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A wise man is one who silences not his cringe, but the part of him who cringes
How? Nobody offers prefrontal lobotomies anymore...
No. You do not remove the cringe, but embrace the cringe. Become one with the cringe and you will transcend it.
Real talk, it's just desensitization through exposure.
Cringing is self-harm, in that no actual damage would have happened except for the ways in which an individual punishes oneself. The punishment, itself, is non-productive and a waste of both personal energy and time as well as emotional capacity.
One cannot learn from punishing oneself. One must learn to reapproach the calculus of benefit and harm from first principles and soberly, mindfully understand what actually matters, without preoccupation for the petty and superficial distractions.
Look... Shame is a tool. It exists to give us a sense of where we stand in terms of compliance or violation with regard to the Social Contract. Societies too steeped in luxury and too abstracted from/no longer concerned with visceral needs will tend to hallucinate new bullshit hoops for people to jump through, for the sake of stimulus alone. Creating aesthetic taboos is little more than superfluous stimming for the sake of feeling SOMETHING where there is otherwise a lack of conflict because our ancestors evolved to confront a world that challenged them. It's practically masturbatory. SHED. THESE. ARTIFICIAL. CHAINS. You will no longer struggle with them if you can finally come to understand that their arbitrary restraint performs no actual viable purpose beyond creating pointless hardship. You do not OWE society a convoluted navigation through its shallow and performative obstacle course if you can actually, instead, comprehend for YOURSELF what the limits of benefit and harm really are. It's like we're expected to navigate a maze blindfolded by smell because "it's tradition" but if you take off the blindfold you'll see that the maze's walls and pitfalls are not aligned 1:1 with the proverbial "scent trail".
Punishment and shame should only be applied to discourage ACTUAL HARMS, not transgressions against the delicate sensibilities of the paranoid loud minority of trendsetters and gatekeepers. If you know yourself and the CONCRETE consequences of your actions, the bleating of the pearl-clutching hand-wringing false idols of stolen authority can no longer contain or threaten you.
I fucking LOVE Lemmy!