Idk how many of you read the article, but one very deep thing really resonated with me and part of how I stay happy: we are all going to die eventually.
The world is obviously a very cruel place. People are suffering and being tortured and there's nothing we can do about it. At any moment, any one of us could have a life-changing event which forces us to live in pain and misery until we die.
But if death is peaceful - maybe happy (like we go to heaven), but really as long as it isn't a negative - it makes a lot of the cruelty much less. All the suffering people will die eventually. All the bad people in power will die eventually. If life ever becomes too bad for you, you will just die, and at least if you're a good person it's unlikely you'll go to anything considered hell.
I've never been suicidal: I honestly enjoy life, and even when I don't, I want to try everything else before I die. But it helps my anxiety knowing that if anything really really bad were to happen to me, the worst that can happen is that I die. And as long as that's ok - assuming death is ok (which I admit is a big assumption), than there's less to be scared of. Of course I want to try everything else before
The thing is that even he died eventually, though. Death is scary because we don't know what happens in the afterlife, but if it isn't suffering, that means all suffering is temporary.
Quetzalcoatl preferred nonhuman sacrifice. Other gods of the Aztec pantheon, such as Tezcatlipoca, Tlaloc, and Huitzilpohctli, however, did have a lot of human sacrifices offered
I quite liked that blog post as well. Unfortunately, I discovered recently that it is, if not wrong, then at least misleading. For one thing, it misrepresents Clendinnen: when she states that the incoming tlatoani is called ‘our lord, our executioner and our enemy’, it is as part of a reminder that such a powerful leader must act benevolently towards his people. Indeed, the whole thing was meant to be a speech delivered to the incoming tlatoani, in much the same way that we might remind a president of their power over millions of people’s lives. (Also, Classical Nāhuatl rhetoric relies heavily on allusion and parallelism, and doesn’t translate to English very well.) Furthermore, the blog post treats Tezcatlipoca as very much an evil god; though this seems a sensible interpretation to us, my understanding is that the Aztecs certainly did not think this way. Given that it has this number of obvious mistakes, I wouldn’t really trust this blog post.
(Source: I linked to that post on another forum, and someone else with an interest in the Aztecs went through it and came to the conclusions above.)
Happiness is your internal estimate of how successful your actions are. Goodhart's law applies, of course, but our culture (I'm usian) seems to have a fixation on gaming the metric in this case.
I think it was the Aztec astronomers who placed a vertical stick in the line of sight to a star in order to focus or magnify it. What is this optical effect called?
So the secret to happiness is exercise, meditate, be social and develop a spiritual relationship with nature? So basically no more insightful then any pop self help book.
Maybe the more interesting question is why no one putting down there hand when being told facts about how they will be happier without kids is instantly glossed over. Maybe this instant acceptance of equating traditional life milestones as leading a fulfilling life is the real issue. Giving that up is the real key to happiness.
Do you think people are eventually happier without children? In short term, maybe. I guess nobody enjoys changing or feeding a baby at 3a.m. that much. In the long run, I would be surprised if that's still true. Not having relatives when growing old seems like a recipe for misery.
Maybe you meant involuntarily? Planned childbirths are certainly invited.
Regardless, it would be selfish if the parent's sole motivation were to produce caregivers. IME many people deciding to have children aren't thinking only of themselves.
No, they mean that the children did not consent to birth. It is selfish to have children whatever your motivation, because at some level you unilaterally decide that the suffering they will inevitably feel throughout their life is justified.
That assumes ones children will certainly suffer. And while some discomfort may be inevitable my experience is that many parents do consider the potential quality of life.
Often consideration is both for their children and themselves. My friends and I certainly thought about it and discussed such things.
Anyway, while children may experience good and bad things they'll also be free to decide if life is something they want to personally continue living or not. Many will also be free to choose whether or not to bring children into the world themselves.
> Can you guarantee the children won't suffer? If not, then again you're unilaterally deciding the risk is justified.
Until we can communicate with the preborn is there anyone better to decide then the parents?
> Really? It's okay to force people into existence because they are free to commit suicide?
