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13/ Our penal system implicitly assumes shades-of-red theory. Prison guards and cops I suspect have at least a small streak of sadism.
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15/ If this is true, my original definition of civilizing project is nonsensical and most people are NOT on board with it
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16/ Worse, most moral philosophy is obsessed with defining evil primarily to find targets for justifiable pain-causing.
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17/ Enemies give life meaning and purpose. Moralizing is overtly about trying to do good, but covertly about prepping victims for pain
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18/ The most common form is NIMBYism/tribalism. For many, the ingroup is _formed_ in order to create an outgroup it's ok to hate and hurt
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19/ As a mostly-apathetic, I only came very reluctantly to this conclusion: that many actively enjoy causing/witnessing pain
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20/ It's an ugly theory of humans, but unfortunately very plausible evolutionarily. Finding pleasure in pain is adaptive in scarcity.
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21/ Note that feeling others' pain (friends, kin, ingroup, random others) is not mutually exclusive with finding pleasure in pain
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22/ You might be capable of both. But people *incapable* of finding pleasure in others' pain might be minority mutants.
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24/ Which brings us to the dark question: if finding pleasure in others' pain is central to psyche of "normal" humans, what is civilization?
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25/ It might very well be that a scalable, meaningful utopia for most humans will be based on bloodsports and torturable AIs in VR 😐
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