Malcolm Ocean's roamblog

October 27th, 2023

edited 2023-10-27 · open in Roam
  • reality distortion fields
  • I can tell for myself — tennis example
  • fragments from thread on coercion
    • questions to maybe address:
      • what's the difference between material coercion and incentives?
        • could say it's about whether you're bluffing, but a bluff definitely has moves in the existential dimension.
        • oh, it could be something about the outsizedness of the punishment—something about that feels right. not "this is a reasonable cost that you might choose to pay" but "technically you can do whatever you want but obviously you will want to follow orders because that's better than dying"
      • what's the difference between existential coercion and the social contract?
        • I find myself thinking that there's something similar here. a healthy social contract has appropriately-sized consequences for things, and is open to deviance and new ideas to the extent that this variance can be integrated into the whole
    • there's a kind of groundedness/sovereignty where you are immune to existential coercion, but where ofc someone might still be able to get you to hand over your wallet if they have a gun
    • ---
    • twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1691110752369713152
    • this thread was inspired by @RichDecibels tweeting about non-coercion and being surprised by how much people talk about self-coercion rather than other-coercion
    • twitter.com/RichDecibels/status/1717571554748350710
    • it seems to me that we don't generally materially coerce ourselves—is it even possible? maybe not.
    • ahh tho maybe, riffing on Core Transformation, we might posit that parts withhold states of joy/bliss/pleasure/oneness, as a carrot/stick
    • 0000
    • it comes from recognizing your fundamental freedom—seeing this:
    • twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1602413329322020892
    • something about ego feels relevant here; relates to being open to dying
    • ---
    • it also seems to me that it's in some sense impossible for us to be existentially coerced by someone else without existentially coercing ourselves
    • you can practice not getting existentially coerced by yourself, then it translates to others