Freedomain Radio

I am interested in conversion experiences people have had and the psychological factors behind all sorts of irrationalism for a reason that is probably different than a lot of people on here.  I have never had a credible authority figure, but was never overtly imposed upon by my parent.  I was never instructed in religion or political ideologies, and I skipped school most of my life.  The consequence, when combined with a natural intellectual capacity, is that I have always been an individualist, a rationalist and an egoist; explicitly and intentionally at least since I was twelve.  Now I am in a rather different position from many of you.  I don't have the slightest personal experience or idea on how to relate to people who do have these hang ups and problems.  They never occured to me.  I'm certainly not free from error in my life, but most of my errors have been empirical and immediate in nature; I have never suffered under categorical problems of my weltanschaung because I always figured that the world is pretty much out there and I'm going to have to deal with it to get what I want.  The notion that I ought to try for something aside from what I want, IE external idealism/altruism was frankly absurd and shocking to me when I first began to explicitly encounter it while talking to people.  Now in one sense, this is great for me.  But it has seriously hampered my ability to debate and empathise with people who have had these backgrounds, especially the billions still under their sway.  Having never lost the 'seriousness of a child at play', 98% of the time all people make me want to do is not talk to them because they're a bunch of crazies and there's nothing in it for me.

This is both a conversion experience and a question: how does a person who hasn't dealt with so many of the self-inflicted problems of human beings understand what they are going through?  I just can't figure out their motivations.  Being critical isn't even a conscious effort on my part.  You say something to me and chances are I'll subject it to analysis from five sides without even intending to.  Most of the time I won't even mention it.  So for someone to accept blatant nonsense and stick to it in spite of evidence and argument just looks totally retarded to me.  I can't help but feel that I am a different kind of person from the mass of people I encounter every day.

I'm not so sure I understand why you never going through a conversion experience would make it difficult for you to empathise with people who are struggling through theirs.  I've never had cancer and gone through chemotherapy, but I can still empathise with people who do.  I may not fully understand what that experience is like for them, but I can understand that it is painful and frightening.

Does that analogy fit with your situation?

As for people who don't have any interest in being rational at all (i.e. crazies), why even bother trying to empathise with them?

I was more talking about a person who is still a statist/religious nut and my total inability to empathise with them, but of course a person who has converted was at least previously under the influence of these ideas.  The difference is this: a person with cancer is suffering from physical pain, loss of physical capacity and death.  Those fears are very visceral emotions that I can call to the surface.  Furthermore, I can be pretty sure that they aren't intentionally failing to treat it.  But these people who can get something out of their mouth without apparently sending it across their brain, or who do sense the problems and say it anyway...they could choose to think, and they're not doing it.   It causes a kind of contempt in me for a lot of people, which I guess is something a lot of intellectuals deal with, but the fact that I believe almost everyone is a kind of screwed up lunatic whose made himself into an idiot really kills sympathy.

To me, a person is good for pretty much nothing but his brain.  A person who doesn't use their brain is, to me, pretty much as good as dead.  The fact that such zombies have the presumption to lecture me on how to live my life rapidly raises my indifference to a solid antipathy.  Their existence is not so obnoxious as the fact that I am surrounded by these twits who talk a lot but say nothing.  It's the old problem of the mountain tops, you're lonely, but once you see how little everyone else is, you'd rather die than come back down.

I kind of have a problem with the human race in general, I guess.  I think that the paradigm is flawed.

Ive had many of these misanthropic feelings as well perhaps this podcast might help or at least be entertaining

http://www.freedomainradio.com/Traffic_Jams/FDR_1010_Mr_Nihilist_Listener_Convo.mp3

dittotl:

Ive had many of these misanthropic feelings as well perhaps this podcast might help or at least be entertaining

http://www.freedomainradio.com/Traffic_Jams/FDR_1010_Mr_Nihilist_Listener_Convo.mp3

I haven't listened to the podcast yet, but I wouldn't categorize it as misanthropy precisely.  I don't have a problem with people existing or doing whatever, even being stupid, I just have a profound disinterest in interacting with these people and it somewhat annoys me that I have to, because they make up the majority of the population.  I am very much a transhumanist, and this is one of the reasons why.  Humans are a good PC with a bad virus.