- #51
katelynndevere
- 48
- 0
learningphysics said:
I amended my response to answer your question about the treatment of bi-polar disorder, I expect we were both composing our posts at the same time - it happens when conversation is as lively as this one (you are so much fun to debate with
). Of course they should have treatment, if they want it. I say if they want it, because some people affected by the condition prefer not to take their lithium, at least occasionally, they like the euphoric highs and are prepared to suffer the lows to experience them. Heroin users should and are (the law aside) free to take it if they wish, what I object to is conditioning people so that such drug use offers their only respite from negative emotions. What I object to more, is conditioning people to believe that negative emtions are necessarily something to be feared. In fact, I'm not completely comfortable with the term negtive; to grieve for a lost loved one is not necessarily negative.It is indeed a sad and terrible fact that people are being tortured and that unique, thinking, feeling human beings die in pain and squalor. In some respects, this is due to the maintenance of the staus quo, but when did I say that I am in favour of maintaining the staus quo? I simply do not want to live in a BNW-like world. We may be at cross-purposes here, I am all for a society in which everyone is happy and I have no problem with using psychotropic drugs as a tool to establish it; I take mirtazapine, myself. What is significantly different is that I am free to experience misery, should I perversely choose to. This important to me, because I want to make up my own mind about what makes me happy, about what happiness is.
I don't agree with the electric shock torture of infants being less terrible than events in the real world. Pain is terrible. Fear is terrible. Torture is terrible. Always, in every instance, for whatever end it is practised.
What the Alphas have that, say, the Epsilons do not, is a certain amount of intellectual freedom, at the very least. The lower castes are purposely stunted and frightened away from reading, by loud noises in their nursery dorms. There is also the prospect of exile for those high-ranking members of society who, because of the higher degree of intellectual freedom afforded them, are unable to assimilate the norms of mass consumption of obstacle golf. The bloke who writes the feelies (what's his name?) is pissed off, because he is frustrated and feels himself capable of greater things, but has no possible outlet for them. He is, at least free enough in his mind, to entertain such thoughts; the Deltas are not, because their brains have been deliberately poisoned. If you were a Delta, you would be incapable of this discussion. To say that you would not miss what you never had (I am anticipating your response here) is a fallacy. I've never been able to do quadratic equations, but I wish I could.
I cannot believe that you are serious when you say that you would allow your children to be tortured with electric shocks, if that meant avoiding a certain amount of misery in later life. I know you don't have any now, but you might have, one day, and you must know some one with children, or remember being one. I would die to prevent my children experiencing that. I expect a lot of other people would, too.
Finally, a virtual experience is just that. it is real in one sense, but only in the sense that a picture of an apple is real. The picture is real, but I can't eat it.
Kate.
That's the point!
