THREAD: I wonder how much of our social issues are caused, at the root, by a growing (is it growing or just more visible now?) inability to handle negative emotions. We draw cultural boundaries around 'acceptable pain' and 'unacceptable pain.' Acceptable pain is stuff like
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The vast majority of policy and regulation is driven by arguments around acceptable and unacceptable suffering. It's easy to present a frame that actually creates real pain by telling someone they should be feeling pain (which can be useful socially but not with policy!),
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and then that genuine experience of pain is used to fuel changes in the government. Weaponizing pain as an agent of regulatory change is a terrible way to run a government or guide a culture. There's obviously so many flaws - pains aren't weaponized equally, but rather by
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people with the power to weaponize them. Moving pains from the 'acceptable' to 'unacceptable' category might just increase raw suffering (tho ofc can still be useful but not in a weaponized context!). And nobody knows how to fight weaponized pain well, because it's actually real.
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In conclusion: I am extremely wary of any arguments for social or political change that stem from a pain too close to that gerrymandered boundary around unacceptable issues.
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End of conversation
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Yeah, suffering is approximately "this shouldn't be happening"—often about something painful but needn't be. I think people want meaning, more than they want to not be in pain. But these get conflated, and "pain" synonymous for "this shouldn't be happening" ...or something.
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