Conversation

Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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Aella
@Aella_Girl
working 40 hours a week or going to the doctor or having to do bureaucracy or paying taxes or getting educated in things you don't really want to learn or being in debt or social hardships in high school. Unacceptable pain is stuff like having too many kids living in one room or
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
not having healthcare bundled with employment or any jobs you can't support a family on or cheaper housing with higher chances of issues or homophobia or selling people expired food. The boundary between acceptable and unacceptable pain looks a bit like a gerrymandering district
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
- the boundary is often influenced by ideas that came out of incentive to change them - I'm sure you've heard arguments that public school is designed to keep the people passive or that insurance companies make more money through being bundled with employment.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
And further, our internal experience of pain is heavily dictated by whether society approves of it or not, in the same way a hurt child might look to its parent to figure out if it should cry. Some ancient societies were chill with horrific coming of age rituals for kids,
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
and the kids probably experienced those rituals in the same way we experience things in the category of "acceptable pains" today - annoyance but no trauma. Probably in a century circumcision will be seen as barbaric, but today circumcised men don't mind that much
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
because the rest of society shrugs and goes "yeah, that's normal." My point is that, as a whole, our tolerance of suffering is 1. Arbitrary and influenced by incentives 2. Relative and dictated by society What does this mean?
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
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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