Jealousy & Sympathy: A Practical Philosophy Of.
11 May 2018 [link youtube]
https://www.patreon.com/a_bas_le_ciel
Youtube Automatic Transcription
this is a standalone video on jealousy
sympathy the human condition how to cope with it you do not need to have seen any of the prior videos on this channel to pick up what I'm putting down I do think that jealousy is a very important instinct I think it's a very important psychological and social factor in life on Earth as we experience it on the one-to-one level of human interactions and when you scale it up and look at how our society and culture operates collectively as a whole jealousy is a big deal and I feel I have something to offer in talking about my analysis of jealousy now to cope with it even though I myself do not experience jealousy really brief digression on that come from a large family my father had nine kids so it was possible for me to compare myself to a lot of other people who had a lot of genetic material and come with me but who were profoundly different in many other ways including this instinctual experience of jealousy as the years went by of course I also learned this lesson in getting to understand the psychology of my girlfriends who of course later became my ex-girlfriends um I got to see this play out in the workplace with coworkers how they experienced enacted of jealousy how important a psychological fact this wasn't their wives and how really alien it was to me and me having to understand why don't I think that way why don't I feel this that way when for them this was very immediate this was as immediate to them as their experience of color where they don't look at something in question is that red or is that orange they apprehend the color right away and had seen sense they were having a jealous instinctual response to things the moment they saw them one of my ex-girlfriends in particular was really striking many many people have known are like that I'm not like that so to some extent talking about this I'm giving advice that's got to be terrible because it's like someone giving you advice on weight loss who's never had the experience of gaining and losing weight I'm aware of my limits I'm aware this is an area in which it's difficult for me to articulate myself but it's interesting to me that I was misunderstood philosophically but one of the people in the comment section from my prior video I think the misunderstanding is really worth addressing in and of itself this person misinterpreted my advice as if my point was as if my point was that when you meet someone who's gorgeous someone who's very perhaps who you feel as superior to you in terms of their aesthetics their strength their body that you should shift into appraising them jealously in other categories where you might have an advantage I totally understand why this person misunderstood my advice that way so the hypothetical scenario is here you meet someone who's a model fitness model or body builder at the at the gym and then you switch into a mode of shrewish ly imagining well they must be inferior intellectually or economically in terms of their success in business or education or reading ancient Greek philosophy or something right now that is not only can I say that's not what I'm recommending at all to me it's inconceivable or it wasn't conceived before I read this that some would misunderstand what I had to say in that way because to me it's obvious that's just repeating the same error but under another heading that's playing the same game but the context for you what do you think you can win right and I'm saying no no no the whole game is bad and bankrupt and counterproductive and psychologically unhealthy I think it's not really hard to argue that that Envy is a counterproductive and pointless you know emotional response to the world what I'm propelling here is the idea that sympathy is an analytical tool that we shouldn't just sympathise with other people in order to be sympathetic sympathy isn't an end in itself but that sympathy leads to an appreciation of someone in the context of their whole life cycle what I call lifecycle analysis that it's gonna lead you to understand these traits where they may be your superior they may be more beautiful than you stronger than you fitter than you they need more intelligent you they may be better educated than you they may be more successful than you that it's gonna let you understand that in the context of their suffering their struggle and their effort I may meet someone who's very successful and has a PhD in Sanskrit I don't feel jealous but now in my case my specification this example it is literally true that I could have gotten a PhD in Sanskrit and I chose not to write now for some people make jealousy and envy worse because they feel regret like I could have been successful like this person if only I made this choice no I don't I don't respond that way at all and then for other people you know they'd never even considered the option of getting a PhD in Sanskrit meaning that makes the jealousy worse oh I could have had this totally different life if I devoted myself to this type of intellectual historical and language study alright um the point is when I see them and it's not that I switched you like oh well they've got a PhD in Sanskrit but I can benchpress more than them to me that's gif is repeating the same game that's the same kind of jealousy but you're another heading making the same mistake twice you're making it worse right when I meet this person and I've met many many people with pages in Sanskrit I can sympathize with the sacrifices they've made in learning the language in conformity to the academic system in going through this process in gaining this ability etc in the pursuit of this form of success that they now have or this form of educational requirement and I can also feel or I know that I wouldn't want to go through that same suffering I wouldn't want to make that same commitment I wouldn't want to make those same sacrifices now if you do there's a flipside here what if you meet some of that and you don't feel that way you think wow I'd love to do that I'd love to go through that process then the way to