Happiness, Responsibility, and Criticism: An Envisioner Rant

I don't know that the second implies the first, nor that there's anything wrong with the second.  The first is rude, yes, but a person should not necessarily infer that someone claiming to be an expert on some subject is also claiming to be a superior person in general, just a superior authority on some topic.  Nor should they even imply that someone else's claim "I am superior" is meant to immediately imply "I consider you inferior".  People with superiority complexes often do not pay enough attention to other people to form a strongly negative opinion of them.

You have every right to your opinion, but there is an amount of common politeness and manners fall upon one to use when dealing with peoples work that they poured blood, sweat, and tears into. Telling them they did a labor of love wrong is not only rude, but downright brutal.

Speaking as someone who engages in a great many labors of love, I want to hear what other people think of them, and if that opinion is "it sucks and you wasted your time", I just ignore that opinion and go looking for others.  If that's the only thing I hear, I just shrug that my creation is something that the world is not ready for, and I keep it to myself as my own private treasure.  I think if you really love something, you don't care whether anyone else approves of that love; you ignore the naysayers and continue loving it.  Obviously, not everyone feels that same way, but it is my entirely subjective belief that this is the most sensible outlook to have, and they should attempt to adopt it, if their own feelings on the subject are still malleable enough to be changed through an act of will.  (I well understand that feelings often are not.)

I never have said that George Lucas /should/ have done it a certain way. I was not on set. I never have made a movie. I have never acted in a movie. I have never written one. I have never been to hollywood or dealt with the people that make movies. I have never been involved in movie making.  I can express an opinion of dislike all I want, but i have no right to tell him how he /should/ have done it.

Well, if that's the way you feel, so be it.  But I think an attitude like this encourages cabals of "insiders" to run roughshod over the public from whom they conceal the details of their work, knowing that if anyone looks behind Oz's curtain, they'll find only a charlatan with a projection device.  I believe that everyone has not only the right, but the fairly-low-level responsibility (if they don't have anything better to do, which they probably will, but I certainly don't because nobody will give me a job or anything to keep me busy), to learn as much as they can about any subject they can stand to learn about, and then to make judgments on the basis of that information, and to get involved.  Obviously it's better to get more complete information, but that doesn't mean you should reserve ALL judgment until you know EVERYTHING, because that's impossible and you'll never actually be DOING anything.  Instead, do the best you can to learn the topic, then offer your input, and it either will or won't influence the outcome.  Either way, you did your part, you tried to change your little slice of the world to be more to your preference, and I think that's a fundamental right that everyone who is alive in the world is inalienably entitled to.

Well, that certainly explains the rest of your attitude, but I could not POSSIBLY disagree more, not just on my own behalf, but that of all society.  In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter in the slightest how hard someone works; only the quality of their results is relevant to anyone except themselves.  For an extreme example, you may remember the I-35W bridge collapse a few years ago, which my stepfather would have been involved in, had he been an hour later crossing that bridge than he was.  That disaster happened because some engineer somewhere said "This is good enough" when that was not a true statement.  That person's feelings were irrelevant, and nobody should have permitted them to indulge in such satisfaction.  They had a responsibility to do the job right, regardless of their personal feelings, and nobody enforced that responsibility upon them, and a lot of people were plunged into a river and had to swim away from their sinking cars.  Screw that engineer's feelings; I don't care how hard he worked getting that bridge "pretty close" to being "adequately" safe.

So...

Yeah. I just spent 15 mins typing a reply only to realize, as usual in this situation, that all I would be doing is arguing with a brick wall who see's the world through a lense that is extremely thick and personal. There would be no point. I would feel entirely like Bill Nye. 

Sorry for opening my mouth everyone. I'll do a better job of turning on my ignore filters in the future.

I might never agree with your perspective was, Lynkfox, but I would have been perfectly willing to read and consider it, and might well have found it interesting.  But it's your decision.  Life's too short and all that.  (Though personally, I wouldn't mind if mine got a good bit shorter.)

Can the off-topic entitlement discussion move to it's own thread? Or stop entirely?

The title of this split-off topic isn't specific enough.  How am I supposed to know which Envisioner rant it refers to?

The pursuit of happiness is an interesting notion, because human beings and happiness have a very interesting relationship.

As we pursue happiness, and alter the world around us to achieve that happiness, we often find that because we are not omniscient we do not see all the unintended consequences of our actions, that often counteract someone else's effort to be happy, and we find ourselves struggling with others as we try to find our own happy.  Because we don't all want the same things, we can't all be happy.

This ends in two directions, cooperatives that unite to strengthen their ability to inflict their compromised happy on the world, or a strongman that gahters followers under the promise that they are better off joining his happy than being on the wrong side of it.