I believe people have the right to create life, to choose not create it, and full rights over their own lives. And if no one is ever justified to bring others into being then all life is the product of injustice.
Anyway, my preference is to council people against suicide because it is such a permanent choice, and circumstances are often temporary. But ultimately to continue living is a choice.
This is the crux of my disagreement with you, and you haven't really presented an argument for your position.
> if no one is ever justified to bring others into being then all life is the product of injustice
This is exactly what I'm saying. I've said why I believe it's unjust, and you agree with the core of my reasoning; that unborn children can't consent to their birth. If you have an argument for why that doesn't make procreation a moral harm then I'm all ears.
I think it's a real crapshoot, most of the time having kids is a net positive in the long run but you could get unlucky and end up with a child requiring nonstop attention for the rest of his/her life due to various medical conditions and that kind of thing totally annihilates your way of life forever.
Imo, kids are good when they don't materially affect your lifestyle, i.e. when you're poor or rich. The rest have to choose between kids and a very comfortable lifestyle.
And telling someone to exercise is fatphobic, expecting people to be social is discriminating against people with aspergers, telling someone to meditate is anti-ADHD people. Do literally whatever you want, I'm sure you can somehow be happy no matter what you do. Toxicity, toxicity everywhere.
Neither perspective is toxic. I’m sure it’s knowable whether kids add or decrease happiness. And there’s probably some outlier set that feels differently than the population.
Thinking this doesn’t mean anything about toxicity.
Generally speaking I haven’t heard anyone use that word properly in years. It’s a pretty stupid word, unless dealing with chemicals and lethal doses.
> We don’t plan our lives around elevated emotional states. What we want are worthwhile lives,
This article puts forth a premise and states it's a fact. This is undoubtedly a bad theory at odds with a number of religions, much less common sense. Oooh, edgy take, you want to be miserable, embrace it!
> > We don’t plan our lives around elevated emotional states. What we want are worthwhile lives,
> This article puts forth a premise and states it's a fact.
The article does overemphasize the point to some degree, but not as you claim. First, the author cites an exercise he regularly gives in class and its result, drawing a legitimate conclusion (based on his description of the class results). He then uses it as a hook for his actual article which is an exploration of an element of Aztec thought, most of which is unknown in the English speaking world.
> Oooh, edgy take, you want to be miserable, embrace it!
I would hardly call this “edgy”. Certainly this is not at all what the author says. Note the quotations “joy-pain” and the like which are experiences well reflected in philosophical work from Ancient to modern Europe, India, Sumeria, or China and undoubtedly others.
> This is undoubtedly a bad theory at odds with a number of religions, much less common sense.
Is there really a religion whose doctrine is “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law?”
these rules are kind of a joke right? I see top comments breaking them all the time, i guess dismissing comments as "sjw and woke" is permitted on this site
They are no joke. That doesn't we moderate every comment that deserves it. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
There's another aspect to this, though, which is that people with strong political views tend to view the site as dominated by their enemies. Meanwhile the people with opposite political views think their enemies dominate it. These perceptions are what happens when passionate feeling meets cognitive bias. See for yourself: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Um, because they also were proto-socialist, had better healthcare and hygiene than Europe of the time, and had social norms stressing unfailing politeness? I mean, it’s true their morals seem alien and inhuman to us, but that doesn’t actually make them bad people as such, and I certainly wouldn’t reduce the whole of Mesoamerican civilization to ‘those nasty guys who sacrificed people’.
(Further reading: someone at a forum I belong to who is well-read in this area has been doing an excellent series of posts on the Mexica: https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=712, which if you ignore the long discussions between posts is a really readable introduction to Mexica society.)
This is true. People imagine the Spanish conquistadors destroying the Aztec empire, but really it was something like 700 Spaniards + 100,000 pissed off Aztec-neighbors who destroyed it. The Spaniards, as far as I know, tried to actually stop the raping and pillaging of Tenochtitlan but didn't have much luck in that regard.
People call anything and everything "Nazi" in this day and age, but in this case it might be somewhat of a relevant comparison. We're not talking about the Na'vi here: the Aztec were some brutally cruel people.
For example, it was a common practice for the Aztecs to engage in ritualistic wars against their smaller neighbors specifically to abduct captives for use in human sacrifice.