relate to them is as a mentor is as an exemplars as a positive example you want to emulate not jealousy right but for me and what I'm trying to before sleep here is you meet these people anything well this guy is putting in twice as much effort at the gym maybe he's also using steroids or testosterone booster or whatever is the key it's gonna be again this is about particular instances this is not a generalized or universal situation I'm not talking about all Sanskrit scholars or all bodybuilders are all professionals but you see okay this is this guy's life this is this is a struggle I'm seeing it in that context and I can see a lot of things there that to me are a Barbra t'v their sacrifices I don't want to make that their their efforts I don't want to make it's a type of suffering I don't want him to go but I can appreciate his accomplishments I can appreciate what he has done and who he is in this context of his struggle or her struggle right and that struggle is not going to be the same in every case is not gonna be the same for everyone who's a model it's not gonna the same forever wounds of Sanskrit talk but still this I think creates a natural limit to this jealous impulse that the jealousy instinct so look a lot of people misinterpreted this man and think that I'm motivated by jealousy when I'm not there are other youtubers who are way more successful than I am in the same category than I meant so you might ask me you want to ask me aisel do you feel jealous of unnatural vegan unnatural vegan has a YouTube channel that I think is in the same category is mine broadly speaking she's way more successful to me she has more viewers than I do she's a bigger voice bigger platform I don't feel jealous of her at all there are many reasons I think so I think someone who has the jealous personality type is stuck in the jealous cycle there in my situations way they would think thoughts like this person is more attractive than me doubtless true they might feel this person is more intelligent me and feel Jos they might feel this person is less intelligent than me and feel jealous anyway because then they feel like the fame is or the success is undeserved kind of no matter which traits they fastened on in their mind it's only going to provide more fuel for for jealousy for the joy sense thing and I believe that is because they're taking these traits they're isolating them they're abstracting them it is if you like for my perspective a type of religious mentality and what I do is the opposite I don't see these as isolated traits at all I'm integrating them into that person's whole life cycle I'm thinking about this in a way that's sympathetic and analytical I look at this other channel that's more successful than mine I can see the struggle I can see the hard work that got those results I don't want to do that hard work I I literally I don't want to make a single video sitting and doing a product review and smiling and pandering to the audience which he's done dozens of times countless times I don't want to go through the process that built up her her viewership and the way in which she reaches out to people I don't want to make the kind of phony content she makes I don't want to do any of the things she does but again as I said earlier with the sanskrit scholar conversely if i do if i see that and think wow that's just what i want my channel to be like then i would regard her as a mentor as an example are someone i could learn from as someone who a lot to teach me and I'm still not gonna feel jealousy you see that but seeing her success in the context of that cycle of suffering striving and suffering an effort I think really changes how you regard these isolated qualities you see them in that you see them in a different way and I think it's gonna change how you feel about them and and how you respond to them now somebody else wrote in saying that they think the issue here is the difference between perceiving things as inequalities versus acquired qualities that's that's an interesting theory but especially when we're talking about about human beauty of attractiveness it's not the same as learning Sanskrit or learning Chinese yeah there are innate qualities like whether or not you're born with dyslexia is gonna profoundly impact your ability to learn Sanskrit your builder in Chinese even your ability to learn English in French that there are any characteristics that matter in language acquisition there are any characteristics that matter in how successful your your YouTube channel is but there we're talking about a domain that's mostly about acquired characteristics effort and accomplishment and there's no doubt that in terms of human attractiveness it's that were predominantly talking about about characters that really are innate and unearned even if you had to work hard to maintain your attractiveness that's different from trying to achieve it when you start out ugly when you start out with a deformed face deform body with with different aesthetic disadvantages so there's an interesting point that someone else wrote into me but I think it's salience to this discussion is is is limited now out of left field for a lot of you here another thing that I feel is related to this is my own nihilist philosophy and I don't know to what extent I don't experience jealousy today because of something innate and instinctual me and to what extent it's because of my own peculiar philosophy that's shaped the way I see the world the way I feel about these things someone comment to me recently this will seem totally unrelated philosophically someone demanded to know why it is that I as a nihilist want to conserve nature intact like when I talk about conservation of a forest I want the forest to basically that remain the way it would be without human intervention to the greatest extent possible there are limits to that throw it into the footnotes not gonna cut that in this video but this person was demanding to know if it was possible for me to do something morally positive and reduce harm reduce suffering within the forest if we could have human intervention in the forest that for example prevents bears from engaging in cannibalism against other