That's how we get government.  That's how we get Grass-roots movements.  That's how we get crowdsourcing and GTG.  That's how we get neighborhood organizations that tell you that you can't plant a tree in your front yard and jointly agreed upon and protected freedoms like our Bill of Rights.  Heck that's how we get organized crime and drug kingpins.

Even religion is simply faith that something greater than man exists, and that thing knows the real way to be happy, and then doing your best to make the world more that way.

So yeah, get informed and go shape the world a little more your way, just know you aren't doing anything new, and your opposition isn't trying to stop your happy, they are pursuing theirs.

Thank you.  Now I can see why, specifically, I want to avoid this topic. ;)

Fixed.

I would not agree with that last sentence; I think we can all get something that adequately satisfies our desires, even if it's not exactly what we think we want.  For instance, a Nazi skinhead and a Black Panther might each want the other to not exist, but they'd probably be tolerably content if they lived on separate islands (or planets) and were never forced to interact, each having an adequate social support network consisting solely of "their people", able to conduct any unavoidable business between them through a series of third parties that were mutually amicable (the white-supremacists would talk to a society that was also all-white, but was willing to talk to another society which contained a few black people in a strongly white-dominated culture, and that one would talk to a more egalitarian culture which would talk to a largely black-dominated one which would talk to an all-black but not racist one which would talk to the Panthers).  There are certainly potential complications, such as the children of such xenophobe societies wanting to move out into more cosmopolitan societies against their parents' wishes.  But ultimately, a sufficiently enlightened meta-government could moderate the whole process to give everyone a fair percentage of what they want, and educate/indoctrinate the populace to accept a decent compromise rather than to demand more than they can reasonably have.

This ends in two directions, cooperatives that unite to strengthen their ability to inflict their compromised happy on the world, or a strongman that gahters followers under the promise that they are better off joining his happy than being on the wrong side of it.That's how we get government.  That's how we get Grass-roots movements.  That's how we get crowdsourcing and GTG.  That's how we get neighborhood organizations that tell you that you can't plant a tree in your front yard and jointly agreed upon and protected freedoms like our Bill of Rights.  Heck that's how we get organized crime and drug kingpins.Even religion is simply faith that something greater than man exists, and that thing knows the real way to be happy, and then doing your best to make the world more that way.

That may be how those things begin, but almost invariably they quickly mutate into cancerous, incompetent, mutually hostile organizations existing only to further their own welfare.  (>G hasn't reached that stage yet, and probably won't as long as it's still just Christopher and Adam and Paul and a couple of their friends - but the more people they have to hire to alleviate their increasing workflow, the more of those people will just be ambitious industry types who will slowly strip the company's humanity and turn it into just another self-sustaining vehicle for profit.  In an industry as niche as gaming, this might take an extremely long time, but then again, look at World of Warcraft - gaming is big business these days, and that means that the ruthless Goldman Sachs types are going to end up controlling it sooner or later.)

So yeah, get informed and go shape the world a little more your way, just know you aren't doing anything new, and your opposition isn't trying to stop your happy, they are pursuing theirs.

Oh, they are very frequently trying to do both.  The Westboro Baptist Church comes to mind; they very much want to ensure people they disapprove of aren't happy.  The only way such organizations can fit into a mutually beneficial world is if they're deprogrammed and induced to moderate their beliefs.  As long as they're able to cling to an extremist perspective, they will always view most of the rest of the world as enemies attacking them, and will refuse all cooperation with those hated forces.

Yeah, some people aren't happy unless they are preventing others from doing something, or getting in people's faces and telling them they are wrong.

Self-Righteousness can be a great drug.  It even lets a person derive a perceived benefit from opposition, as persecution only proves their rightness.

In my religion society and politics class in college we read a trilogy of Books by Walter Wink, and his ideas were very similar to yours, that as mankind began interacting in groups they became more than just the sum of their parts, and with no intent required would become evil.  His ideas on how we could "Redeem" such institutions were interesting and questionable as to whether they could be achieved, but his exploration of the nature of evil in such circumstances was really interesting.

I can't disagree that as groups of people get bigger they begin, without need for (but not necessarily lacking) evil intent on the part of any significant number of people.  In fact I see it happen in things like city councils and church boards.

A lot of times it comes from the pursuit of their particular happiness, which when it faces a happiness running contrary to it, begins to act in protection of their pursuit, against what they perceive to be an outside force opposing their happiness.

They then take measures to protect their pursuit of happiness, which end up coming across as attacks against the happiness of the other group, who then to protect their own version of happy reciprocate.

People don't have to give up their own pursuit of happiness to try and destroy others.  Evil isn't usually in the intent, but the unconsidered consequences.