mmmm. Perhaps long, long ago, when someone got up themselves (as the antipodal pasty people put it) of line we'd just bash them on the head with a stick. Very satisfying, it must have been. Now we wait for fate to deliver the blow...
Soz- Got to disagree with your "take" on selfishness. A person who has a well developed self will not need to raise his self esteem by lowering other people. It is people who are selfLESS who derive enjoyment from the misery of others. It is like a see-saw for the selfless. The more that they can lower someone else, the higher (better ) they feel about themselves!
What does "selfless" mean?
But Phoenix, we laugh at their misery when it is caused by their own stupidity. You don't see people jumping for joy when a celebrity is killed in a genuine accident - like the plane crash that took Alliyahs life.
It is more so situations where they get into trouble for their excesses - like picking up a hooker (Eddie Murphy), abusing drugs (Robert Downey Jr), getting obscene face-lifts (Michael Jackson), shop-lifting (Winona Ryder), drugs (Whitney Houston), assaulting a cop (Zsa Zsa Gabor), public lewdness (Pee Wee Herman), domestic abuse, nakedness, statutory rape, DUI's, etc.
Phoenix, that's what I was saying. A selfish person wants the big fancy house et al and wishes the owner of the house harm. Shoots him scathing glances, won't help him in a pinch -- whatever. I'm positing that the whole schadenfreude thing is a self-correcting mechanism for society, so that the (selfish) owner of the big fancy house decides to build a neighborhood rec center so that people like him more.
This isn't selflessness, it's just various permutations of selfishness.
"If you can't love yourself, you can't love others." Isn't that the way the saying goes?
It's the way out of the existential dilemma, if I may digress ever so slightly. If we are only a sum of our actions, what motivation do we have to treat other people with kindness and compassion? Well, if we really are just a sum of our actions, then the only thing we should value is ourselves. However, if we are able to recognize that other people are like us -- that is, if we are capable of empathy -- we can follow the Golden Rule, as 'twere: treat others as you yourself would like to be treated. Accepting this, there are only two reasons to treat others poorly: we have no empathy (we do not see them as being like us), or we do have empathy but we do not value ourselves. To deny the self -- to be "selfless" -- is also to deny others.
One of the trappings of celebrity is to make them not like us, and to remove, to some extent, our capacity for empathy towards them. (But since this doesn't explain why we'd delight in our neighbor's lawn dying because she inexplicably threw a dead squirrel in our yard -- not that this has happened to me or anything -- my model must be inherently flawed.)
(Talking out me bum this morning...)
(If that's cogency, I'd hate to see a ramble!)
Patiodog- Made perfect sense to me!
I thinks Phoenix is working on a philosophy of magnanimous hedonism, I does.
patiodog- Magnanimous- yes
Hedonism- Nah- Been there, done that. didn't even get the T-Shirt! :wink:
(surely you had the t-shirt but lost it somewhere...)
Well, I tried tossing dispersions on a young narrow, but I couldn't find my mark.
I think those miserable people who have pissed away their own lives take great pleasuire in the failures of others. It's that "crabs in a barrel" mentality. They didn't have what it takes to achieve their own dreams and don't want to see anyone else do it either.
As far as selfish vs. selfless, I can appreciate what Miss Phoenix says about looking out for oneself. Without stepping on others or allowing others to step on you. Sometimes you have to say no to people and it may appear as if you're being selfish but what you're really doing is not allowing them to take advantage of you. We all know takers. That's all they do is take. And it's up to us to protect ourselves, which means saying no, sometimes hell no.
But Miss Phoenix, I don't get the tie between selfish, selfless and delighting in the failure of others. Did I miss something?
He-don-ism: The act of men adoptings philosophies, or perhaps a way of life.
ooooh, that's a good one, cav. took me a minute...
Being a lazy son of a b.....(actually, come to think of it I don't like that term; it foists one's shortcomings off on one's mother, and slanders her at the same time.... retracted) jerk, I haven't read all the posts, but wish to comment anyway;
Once again I hark back to our humble beginnings as hairy apes in a precarious existence. We lived in a heirarchical system of "top down" management because that seemed to work best for the gene pool which, after all is all that matters in a jungle environment - survival.
Therefore we all had to "cowtow" to those higher on the totempole of importance than ourselves, bowing and scraping (licking and grooming) to keep from invoking "society's" censure, which we would probably not survive. So whenever the mighty screwed up and provided a little entertainment, we would throw the first, second, etc...... stones as hard as we could, without fear of reprisal; and it seems to have stuck for those who still give credance to the sanctity of "betterness".