bears or another example prevents wolves from killing their fellow wolves which happens in the wild which maybe you could you could prevent by just separating the animals making sure they're distributed more evenly within the this park instead of being clustered together something if you could intervene to rob nature of its of its sting shall we say to reduce the amount of suffering why wouldn't you modify nature you want to know especially if you're a nihilist if you don't believe in nature as some kind of abstract having some kind of you know religious value and part of my answer this is my whole answer but one part of my answer would say look I have to let you know I don't believe in your concept of better when you say better I feel like you're using a religious concept that I don't believe in and I can't believe in and that is because there's such a simplification and abstraction from the complexity and richness and suffering of reality and is the same thing if you meet someone at the gym and you just feel that they are better than you who you just regard this person this path you if you meet someone in the ph.d program at the University and you just feel that they're better than you um I know jealousy I mean I'm not saying jealousy is a religious mode of thinking but I think I've so far just talked about how an anal analysis and sympathy has to reach outward I have to look at this person analytically and sympathetically and understand their whole life cycle but this is one sense in which your analysis has to reach import what is it you mean what is it you're thinking what is it you're doing when you construe and posit this idea of better because it's it's not something simple and self-evident this person has their life they're born with some advantages and disadvantages they go through these struggles they made these choices they have to live with these consequences and they're elements of risk and regret and fall there there's a lot there to relate to and you know your or you're abstracting from that this resented kernel of better and worse there's a there's a process there sorry philosophical parlance there's hypostasis ation there that I think you can you know you you can break down analytically psychological I think you can overcome that that habit that that turn of mind okay guys I think that's all about to say in this video my advice again is not to shift your focus from thinking about someone in the way in which they're superior to you like oh this person's sexier than me or fitter than me listen or me to a context of thinking of imagining imagining some other ladder of values where they're in fear you that is decidedly not my point at all my advice is directed towards overcoming this creation of ladders of value of people being better than you and you're being inferior these feelings of of an inferiority through a type of sympathetic feeling because as I say again again I think the primary value of sympathy is as an analytical tool and in the context of overcoming jealousy it's an analytical tool or pardon me it's an analytical tool that leads us to both a greater understanding of others and I think a greater understanding of ourselves
sympathy the human condition how to cope with it you do not need to have seen any of the prior videos on this channel to pick up what I'm putting down I do think that jealousy is a very important instinct I think it's a very important psychological and social factor in life on Earth as we experience it on the one-to-one level of human interactions and when you scale it up and look at how our society and culture operates collectively as a whole jealousy is a big deal and I feel I have something to offer in talking about my analysis of jealousy now to cope with it even though I myself do not experience jealousy really brief digression on that come from a large family my father had nine kids so it was possible for me to compare myself to a lot of other people who had a lot of genetic material and come with me but who were profoundly different in many other ways including this instinctual experience of jealousy as the years went by of course I also learned this lesson in getting to understand the psychology of my girlfriends who of course later became my ex-girlfriends um I got to see this play out in the workplace with coworkers how they experienced enacted of jealousy how important a psychological fact this wasn't their wives and how really alien it was to me and me having to understand why don't I think that way why don't I feel this that way when for them this was very immediate this was as immediate to them as their experience of color where they don't look at something in question is that red or is that orange they apprehend the color right away and had seen sense they were having a jealous instinctual response to things the moment they saw them one of my ex-girlfriends in particular was really striking many many people have known are like that I'm not like that so to some extent talking about this I'm giving advice that's got to be terrible because it's like someone giving you advice on weight loss who's never had the experience of gaining and losing weight I'm aware of my limits I'm aware this is an area in which it's difficult for me to articulate myself but it's interesting to me that I was misunderstood philosophically but one of the people in the comment section from my prior video I think the misunderstanding is really worth addressing in and of itself this person misinterpreted my advice as if my point was as if my point was that when you meet someone who's gorgeous someone who's very perhaps who you feel as superior to you in terms of their aesthetics their strength their body that you should shift into appraising them jealously in other categories where you might have an advantage I totally understand why this person misunderstood my advice that way so the hypothetical scenario is here you meet someone who's a model fitness model or body builder at the at the gym and then you switch into a mode of shrewish ly imagining well they must be inferior intellectually or economically in terms of their success in business or education or reading ancient Greek philosophy