I saw what you did there.
Funny quote, Inigo. I think I’m using “rationalization” here to mean the reasons we find to explain why we do things or allow things to be done to us. Theft is theft at its root, where someone takes from someone else something that isn’t theirs to take. Sure we agree to pay taxed or risk consequences, but there is also an understanding of what that tax money will be used for, like schools, hospitals and infrastructure. For the gov’t to use this money to bail out banks or other private businesses just feels wrong. We can rationalize why they do it, to avoid the collapse of the economy for example, but it sure don’t feel right sometimes. The guy who took your wallet had his rationalizations too, which you and I may not agree with, and maybe in a zombie apocalypse I would see it differently. Survival has a way of changing our priorities and our sense of what is right or wrong.
Posting on internet message boards is affirming.
“I would do X all over again, for it has made me a better, stronger, more appreciative person. I have no regrets.”
Where X is living through cancer, breaking one’s neck, having a disabled child, losing one’s job, being homeless, or any other adversity.
It may not be a lie for some people. But I could see someone saying something like this just because it sounds like something you’re supposed to say or they want to believe that their pain wasn’t totally in vain. For once, though, I’d love for a person being interviewed to say, “Hell no I wouldn’t choose to live through that all over again! Are you crazy!”
Kind of like that Seinfeld episode where people don’t really want to look at the new baby because the thing is actually repulsive. Just be nice!
My employees like and respect me
Ah, all right - to me “rationalization” implies that one either knows deep down the real reason one is acting, but dislikes them for one reason or another or knows them to be morally wrong and thus create new narratives for themselves to justify what they’re doing, often retroactively. Lying to oneself, in other words, either consciously or unconsciously. E.g. “I didn’t have a choice” (yes, yes you did, you just dismissed all the other ones)
Which is why I got confused by your use of the word :o.
When I say that there are a hundred things that factored into Wallet guy deciding to take my wallet, that doesn’t mean I justify his action or excuse it, or dismiss his agency in the matter (although that… eh, the whole free will/determinism shit would take ages. Another thread :D). Wallet guy obviously bears more than token responsibility for his own actions 
- but it’s also simplistic to consider that responsibility to be 100% his, either, even in the exact instant he decided to jack my shit. Criminals are not born, they’re made. It’s a long process with lots of little steps - but by necessity/practicality we only focus on and address the last and most striking one.
It is a Thing to be sure, but justice ? I 'unno, man.
BTW, and for the record, while in this thread I might come off as all philosophical and Zen-like and shit (or possibly extremely masturbatory :p), and while I do mean every word I wrote and believe them to be true (or at least valid) on an intellectual level ; all this deconstructive, introspective, external observer crapola goes right out the window when I’m actually involved with the world.
I’m really a monkey like all the others and instinctively know this is **MY **wallet and all of you bastards can pry it from my cold, dead paws :).
I’m actually not sure that’s true.
It’s kind of a cliché at this point in fiction that civilization and the coercive force of Law, Government, Religion or whatever are the only things keeping us from going all Lord Of The Flies on each other, but I think people don’t particularly change in sudden crises. Sure, basterds will be basterds and will have plenty more leeway and means to express their basterdity in a post-apocalyptic wasteland or a zombie outbreak ; but then again we *come *from a hard scrabble, kill-or-be-killed, no rules but what we make, harsh survival world. We built civilization out of it in the first place. Man’s basic decency (or at least usefulness) to man had to come before civilization, not the other way around.
We’re a fundamentally social species, in every aspect of our existence. If your (not **your **specifically - general your here) reaction to a sudden crisis or a life-threatening scenario is “everyone for himself !” and “fuck all of y’all, I got mine”, you’re a broken part of that species IMO.
I can buy shit I don’t need with money I ain’t got: I have credit cards.
This is the smartest place on the internet and fighting ignorance is our raison d’etre.
Biggest myth of all: We have free will. It makes things much easier to pretend that we do.
“I look young for my age”.
Well put, IMHO. Plus I’m a big fan of the expression “fuck all of y’all.” It’s something Daryl Dixon would say.
And even people who insist that free will does not exist also insist on talking and acting as though what they said and did made a difference, and that the words “could” and “should” are applicable to other people, and that they even exist as anything other than a blind helpless vehicle for a funny-shaped protein to perpetuate itself.
I prefer to think of myself as an overdesigned, self-propelled life-support system for a cock.
For the sake of not hijacking this thread, I’ll just point out that not everyone agrees with this.
…Oh all right, I’ll elaborate a little…
I mean, that even if the universe is Deterministic, that’s not the same thing as it being Fatalistic, so we can still talk about humans having choices and making decisions (indeed, I would argue that it’s only within a deterministic context that the concept of choice is meaningful).
It’s more than that, though. There have been experiments done in which humans have taken some sort of action, but did not form the conscious “determination” to commit the act until after it was already done. They believed their consciousness had directed their body to act, when it was actually the other way around. It’s not difficult to surmise from this that our consciousness, whatever that is, is not a coherent entity that weighs available evidence and acts on it, but rather a method of taking events and assembling them into a convenient narrative that can be more easily recalled than random disjointed stimulus-response events.
Nothing to add or ague, I just wanted to say that’s a truly fascinating notion.
I’ll probably be up all night with this (or was I already slated to stay up all night anyway and my consciousness glommed onto some convenient filler material for me to pass the time ? :))
Kind of like dreams and rapid movement. One school of thought says that you are imagining a street and you watch a person cross left to right, your REM showing the same pattern in your cornea beneath your eyelids. Another school says the random neural firing of your brain makes your eyes move left to right so your brain creates the narrative of the street in response.
Personally, I suspect that creating this “narrative” is in fact the primary function of the higher brain. I recall from college psych class a description of an experiment where subjects sat in a dark room while two lights, located a certain distance apart, were flashed in sequence. When asked to describe what they saw, subjects said they saw a continuous light source move from one side of the room to the other. They had incomplete visual information, so their brain made up a story to explain it.
Agree with all this (although I wouldn’t say this is what consciousness is, merely one property of it), but don’t think it affects my point at all.
I’ll leave it at that for the purposes of this thread.