Sufi Way: Building Up Character

[Greg]

I disagree.  There are a lot of people who are easy to love.  Mentally handicapped people for example, such as those with Down's.  Or my wife's best friend's child who has severe autism and most people find terribly difficult to love or be around.  I like her and I always go out of my way to talk to her and shower her with attention, since it is not her fault that she is severely mentally handicapped.  She is completely innocent.

Nobody hates these people, they just ignore them.

Same with little kids.  I go to kids parties frequently and the vast majority of parents would far rather drink wine and talk about viruses and soap opera plots than engage with their children or other people's children.  I don't know why they bothered to marry and have children if they don't like them.  They are little more than accessories that the parents take responsibility for clothing, feeding and shooing off to school each morning and then moan about how hard it is parenting 2 children.

You can tell they never get read stories and very often view their parents like they were fostered for the welfare childcare payments.  They don't hate their kids, they just don't like them very much.

Then there are my elderly neighbours who would otherwise be completely ignored and forgotten about by the rest of the street.  I visit them daily, do shopping for them and help them with errands, post, fixing jobs in the house.  They are easy to love and impossible to hate, but invisible to the community around them.

The world loves showing how merciful it is by forgiving the junkies, the dope-peddlers, the women who abort their children, the whores who sleep around and them claim 23 years later they were "raped".  The Presidents who get blow-jobs from interns and the former sodomites, who become self-appointed Catholic spokespeople and judges of who is too traditionalist and not Catholic enough.  Yet, somehow, all this mercy only serves to give us more, junkies, dope-peddlers, perverted politicians, unhinged Catholic-lay spokespeople and the next generation of children aborted in equal numbers to the generation before them.

[The Theosist]

I don't disagree with what you've written there. But what that's actually been said are you disagreeing with?

[Greg]

It doesn't take much looking to find good reason to hate everyone

This is not true.  I tend to love the weak and lonely, old and frail and hate celebrities and the vacuous.

Most people I like, because most people are ordinary.

[The Theosist]

It doesn't take much looking to find good reason to hate everyone

This is not true.  I tend to love the weak and lonely, old and frail and hate celebrities and the vacuous.

Most people I like, because most people are ordinary.

This is true, and that you and most of us don't look much or place much stead in good reasons in those cases doesn't make it untrue. Children are as vile as they are endearing, a fact I recall quite clearly from my memories of being around them every day of my childhood. Their much overplayed "innocence" doesn't change that anymore than it changes it for a mangy rat.

[Greg]

Children are not vile.

Compared to adults they are much more likeable.

[The Theosist]

Children are not vile.

Compared to adults they are much more likeable.

Really? I prefer someone who at least has the capacity for morals and reason to bipedal beasts who, if left to their own devices, would tear each other apart. Children are perverts, they laugh at toilet humour, they are tempestuous and violent, they are inveterate bullies who hunt in packs and sniff out weaknesses like bloodhounds, and they are ignorant and stupid.

Yes, of course they daren't try most of that with adults, which is all the more unfortunate for those adults who seems to have forgotten what is was to be a child. They're the ones we have to blame for this stupid post-Victorian view of kids.

[Frank]

I think Lord of the Flies sums up childhood in isolation quite well. I'm
sure that if I had not been a year younger than the rest of my class at
Gunnersbury I would have been one of the more odious members.

[Jayne]

I think Lord of the Flies sums up childhood in isolation quite well.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months

The story concerned six boys who had been found three weeks earlier on a rocky islet south of Tonga, an island group in the Pacific Ocean. The boys had been rescued by an Australian sea captain after being marooned on the island of ‘Ata for more than a year.
[...]
No one noticed the small craft leaving the harbour that evening. Skies were fair; only a mild breeze ruffled the calm sea. But that night the boys made a grave error. They fell asleep. A few hours later they awoke to water crashing down over their heads. It was dark. They hoisted the sail, which the wind promptly tore to shreds. Next to break was the rudder. “We drifted for eight days,” Mano told me. “Without food. Without water.” The boys tried catching fish. They managed to collect some rainwater in hollowed-out coconut shells and shared it equally between them, each taking a sip in the morning and another in the evening.

