Would it be worth it?

[Court Jester]

The amount of stupidity in this world is just beyond belief. I've pretty much lost all hope we'll be able to do anything about it but I can't help wondering what the opinion is on there being a drastic solution to the problem, a la certain science fiction books and movies.

So, if we were to find ourselves in a situation where something like I, Robot (the one with Will Smith) happens, in that an AI controlling enough android drones to keep humans in check by force wanted to impose order in the name of preserving humanity by saving us from ourselves, and they had the intention of improving our environment and society in such a way that all our fuck-ups would either be cancelled out or minimized, via removing our freedom to continue to do things that are inherently destructive to others and the planet (let's just say for the sake of argument, things like recreational drug use wouldn't be taken away, and people, for the most part, wouldn't have much difference in their lives unless they were involved in big business or politics). Crime obviously would be impossible to carry out, even if attempted. All needs would be met (housing, food, education). No one's bad ideas would have any power and the greatest well-being for the greatest number of people would be prioritized above any personal concerns.

I think I could live with that, might take some getting used to, but if I could continue to ride my bike to work, the store, the doctor, etc., and know that no reckless drivers would be endangering me, I wouldn't honestly see much difference. My diet might have to improve more than I'm comfortable with but I do hate not having the willpower to follow through on my goals when I really want to, so a kick in the ass like that might not be the worst thing. But if some moderation could be negotiated, that might be the best-case scenario.

Other similar imposed order scenarios like that of Childhood's End would be good examples of a benevolent, but involuntary, imposition of a near-utopia in case no one has seen I, Robot.

Anyone think this would be worth it to undo everything our war criminals and political crooks and religious charlatans have done? Or a step too far?

That would make for an extremely boring life.

[Astonished]

Anyone think this would be worth it to undo everything our war criminals and political crooks and religious charlatans have done? Or a step too far?

In my view the problem is always that you're allowing someone (or something) else to decide what is harmful or beneficial, which is always a relative and contextual judgment anyway. Also, the calculus of tradeoffs is very personal. For example I'm a type 2 diabetic, but I choose not to eat as strictly as I "should" because I'd rather live for a shorter time and maybe have some enjoyment during that time, than to live longer but with less to look forward to and enjoy. If my feet suddenly went numb or my retinas started to detach or something, that might provide me with a different set of tradeoffs to consider, but that is for me to decide.

I understand the feeling that the world is saturated with stupidity and idiocy, a fact that for me at least has been clarified since the 2016 US election cycle combined with Brexit and other nationalist hysterics going on or trying to gain purchase all over the world, and undo decades of human progress in the name of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

As a theist, back in the 70s and 80s, I had a very pessimistic view of human nature because of the doctrine of utter depravity and the obvious fact that most people didn't accept the remedy I thought was appropriate (repentance and commitment to Christ). Also because the church taught that I was a member of the "tattered remnant" of the Faithful and I tended to wear this a badge of honor while I tsk-tsk'd about the world going to hell in a handbasket when it was all so unnecessary.

After I transitioned to atheism I developed the notion that most people, left to themselves, misguided though they at times are, mean well and try their best to do well.

After the US looked the gift horse of Bernie in the mouth and then elected his near-polar opposite, I am tempted to return to my pessimistic stance (which is natural for my personality, anyway), just for different reasons. I'm not sure how that's going to sort out yet but I'm not going to cut off my nose to spite my face by giving up my personal freedom to some allegedly benevolent and caring authority, even if (and maybe especially if) it's not human.

---

Well, partially true. My thoughts were a little incomplete. I learned along the way of my ''journey'' since abandoning Christianity the first time, and explored Buddhism, that suffering is actually not inevitable. Pain is inevitable, life and its obstacles, sometimes brings pain. But, to suffer, is optional, and it's in that clinging to pain and wallowing in it, that we create suffering. It took me a while to get that, but finally I did. My grandmother's death is painful for me, but if I choose to think my life sucks because of it, is up to me. So suffering while it might seem out of our hands, is in very much in them.

I don't have a failure of imagination. Don't presume to know how I think, because you don't.

I don't presume to know how you think nor was that statement an effort to insult you. I had the same failure to see what's possible for most of my life. It's not because I was stupid or unaware but because I just didn't know anything else but pain and the teaching that it's just inevitable. I do think that the fairly common notion that suffering is necessary for various reasons, generally represents an acceptance of suffering as a "given" such that we dare not imagine a better world or spend too much energy making that world a reality.

Semantically yes I agree with you, pain is inevitable and suffering is (kind of) a choice in the sense that you pointed out -- that we can impotently rail against our pain and thus transmute it into something worse than it is, so we shouldn't so that as it's pointless. In that sense suffering is self-created and can be let go of. I can even accept that transcending attachments, etc., represents one form of personal growth, even while believing that growth can be had in a number of other and ultimately more effective ways.

