Orchids and Dandelions

[anthony]

[Image: https://i.ibb.co/zR6mVnY/image.png]

It's about time we created a space to discuss this graph and its potential implications. Any adjacent phenomena also welcome. Please speculate away.

[Grimm]

Changing "respiratory illness" to "disgust response" this makes a decent map to how strongly and quickly RW autists respond to swarthy danger in "social environments".
Maybe the fact that orchid starts off lower than dandelion shows that also autists were born more innocent and pure than normies ever were.

In nature orchids are more sensitive and dandelions more adaptive, I definitely see parallels to sensitive young men being wronged by their upbringing: longhouse public school, loud negro music in public, odd smells; all societal equivalent of concrete for dandelions to grow in the cracks of.

Feels bad to use something precious like flowers for this analogy, I like dandelions. I'm a sensitive man.

[anthony]

Changing "respiratory illness" to "disgust response" this makes a decent map to how strongly and quickly RW autists respond to swarthy danger in "social environments".
Maybe the fact that orchid starts off lower than dandelion shows that also autists were born more innocent and pure than normies ever were.

In nature orchids are more sensitive and dandelions more adaptive, I definitely see parallels to sensitive young men being wronged by their upbringing: longhouse public school, loud negro music in public, odd smells; all societal equivalent of concrete for dandelions to grow in the cracks of.

Feels bad to use something precious like flowers for this analogy, I like dandelions. I'm a sensitive man.

This thread was created in an attempt to get a certain poster to stop putting textwalls in the shoutbox. I forgot it was here and didn't give it a serious OP, but I guess we can still get some use out of it.

I believe that the trend tracks with a lot of things. And what you say about disgust and danger sense brings to mind a thought I had recently. That sensitivity and tolerance track together. The sensitive obviously have a greater capacity to feel negative stimuli, and will likely find a wider spectrum of things and sensations unpleasant, but also have a greater capacity to tolerate what is disliked and uncomfortable, because sensitivity also grants a greater ability to imagine the minds of others and a more complex idea of what is needed to make social systems work, and so they step up to do what's needed to create and maintain peace.

If you don't like flowers, I've also seen it put in terms of cats and dogs. I think that also works quite well to get the more general points across. What the flower point is really good for is to hammer home the idea normalfreaks always miss, that quality does not thrive in adversity. Normalfreaks love nothing more than parading success stories of 102IQ grindmaxxers in the faces of broken prodigies. "If you're so great why couldn't you make it?"

[parsifal]

sorry, i completely forgot about it, hehe

[Guest]

I believe that the trend tracks with a lot of things. And what you say about disgust and danger sense brings to mind a thought I had recently. That sensitivity and tolerance track together. The sensitive obviously have a greater capacity to feel negative stimuli, and will likely find a wider spectrum of things and sensations unpleasant, but also have a greater capacity to tolerate what is disliked and uncomfortable, because sensitivity also grants a greater ability to imagine the minds of others and a more complex idea of what is needed to make social systems work, and so they step up to do what's needed to create and maintain peace.

I remember reading Utilitarianism and John Mill Stuart describing how higher forms of life have both a higher capacity for pain and pleasure. He then goes on to affirm that the masses have claim to the greater happiness principle over the “sentsitive” higher men. He himself was a highly educated man and had a belief that the rich could easily suppress the poor yet him still holding to his utilitarian ideals over his own self interest is a real example of this(of what your talking about)

“People feel obliged to argue that the State does more for the rich than for the poor, as a justi- fication for its taking more from them: though this is in reality not true, for the rich would be far better able to protect themselves, in the ab- sence of law or government, than the poor, and indeed would probably be successful in converting the poor into their slaves.”

