Discussion Groups / English Usage / May 2009

I'm breaking protocol on this message by overquoting and crossposting the
reply to talk.origins because of the content, reasoning, logic and
illustration of my views on lying, telling the truth, human psychology and
how it relates to evolution in the past, now and in the future.

To anonymize the messages or not?  I left them as is since anybody can
check the References headers:

Reading from news:alt.english.usage,
"Pat Durkin" <durk183@sbc.com> posted:

"Cynic" interested me enough to check the definition in the dictionary.  I
found what could be the perfect word for it in the list of synonyms:

    misanthrope
   
    a person who hates or distrusts all people: also misanthropist

But the only problem there is the Wikipedia article that categorizes
people beyond the dictionary definition:

qqq:
Wikipedia - Misanthropy
-
Misanthropy is a general dislike, distrust, or hatred of the human species
or a disposition to dislike and/or distrust other people's silent
consensus about reality.  The word comes from the Greek words (misos,
"hatred") and ( anthro-pos, "man, human being").  A misanthrope is a
person who dislikes or distrusts humanity as a general rule.
#

In talk.origins, the general debate I've been in over the last week is
about evolution of the past, the present time, and future evolution.  My
contention is that eventually, our minds will become so great that we will
be able to recognize the sensations in our bodies as evolutionary forces
at work, as we live our lives, manifested through our ability to analyze
our own feelings and decide how we next want to feel about our situations.
Note that sometimes feelings seem like they're out of control when
extraordinary things happen, or when an idea comes to mind that suddenly
makes you realize how "the way it is" is not the way it has to be, and
things can change to make things fairer in the world for everyone.  The
flood of emotions, feelings, reorganizations of thoughts as we try to
figure out what's going on in the world exercises the brain and mind to
the point that you see the entire world as a whole, and you see how the
actions of one group of people clashes in so many ways with the struggles
of other groups of people trying to survive under a canopy of rules,
regulations, expectations, demands that require debt to have just one
modest house to live in, and threats of punishment by destitution and
homelessness if you don't comply.  "Resistance is futile," saith the Borg.

Eventually this would come to such a state of awareness about our
situation that nobody could be fooled by the smoke and mirrors of politics
and money, and we would have to come to some agreement about how society
should proceed.  If we can find some way to make everyone happy in a way
that no one feels cheated or left out, then we /can/ make a happy world in
which we can constantly build instead of constantly rebuilding what has
been destroyed.  The removal of stimulus that cause painful feelings would
mean that our minds and brains would be free of the stresses caused by
these negative societal factors.  Being free of such stresses, the body
could relax more instead of being uptight.

My contention is built on the fact that I was forced by my mental state to
quit playing the game of life as we know it since I was a consistent
failure at it.  I went home and stayed there.  I have good reasoning and
logic for it in the digression about what happened with my attempt to dig
myself out of a hole with a late-in-life online college education, but the
choice to read it is yours. I've indented it if you don't want to hear
about it.

    Digression
   
    I had followed the rule of work hard, bust your a.s, and you'll
    make it, but I was sinking financially more and more each year.
    It finally got to the point where I was working until I was in
    outright depression just getting up to go to work each day.  After
    a conversation about it all with my roommate, he said if I wanted
    to quit, I could.  He said there was no point in working if all it
    was doing was driving me further into debt.  (Pizza delivery is
    expensive.  That's why we need the tips, but we understand the
    hard times, too.  I'm 38.9, by the way.)  So as my bills fell
    further and further behind, no matter how much I forced myself to
    go back in each day, I finally just gave up.  I quit, went home,
    stopped making money, had no way to pay bills, and so they've been
    unpaid ever since.  Why struggle against the impossible?  Even the
    online college I signed up with for a last-ditch effort to save
    myself with a degree in graphic design turned out to be a
    "woowoo(?)" outfit.  I had done my research on their accreditation
    before enrolling, and called the school to inquire about it since
    I really couldn't find many internet forum postings about them; it
    was such a new school (Anthem College, division of High-Tech
    Institute, if you're interested, for your protection and theirs).
    During my phone call, I recollect that he told me that the school
    was on probation because their job placement program had fallen
    below the standards set by the accrediting agency, and to be taken
    off probation, the school must fix the problem.  That didn't sound
    too bad, but since none of the other schools I checked looked all
    that great, I went ahead and enrolled for about $30,000,
    considering PELL and loans.
   
    The school was quite odd.  The lesson plans at first were fairly
    creative, but once getting into the later software and 3D
    animation and modeling software we had to learn, it was less about
    creativity and more about paint-by-number.  They told you
    step-by-step, how to complete each project in such a way that
    you're not really learning anything creative, but just copying
    variables from the book to the computer and...it was just a mess.
    I had no more clue about 3DStudioMax after the course than I did
    when I started.  It was the same for software used in earlier
    classes, but thought I had no clue after some of that software, I
    still made 100s just because I parroted perfectly the instructions
    in the test.
   