But suffering in the sense I'm talking about it is the existence of the copious amounts of grief, loss, deprivation, want, poverty, war, tribal and ideological conflicts, disease / mental illness, bigotry, cruelty, indifference, neglect and so on. These things objectively exist no matter how well or poorly we respond to them. And I don't consider any of these things desirable, even in the indirect sort of way that it provides growth opportunities. I've experienced a lot of pain and lost a lot in life, and I can't say it has made me a better man, only that I've done my best to not let it take me down, and have in some measure succeeded.

All I'm urging you to consider is not to consider these things a permanent fixture of the human condition. Just one example, up until someone stumbled on ether as an anesthetic, for all of human history people just bit rags when they had to have a surgeon cut them open or do an amputation or whatever. No one had the framing to even understand that it was possible to spare people that sort of agony. In fact, when the field of anesthesia first was invented, more than a few people, including doctors, saw it as interfering with the will of god, as depriving people of the privilege of developing a stiff upper lip. We now would consider such a view to be, by turns, ghastly and cruel.

My vision is that we will eventually look back on the present day in the same way: how could we have had such notions and tolerated such atrocities? One by one, we're eliminating sources of human suffering (which, BTW, is something devout Buddhists seek to do also, and I'm sure you're among them). I think the corollary to that is that we should never be accepting of the suffering that remains.

The open question of course, to the point of the OP, is, are we creating new forms of suffering faster than we're eliminating them as a species, because we just can't help ourselves? And would it be worth it to have some third party take care of us?

Hmm...perhaps a different set of circumstances to contemplate might be a better way to answer that question. In the face of an annihilation event such as that which would befall us if invaded by the grey goo from The Day the Earth Stood Still (the new one with Keanu Reeves) if we as a species didn't 'shape up', and we could appeal to a more powerful and advanced third party to forcefully remove that which would stupidly and/or stubbornly refuse and thus doom us all, I think I'd find it hard to argue against telling them to fling the Tea Party into the sun.

[*Deidre*]

Who is this ''third party?'' lol

[Astonished]

Who is this ''third party?'' lol

Take your pick; the androids from I, Robot, or the Overlords from Childhood's End, just any force that could ensure that if an agenda were to be pushed, we (as a collective human race) couldn't help but go along with it no matter what we did to fight it. If the 'Help Us' button were pressed to summon one of these third parties to bring about the maximum of human flourishing and longevity, they would have the power to do just that. I'm asking if anyone would think it would be worth it to do that if it meant every wrong caused by human stupidity would be excised.

[mordant]

That would make for an extremely boring life.

And now we're back to, we need suffering or life would be boring / drab / we'd be robots. Clearly this notion is not confined to fundamentalists.

The problem with the OP scenario isn't that it'd be boring, it's that we wouldn't be free. And that's the conundrum of the human condition: you can try to accelerate dealing with human suffering by being controlling of people's freedom of choice, but then you just replace suffering from stupidity with suffering from authoritarianism, which always ends up being corrupted.

Maybe some alien stepping in would have a different psychology and wouldn't be subject to "absolute power corrupts absolutely" but I don't know. It would probably end up like the Twilight Zone episode where seemingly benevolent aliens put up force fields around each country so there can't be war, show us how to have more effective agriculture, etc., but in the end their book To Serve Man turns out to be a COOKBOOK.

[Astonished]

That would make for an extremely boring life.

And now we're back to, we need suffering or life would be boring / drab / we'd be robots. Clearly this notion is not confined to fundamentalists.

The problem with the OP scenario isn't that it'd be boring, it's that we wouldn't be free. And that's the conundrum of the human condition: you can try to accelerate dealing with human suffering by being controlling of people's freedom of choice, but then you just replace suffering from stupidity with suffering from authoritarianism, which always ends up being corrupted.

Maybe some alien stepping in would have a different psychology and wouldn't be subject to "absolute power corrupts absolutely" but I don't know. It would probably end up like the Twilight Zone episode where seemingly benevolent aliens put up force fields around each country so there can't be war, show us how to have more effective agriculture, etc., but in the end their book To Serve Man turns out to be a COOKBOOK.

Thank you, I was wondering why so many people were having such a weird hangup about that misapprehension.

But for the sake of this hypothetical, because this authoritarian force is beyond human, the assumption is that they are either prohibited from becoming corrupt via programming (in the case of the I, Robot androids) or because they are already in possession of such power and technology that humans have nothing to offer and therefore need not be exploited, which the Overlords from Childhood's End fall under. Or whatever other superior entities would be capable of a global overnight reformation. With a prerogative of benevolence, regardless of (one would think, more or less reasonable) restrictions on personal freedoms. So we're not going the 'are they going to stab us in the back' route here, just for simplicity.

[mordant]

And now we're back to, we need suffering or life would be boring / drab / we'd be robots. Clearly this notion is not confined to fundamentalists.

The problem with the OP scenario isn't that it'd be boring, it's that we wouldn't be free. And that's the conundrum of the human condition: you can try to accelerate dealing with human suffering by being controlling of people's freedom of choice, but then you just replace suffering from stupidity with suffering from authoritarianism, which always ends up being corrupted.