“A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering, and certainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior type; but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence. We may give what explanation we please of this unwillingness; we may attribute it to pride, a name which is given indiscriminately to some of the most and to some of the least estimable feelings of which mankind are capable: we may refer it to the love of liberty and personal independence, an appeal to which was with the Stoics one of the most effective means for the inculcation of it; to the love of power, or to the love of excitement, both of which do really enter into and contribute to it: but its most appropriate appellation is a sense of dignity, which all human beings possess in one form or other, and in some, though by no means in exact, proportion to their higher faculties, and which is so essential a part of the happiness of those in whom it is strong, that nothing which conflicts with it could be, otherwise than momentarily, an object of desire to them.”

“It may be objected, that many who are capable of the higher plea- sures, occasionally, under the influence of temptation, postpone them to the lower. But this is quite compatible with a full appreciation of the intrinsic superiority of the higher. Men often, from infirmity of charac- ter, make their election for the nearer good, though they know it to be the less valuable; and this no less when the choice is between two bodily pleasures, than when it is between bodily and mental. They pursue sen- sual indulgences to the injury of health, though perfectly aware that health is the greater good.”

(If you like the quotes I have more from utilitarianism)

[parsifal]

now if i recall my objection to the graph was that if taken alone it implies that anyone who succeeds *in spite of* the dreadful stress placed on sensitive people must have actually been a dandelion all along. the inverse of "if you're so great why aren't you a multimillionaire like andrew tate?" becomes "if you're so sensitive why haven't you completely degraded into a tranny?"

nobody here is silly enough to believe the entire issue boils down to the slope on a line, but given that "sensitive young man" as a phrase has seen an explosion in popularity (just today i saw this atrocity) it is good to mention that sensitivity as well as robustness are both important qualities which do not have a simple inverse relationship and in fact are required in equal measure to make a good amarnite. 

aside: there is a nietzsche(?) quote on the characteristics of nobility, in which i recall him saying how not all that is noble is tough as leather as the romans were. i would very much like to repost it here but i have not been able to find it again.

[anthony]

I remember reading Utilitarianism and John Mill Stuart describing how higher forms of life have both a higher capacity for pain and pleasure. He then goes on to affirm that the masses have claim to the greater happiness principle over the “sentsitive” higher men. He himself was a highly educated man and had a belief that the rich could easily suppress the poor yet him still holding to his utilitarian ideals over his own self interest is a real example of this(of what your talking about)

(If you like the quotes I have more from utilitarianism)

I think Mill might have been one of the most miserable looking men who ever lived.

[Image: https://i.ibb.co/PxcVDVG/image.png]

"Let me tell you about happiness."

If there's more you'd like to share I'd be happy to see it. Very relevant to the thread.

now if i recall my objection to the graph was that if taken alone it implies that anyone who succeeds *in spite of* the dreadful stress placed on sensitive people must have actually been a dandelion all along. the inverse of "if you're so great why aren't you a multimillionaire like andrew tate?" becomes "if you're so sensitive why haven't you completely degraded into a tranny?"

Life is endlessly dynamic. We cannot quantify stress, any more than we can success. As I'm sure I said to you before, this hypothetical objection you raise could not emerge intelligently under any organic circumstance. If you believe you have an actual case to raise where you believe this line of thinking creates or runs into a real problem I would happily go into it, but raised in the abstract this line of thinking is meaningless.

nobody here is silly enough to believe the entire issue boils down to the slope on a line, but given that "sensitive young man" as a phrase has seen an explosion in popularity (just today i saw this atrocity) it is good to mention that sensitivity as well as robustness are both important qualities which do not have a simple inverse relationship and in fact are required in equal measure to make a good amarnite. 

aside: there is a nietzsche(?) quote on the characteristics of nobility, in which i recall him saying how not all that is noble is tough as leather as the romans were. i would very much like to repost it here but i have not been able to find it again.

I don't believe that this follows naturally at all, that we ought to be looking for the natural sensitive toughs. I don't believe that this exists as a type as opposed to the sensitive. Again, see the picture at the top of the thread. And perhaps the book. The sensitive tough are benefiting from the circumstances of their formation. And these circumstances may even look superficially negative or stressful. People are dynamic. The line of thinking places the blame back upon the suffering. "Your fault for not being made of harder stuff". I don't believe the relationship is inverse, I believe it varies and the outcomes will tend to resemble the distribution in Boyce's findings.