Then, on the eighth day, they spied a miracle on the horizon. A small island, to be precise. Not a tropical paradise with waving palm trees and sandy beaches, but a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than a thousand feet out of the ocean. These days, ‘Ata is considered uninhabitable. But “by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year.

[Greg]

Well I guess I understand why children flock around me and Jesus.

We both like them.

[The Theosist]

I think Lord of the Flies sums up childhood in isolation quite well.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months

These were six teenagers, not children. Any playground is more horrific than this and a reflection of a chaos reigned in only by adult supervision.

Apropos the author

A book whose subtitle is “A Hopeful History” should be welcome at a time when people are gagging for cheering news. It fits the mood too, appearing just as neighbours are helping neighbours, people are clapping for carers, and humans the world over are cooperating to save each other’s lives. What’s more, as some are talking of a radical fresh start once we emerge from this crisis, a 1945-style new settlement, Humankind offers a roadmap for how we might organise ourselves very differently.

Fame would not be wholly unfamiliar to Bregman, who recently turned 32. He briefly became an online sensation at Davos last year when he turned on his audience, condemning the absurdity of the rich taking 1,500 private jets to hear David Attenborough warn of the climate crisis and, above all, their failure to pay their taxes or even to mention the word. He said he felt as if he were “at a firefighters’ conference and no one’s allowed to speak about water”.

Oh, I remember this c**t's face now.

He had already made waves with his book Utopia for Realists, a call for a universal basic income or UBI: an idea once dismissed as absurd, but which seems positively mainstream now that the UK government is paying 80% of the wages of all those furloughed by the virus crisis.

Bregman charts how Hobbes won the argument. Society and its key institutions –schools, companies, prisons – have been designed based on a set of bleak assumptions about human nature. But, Bregman says, the scientific evidence suggests those assumptions are badly flawed, that as a species we’ve been getting ourselves wrong for far too long.

Back when we were hunter-gatherers, we roamed peacefully in the Garden of Eden; then we enclosed a square of land, called it our own, invented property and settled down to defend it, wars began and our innocence was lost.

Piss off. Another looney Scandinavian socialist, mollycoddled his whole life and cherry picking data to support a conclusion

[Jayne]

Piss off. Another looney Scandinavian socialist, mollycoddled his whole life and cherry picking data to support a conclusion

Lord of the Flies is a work of fiction.  It is not data at all.  It is one man's imagining.

The story of the real ship-wrecked boys is one data point.  This is too small a sample to draw  conclusions from, but it is an interesting contrast to Golding's views expressed in fiction.  It was not "cherry picking".  The author, as far as we know, did not ignore other incidents of ship-wrecked boys while only choosing to write about the positive one.  He claims that he was only able to find one and I see no reason to doubt this.  Groups of boys being ship-wrecked is not a common occurrence.

You are the one who seems to be selecting data to support your conclusion.  You look for excuses to reject the true story while treating the work of fiction as if it really happened.  You compare the ages of the fictional boys  (around 12) with those of the real boys (13-16) as if this were the significant difference between them.  Golding's boys did not behave so much worse because they were a few years younger.  It was because that was the story Golding wanted to tell.  You find Golding's story more compelling because it matches what you already believe, not because you made some objective analysis of what happens to ship-wrecked boys.

[The Theosist]

Piss off. Another looney Scandinavian socialist, mollycoddled his whole life and cherry picking data to support a conclusion

Lord of the Flies is a work of fiction.  It is not data at all.  It is one man's imagining.

The story of the real ship-wrecked boys is one data point.  This is too small a sample to draw  conclusions from, but it is an interesting contrast to Golding's views expressed in fiction.  It was not "cherry picking".  The author, as far as we know, did not ignore other incidents of ship-wrecked boys while only choosing to write about the positive one.  He claims that he was only able to find one and I see no reason to doubt this.  Groups of boys being ship-wrecked is not a common occurrence.

You are the one who seems to be selecting data to support your conclusion.  You look for excuses to reject the true story while treating the work of fiction as if it really happened.  You compare the ages of the fictional boys  (around 12) with those of the real boys (13-16) as if this were the significant difference between them. 

Golding's boys did not behave so much worse because they were a few years younger.  It was because that was the story Golding wanted to tell.  You find Golding's story more compelling because it matches what you already believe, not because you made some objective analysis of what happens to ship-wrecked boys.