    Photoshop, InDesign, QuarkXPress and Dreamweaver I was fairly good
    at because I was so familiar with years of use of Paint Shop Pro
    and Dreamweaver as a hobbyist.  3D animation is where it fell
    apart.  I had maintained a 4.0 GPA all the way up to the animation
    point and that was also the time that I was losing faith in hard
    work to support me.
   
    About that time, the Anthem College president was forced by their
    accreditation agency to put a video message of the school's
    situation on the student login page.  The school president said
    that Anthem College was on probation again and not allowed to
    enroll any more students until the curriculum requirements were
    addressed.  You might be able to imagine how that set with me at
    the time.  I had taken on a huge debt that my friend had also
    cosigned for to go to this school, and all this was tied in with
    Sallie Mae, federal PELL grants, Stafford loans and the Department
    of Education of the U.S. Government, and I was essentially going
    to end up with a diploma not worth the paper it was written on.
    During my active time enrolled, I had run across some new forum
    postings from former employees of the college with accounts of the
    school receiving letters from employers saying they were not happy
    with the work of their graduates.  I could believe it.  I had seen
    some of the examples posted by the school for us to study to see
    what others had done, and to give us ideas.  I wasn't impressed
    with very many of them at all.  They all looked like something
    done by any 12-year-old of the 1990s with that time's computer
    technology.  My years of work with Paint Shop Pro, however, gave
    me such an advantage over others that I aced all the courses and
    got nothing but praise and adulations from the instructors.
   
    Each week, the grades were updated and I could see how my grades
    were compared to the class average.  I was always up between 95
    and 100, even on the academic courses (psychology, sociology,
    algebra, critical thinking, and humanities) while the rest of the
    class was usually down between 50 and 65, sometimes between 65 and
    75, but rarely did I see anyone get beyond 80%.  Sometime grades
    were in the 30s and 40s on average.
   
    The problem with that observation, though, is that some students
    enrolled and didn't participate at all, so their zeroes dragged
    the entire class average down.  Some assignments were just not
    completed, some may have been poorly done.  But there was rarely
    ever any forum for us to compare our work, so I had no idea how to
    gauge how I was really doing.  The teacher may have been praising
    me by e-mail (one time I was even told my work was professional
    grade), while laughing at me back at the school.  I could look at
    my own work and see for myself that it was professional-grade in
    some cases, and some I knew were not the greatest..sometimes
    because they restricted what we were allowed to do and I couldn't
    work within their boundaries.  But the ones I felt *were* good
    were the ones I loved, while the ones I felt restricted on were
    the ones I didn't like, but got high grades on, anyway.  Sometimes
    teachers were pigheaded, quite frankly.  In one assignment, I had
    to design a book cover.  The front of the book cover had no
    border, but the back of the cover had a sizeable black border
    around it.  Many books have only a picture of the author on the
    back cover, so that's all I put, was a picture of a geek
    caricaturizing himself, while on the front cover is a creepy
    picture of a tiny trailer in the woods with a light on inside.  I
    meant for it to be a strange kind of irony that someone who looks
    like that could write a story so creepy.  But the teacher just
    didn't get it.  He not only marked off for my choice of picture,
    but then told me that the spline image was off-center.  He was
    even too stupid to see that it would naturally appear to be
    off-center if the front cover has no border, but the back cover
    does.  I wrote him an e-mail about it, explaining my side.  I
    can't remember what he said, exactly, but he didn't budge from his
    position.  He left my grade as it was.  I think I got an 80 on it
    or something.  I knew then my teacher was an idiot and no idea
    what he was doing.

    I uploaded the project to my webspace on Earthlink so people could
    see my point:
   
    http://home.earthlink.net/~matthaeus/images/book-cover.jpg
   
    Since other designs had shown that I knew how to use color, I
    decided to do something different with that one, which is why its
    use of color isn't that...' '\\ splashy //``.  To at least show
    some comparison to my other projects, I uploaded a few more:
   
    http://home.earthlink.net/~matthaeus/images/culinary01.jpg
   
    http://home.earthlink.net/~matthaeus/images/cd-cover.jpg
   
    http://home.earthlink.net/~matthaeus/images/movie-poster.jpg
   
    http://home.earthlink.net/~matthaeus/images/museum-invite.jpg
   
    I have some other stuff in PDF format if anybody is interested.
    LOL

    Anyway, with the quirkiness of the grade comparison charts, my
    skepticism about the lessons and the accrediting problems, and the
    idea that you "need that degree" to even get your foot in the
    door, I just lost faith in the idea that you "must" keep trying at
    all costs to succeed at a game that, the way I was beginning to
    see it, should be purely optional.  And it is.  Some people choose
    not to work and are homeless.  I decided to stop working with the
    permission of someone I've been friends with for 20 years who
    doesn't mind if I live with him without working.  And he likes
    having me around because of his health problems.  I'm someone to
    be here if he needs someone to help him get to a hospital.  I
    still struggle with the perception of myself as an unwitting
    moocher, but I watch the news daily hoping to see signs of change.

