Heaven. Or just the idea that some part of the consciousness outlives the body. I really hate that this is all I get, there’s so much I’ll never get to do just because my parents decided when I was too young to decide for myself.
Spirits.
It’d be cool.
Magic
That people are inherently good. This not being the case is reinforced near daily by people’s behaviors.
Hanlon’s razor. It’s pretty clear some people can be stupid and malicious simultaneously, or will even feign stupidity to hide malice.
The notion that “facts matter”.
I’ve spent my entire life believing that facts don’t care about feelings. That scientific truth doesn’t require your belief in it in order to be true. That at the end of the day, reasoning will beat emotion…
By far the most dis-heartening thing about the last few years (to me) has been accepting the idea they “facts” are “whatever is shouted the loudest”.
It, more than anything else, makes me feel helpless. If the enemy isn’t even playing with the same fact-sheet… How do you even begin to fight that?
The average person having empathy
Ghosts. My 18 year old cat passed end of last year and she was one of my best friends. I just wish that instead of me knowing that the shades of her I see are actively produced by my mind (i notice me doing them) that she’d really spook around me, that i could just embrace the little shade and show her that i still love her. Well now I’m crying at work
The revolutionary potential of the American people.
Trickle-down economics.
U.S. democracy
Karma - there are way too many shitty people who just continue to be shitty because nothing ever comes back to bite them. Meanwhile, people who actually try to help are kicked around the most.
Most people at their core are good people
I would say most people are good. However, the human brain is pretty shit and easy to manipulate. It’s easy to make people view other people as not human or other to them, or to not think about them at all. Maybe that is “not good” in some definitions though. When face-to-face, I will bet every time on someone treating someone well. I’ll lose the bet occasionally, but I’ll be right more than wrong.
I don’t remember where I read this quote originally and I can only paraphrase it, but observing people living in a capitalist society and concluding that human nature is self-centeredness and greed is equivalent to observing workers in a factory that is poisoning their lungs and concluding that human nature is to cough.
That’s a nice quote, thank you. I looked into it. It’s by Andrew Collier:
To look at people in capitalist society and conclude that human nature is egoism, is like looking at people in a factory where pollution is destroying their lungs and saying that it is human nature to cough.
Primary goal is to survive in the environment you are in, how many might have a desire to escape that environment but lack the ability to do so? Leave it all behind and live in a cabin in the woods isn’t exactly an unheard of idea.
The issue, as I see it, is that most people struggle to envision a society beyond capitalism. Capitalist ideology is embedded in every aspect of our lives. It appears in our mindset, in books, movies, and even in children’s television shows. The narrative that anyone can succeed if they work hard enough, and that poverty is simply the result of laziness, is both powerful and pervasive.
The idea that everyone should live in isolated cabins is neither a realistic vision nor a desirable goal for society.
Not everyone thinks “society” is a goal.
You mean like a hermit? I think that’s a rare fantasy. But if you want to do it, sure, go for it. Isn’t there a lot of space and wilderness in Canada?
Damn, ya beat me. I’m not good people to so I know from first hand experience.
Don’t worry, people can change.
Trust me, I used to be a huge piece of shit
No one can stop you ordering a huge steak and a glass of water.
I was gonna go with “most people give a damn”, but I think you phrased it a bit more positively.
I think “good” and “bad” are hard terms to apply to people objectively, but I do believe that most people value social coherence and are willing to do (the minimum amount of) something to maintain it. If you can’t believe at least that it means that all of those thin blue line people are right, and I’m just not willing to believe that’s true.
I used to think the Anne Frank quote was inspiring. Now I just see it as bitterly ironic.
Showing people irrefutable proof of something will change their minds.
There are only finitely many prime numbers and I will not hear otherwise.
And your irrefutable proof is…?
If you want to show there are infinitely many primes, one way is to first note that every integer greater than 1 has a prime factor. This is because if an integer n is prime, n is a prime factor of itself, and if n is not prime then it must have a smaller factor m other than 1, 1< m < n. If m is also not prime, it too must have a smaller factor other than 1, and you can keep playing this game but there are only so many integers between 1 and n so eventually you’ll get to a factor of n that has no smaller factors of its own other than 1, which means it is prime.
Let’s now suppose there is only a finite number of primes, we’ll try to show that this assumption leads to nonsense so can’t be possible.
We can multiply any finite number of integers together to get a new integer. Let’s multiply all of the primes together to get a new number M. Then M + 1 gives a remainder of 1 when you divide by any prime number. Since dividing by a factor will always give a remainder of 0, none of the prime numbers can be a factor of M + 1. So M + 1 is an imteger bigger than 1 with no prime factors. This is impossible, so there must be a mistake somewhere in this argument.
The only thing we said that we’re not 100% sure is true was that there are a finite number of primes, so that has to be our mistake. So there must be infinitely many prime numbers.
