saying that the Nazi’s were altruistic because they didn’t have inanimate technology for suicide in their camps, thus allowing some of the prisoners to “survive” when the war was over. The point here, is that the camps would have been IMPOSSIBLE to run, start or maintain with this technology in their camps. It would have been IMPOSSIBLE to wage this war… they would have had to have found something else to do. It is in this sense, that your data is misleading you.
You know, olanv, people in this thread have practically begged you to give some concrete answers, pointing at real life situations and examples, not for your theory as a whole, but for the first and most basic term you’ve used: suicide tension.
You have been asked:
to provide a concrete, existent example of ‘suicide tension’ (pervert)
to provide a realistic design study stating what you would be measuring and what you would do to set up a situation demonstrating your point, for what you claimed to be a fully falsifiable theory (me)
to answer whether suicide tension is something that instills the motivation to commit suicide in people (such as news that would cause people to despair en masse) or that provides the means or eases the ability to commit suicide (your example was a shot gun). (me)
Since you refuse to answer even those simple, straightforward questions, I have to assume at this point that despite your statements to contrary, you have no actual interest in communicating what is it you’re driving at.
Additionally, to comment on this remark munch. It’s not that altruism and philanthropy don’t have survival value, it’s the semantic problem I referred to before. In this sense, the variables aren’t bound, which allows you to interpret as altruism, that which is it’s opposite. So, what’s key here, is “what is altruism”? What allows a person such as yourself to spend three years studying altruism (maybe with good intentions) only to emerge as an apologist for human slavery, unbeknownst to you?.. To just be another cog in the wheel of human suffering and destruction? I’m stating, that it’s suicidal tension that allows you to come to conclusions which are muddled; which don’t correspond to the term that is operative with respect to your very study. In this sense, I am certainly suggesting, that your research has done little more than rub the backs of people who are committing homicide on a massive scale.
Rather than commenting on your own posts, why don’t you provide cites or references for what you’re talking about?
For these, I require time to think, as, in my mind, I have already answered all of these questions. So, now, AGAIN, I need to figure out the translation problem that is occurring. That’s easier said than done.