Last updated: Sat, Aug 24, 2024
We are obsessed with other people. We observe each other in life doing nearly all the things that people can do, we obsess about relationships, we evaluate others' behavior, we produce and consume fictional accounts of fictional people with an endless appetite and at enormous expense. We invent ritual competitions and work ourselves into a state of apoplexy over them. We line people up in rows and columns and watch them dance or march together. We are above all else social.
Among the great eternal social issues for humankind are issues of cooperation and competition. On one hand, cooperation is essential for personal and group success. Notwithstanding hero myths, people succeed through group effort. On the other hand, important resources are limited. It shouldn't be surprising that people develop strong norms about the obligation to compete fairly, about what is fair and what isn't. Nobody likes a cheater.
Pain is frequently cast as the false face of a suspected villain in a melodrama about cheating. (See Cheating.)
Cooperation is usually seen as the bright side of the cooperate/compete coin. But judging from history, fair competition is a difficult goal. Feudalism, slavery, capitalism, communism, bureaucracy, communalism, state religions, representative democracy, are among the institutions that have served as large-scale frameworks to promote collective efforts. At a smaller, more human scale, the need for cooperation and the recognition of our mutual reliance have resulted in norms about personal responsibility and its complement, free will.
Pain is sometimes seen as an anomaly antithetical to personal responsibility. The claim that pain necessarily affects behavior is implicitly an argument against free will (Pain, Will, and Responsibility.)
Within this section...
Cheating (Last updated: Fri, Sep 13, 2024)
Pain, Will, and Responsibility (Last updated: Fri, Sep 13, 2024)
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Understandings of Chronic Pain in the Culture (Last updated: Fri, Sep 13, 2024)