Why do people think happiness can only be bought and seek many

>>525750
>Why do people think happiness can only be bought and seek many material possessions
No one actually articulates this as their position, this is you claiming that other people hold this position. So you need to answer your own question.


>Why is consumerism like a religion nowadays
If you mean why is it a thing, it's because capitilism. If you mean why do people care about it wait till your parents are not taking care of you and realize how expensive everything is. People are not working for 'fast cars' they are working to afford the monthly payments on normal cars.

>Why do people put such great stock in earthly possessions
If you don't believe in souls than everything in the world is 'earthly'. So you are either asking why people care about anything what so ever (since everything is earthly) or you are asking why people do not completely ignore physical things and focus entirely on mystism.

>Why do people want big houses, expensive cars, and even more stuff that is hollow and unnecessary
What is necessary? Again you seem to have your own concept of what 'nessary' means. So you need to answer your own question.

>>525750
What else am I supposed to do with my money? Give it all away?

>>525928
Why would you do that? You'd only be encouraging the people you gave it to, to become materialistilistic. You should burn your money and work for free.

>>525750
because hedonism is the praxis of the liberal doctrine, especially once that the liberals and libertarians have created, without thinking, the hundreds of millions of people that they put in the middle class, like you.

the fantasy of these people is to turn this mundane hedonism into a faith in rationalism, especially science, which would back up the faith of the liberals and the libertarians in the human rights, the legal conventions, the faith in the concept of ''want'', ''will'', ''consent''. The best in this doctrine is to put the scientist has politicians, or rather, to have politicians as close as scientist as possible. of course, you have liberals who fear this and wish to remain explicitly hedonistic even in politics. they show this in betting on intellectual terrorism through their entertainment industry in depicting explicit totalitarian societies where the justification for this clear authority is for ''orders''.

of course, not a single liberal/libertarian can tell you in 2016 what is ''will'', what is ''consent'' what is ''want'' what is a ''willing agent'', but their lack of clarity in their concepts does not prevent them to judge you on what they think is your ''will, consent, intention, motives''.
none of this matter much, since after all, the humanity is mostly hedonistic, that is to say that most of the humanity cares about their desires, their emotions, their pains [which they want to avoid], their pleasures [which they want to have].

>>525750
most people view money as the solution, rather than the problem. its becomes a necessity to survive, thus "success" is rated by a number of dollars and not personal achievement or a particular skill or craft. material objects become a proxy of self-worth. having more expensive things, rather than just what you need or want, shows you have a surplus of "worth" as a person.

the alternative to live without money is to live to survive. taking most of your time just to stay alive, instead of just devoting 40 hours or so a week and just buy everything you could need all while having time to do as you please.

>Why do people think happiness can only be bought and seek many material possessions?
Le strawman argument.

>Why do people want big houses, expensive cars, and even more stuff that is hollow and unnecessary?
Have you ever had a big house and nice property? It's pretty great. You get to do whatever you want and there's no neighbors banging on the ceiling or eyeballing you from over the fence.

>>526075
So do you believe that rationalism is subjective?

>>526075
t. american

>>526075
Your /pol/ is showing m8.

You should hide your power level better.

>>526165
I think he's mostly referring to the dissonance between the ease of modern materialism and the personal satisfaction of attaining these things.

Modern materialism has a sort of superstitious magic about it in which certain products like cars and big things are fetishized to the point that we give our life force, which money is symbolic of, to attaining these things. It's a lot like how the church in Luther's time sold salvation to wealthy customers.

The sleek, fast car is our flail and the fastest, most inclusive smartphone is our sceptre. There are some men who choose to see past these magical objects and who would rather allow themselves to be measured. Like OP.

The truth is that the liberal application of these tools is where OP is confused. These are very powerful objects but the applied magic is being used to satiate primal emotions and desires. OP sees the huge potential in the tools of modern hedonous society but fails to see why they are being used in satisfying hedonism.

But don't worry OP, corporations are fulfilling the prophecy of the returning king in some sick and twisted reversal of proper rule. Where there once sat priests who dictated the will of the gods there now sits men who dictate the will of their own indulgent empires.

>>525750
>false flagging this hard

Hi Bernanke

>>525750
It's all about power
Rich people buy boats, generally it's not cause they like to fish but to prove that they have something that others can't

But material objects are worthless
You can still catch fish with a shit fishing rod and knowledge of a good fishing spot rather than a decent boat

This is why I eye-fuck the bourgeois
I work selling tickets to sporting events and work at corporate box offices doing menial work
I flirt outrageously with the most powerful people's wife's right infront of them

Then they know that money doesn't buy power, if the worker can fuck your wife.

>>526170>>526181
>>Your /pol/ is showing m8.

I like americans for they show well how the liberalisms, classical and new, are disastrous since it leads to take seriously the content of the entertainment industry. and then hedonism is not really a problem, since most people love to love their emotions, or at least, to they love to love the emotions that they consider good, to the point of not willing to leave and not being able to anyway..

>>526167
yes, but I say that it does not matter.
I do not think that subjectivity is bad, as long as you do not take seriously what your mind produces. subjectivity is bad only for the guy who cling to the fantasy of objectivity [whereas he cannot even instantiate any objectivity, since it remains a fairy tale, so far]

there are plenty of rationalisms. but so far, any rationalism is, at least, the personal faith in the relevance of a few personal abstractions and inferences amongst the flood of abstractions and inferences that each person's mind produces, in order to reach some truth/reality/objectivity/universality/certainty [with all those words personal abstractions again] with, for a few rationalisms, a minuscule touch of empiricism in order to avoid the critique, towards the classical rationalism à la Descartes, that pure reason is disconnected from the world and is therefore sterile. [with Kant offering a bastardization of modern rationalism+empiricism]

>>526429

of course so far, any rationalism has failed, from the faith in your favourite formal languages more or less coupled to ''the scientific method'' to the old faith in the analysis of the natural languages, in order to establish explicitly any relevant abstraction to the empirical world, leaving then to ''mysticism'' the view that the intellect [= that which ties, that which abstracts], or more commonly the mind/spirit, is nothing but the intellect and that the mind is just what the mind is : another sensual channel that can be pleasant or not.

