I’d be into it, when’s good for you?
You see this a lot in paranoiacs, they will find all kinds of far-fetched reasons why they are in danger
I guess in that way we are all paranoiacs
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Let me have a think when I’m free and times that would work and I will drop you a message, I’m thinking Fri/Sat/Sun in the evening (around 5-7pm UK time).
Sat / sun should work… I’ll be occupied Friday because the USA are playing ENG in the World Cup 
@claudiu I just realised I could have quoted Andrews post and then linked it straight to the ‘harmlessness’ thread but I got too passionate to reply first, let’s maybe move all these too then 
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Instinctual aggression comes by birth…that’s the “infant throwing tantrums at their toy taken away” example Richard gives…but there is also the other one Richard says - taking offence.
He said something like - I never take offence, so I’m freed from the horror of revenge… in this sense, one can say that if there is no hurt, then there is no need to hurt back.
Methinks its just a matter of what you want to call as hurt here.
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This is assuming children wouldn’t have egos. As young as 1.5 years, they form identities. I didn’t see malice in kids prior to that, and malice(which is different from violence, and even aggression due to a physical threat) needs some degree of intelligence. So kids younger than a year are incapable of it, anyway.
Not many non-primates exhibit malice because they lack required intelligence.
Pleasure from one-upping others is a social phenomenon. Pleasure, although it reinforces its need thereby perpetuating itself, is a reprieve from a myriad of pains that people face or even existential sadness. Like a fresh rain on a barren land.
Malice may be a part of human condition, but a huge part of it is caused by social identity. It’s everybody’s experience that they are far less likely to hurt when they are happy.
They got hurt due to their social identity.
That’s a conditioned response. That and many such reactions can be gotten rid of by just being aware of our responses.
We are of course, not talking about physical threats here, but about clearing out the hurts caused by our social identity. Sarcasm isn’t about physical hurt or threat.
Are you separating malice from aggression here? As in malice is conditioned & aggression is instinctive?
Yes. Malice is an egoic game. It’s a response to (an already) hurt identity.
Machiavellianism and maintaining hierarchies is observed in chimps and bonobos, but they too have identities, cruder than humans, sophisticated than most other mammals.
Malice is mostly, if not all, an identity issue.
Aggression as a reaction to a threat, or violence are encoded.
Wait, why are instinctual passions even discussed here? Can anything be done about them, except extinguishing them via self-immolation?
So then I wonder if @Kub933 was meaning malice in the same way as you or not
Richard & Peter split the actualism process into two ‘stages,’ the first is primarily involved with removing the social identity & ego, and the second is involved with massaging out occurrences of the instincts. It’s true that the instincts remain ‘of a piece’ all the way until self-immolation, but it’s still well worth noticing when they crop up & returning to enjoying & appreciating. They maintain their potential all the way until SI, but the ability to not be swept away by them can increase.
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At the risk of having two conversations going now under two topics,
This is my reply in the other one.
We are getting into an academic discussion again though.
When did the malice start? Remember that animals display aggression, but malice is actually something else.
They are not synonymous.
Humans will deliberately seek to harm others out of revenge. Some other animals too. But the vast majority of creatures don’t do that. They are aggressive, but not malicious.
So, one could ask, quite naively, “why am I being malicious?”
Was I born malicious? I very much doubt that, as I observed no malice in my children as new borns. Aggression, after a certain age, but no malice.
In which way does malice first arise in a child? In me?
With specifics in mind, one can dismantle the ‘social identity’ which has the malicious tendencies, and then deal with aggression, which is quite interesting to do. I am finding once I see a specific reason I am experiencing malice, I get the choice to apply intelligence.
The aggression is actually useful here. Instead of it being directed at people, it can be channeled back into determined effort.
I find lately that most of the flatness that happens is the result of repressing aggression.
When that aggression can be focused on an idea, it soon becomes determination, and later “willfulness”.
Which is the full story behind me “bootstrapping” myself back to feeling good the other day.
I saw that my malice (although I didn’t use that word, I used “abused”), was because I wanted to maintain “rejection” in my reality.
It is becoming very clear around the particular of “romantic love” that I have a question to answer;
“Am I prepared to sacrifice my reality by no longer acting in this way? (Rejection in both directions)”.
It feels like it’s “unfair” , that I have a right to feel that I should be able to have these feelings. “My precious” .
It’s me.
Yes the instinctual aggression observed in an infant is transformed into something much more sophisticated once the social identity forms. Part of it is the infant learns to develop reasons for why he is being aggressive and then express this aggression in somewhat socially acceptable ways.
Malice is the intent to cause harm, it is fuelled by the instinctual passion of aggression and is also related to other instincts eg I might be aggressive as a response to feeling under threat or in order to attain that which I desire etc.
It is still all part of that same package of ‘self’, to deny that malice is an intrinsic part of this package is not in line with facts.