What? Frank said, "I think Lord of the Flies sums up childhood in isolation quite well." You linked to this story as if it refuted his belief. It doesn't. It doesn't because the story doesn't concern children and childhood but six teenage males. There is no comparison. End of discussion.

These are the "boys" in 1968 after being rescued, just a couple years after their ordeal that began in June of 1965.



More of the "boys".





Note also that the premise is entirely different, as these were a small group of already close-knit friends running away together and more than capable of surviving in the situation from their native lifestyle. These weren't a mixed group of English schoolchildren randomly marooned in a foreign environment. And even if Golding had just projected the carryings-on of a public boarding school, with authority taken out of the picture onto the group it would have painted a nightmarish picture.

Oh look, he wants a movie.

https://twitter.com/rcbregman/status/1263873279737159682

The story of the real ship-wrecked boys is one data point.  This is too small a sample to draw  conclusions from, but it is an interesting contrast to Golding's views expressed in fiction.  It was not "cherry picking". 

I didn't claim the story is a cherry picking of data on shipwrecked "boys". What's cherry picking is the author's book itself, an intentional search for data to support his contention that human beings are "basically good", an effort that requires turning a blind eye to six millennia of data on wars, revolutions, riots, criminals, slavery and the sordid lives of people on the ground. It's not just about the Holocaust, which is a blip on the radar when one looks at the last 150 years and Isis, Maoist China, Vietnam, the Holodomor, Bolshevism, nationalism, genocides on every continent but Antarctica ancient, and all our daily lives in-between, a never-ending narrative of deception, betrayal, theft, sexual deviance and even murder. How can any historian even entertain such nonsense? Just looking at the Middle Ages, whether its political structures, serfdom, standard practices of warfare, peasant revolts, witch hunts or the chronicles of daily life  should be enough to fill one with utter contempt for man in his fallen state. It's so monumentally absurd.

I don't need "data points" like stupid faux scientist to "prove" what is plain to see about human and child nature, and if you disagree with that I disagree with your dumb epistemology, but as it is every reform school is a "data point" against this one; but if you believe children are "basically good", rather than tamed beasts, by all means, don't punish them, don't supervise them and don't try to order them. You're not needed. They will take care of themselves.

The author, as far as we know, did not ignore other incidents of ship-wrecked boys while only choosing to write about the positive one.  He claims that he was only able to find one and I see no reason to doubt this.

I have absolutely no reason to trust a single word that proceeds from the pen of a man setting out to prove a contention for the sake of providing a justification for the Communist socio-political ideology he's peddling.

[Jayne]

The ship-wrecked boys were 13-16 years old.  Showing pictures of them a few years later does not show that they were not boys. 

I posted the story because it was interesting and Frank's comment reminded me of it.  Obviously it does not prove anything one way or another.  Theosist's emotional and lengthy response comes across as an over-reaction.

[The Theosist]

The ship-wrecked boys were 13-16 years old.  Showing pictures of them a few years later does not show that they were not boys.

In Jayne's world, boys turn into men in the space of a year. The youngest chap in these pictures will have been no older than fifteen in them, which is younger than the eldest during the ordeal. Now, please point out who in these photos looks like he's a child.

[awkwardcustomer]

Really? I prefer someone who at least has the capacity for morals and reason to bipedal beasts who, if left to their own devices, would tear each other apart. Children are perverts, they laugh at toilet humour, they are tempestuous and violent, they are inveterate bullies who hunt in packs and sniff out weaknesses like bloodhounds, and they are ignorant and stupid.

Yes, of course they daren't try most of that with adults, which is all the more unfortunate for those adults who seems to have forgotten what is was to be a child. They're the ones we have to blame for this stupid post-Victorian view of kids.

The idea of children's innate 'innocence' seems to be Victorian, or so I've heard.

Some children are vicious, as anyone who has any experience of being bullied in childhood knows.  And they do hunt in packs seeking out victims.  And some children are kind and sweet, while others are somewhere in between to varying degrees.

But the idea that ALL children are innocent implies that vicious adult behaviour begins overnight, when the child becomes an adult when in fact it's far more likely that adult psychopaths were also psychopaths as children.  There are signs, apparently, to watch out for in childhood such as a liking for the mistreatment and even torture of small animals. But who cares to notice, especially when the assumption of innocence is being made?