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Sympathy and shame vs empathy and guilt


Loz

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Sympathy and shame vs empathy and guilt

(I decided to reduce a long text to bullet points)

  • question: are sympathy and (public) shame universal, but empathy and (private) guilt European or Caucasoid?
  • moral crisis in Oriental societies and much talk of a loss of empathy

  • investigation led me to legacy media article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/22/china-nation-cold-hearts about China being a nation of '1.4 billion cold hearts'; 

    and to research on Chinese/Japanese empathy and guilt, e.g. http://www.academia.edu/3620724/Chinese_Lack_of_Empathy_in_Development. 

  • psychologists proffer environmental reasons : for the Chinese, problem is one-child policy and selfish children; for the Japanese, rapid industrialisation
  • question: could 'loss of empathy' in fact be the evaporation of shame in the absence of village stigma?

  • question: does pro-social behaviour in other races depend on the all-seeing eye of close-knit communities and a tribal dictator?


The golden triangle of freedom

  • Socrates in the City lecture, 

    Os Guinness talks about the golden triangle of freedom: faith, virtue and freedom. (Stefan would no doubt replace faith with truth). Freedom comes from removing the need for external control by governing our own behaviour. Governing our own behaviour (virtue) requires faith. This is the Golden Triangle of Freedom.

  • question: do empathy and guilt govern Europeans internally and thus free us from the need for external community stigma and the iron rod of a dictator?

  • question: are the other races bemused by our behaviour: going to the ends of the earth to rescue strangers of other races, charity donations, giving blood, and protesting on behalf of hedgehogs? Recently we've seen mocking stories about 'typical white tears', which betrays a little bit of the black perspective http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/leader-of-rhodes-must-fall-campaign-was-right-to-mock-white-tears-theyre-just-another-form-of-racism-a7013456.html.  

  • question: do some members of other races look at empathy and guilt in Europeans with contempt, as a horrible weakness or a mental illness, but also as something they can exploit and should keep quiet about? Can we hear it from the horses mouth?
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Culture, not race.

honor societies suffer some due to the terrible motivations created by the system.

It takes a long time to accrue Honor, but it can be lost with one foolish mistake, so it is selfishly viable to engage in crimes to cover up the first error.

Honor societies are not limited to Asia and N Africa, but they are very common there, including China, Korea and Japan.

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On 21/02/2018 at 10:09 AM, barn said:

Hi @Loz

I think you'll find this interview highly correlated with your area of focus.

It is the talk between Jordan B Peterson & Dr. Jonathan Haidt, hopefully this link'll take you there.

Nope. What I'm asking is this: Are Europeans afflicted with the heavy burdens of empathy and guilt while the other races are privileged to swan through life bearing the comparatively trifling loads of sympathy and shame? And if so, since culture seems to be in our DNA, is this difference likely to be genetic? 

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On 02/25/2018 at 8:59 PM, Loz said:

Nope. What I'm asking is this: Are Europeans afflicted with the heavy burdens of empathy and guilt while the other races are privileged to swan through life bearing the comparatively trifling loads of sympathy and shame? And if so, since culture seems to be in our DNA, is this difference likely to be genetic? 

I hope you watched the right interview with Dr. Jonathan Haidt, my linking could have been erroneous (taking you to another one).

In any case, if it didn't prove to be correlated, useful to you, I hope you'll find your answers eventually.

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Thanks. I think it's more controversial and of even greater importance than the issue of IQ. I'm sure military intelligence have some stunning data. Another intriguing subject is the European ability to foresee seemingly unforeseeable problems. A Chinese psychologist was doing research into this in the USA, but was shut down for the usual reasons. The idea that the military didn't take up the research is impossible. 

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Hi @Loz

The one I had in mind with Jonathan Haidt discussed (amongst other things) disgust, purity... the drivers behind how open one can get to new ideas (if I understood it correctly)

7 hours ago, Loz said:

I'm sure military intelligence have some stunning data.

I'm sure too, though I question how efficiently they're able to process even a fraction of it... hahaha.

7 hours ago, Loz said:

Another intriguing subject is the European ability to foresee seemingly unforeseeable problems.

Why would you characterise it as a European trait, would you shine a light on it for me, please?

 

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On 01/03/2018 at 4:59 AM, barn said:

Hi @Loz

The one I had in mind with Jonathan Haidt discussed (amongst other things) disgust, purity... the drivers behind how open one can get to new ideas (if I understood it correctly)

I'm sure too, though I question how efficiently they're able to process even a fraction of it... hahaha.

Why would you characterise it as a European trait, would you shine a light on it for me, please?

 

Yes.

According to the data, IQ and time preferences/future vision are correlated.

Low IQ  = poor ability to put oneself in a future situation, bring that image into the here and now, feel the emotion and act now to avert disaster in the future, be it with your harvest, your exams, pension etc.

North east Asians have a high IQ and can plan long-term. However, it seems that they need predictability based on experience rather than imagination or foresight. This might explain why they are so cautious.

Given the above, of the three broad racial groups, Negroid, mongoloid, and Caucasoid, Caucasoid people are the best at foreseeing future problems. This is neither good nor bad, I would add. Caucasoid people are more confident to take action based on foresight rather than experience. However, disaster sometimes ensues. 

Perhaps I should have said Caucasoid rather than European. All is moot without comprehensive studies and open discussion. 

Also, I think 'low IQ' is an abysmal term to use when comparing races. European children have high time preference, meaning they are focused on their own well-being in the present and the immediate future, but we don't say they have low IQ. Low IQ describes and explains nothing about something which is of vast complexity and possibly beyond the grasp of the most intelligent.

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No worries. I see where you were coming from. It seems to me it's more like Caucasoid too.

I'm looking forward to the discovery of the 'Faustian' gene sequence. Not that it changes the power of arguments but perhaps it will add to the better understanding of the...

10 minutes ago, Loz said:

something which is of vast complexity and possibly beyond the grasp of the most intelligent.

Nice one!

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  • 2 weeks later...

I am unable to go through all your points today but I've been studying and reading up on this topic for a few weeks when I started running my raw DNA data (had it sequenced recently) through algorithms in order to analyse my genetics. The first algorithm I tried was through "Promethease", which upon first opening my html-file gave me the detected genes ordered of their magnitude. The label shown for number 3 was "lack of empathy?". Which took me back to when I was 13 when I first talked to a close friend about my suspicion of being some sort of sociopath(i am not but probably could have become one).

 

Now, my parents are very empathetic people. My mother, an extreme leftie, never ended up changing anything inside my mind on any such topics. I have not been altered even though I went to extremely left wing schools that literally fed us all kinds of guilt and propaganda. It never came through. 

 

So all I wanted to leave here for now is that it really is not necessarily all environment, because I grew up with the extremes and did not discover any other opinions until I got older - which changed my entire world in a very significant way. 

 

I will get back to this post, don't know when though. Awesome you posted this.

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