And I don't have that particular Nietzsche quote at hand.

[Guest]

If there's more you'd like to share I'd be happy to see it. Very relevant to the thread.

 Quotes from Utilitarianism I thought relevant.

“But great numbers of mankind have been satisfied with much less. The main constituents of a satisfied life appear to be two, either of which by itself is often found sufficient for the purpose: tranquillity, and excitement. With much tranquillity, many find that they can be content with very little pleasure: with much excitement, many can reconcile themselves to a considerable quantity of pain”

“It may be further objected, that many who begin with youthful enthusiasm for everything noble, as they advance in years sink into indolence and selfishness. But I do not believe that those who undergo this very common change, voluntarily choose the lower description of pleasures in preference to the higher. I believe that before they devote themselves exclusively to the one, they have already become incapable of the other. Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favourable to keeping that higher capacity in exercise. Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access, or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying. It may be questioned whether any one who has remained equally susceptible to both classes of pleasures, ever knowingly and calmly preferred the lower; though many, in all ages, have broken down in an ineffectual attempt to combine both

[anthony]

 Quotes from Utilitarianism I thought relevant.

“It may be further objected, that many who begin with youthful enthusiasm for everything noble, as they advance in years sink into indolence and selfishness. But I do not believe that those who undergo this very common change, voluntarily choose the lower description of pleasures in preference to the higher. I believe that before they devote themselves exclusively to the one, they have already become incapable of the other. Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favourable to keeping that higher capacity in exercise. Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access, or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying. It may be questioned whether any one who has remained equally susceptible to both classes of pleasures, ever knowingly and calmly preferred the lower; though many, in all ages, have broken down in an ineffectual attempt to combine both

This one in particular grabs my attention. Completely dead on and observable all around us. I believe one of the strongest factors in the decline of culture which nobody wants to talk about is the brutalisation of finer natures. When every intelligent man has to work like a dog until his soul is dead who's going to appreciate the nice things? If we want fine natures we need to work to keep them. And the 20th century proved that most people do not want fine natures, and in fact hate them and want them dead. Such natures need their own teeth if they're to survive and have their own place.

This is all very lucid stuff. What a shame Mill himself never grew any teeth.

[Guest]

This is all very lucid stuff. What a shame Mill himself never grew any teeth.

 
It really perplexed me while reading utilitarianism on him coming to these points and yet not affirming the higher man’s rights over the lower. 

While I was looking through the quotes I saved from Utilitarianism it made me reminiscent of todays Conservative intellectualism. That Utilitarianism was a reactionary intellectual movement trying to to affirm itself with the social changes at the time without applying themselves to the dominant theory. 

A new clever perspective to try and keep dissident thinkers on the plantation.  “Dissatisfied with the current theory? How about our new cool theories and ideas that’s still affirm the same social changes but for different reasons.”

“This mode of conceiving ourselves and human life, as civilisation goes on, is felt to be more and more natural. Every step in political improvement renders it more so, by removing the sources of opposition of interest, and levelling those inequalities of legal privilege between individuals or classes, owing to which there are large portions of man- kind whose happiness it is still practicable to disregard. In an improving state of the human mind, the influences are constantly on the increase, which tend to generate in each individual a feeling of unity with all the rest; which, if perfect, would make him never think of, or desire, any beneficial condition for himself, in the benefits of which they are not included. If we now suppose this feeling of unity to be taught as a religion, and the whole force of education, of institutions, and of opinion, directed, as it once was in the case of religion, to make every person grow up from infancy surrounded on all sides both by the profession and the practice of it, I think that no one, who can realise this conception, will feel any misgiving about the sufficiency of the ultimate sanction for the Happiness morality. To any ethical student who finds the realisation difficult, I recommend, as a means of facilitating it, the sec- ond of M. Comte’s two principle works, the Traite de Politique Positive. I entertain the strongest objections to the system of politics and morals set forth in that treatise; but I think it has superabundantly shown the possibility of giving to the service of humanity, even without the aid of belief in a Providence, both the psychological power and the social efficacy of a religion; making it take hold of human life, and colour all thought, feeling, and action, in a manner of which the greatest ascen- dancy ever exercised by any religion may be but a type and foretaste; and of which the danger is, not that it should be insufficient but that it should be so excessive as to interfere unduly with human freedom and individuality.”