or something right now that is not only can I say that's not what I'm recommending at all to me it's inconceivable or it wasn't conceived before I read this that some would misunderstand what I had to say in that way because to me it's obvious that's just repeating the same error but under another heading that's playing the same game but the context for you what do you think you can win right and I'm saying no no no the whole game is bad and bankrupt and counterproductive and psychologically unhealthy I think it's not really hard to argue that that Envy is a counterproductive and pointless you know emotional response to the world what I'm propelling here is the idea that sympathy is an analytical tool that we shouldn't just sympathise with other people in order to be sympathetic sympathy isn't an end in itself but that sympathy leads to an appreciation of someone in the context of their whole life cycle what I call lifecycle analysis that it's gonna lead you to understand these traits where they may be your superior they may be more beautiful than you stronger than you fitter than you they need more intelligent you they may be better educated than you they may be more successful than you that it's gonna let you understand that in the context of their suffering their struggle and their effort I may meet someone who's very successful and has a PhD in Sanskrit I don't feel jealous but now in my case my specification this example it is literally true that I could have gotten a PhD in Sanskrit and I chose not to write now for some people make jealousy and envy worse because they feel regret like I could have been successful like this person if only I made this choice no I don't I don't respond that way at all and then for other people you know they'd never even considered the option of getting a PhD in Sanskrit meaning that makes the jealousy worse oh I could have had this totally different life if I devoted myself to this type of intellectual historical and language study alright um the point is when I see them and it's not that I switched you like oh well they've got a PhD in Sanskrit but I can benchpress more than them to me that's gif is repeating the same game that's the same kind of jealousy but you're another heading making the same mistake twice you're making it worse right when I meet this person and I've met many many people with pages in Sanskrit I can sympathize with the sacrifices they've made in learning the language in conformity to the academic system in going through this process in gaining this ability etc in the pursuit of this form of success that they now have or this form of educational requirement and I can also feel or I know that I wouldn't want to go through that same suffering I wouldn't want to make that same commitment I wouldn't want to make those same sacrifices now if you do there's a flipside here what if you meet some of that and you don't feel that way you think wow I'd love to do that I'd love to go through that process then the way to relate to them is as a mentor is as an exemplars as a positive example you want to emulate not jealousy right but for me and what I'm trying to before sleep here is you meet these people anything well this guy is putting in twice as much effort at the gym maybe he's also using steroids or testosterone booster or whatever is the key it's gonna be again this is about particular instances this is not a generalized or universal situation I'm not talking about all Sanskrit scholars or all bodybuilders are all professionals but you see okay this is this guy's life this is this is a struggle I'm seeing it in that context and I can see a lot of things there that to me are a Barbra t'v their sacrifices I don't want to make that their their efforts I don't want to make it's a type of suffering I don't want him to go but I can appreciate his accomplishments I can appreciate what he has done and who he is in this context of his struggle or her struggle right and that struggle is not going to be the same in every case is not gonna be the same for everyone who's a model it's not gonna the same forever wounds of Sanskrit talk but still this I think creates a natural limit to this jealous impulse that the jealousy instinct so look a lot of people misinterpreted this man and think that I'm motivated by jealousy when I'm not there are other youtubers who are way more successful than I am in the same category than I meant so you might ask me you want to ask me aisel do you feel jealous of unnatural vegan unnatural vegan has a YouTube channel that I think is in the same category is mine broadly speaking she's way more successful to me she has more viewers than I do she's a bigger voice bigger platform I don't feel jealous of her at all there are many reasons I think so I think someone who has the jealous personality type is stuck in the jealous cycle there in my situations way they would think thoughts like this person is more attractive than me doubtless true they might feel this person is more intelligent me and feel Jos they might feel this person is less intelligent than me and feel jealous anyway because then they feel like the fame is or the success is undeserved kind of no matter which traits they fastened on in their mind it's only going to provide more fuel for for jealousy for the joy sense thing and I believe that is because they're taking these traits they're isolating them they're abstracting them it is if you like for my perspective a type of religious mentality and what I do is the opposite I don't see these as isolated traits at all I'm integrating them into that person's whole life cycle I'm thinking about this in a way that's sympathetic and analytical I look at this other channel that's more successful than mine I can see the struggle I can see the hard work that got those results I don't want to do that hard work I I literally I don't want to make a single video sitting and doing a product review and smiling and pandering to the audience which he's done dozens of times countless times I don't want to go through the process that built up her her viewership and the way in which she reaches out to people I don't want to make the kind of phony content she