It’s this weird myth of some kinda ‘blank slate’, that if only kids didn’t have bad role models and hurts in the world that they would be innocents, they would not, they would still all develop with malice hence the need for morals.
The whole thing of taking offence is an extension of that instinctual behaviour also. ‘I’ make those beliefs an extension of ‘me’ and as such ‘I’ will always find ways and reasons to instinctually feel that those outlines are under threat, need defending, need to be enforced etc
So malice is the natural outcome of being ‘me’.
If we are taking this angle of malice is somehow learned/a response only this would mean that it is possible to be free of malice whilst still a self.
And it is called a virtual freedom for a reason, there is no possibility of ending malice as long as ‘I’ exist.
It is “catastrophying” to imagine otherwise as well.
The universe itself, as you are so fond of, is pure.
The issues are never the origin of evil, but what we are going to actually do about it.
Am I going to continue to reject myself and anyone else around me?
I see it like a vortex, a feeling which I had no ‘self’ awareness about.
Again, and I will keep saying this until if or when the general consensus regards me as too “unactualist”, it doesn’t matter at all what the origin of evil is, it only matters what you are going to do about it.
In a sense no it doesn’t matter but in another sense it does. Because by understanding the origin and extent of malice better we are better prepared to do something about it.
For example if I believe that the only reason I am ever malicious is because others hurt me that is not seeing the full picture of how ‘I’ tick.
This means I am leaving out a whole avenue of understanding and thus corrective action with regards to myself.
We can argue about the details, yet, is a half dozen active members here, going to make the slightest difference?
Theres the rub.
It up to me, whether I make the slightest difference.
As far as an actually free person is concerned, the ultimate sacrifice is made; ‘me’.
It’s the feeling that I must argue, defend some creed, when really all that is ever being fought for is the conviction that ‘I’, this nebulous mystery, has something to achieve.
I do.
Save the world.
From what?
Yet another war. Another rape. Suicide. Brutality.
We are not here to save the world from inaccurate “early childhood development psychology debates”.
I wonder why anyone would argue"but Richard says this" as something about anything other than what ‘Richard’ gave 'his life’s to achieve?
Peace on earth in our lifetime.
Leave it to people actually qualified to argue about whether malice is present in new borns, and work at getting rid of malice in oneself.
Or to put it succinctly;
When I do it, the world will be saved.
Right but in the process of doing something we do not need to get intellectually sloppy.
So in order to further make my case I will write a story about my childhood which by the end of it I am sure you will agree that I was a little (or not so little as I was pretty chubby) malicious shit 
There are many examples I remember from my childhood which are very good demonstrations that malice is simply intrinsic to being ‘me’, I will write them below :
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I remember when we were kids in Poland we would roam around in the woods and eventually we found this house of an old lady who lived on her own. We decided to essentially rob and destroy her house and with the stuff that we broke/robbed we built a tree house right outside her house. This was brilliant fun for us to run around as she was trying to chase us away, it was exciting, it was funny, it gave us a high.
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Once upon a time when I was about 10, there was a kid who just joined our school, he was mentally not on the same level as the rest of us and I decided one day that it would be very cool and edgy if I would beat him up so after school as he was getting changed I simply pinned him up to the wall and punched him in the face then ran off. I felt powerful, cool, not to be messed with.
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When I was also about 10 I would visit my grandparents for summers, they had a cat that was a little rough. One day I tried to pet it and it scratched me instead. I was not hurt but rather I had a sense of “how dare you, let me show you what I can do”, and so I carried this cat onto a balcony and threw it off. Dont worry the cat was well after
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I remember wandering around the woodland areas near my home town and finding frogs then doing all sorts of horrible things to them just cos it was fun.
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I remember going around my home town and essentially starting fights with anyone and everyone. It felt good to be towering over them, to be more powerful than them, to be the toughest kid around.
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I remember one day my mum left me at home and I was bored, we lived in an apartment block quite high up so I decided to grab some eggs and throw them at people and cars outside, I actually ended up completely messing up my neighbours car and luckily I missed the people that I was aiming for with the eggs as it was quite high up.
There are many more just like this, in fact I could go on all day
To say that I was only acting like this as a learned response or that I was only acting like this because I was somehow hurt is to miss almost the entire picture of what actually motivated my behaviour in those instances.
There is a good reason why there is such an intricate system of morals and beliefs that is so heavily indoctrinated into children as part of the socialising process.
I actually remember Peter sorta debunking this in the virtual freedom DVD, where he mentions that this is one of the ‘flavours’ of beliefs in the world at that time, that if only we tear the system down we would all be happy and he points out that what actually would happen is a complete breakdown of what we call civilisation, with looting, murdering, rape etc
So much for the poor ‘me’ only hurting cos ‘I’ am hurt.
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