[anthony]

From this crisis came Mill’s opinion that there are higher and lower pleasures, which Bentham had denied. Over the course of the next year or two, he would nurse himself back to some kind of spiritual health with music, Romantic poetry (especially Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Goethe), and the works of Thomas Carlyle. His choices seem to reflect, not just a desire to make up for the deficiencies of his childhood, but a personal longing for the infinite, for Nature, and for greatness. But the damage had already been done. He found some degree of happiness, but never freedom. He modified Bentham’s theories, but never abandoned them. He remained a slave to his father’s system: his life's work was to refine James's teaching, spread it, and apply it to social questions -- he can’t praise his beloved Romantics unreservedly; he has to criticize them for their “bad philosophy” — even as he writes his autobiography, he judges his younger self for the “egotistical” nature of his crisis. “The greatest pleasure for the greatest number” remained his guiding principle, and he never again seriously questioned it. Nor did he make the attempt to find or fashion a philosophy more in keeping with his own nature. Broken by his father, JS Mill devoted his formidable intelligence, not to any desire or mission of his own, but to the liberation of women and slaves. 

Mill’s writing points out one source of danger to the sensitive young man: being denied recourse for his nobler feelings and forced into an addiction to cheap pleasure. But his life illustrates how that can happen: by being shackled to a rigid moral system and choked by an impersonal education; by having one’s soul cut to fit someone else’s measurements; finally, by being placed in service to one’s lessers, which Nietzsche correctly identified as a catastrophe that can ruin a noble spirit. Mill escaped the worst consequences of his upbringing, which is more than many can do. He never committed suicide (though his brother did) and never fell into dissipation. He lived to become an effective and enthusiastic apostle of the Longhouse; that is, to have a hand in creating the systems which today strive to kill all capacity for the higher aspirations he wanted so badly to nurture.

Thank you for your excellent contribution, and welcome to the forum.

Mill is a character I sympathise with very strongly, and relate to in many ways. His story is an incredible example of the pliability of fine human nature. The depth to which his early education sank in would be unbelievable to many educators today. He was probably An adjacent tragedy, how much we could be doing with our high quality humanity if we had any serious aspirations as a society other than denying them. He was probably the intellectual superior of the average 21st century university graduate by the age of eight.

Mill was a notably precocious child. He describes his education in his autobiography. At the age of three he was taught Greek.[17] By the age of eight, he had read Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's Anabasis,[17] and the whole of Herodotus,[17] and was acquainted with Lucian, Diogenes Laërtius, Isocrates and six dialogues of Plato.[17] He had also read a great deal of history in English and had been taught arithmetic, physics and astronomy.

At the age of eight, Mill began studying Latin, the works of Euclid, and algebra, and was appointed schoolmaster to the younger children of the family. His main reading was still history, but he went through all the commonly taught Latin and Greek authors and by the age of ten could read Plato and Demosthenes with ease. His father also thought that it was important for Mill to study and compose poetry. One of his earliest poetic compositions was a continuation of the Iliad. In his spare time he also enjoyed reading about natural sciences and popular novels, such as Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe.