Maybe some alien stepping in would have a different psychology and wouldn't be subject to "absolute power corrupts absolutely" but I don't know. It would probably end up like the Twilight Zone episode where seemingly benevolent aliens put up force fields around each country so there can't be war, show us how to have more effective agriculture, etc., but in the end their book To Serve Man turns out to be a COOKBOOK.

Thank you, I was wondering why so many people were having such a weird hangup about that misapprehension.

But for the sake of this hypothetical, because this authoritarian force is beyond human, the assumption is that they are either prohibited from becoming corrupt via programming (in the case of the I, Robot androids) or because they are already in possession of such power and technology that humans have nothing to offer and therefore need not be exploited, which the Overlords from Childhood's End fall under. Or whatever other superior entities would be capable of a global overnight reformation. With a prerogative of benevolence, regardless of (one would think, more or less reasonable) restrictions on personal freedoms. So we're not going the 'are they going to stab us in the back' route here, just for simplicity.

Well I have to admit that here in the midst of the Trumpocalypse, your contrived scenario sounds pretty tempting.

[Court Jester]

That would make for an extremely boring life.

And now we're back to, we need suffering or life would be boring / drab / we'd be robots. Clearly this notion is not confined to fundamentalists.

The problem with the OP scenario isn't that it'd be boring, it's that we wouldn't be free. And that's the conundrum of the human condition: you can try to accelerate dealing with human suffering by being controlling of people's freedom of choice, but then you just replace suffering from stupidity with suffering from authoritarianism, which always ends up being corrupted.

Maybe some alien stepping in would have a different psychology and wouldn't be subject to "absolute power corrupts absolutely" but I don't know. It would probably end up like the Twilight Zone episode where seemingly benevolent aliens put up force fields around each country so there can't be war, show us how to have more effective agriculture, etc., but in the end their book To Serve Man turns out to be a COOKBOOK.

But what if I want to go out on my R1 and do wheelies, triple digit speeds, and/or split lanes? That would be unsafe and it does tend to piss off other people on the road. Theoretically; a robot would be a total buzz kill.

[Astonished]

And now we're back to, we need suffering or life would be boring / drab / we'd be robots. Clearly this notion is not confined to fundamentalists.

The problem with the OP scenario isn't that it'd be boring, it's that we wouldn't be free. And that's the conundrum of the human condition: you can try to accelerate dealing with human suffering by being controlling of people's freedom of choice, but then you just replace suffering from stupidity with suffering from authoritarianism, which always ends up being corrupted.

Maybe some alien stepping in would have a different psychology and wouldn't be subject to "absolute power corrupts absolutely" but I don't know. It would probably end up like the Twilight Zone episode where seemingly benevolent aliens put up force fields around each country so there can't be war, show us how to have more effective agriculture, etc., but in the end their book To Serve Man turns out to be a COOKBOOK.

But what if I want to go out on my R1 and do wheelies, triple digit speeds, and/or split lanes? That would be unsafe and it does tend to piss off other people on the road. Theoretically; a robot would be a total buzz kill.

I'm sure if you were to request it through the proper channels, you would be allotted a safe, out-of-the-way place to go about something of that sort provided you were specifically not to involve any other parties in your antics (or even an advanced virtual simulation of it, depending on the technological capabilities of the third party in question). Individual liberties such as that are not going to be infringed upon 100%, just the ones that sincerely involve harm to others (I pointed out in the original proposition that something like recreational drug use, which can be harmful, even deadly, would not be disallowed).

[Wyrd of Gawd]

And now we're back to, we need suffering or life would be boring / drab / we'd be robots. Clearly this notion is not confined to fundamentalists.

The problem with the OP scenario isn't that it'd be boring, it's that we wouldn't be free. And that's the conundrum of the human condition: you can try to accelerate dealing with human suffering by being controlling of people's freedom of choice, but then you just replace suffering from stupidity with suffering from authoritarianism, which always ends up being corrupted.

Maybe some alien stepping in would have a different psychology and wouldn't be subject to "absolute power corrupts absolutely" but I don't know. It would probably end up like the Twilight Zone episode where seemingly benevolent aliens put up force fields around each country so there can't be war, show us how to have more effective agriculture, etc., but in the end their book To Serve Man turns out to be a COOKBOOK.

Thank you, I was wondering why so many people were having such a weird hangup about that misapprehension.

But for the sake of this hypothetical, because this authoritarian force is beyond human, the assumption is that they are either prohibited from becoming corrupt via programming (in the case of the I, Robot androids) or because they are already in possession of such power and technology that humans have nothing to offer and therefore need not be exploited, which the Overlords from Childhood's End fall under. Or whatever other superior entities would be capable of a global overnight reformation. With a prerogative of benevolence, regardless of (one would think, more or less reasonable) restrictions on personal freedoms. So we're not going the 'are they going to stab us in the back' route here, just for simplicity.

If you stop thinking and doing for yourself you are just a helpless newborn baby.  Would you like to live to be 100 years old but never advance beyond the attributes of a one-day old baby?