After losing faith in hard work, education, getting up and trying again,
after my discussion and permission to quit, I put my faith in uncertainty.
I decided to just go home and see what happens.

Having more time to sit back, think about all that's happened, think about
how money works, how one must take on so much debt just to get started in
life, it made me think that if we had just thought to play the game of
Life just like the board game, and give each baby a million dollars in a
trust fund to draw 5% interest for 18 years on a certificate of deposit,
they could get a house, buy a car, go to college and start a family
without even having to go into debt for a single penny.

So I decided to wait.  And as Archie Bunker would say watching the news,
"Look at this..."

Is it time for tea?

"That must be the tea."  (Caddyshack)

I think what is going on now is going to take us into the next huge leap
forward in evolution.  The reasoning and logic follow in the rest of the
story:

Now there's no point even trying to fool myself into thinking just
scraping together a graphic design portfolio is going to get me a job.  I
bet nobody is thinking of leaving the job they already have, so that makes
any new employment highly unlikely.  And my feeling about it all is such
that I can't even think of starting Photoshop without puking in my mouth a
little.  If the politicians and bankers are too stupid to see the reality
of the situation of what's going to be happening to everyone, then I
dunno... Somebody needs a head examination.

The way I see it, this tiptoeing charade through smoke and mirrors has
become a Christmas parade down Broadway and nobody in the parade realizes
their flies are open and their penises are waving proudly in the air,
dripping with semen at every idea that gives them political pleasure.

Don't think I just sit back and laugh with hedonistic pleasure as I take
as many hot showers a say as I can stand without fainting with reprieve. I
do revel in that mindset in single moments from time to time as I think of
where mankind must be headed if a wave of happiness spreads around the
globe when a way is finally found for everything to be fair.  That would
result in more pleasure, and less pain in life.

The chemicals released by washing your body in pleasure is good for it.  I
think it's going to lead to a society in which people can work very little
and get a lot of lifestyle.  I think of how many people are wasted, and
how many "primitive cultures" are overlooked simply because they're being
saved to bring in some form of capitalism to make a few people richer and
richer.  But think of what we could build with true quality instead of
exploitative cheapness for profit margins?

It'll be a world where 7 billion people work 5 hours a week, instead of
having however many work now do it all for 40-60 hours a week while
draggind a mountain of debt behind them all their lives.  The "I feel so
cheated" chemicals go away and are replaced with "wow this is fantastic
and fair for everyone" chemicals, and the whole situation of lack and
wanting greener pastures would be gone.  The whole world would be a green
pasture and everywhere you go, there would be beauty, art, music and
dancing.  People building things because they love what they're building,
and what they're building it for, making them want to live there,
participate, and spend a lifetime on the project that makes a difference
in the world, not just a living for some old coot who is forgotten by all
but a few.  That's not to bring in some egotistical sense of
self-importance, but to just set up a system that allows EVERY person a
way to do what they dream of doing instead of settling for what you can
get a degree for, or get paid to do.

Now think of how sick people are now under our current system with the
cancer and heart disease.  What would happen if we repolarized society to
be not about money, but about building what we love and participating in
building it ourselves.  I just see that as like taking on life as a hobby,
and not a career.  Like some love gardening, but they don't want to run a
gardening business because they don't want to to spoil their hobby. Hunger
could be helped by planting fruit and nut trees instead of foodless shade
trees.  Why cities and towns haven't figured this yet out is beyond me,
though I guess produce growers probably wouldn't want produce growing all
over the planet...only on their property so they can make money off of it.
People can plant fruit trees at home, but people move and it's hard to get
a tree to grow enough to provide food before you're moving again for a job
transfer or just getting a better house.  So cities and towns should just
plant fruit trees all over the place and grocery stores can alter their
stock and reduce produce sections as necessary and provide other items not
available growing all over creation.

That kind of world would have to have a profound impact on human
psychology as they see the folly of the ways of the past and move forward
into a future that ends all violence and gives us all the time to live in
bodies without fear of death, and in doing so, find ways through a
peaceful life to immortalize our bodies and make them live forever.

Damaeus