Of course as noted above, the discipline and suppression of his own will required to take in this much this quickly was a horrific strain upon his humanity. And that's the other side of sensitivity. The depth to which impressions can be made, for better and worse, and tolerance of impression and pressure. Sensitivity and insensitivity are both two-edged. Most things will bounce off of the insensitive and they'll more or less be what they'll be. While for better and worse the nature of the sensitive is pliable and open. Capacity to receive and feel spiritual pain rises alongside tolerance.

From the book used in the OP.

In one of our first studies exploring the music amid the noise in adversity’s
effects on health and behavior, a shy little girl—let’s call her Molly—became a
harbinger of discoveries yet to come. Molly, who had just completed our stress
reactivity protocol, which tested her neurobiological responses to a set of
standard laboratory challenges, was now faced with a well-engineered dilemma.
She had been brought into a room with two tables placed on either side of the
child-sized chair on which she now sat, facing a kindly young female research
assistant. The young woman explained to Molly that they would be doing some
talking and playing, with the toys that sat atop the table to her left—a motley,
unenticing array of old, faded, broken toys that looked like relics of a Salvation
Army Christmas long past. On the other table, to the research assistant’s right,
lay a spectacular assembly of brand-new, shiny toys, like a window display at
FAO Schwarz compared to its dismal counterpart. The research assistant said
she had forgotten something in another room that she needed to retrieve and
would step out for just a few minutes; in the meantime, she said, Molly could
play with the toys on the former (dismal) table, though the ones on the latter
table were someone else’s (shiny) toys and could not be touched until the
research assistant had gotten permission.

She then exited the room, and Molly was left to contend with this agonizing
moral quandary: Which toys to play with? All the while, her behavior was being
covertly videotaped from the other side of a one-way mirror. In the immediately
prior stress reactivity procedures, she had proven herself to be a highly reactive
child, showing a remarkable level of stress system activation to virtually all
challenges—answering an interviewer’s questions, tasting lemon juice, watching
a sad movie, and memorizing several series of numbers. As we watched
undetected through the one-way mirror, Molly mustered every conceivable
strategy within her five-year-old repertoire to inhibit her overpowering urge to
play with the new, shiny but forbidden toys. Her small round face became a
lucid window onto the torment of her perplexity about what to do. She attempted
to distract herself momentarily with the deteriorating relics on the authorized
table of toys, but quickly abandoned the tactic as hopeless. She tried averting her
gaze from the enticing new toys, holding her hand up to the side of her face so
that the toys were screened from view. She sat on her hands and wiggled; she got
up and circled the perimeter of the room; she bit her fingernails and twirled her
hair; she made faces at herself in the mirror. Finally, in a fit of desperation, she
began a long, animated monologue, admonishing herself to obey the research
assistant’s instructions, to ignore temptation’s charms, to act as the adults would
want her to act. For ten excruciating minutes she warded off desire, until the
research assistant returned and told her she could now play with any of the toys,
which she did with delectation and delight.

In contrast to this extraordinary restraint, the “delay of gratification” revealed
by most other children, placed in the same behavioral dilemma, could have been
measured in seconds: almost the moment the door closed upon the research
assistant’s departure, most other children were all over those new toys, engaged
in an ecstatic festival of unapologetic, unfettered play. It was nearly always the
highly reactive, biologically activated children who showed a seemingly
limitless capacity for resisting temptation, delaying gratification, and self-
regulating their impulses to transgress a boundary clearly set by the adult
authority figure. Why was this, and what could it add to our research?

Once you recognise this playing out in enough places you can see how it's in the nature of human social systems to enslave their finest parts and eventually destroy them through exhaustion. The best are the most feeling, which means they are the most perceptive, pliable, and tolerant. It's only possible to turn an exceptional person into John Stuart Mill.

I want to elaborate more later using more sources. Something I've been meaning to do for a long time.

[turnip]

I want to elaborate more later using more sources. Something I've been meaning to do for a long time.

I hope that you follow up on this. This is fascinating to me, especially in light of the focus on sensitivity recently in the sphere, I would like to explore the topic more and feel it has great explanatory potential. I might read the book you've recommended.