Not to whatabout anybody, but a comparison of murder rates by the Aztecs to the murders of supposed witches by the Franciscan and, particularly, Dominican Inquisitions does not show Europeans in a favorable light. But at least Europeans tortured their victims first. I think the Aztecs preferred to feed and drug them, instead.
Still, if I were looking to pre-contact America for life lessons, I would look at some more northerly tribes, first. But we don't know as much about what they thought.
The documented death rate of the inquisitions is on the order of 4500 people over 400 years [1]. That’s a rate of 11 people per year.
Aztec sacrifice estimates are on the scale of 20,000 to 250,000 per year. [2]
In actual fact, the Aztecs are in a far worse light than the Dominicans and Franciscans. The Nazi comparison is valid. There’s no society on earth that would end innocent life on that scale for another 500 years.
If they are not all bad or good are they all the same ( that is to say composed of equal number and value of good and bad parts) that seems unlikely to be the case and would need some theory other than just answering yes so I suppose we will say no.
If people / cultures / civilizations vary in the level of goodness and badness in them then it follows that there should be a distribution of societies that are significantly more good than bad, societies that are average, and societies that are significantly more bad than good.
If a society is significantly more bad than good it can be true that you could still find something good in them but it becomes questionable if it is worth an individual to study the society to extract this good part from all the bad.
Thus I would conclude that it might not be really worthwhile to learn anything from the Aztecs.
It might be worth noting that the Aztecs demonstrated that if you cannot defend yourself against warlike peoples then lousy become their subjects. This is a lesson of enduring importance.
The Aztecs had a neighboring state to the north east I think. Who were not as violent or warlike as the Aztecs. Every time the Aztecs went to war against them they got rekt.
One historian I read said if Cortez had shown up 50-100 years later they probably would have ended up facing those those guys first instead of the Aztecs and had a really bad time.
> If they are not all bad or good are they all the same ( that is to say composed of equal number and value of good and bad parts) that seems unlikely to be the case and would need some theory other than just answering yes so I suppose we will say no.
Good and bad are time and culture specific. In 50 years, many things that we do everyday now will be "bad" and many things that we see as "bad" will be "good."
This is why the phrase “on the right side of history” is so stupid. It is literally impossible to know what is and is not on the right side of history until it actually is history.
I meant far closer to the present than "past few hundred thousand years" but yes, that's why I used the past tense "did" rather than the present tense "does."
Slavery? Genocide? Plunder? Rape? Religious violence? Slaughter of peoples they considered inferior? The "civilized" Christian cultures of the time did everything the Aztecs did, minus the human sacrifice.
There's something many people find uniquely, particularly offensive about using the machinery of war to perform human sacrifice as its own end (and not as the means to some variety of conquest or resource extraction), and there aren't many cultures that have actually historically engaged in that sort of thing.
They weren't performing human sacrifice as its own end, they were performing literal human sacrifice to honor their God... which is essentially what the Crusades were, an act of figurative ritual human sacrifice to honor the Christian God.
One is just more alien to Western culture than the other, so it seems more viscerally evil, and their means differ but their nature is the same.
The crusades were armies raised in response to the Muslim invasions of Christian countries. Motivations varied between religious (defense of the Christians being oppressed) to political (I want a kingdom to rule over) [1].
The world is obviously a very cruel place. People are suffering and being tortured and there's nothing we can do about it. At any moment, any one of us could have a life-changing event which forces us to live in pain and misery until we die.
But if death is peaceful - maybe happy (like we go to heaven), but really as long as it isn't a negative - it makes a lot of the cruelty much less. All the suffering people will die eventually. All the bad people in power will die eventually. If life ever becomes too bad for you, you will just die, and at least if you're a good person it's unlikely you'll go to anything considered hell.
I've never been suicidal: I honestly enjoy life, and even when I don't, I want to try everything else before I die. But it helps my anxiety knowing that if anything really really bad were to happen to me, the worst that can happen is that I die. And as long as that's ok - assuming death is ok (which I admit is a big assumption), than there's less to be scared of. Of course I want to try everything else before