transgenderer:

ethnianmandarin:

nuclearspaceheater:

kontextmaschine:

nuclearspaceheater:

kontextmaschine:

nuclearspaceheater:

kontextmaschine:

stoicmike:

If I was born in some other country I would be waving some other flag. – Michael Lipsey

I’m Prepared To Give My Life For This Or Any Country

Is there a name for the unstated belief that everyone exists prior to their birth in some universal, possibly atemporal pool of souls that is drawn from at random as people are born, that is implied by, among other things, any use of the work “luck” to describe the circumstance’s of one’s parentage?

The “

Veil of Ignorance

”?

No, that’s a thot experiment about explicitly imaginary circumstances.

Which is totally distinct from religio-mystical narratives that underlie ethical worldviews

Except it’s not really a narrative that most people who use it would even recognize. It’s just there, in the unstated and unconsidered ramifications of so many different lines of thot and argument, from those espoused by people who actually might believe in a literal pool of souls, to those who would explicitly deny such a thing.

there is no name for this myth – i’ve looked and tried to find it. this myth only exists in stories and lessons. that’s how u can tell it is living. some day it will be given a universally recognised name by some unborn scholar of a civilisation that doesn’t exist yet,  but not for a while yet.

i think this “myth” is often just a metaphorical way of stating the belief that all humans share some fundamental similarity, or that all people, upon birth, have fundamentally identical selves, and its only those things that happen to you in life that make you different from other people. collective metaphors are like…a thing society does sometimes

I’d never really thought about this before, but this idea seems incompatible with other widely shared ideas about how people’s personalities are formed, which is interesting (?).

Like, my initial reaction was “oh, this is a nature vs. nurture thing, because to imagine that ‘the person you are’ might have been born with different parents – and not by adoption – you have to assume genes don’t affect ‘the person you are’.”  But then I was like, wait, this is also hard to reconcile with effects of upbringing, since a person who got a different upbringing might well not be “you” either.

It’s very common these days (due to the rise of psychotherapy?) to think that the emotional reactions one has in adult life are heavily influenced by childhood relationships with family members.  (I mean, this is obviously true of people who have PTSD as a result of those relationships, but the claim is that the influence isn’t restricted to cases like that.)  This idea produces a really convincing story when applied to me and to a number of people I know, so I’d wager there’s something to it.  But then, insofar as these reactions are a nontrivial part of one’s self or personality, it doesn’t make sense to imagine that you could have been brought up in some totally different family and still been “you,” not without some messy caveats.

(If someone tells their therapist “I’m always motivated to seek these things out of human relationships, because I conspicuously didn’t get them from my parents when other kids did,” and the therapist says “well, if you had been born to other parents, you wouldn’t do this,” that … isn’t very helpful?  The conversation itself is premised on the idea that these effects happen and matter and cannot just be whisked away by invoking their “arbitrariness.”  [Well, I don’t know every school of therapy; maybe there are some that do try to do that.])

Anyway, you could straightforwardly carry all of this over to the case of patriotism, although I don’t know if it’d be equally valid there.  I.e., “if you were born in some other country you would be waving some other flag” may be like the therapist’s comment in the previous paragraph.  “What happened to me was arbitrary” does not imply “what happened to me is reversible” or “what happened to me is merely incidental to my own self-concept.”

(via transgenderer)