Eh. Until every person on this globe can agree on a common vision of an ideal world, any utopia project is going to fail. Some folks feel that personal freedom is the highest virtue. Others feel subserviance to a higher power is the highest virtue (and often don't agree on which power, or by which means this subservience is best presented). Some feel we should turn to technology as the answer to the problems of the future, others look instead to the past. The world is too chaotic a place for any one ideal society to last. And where there are multiple ideals, there will be conflict. And eventually, the fall of such a society.
Wide awake in a world that sleeps, enduring thoughts, enduring scenes. The knowledge of what is yet to come.
From a time when all seems lost, from a dead man to a world, without restraint, unafraid and free.
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' Wrote:In my experience it has more to do with giving a cynic the scenario he expects will happen.
Which only reinforces cynicism and bitterness.
Hell, half the complaining around here isn't because of the rules. The rules are big and bulky and clumsy, but they work. It's more or less about people having their roleplay crushed by the system because somebody, somewhere up top, didn't like them having a spine.
Actually, Tycho, it's not always and or completely about that. The problem with spiny creatures is that they use those spines for a defense mechanism against attacks, whether they are justified (or had RP in advance) or not. The problem is that some people persist in acting like certain organs that become engorged with blood during a state of excitement - and I'm not talking about the pupil of the eye in this instance.
So while both something with a spine and something else can be hard and erect, one is to have a purpose while the other is simply out there to spew things around and hope that some of it sticks somewhere.
Also, past history does have quite a bit to do with the individuals involved. Someone who started out on the wrong foot may be given another chance - but often they make not one or two or three issues, they make several. So if a player who has received numerous sanctions for violating the rules happens to come up with a great role playing idea, his past history is taken into account.
Thus, to simplify things, if you act like a dick, then don't be surprised when you're treated as one later on.
Now, the whole article that Xoria linked to - I did read it. However, the subject matter was all Greek to me...
Okay, slight humor aside, one problem with the article is that in almost the first paragraph, he mentions the words freedom and Marx in the same sentence. Marx was not a freedom seeking revolutionary.
Another is that he defines freedom in the modern world with a comment about the shoe thrower in Iraq, and finds that to be a positive measure of the increase of freedom today. Yet thousands of examples abound of examples where freedom is being even more repressed and crushed since the time of Nike, the shoe with wings. A perfect example is from, quite literally, last week - where in Indonesia the constitution states, "no one has the right to prohibit any religious community from practicing its faith", yet sharia law prevents construction of churches so Christians had to celebrate Christmas in a tent set up in a parking lot.
I think the author would do better to discern where freedom is being repressed more, in the name of religion, since that religion subsumes and takes over the control of the state. He's so proud of the shoe being thrown at President Bush - any thoughts on 51 Catholics being slaughtered just miles away from where that shoe was thrown?
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Quote:Athens taught us that free will and critical thinking go together...Free thought, by contrast, requires us to look reality, including unfortunate reality, in the eye.
To discover one's freedom is to recognize a capacity for self-intoxication and self-deception, and thus to condemn oneself to doubt.
Thought question: what do you do with this doubt? Does/should it lead to action or passivity?
In the remaining 9 minutes of my lunch break I'll attempt a brief answer.
About a dozen years ago I experienced a realization about self-deception. Without going into details, let's just say it was about personal matters rather than broader philosophical/religious/political issues.
In my case, it lead to substantial passivity. Actually I'd call it closer to stagnation or immobility, and it lasted for a number of years. Doubts finally had given way to allowing me to view the full gulf between my conception of reality and what reality actually was. And so I sat down on the edge, put my head in my hands, and tried to figure out how to navigate my way back to reality. As it turns out, that didn't work very well, for a long, long time.
Finally, after several years of this, I decided that there were no answers that were reachable as long as I stayed where I was. I'm not entirely sure at this point if there are any reachable answers from my frame of reference anyway. What I am sure about is that the answers don't just come to you, you have to go to where the answers are. And that means getting to your feet, and deciding to march off into the darkness, certain only in the knowledge that you don't know exactly which direction you are going in, don't know where you'll end up, or when you'll arrive. You may not even know it when you do arrive. But you WILL get somewhere eventually, and chances are it will at least be different from where you are, if not better or worse. Different, at least, may provide some perspective that helps you find the correct direction to the destination you want, if you've managed to figure that out yet.
Does doubt lead to passivity? Unfortunately yes it can. But passivity is, in my view, the worst of all possible options. Remember that three-fold passageway ahead in the Mines of Moria in the Fellowship of the Ring movie? You could die while sitting there waiting for an insight. You ultimately just have to pick one path and follow it until you know where it goes. Our legs are more useful than our posteriors when it comes to solving just about anything.
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