So we can conclude that, so far, the various logics, reasons, reasonings, formalized or not, are conventions.
Given the diversity of formal languages, and the perpetual fight of the few guys who want their preferred formal languages to explain anything else, we are far away from reaching whatever the rationalist's fantasy standing behind the word ''objectivity''.


All this faith in rationalism do not date back to the liberal/libertarian [starting with classical liberalism and then its numerous nuances]. Those guys only took over after the Catholics and attempted to secularize their notions, with, typically, the notion of ''will'' which has become legalized as ''consent'' [and then the actual challenge of the liberals.libertarians is to manufacture a ''secularized will'' which goes beyond their legal structure and, if possible, is backed up by whatever he calls by ''science''. I say good luck to them.].
Catholicism took the rationalist trend as opposed to Orthodoxy's mysticism. The Reformation was not only anti-clerical but anti-monastic so Europe's contemplative tradition is more older material and thus harder to get into for the Catholic parts of Europe that retained the monastic tradition despite.

>>526431
It is the scholastics in the universities, newly created, who transformed the philosophy in to the tools for teleology which is thus making philosophy the field of logic done in natural language.
Logic is now a metaphysics and the prime tool to reach god/truth/certainty.

then the modern rationalist took over in ridiculing aristotle logic [which could be leniently seen as some contemporary intuitionist type theory, for whose who know] and then, as the modern rationalist was more and more interested in what he calls empiricism, some guys wanted to apply this to the social realm which flourished into positivism and failed miserably [even logical empiricism and logical positivism failed...].

Since the beginning, there is a clear tension between the rationalist-liberal [in universities] and the liberal/libertarian which consists in the rest of the pleb who can do nothing but work and dwell in leisure... [and praise the rationalist in the university still fantasized, but now mostly solely by the pleb, as a disinterested guy working objectivity, especially if this guy provides the scientific/technological progress which sustains nothing but the hedonism of the populace].
too bad that no rationalist has a clear view on what can science do, beyond sustain hedonism.
The modern rationalist has split the field of his study in various sub-fields such as epistemology, ethics, Mind and Cognition, philosophy of science, as if it makes sense, beforehand to split these fields and study them for their own sake. There is also the more adulated fields of pure sciences since, at the end of the day, philosophy is still considered as a waste of time, since precisely it does not give us ''computers, cars, planes, TV, houses'' and whatever things the material hedonists crave...

>>526433

in the social realm, we are now stuck with the liberals and libertarians who clearly have no idea about what they are doing in order to manage their ''nations'' of hundreds of millions of people, with just as much as personal opinions, created thanks to their sciences.
The problem of the human rights is that they forbids more than they make explicitly mandatory any praxis, explicit authority which the liberal/libertarian have tremendous difficulty to justify [like he said himself about the monarchs, by the way].
At best, when the liberals and libertarians are asked why democracy/republics are good, they reply that ''it is the not the best system, but it is clearly not the worst'' which naturally convinces nobody but themselves.

And since Very few people are not born as hedonist, there is not much they can do. And anyway, nobody can leave hedonism in reading popsci books and merging the entertainment industry with the most applied sciences, like the rationalists-liberals would like in manufacturing some social structure to convert the ignorant people to their dreams.


You can have a spiritual hedonism, through drugs of pure meditation [done for pure pleasure and appealing because it appears as exotic], but it remains a hedonism and even the best yogis who refuse drugs, foods, and other entertainments, which the materialistic hedonist loves, have a hard time to leave this spiritual hedonism.

>>526438

now the companies try to appear as moral agent with of course, the sole purpose to make profits. But this entrepreneurial fallacy benefits the clients as well, since they can now be explicitly hedonistic and and be called moral in consuming green, or local or giving 1 pound to charity at the check-out, in providing for, sponsoring , fostering a few ''refugees'' that they never see.
Every wins, except the poorest. but then they are poor and nobody cares about them.

I think that liberalism is a marvellous doctrine nearly unbeatable, beyond some major events. I think that it not so bad that most people are hedonistic, because as soon as you are less hedonistic than them, you can take advantage of their society without troubles [in fact you appear, to them, as a good guy], when they do not give you directly the means to do what you want.

in the social realm, nowadays, the concrete fantasy of the occidental humanist is to find a model of society which is ''liberal without being so prone to free markets'', in other words, they want a ''democracy without free markets'' ...

the best part is that they are serious about this.

File: money is more important than people.jpg (238KB, 466x4275px) Image search: [Google]

238KB, 466x4275px

Because money is god.

>>526456
sauce

>>525776
First post, best post.
I would have answered OP exactly the way you did.

Money can't buy happiness, but, then again, neither can poverty

>>525750
i would guess culture plays a big role, if you grow up being told something, that's what you believe

some people might actually find happiness in it though, happiness is subjective, and some people like working and getting something tangible for their efforts

calling it "hollow" is kind of silly though, considering you're judging people's choices without asking them yourself, which is pretty hollow in itself

>>526431
>so Europe's contemplative tradition is more older material and thus harder to get into for the Catholic parts of Europe that retained the monastic tradition despite.
A statement that goes beyond contempt. It is an utter falsehood.

In fact, your entire piece is laden with so many errors and unsupported claims that it is nothing short of poison. So much so in fact, that another has already accused you of being a false flag agent for the very same force you claim to be condemning.