The former. Being a prophet is great! You’ve achieved enlightenment! All you’re doing is trying to spread the good word of your revelations with the rest of humanity. Here are all of these people, living lives of immense suffering, and you have the solution. You can bring them peace. You can ease the torment of their souls! Even a cold-blooded utilitarian can see that a 5% reduction in suffering multiplied by several hundred million people represents a substantial gain in overall utility. And if a bit of force needs to be applied in order to get people to see the Good Word, then that is justified, is it not?
This feels fairly off both from how historical prophets seem to have thought, and the modern day aspiring-prophets I’ve seen behave.
Being a prophet sucks in part because you can clearly see that correct thing that everybody should do… but nobody understands you and are constantly misinterpreting you or not listening to you or seeing you as a threat to their power.
And you generally don’t have the power to actually just make people do things. And if you do… you still have do all the stressful leadership things, without any commensurate reward.
Being a prophet sucks in part because you can clearly see that correct thing that everybody should do… but nobody understands you and are constantly misinterpreting you or not listening to you or seeing you as a threat to their power.
Turns out this part doesn’t suck because being a prophet you also understand this is going to happen and are accepting of it and work with it. It only counter-factually sucks to the non-prophet imaging what it would be like to be a prophet.
At least for some sufficiently advanced prophet. I think Sarah is using “prophet” in a way that your interpretation makes sense, as in many people will be in what I might instead call the “advisor” category.
I think prophets vary in whether they are “the sort of enlightened which comes bundled with equanimity.”
I agree advisor generally works, but not for the use case (important to this post) wherein someone does lead, but isn’t at the top of the pecking order.
We’ve been using the term prophet here, but it’s really just a term to refer to people who make decisions but don’t allocate all the resources to themselves. Certainly that more general group of people has not achieved enlightenment.
I think the distinction is important, but also my sense is the people who are actually enlightened don’t have that great a lived experience [at least of the process of trying to teach others about enlightment].
The former. Being a prophet is great! You’ve achieved enlightenment! All you’re doing is trying to spread the good word of your revelations with the rest of humanity. Here are all of these people, living lives of immense suffering, and you have the solution. You can bring them peace. You can ease the torment of their souls! Even a cold-blooded utilitarian can see that a 5% reduction in suffering multiplied by several hundred million people represents a substantial gain in overall utility. And if a bit of force needs to be applied in order to get people to see the Good Word, then that is justified, is it not?
This feels fairly off both from how historical prophets seem to have thought, and the modern day aspiring-prophets I’ve seen behave.
Being a prophet sucks in part because you can clearly see that correct thing that everybody should do… but nobody understands you and are constantly misinterpreting you or not listening to you or seeing you as a threat to their power.
And you generally don’t have the power to actually just make people do things. And if you do… you still have do all the stressful leadership things, without any commensurate reward.
Turns out this part doesn’t suck because being a prophet you also understand this is going to happen and are accepting of it and work with it. It only counter-factually sucks to the non-prophet imaging what it would be like to be a prophet.
At least for some sufficiently advanced prophet. I think Sarah is using “prophet” in a way that your interpretation makes sense, as in many people will be in what I might instead call the “advisor” category.
I think prophets vary in whether they are “the sort of enlightened which comes bundled with equanimity.”
I agree advisor generally works, but not for the use case (important to this post) wherein someone does lead, but isn’t at the top of the pecking order.
We’ve been using the term prophet here, but it’s really just a term to refer to people who make decisions but don’t allocate all the resources to themselves. Certainly that more general group of people has not achieved enlightenment.
I think the distinction is important, but also my sense is the people who are actually enlightened don’t have that great a lived experience [at least of the process of trying to teach others about enlightment].