Ialdabaoth
Posts: 1073
Joined: 5/4/2008 From: Tempe, AZ Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: sravaka quote:
If I tell you the truth, knowing it will cause you to believe something other than the truth, am I really being honest? Similarly, if I tell you something that isn't actually true, but that leads you to the truth faster than telling you truth directly would, am I really lying? Interesting.... "expedient means," (upaya) as Buddhists might say. Yes! Upaya! That's precisely what I mean. ;) quote:
The question to me is, how do you *know* what your words will lead others to? The same way you know that a certain look means a girl is interested, and another look means she isn't. The same way you learn that a certain tone of the voice means sarcasm, while another tone means sincerity. You pay attention and you learn, and after a few decades you should be able to sort out what sorts of things will be interpreted in what ways by what sorts of people. Not with any real precision, of course, but nothing in life ever is. quote:
And why do you interact with these people who are in need of being gamed? Because - as regrettable as it is - we all need to be gamed now and again, hopefully for our own benefit. Life itself is a "game", after all - that's what's meant by "maya", right? So since we're already several layers deep in illusion, how is anything we say to each other "true" or "real" in the first place? ...h'okay, stepping back from the philosophical wankery for a moment: There are a hundred different layers of "truth". Look at how we teach - have you ever heard the phrase "lies we tell children?" It's a term you hear a lot in the sciences, that means "well, no, this doesn't ACTUALLY work this way, but for now it'll do as an explanation." We don't typically try to teach five-year-olds the intricacies of quantum superposition; we just try to explain that things fall when you let go of them, and heavy things fall harder than light things. Then, in grade school, maybe we learn a bit about Newtonian mechanics - but trussed up in a bunch of irrelevant stories and history about Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton. Then in high school, we learn the full set of Newtonian mechanics. Then in college, maybe we learn special relativity, and then maybe we learn general relativity. And THEN maybe we learn a bit of quantum mechanics, and THEN - if we care - we can find out about quantum electrodynamics and Hamiltonians and all the myriad weirdnesses that make up "real" physics - at least, as far as we understand them at the moment. Which of these stories is the truth? Which of them describes ACTUAL reality? To be honest, none of them - but if we stick with that, we'll never get anywhere, and people have bridges to build and skyscrapers to design and microchips to forge out of tiny silicon wafers and X-rays. So we learn whatever we need to do understand how to make whatever it is we're making, and no more - and maybe we learn that we don't quite have it right, or maybe we just don't care. Either way, as long as the building doesn't fall over, the bridge doesn't fall into the river, and the computer doesn't lock up every five goddamn minutes when the thermometer outside hits 100 degrees, everybody's happy, right? Social stuff works the same way, too. For that matter, so does morality. At core, of COURSE might makes right - because if you can't enforce your sense of "right", then it doesn't happen. We all agree that Hitler was a bad man, but if we weren't willing to fight WW2 to stop him, he would have won, wouldn't he? So might *DOES* make right, in the sense that it causes what we believe to be right to actually *matter*, once we use force to enforce it. But we tell people all the time "might doesn't make right", because we want people to behave a certain way whether or not they have power, and whether or not they think they can get away with being a little dick. Morality has been called the "noble lie", and maybe it is. Maybe there are things that aren't true, but that we should believe anyways - because believing them makes the world better for us. Hell, even self-esteem works this way. Did you know that depressed people tend to have more realistic understanding of their odds of success in any given scenario than "healthy" people? That healthy optimism is, in fact, a delusion - that you can statistically show that being a cynical, self-defeating pessimist tends to lead to a more "accurate" view of the world? But barely anyone thinks that way, because it's useless for getting things done. Yeah, you wind up with unrealistic expectations - but those unrealistic expectations are the only motivation people have to keep trying. So, yeah. Life is *full* of "upaya", inside and out. The trick is learning how to differentiate between expedience for the sake of dharma, and outright manipulation for the sake of selfishness. ... do I make any sense?
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