Good News: And No Religion, Too
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We may bring about socialism or we may not. But whatever we do or not do, we will do what we do.
The material conditions exist; the consciousness has yet to develop where most are concerned. If it happens, it could. If it doesn’t, it couldn’t.
And you people ask:
https://groups.io/g/spopen/topic/why_our_approach_fails_to/93543234
Seriously?
She read what I had written and that stirred sarcasm in her, which results from her personality and manner of thought. This MOVED (motive, from motion) her in two or three seconds at most to type the message and send it. No thought STRONGER to her than the one which motivated her action intervened.
Are you saying that one can think and act in accordance with a motive which does not impel you to so think and act?
Where do you think decisions come from? Where a thought or feeling, and hence action, comes from? Do they arise of themselves from nothing, or are they the result of matter in motion both without and within us?
Your brain is a material organ, as are your nerves, your sense organs etc. They receive and act accordingly. Thoughts and feelings are initiated by both external and internal factors. You are not a “spirit” independent of sensation. Your thoughts are materially produced. Cause and effect proceeds in a chain, one thought then producing another just as it was produced. Decisions and “choices” are likewise produced on the basis of a multitude of factors, drawn from your past experiences, your past responses, your manner of thinking, which all together make your personality. You cannot think, feel or do independent of this. You do not exist outside of natural law. Nothing is supernatural.
I am just trying to find out why you seem to be saying now, that “motives” are not determined by a previous “chain of causation”.
Of course, if you think they are, then, on your own argument, a motive to counter her post could not have intervened because it was impossible for it to. It didn’t happen, so it couldn’t have happened.
Of course motives are determind. They spring from causation, like everything else.
We want to instil in others the same motive for socialism that we have.
In us, that motive was produced by thoughts which responded to prior motives, ad infinitum.When people tell you, “There must have been a beginning to the cosmos” you will rightly say that it has neither beginning nor end. Yet, while having no problem with that, you seem unable to really accept it.
Exactly. Lizzie’s post did not motivate (move) me to anger, and there was no stronger motive than that which produced my little quip about “impatience with deep thought.”
I could not do otherwise because I didn’t. If I had done otherwise, I would not have been able to do what I did instead. We think we have the power to choose other than how we choose, but that’s an illusion. We balance, and come down on the side of the weightiest motive moving us.Interesting. With her Austro-Bavarian accent and interest in astrophysics it could even have been Lizzie herself. But it couldn’t have been as it wasn’t.
What I am interested in is not defending a will free from natural causes but in avoiding fatalism. I think that at the end she provides the answer when she says that what people think and do depends on the information they receive. It is our object to provide people with information as why capitalism cannot work in their interest and why only socialism can — even if, of course, socialist ideas have arisen out of the material conditions of capitalism and are, objectively, factual.
Otherwise, we might as well just sit back and see whether or not Socialism will or will not come.
Haven’t had so much fun since yesterday. No, I’m not going to say what that was – or I just might if sufficiently motivated to do so. Hilarious!
Psst! Better keep quiet about there being no law in your brave new world. Don’t think that would go down too well with the proletariat.
“Otherwise, we might as well just sit back and see whether or not Socialism will or will not come.”
I’ve already answered you on that misrepresentation.
If you have no interest in what way the chain of causation proceeds, then by all means just sit back and do sod all. That would be fatalism, but it’s not my position, as already stated.
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