They say \u201cyou can\u2019t take it with you\u201d. Of possessions, at death. Implicit suggestion being you should shift energy away from accumulating them towards accumulating\u2026 memories? happiness?
But if you can\u2019t take it with you, at least someone else can inherit and use it. Whereas your memories and happiness\u2026
That\u2019s part of why I don\u2019t fuck with the whole EA utilitarian thing. Hedonism is a consumer good. Considering how regularly you need to refresh your happiness, it\u2019s not even a consumer durable. Why the fuck would you maximize for that, at the expense of the charismatic capital goods - the standing waves of meaning that are culture and social technology - that can be generated through denying happiness, through inflicting repressive force?
The other part, and this is going to sound simple as hell but took a whole Ivy League grad seminar on political philosophy to get through to supergenius me, is this - let\u2019s accept, arguendo, that you\u2019ve got a morality that correctly distinguishes good from evil.
Why prefer good to evil?
The Christians have a reason - doing so wins the favor of the most powerful being in existence, that controls all earthly events and can bestow afterlives of eternal pleasure or eternal torment at whim.
That\u2019s the point of a god, to slap together out of pure storytelling charisma a kludge of an instrumental force to prop up your morality.
That\u2019s what Nietzsche was on about when he said that God is dead but it has not yet reached the ears of men - that too many athiests haven\u2019t followed things through to their conclusion.
A lot of attempts at humanistic philosophy try to build a Big Other out of humanity to serve the same purpose - because people will only like and help you if you\u2019re good and thus good is necessary to the conduct of human endeavors.
But it\u2019s the people who go around most strongly insisting on any particular vision of good and evil - social activists, imagine - who can most readily name the most instances of people creating, and attaining and maintaining control over human endeavors specifically by doing \u201cevil\u201d.
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