(08-09-2019, 03:45 AM)Red Belt Wrote: ^^ That doesn't describe someone highly intelligent. Perhaps you haven't encountered such a person yet. Hopefully you never do.
Even not so intelligent people may not have any problems remembering lies. And smart people can lie to you regardless of high hard you challenge them. Many are extremely manipulative. And will use your own emotions against without you even being aware of it.
Again, that may be intelligence of the unwise kind but it's not intelligence of the wise kind.
Quote:Anyways you seem set on the belief that intelligent people who are deceptive harm themselves more in the long run regardless that others may have different experiences. And i have no desire to change that. So i'll leave you with that.
You make me sound naive but that's because I'm clearly not saying what you think I'm saying. I'm not saying that intelligent people can't exploit others for their own gain. I'm not saying that intelligent manipulative people don't exist (I've met plenty of them).
I'm saying that regardless of the fact that their anti-social and/or criminal use of their intelligence has a payoff and a benefit (there are, after all, perhaps evoluitionary reasons for why psychopaths exist) ... of course it does. They're predators.
I'm not saying it doesn't have a benefit. Hell, it might help them get ahead in life. A lot of CEOs that are the head of companies are psychopaths. A lot of highly successful people are psychopaths. And these people do, also, indeed, have a lot of fun exploiting people and they enjoy the fact that they are able to become successful out of exploiting the more vulnerable and less intelligent.
I'm not denying any of that either.
I'm just saying that it does come at a cost as well. Such people are best able to deceive others convincingly by also partly deceiving themselves. And it does require effort for them to do what they do. And even if they have a perfect memory—and I agree that many stupid people can remember their lies just fine—that is besides the point. It's all besides the point. My point is that a higher level of happiness, wisdom and, indeed, secular enlightenment can be reached without any of that shit and without them taking the risks they do. They are very competent at being deceivers so the risks may indeed be very small for them ... but they are, ultimately, being happy in a very hedonistic way or power-driven way that is not the ultimate depths of wisdom. Such people don't experience life at its very best. The happiest person in the world, after all, is Matthieu Ricard ... rather than a psychopath.
It may be wiser to be a crafty and successful predatory psychopath than to be a complete idiot or victim. But it's not the depths of wisdom. They are still foolish.
And, as I said, it's no surprise that even a high functioning psychopath—the ultimate example of a manipulate person—isn't completely high functioning and is self-destructive as well as other-destructive. The thing about completely selfish and manipulative people is that they are often almost as shitty towards their future self as they are towards others.
P.S. I'm not saying you need a conscience to be wise, either, by the way. And I'm not saying you have to feel remorse or moral outrage. I have no conscience and I don't feel remorse or moral outrage. But I don't
need to exploit others and I recognize that there are higher peaks. For starters, even if they're 99% likely to not get caught, they're not 100% likely to not get caught. But somebody like me doesn't need to take that 1% list because I'm perfectly happy without any of that stuff. There are higher peaks of wisdom than exploiting others. My point is that I avoid exploiting others for completely selfish reasons and it's wiser than those who exploit others for completely selfish reasons.
Epicurus got this right.
Wikipedia article on Epicureanism Wrote:The Epicurean understanding of justice was inherently self-interested. Justice was deemed good because it was seen as mutually beneficial. Individuals would not act unjustly even if the act was initially unnoticed because of possibly being caught and punished. Both punishment and fear of punishment would cause a person disturbance and prevent them from being happy.
The ultimate form of wisdom is to be completely selfish but to not
need to harm others in order to be happy.
Rule Egoism works among similar lines:
Wikipedia article on Rule Egoism Wrote:Rule egoism is the doctrine under which an individual evaluates the optimal set of rules according to whether conformity to those rules bring the most benefit to himself. An action, therefore, is right if it promotes his welfare at least as well as any alternative rule available to him. It is associated with foundational egoism, which maintains that normative factors must be grounded in consideration of the agent's well-being - something that rule egoism does but in a way that avoids factoral egoism.
While people who are experts at exploiting others might be able to get away with it—even repeatedly—the possibility of failure (and they can't know that they will always get away with it because they're not omniscient), however small, makes it not worth it. A rule to ot harm others is a rule worth adopting even purely for your self-interest because the risks are smaller.
And even if it's the tinest risk they are taking ever ... it's still inferior to having
no need for such a risk, however small. If you can be completely happy without any of that shit then it's clearly not the pinnacle of wisdom.
And, as Epicurus pointed out, even those who never get punished are often disturbed by a fear of getting punished. The happiest and wisest individual doesn't have that problem. The one way to
guarantee never getting caught is to not do the thing that you could get caught for.