RE: virus:Logic

David McFadzean (david@lucifer.com)
Fri, 17 Oct 1997 11:21:12 -0600


At 09:49 AM 10/17/97 -0700, Richard Brodie wrote:

>I'm not sure that's right. You are filtering their mail through your own
>glasses. You try very hard to make people play on your field rather than
>extending yourself to play on theirs. SO naturally, the messages you accept
>seem to be hideously flawed scientific/rational messages. What if they were
>movements of a symphony?

What could I possibly tell you so that you believe what I say?
(My guess is nothing.)

>> What makes you think I am not past OK?
>
>Hey, I never said that! I'm responding to what I hear as a request for
>learning.

You said "yet you're not happy". I thought you mean what you say
(or maybe you didn't mean it when you said that :-).

>A frequent source of pain is adopting a "victim" position about past
>events. Very often, data can be reframed. For instance, one could easily
>shift a belief that "Germans are evil because they committed the Holocaust
>on poor powerless us" into "the Holocaust was a tragedy caused by
>unenlightened minds being swept up by the Nazi mind virus." The latter is a
>much more powerful belief, in my mind.

Agreed. Let me try again. I think there is a category of beliefs
where what you believe will not affect the truth of the belief in any
way, and in those cases you are better off not deluding yourself,
even at the cost of some happiness.

--
David McFadzean                 david@lucifer.com
Memetic Engineer                http://www.lucifer.com/~david/
Church of Virus                 http://www.lucifer.com/virus/