makes I don't want to do any of the things she does but again as I said earlier with the sanskrit scholar conversely if i do if i see that and think wow that's just what i want my channel to be like then i would regard her as a mentor as an example are someone i could learn from as someone who a lot to teach me and I'm still not gonna feel jealousy you see that but seeing her success in the context of that cycle of suffering striving and suffering an effort I think really changes how you regard these isolated qualities you see them in that you see them in a different way and I think it's gonna change how you feel about them and and how you respond to them now somebody else wrote in saying that they think the issue here is the difference between perceiving things as inequalities versus acquired qualities that's that's an interesting theory but especially when we're talking about about human beauty of attractiveness it's not the same as learning Sanskrit or learning Chinese yeah there are innate qualities like whether or not you're born with dyslexia is gonna profoundly impact your ability to learn Sanskrit your builder in Chinese even your ability to learn English in French that there are any characteristics that matter in language acquisition there are any characteristics that matter in how successful your your YouTube channel is but there we're talking about a domain that's mostly about acquired characteristics effort and accomplishment and there's no doubt that in terms of human attractiveness it's that were predominantly talking about about characters that really are innate and unearned even if you had to work hard to maintain your attractiveness that's different from trying to achieve it when you start out ugly when you start out with a deformed face deform body with with different aesthetic disadvantages so there's an interesting point that someone else wrote into me but I think it's salience to this discussion is is is limited now out of left field for a lot of you here another thing that I feel is related to this is my own nihilist philosophy and I don't know to what extent I don't experience jealousy today because of something innate and instinctual me and to what extent it's because of my own peculiar philosophy that's shaped the way I see the world the way I feel about these things someone comment to me recently this will seem totally unrelated philosophically someone demanded to know why it is that I as a nihilist want to conserve nature intact like when I talk about conservation of a forest I want the forest to basically that remain the way it would be without human intervention to the greatest extent possible there are limits to that throw it into the footnotes not gonna cut that in this video but this person was demanding to know if it was possible for me to do something morally positive and reduce harm reduce suffering within the forest if we could have human intervention in the forest that for example prevents bears from engaging in cannibalism against other bears or another example prevents wolves from killing their fellow wolves which happens in the wild which maybe you could you could prevent by just separating the animals making sure they're distributed more evenly within the this park instead of being clustered together something if you could intervene to rob nature of its of its sting shall we say to reduce the amount of suffering why wouldn't you modify nature you want to know especially if you're a nihilist if you don't believe in nature as some kind of abstract having some kind of you know religious value and part of my answer this is my whole answer but one part of my answer would say look I have to let you know I don't believe in your concept of better when you say better I feel like you're using a religious concept that I don't believe in and I can't believe in and that is because there's such a simplification and abstraction from the complexity and richness and suffering of reality and is the same thing if you meet someone at the gym and you just feel that they are better than you who you just regard this person this path you if you meet someone in the ph.d program at the University and you just feel that they're better than you um I know jealousy I mean I'm not saying jealousy is a religious mode of thinking but I think I've so far just talked about how an anal analysis and sympathy has to reach outward I have to look at this person analytically and sympathetically and understand their whole life cycle but this is one sense in which your analysis has to reach import what is it you mean what is it you're thinking what is it you're doing when you construe and posit this idea of better because it's it's not something simple and self-evident this person has their life they're born with some advantages and disadvantages they go through these struggles they made these choices they have to live with these consequences and they're elements of risk and regret and fall there there's a lot there to relate to and you know your or you're abstracting from that this resented kernel of better and worse there's a there's a process there sorry philosophical parlance there's hypostasis ation there that I think you can you know you you can break down analytically psychological I think you can overcome that that habit that that turn of mind okay guys I think that's all about to say in this video my advice again is not to shift your focus from thinking about someone in the way in which they're superior to you like oh this person's sexier than me or fitter than me listen or me to a context of thinking of imagining imagining some other ladder of values where they're in fear you that is decidedly not my point at all my advice is directed towards overcoming this creation of ladders of value of people being better than you and you're being inferior these feelings of of an inferiority through a type of sympathetic feeling because as I say again again I think the primary value of sympathy is as an analytical tool and in the context of overcoming jealousy it's an analytical tool or pardon me it's an analytical tool that leads us to both a greater understanding of others and I think a greater understanding of ourselves