The latter. Although different people draw the lines elsewhere, and also different people can do the same thing for different reasons.
Is it pathological if someone sends 50% of their salary to charity? Many people would say yes. Some people would say no.
Is it pathological to work yourself to death for a socially accepted reason, such as making enough money to get your children to an expensive university?
From my perspective, the causes of the harmful behavior for the items in the list are:
can’t test reality
can’t feel worthy
can’t accept shame
can’t accept being loved
can’t accept other people dying for preventable reasons
can’t feel preferences
can’t test reality
can’t accept immodesty
can’t accept reality
That one item feels significantly different, although maybe it is just a matter of opinion.
Yeah, I think I agree, and I have hunch as to why. Let me know what you think.
I think an objection such as that they can’t help people if they’re dead misses the point that working themselves to death might just be constructed to be the right thing to do according to utilitarian values, e.g., because it’s the crunch time in their space.
What’s going on is rather that all of these behaviors are adaptations to terrible environments, and people can only really heal once they are out of the environment that makes the behaviors adaptive, that requires them. Otherwise “healing” would be just doubling down on the same adaptations while learning more mature defenses and reality testing. But the world is one ongoing catastrophe, so there’s no getting out of that one.
So to find out whether the behavior is pathological, we’d have to find out whether the person actually has the sort of utilitarian values that make it consistent or whether they’re acting from a place of, e.g., helplessness.
How I would phrase this item is “can’t accept helplessness,” because I imagine that in many cases these people are not actually such consistent utilitarians but that they feel helpless in view of all the suffering in the world. But because helplessness is such an intolerable feeling, they prefer to feel responsible for all the suffering and hence guilty of it, and then this guilt or responsibility propels them into the catharsis of self-destruction.
I basically agree with your perspective, but I wanted to comment on the difference that “killing yourself to help others” at least actually helps others, even if the price is too high, while “killing yourself for purely psychological reasons” helps no one.
Or let me put it this way: If someone worked themselves to death in order to save millions of people (in some way that would make his motivation and impact completely obvious to everyone), such person would be celebrated as a hero. So it’s a question of degree: how many people saved, with how much certainty, how directly… before most people declare that it’s not worth it.
Yeah, makes sense. Something else I failed to mention is that pathology also requires that we’re not simply dealing with a reasoned decision of someone who could’ve just as soon decided something else, but with a decision that is so multiply overdetermined by traumatic adaptations that it’s almost impossible for the person to do anything else. So the type of decision process also makes a difference.
The latter. Although different people draw the lines elsewhere, and also different people can do the same thing for different reasons.
Is it pathological if someone sends 50% of their salary to charity? Many people would say yes. Some people would say no.
Is it pathological to work yourself to death for a socially accepted reason, such as making enough money to get your children to an expensive university?
From my perspective, the causes of the harmful behavior for the items in the list are:
can’t test reality
can’t feel worthy
can’t accept shame
can’t accept being loved
can’t accept other people dying for preventable reasons
can’t feel preferences
can’t test reality
can’t accept immodesty
can’t accept reality
That one item feels significantly different, although maybe it is just a matter of opinion.
Yeah, I think I agree, and I have hunch as to why. Let me know what you think.
I think an objection such as that they can’t help people if they’re dead misses the point that working themselves to death might just be constructed to be the right thing to do according to utilitarian values, e.g., because it’s the crunch time in their space.
What’s going on is rather that all of these behaviors are adaptations to terrible environments, and people can only really heal once they are out of the environment that makes the behaviors adaptive, that requires them. Otherwise “healing” would be just doubling down on the same adaptations while learning more mature defenses and reality testing. But the world is one ongoing catastrophe, so there’s no getting out of that one.
So to find out whether the behavior is pathological, we’d have to find out whether the person actually has the sort of utilitarian values that make it consistent or whether they’re acting from a place of, e.g., helplessness.
How I would phrase this item is “can’t accept helplessness,” because I imagine that in many cases these people are not actually such consistent utilitarians but that they feel helpless in view of all the suffering in the world. But because helplessness is such an intolerable feeling, they prefer to feel responsible for all the suffering and hence guilty of it, and then this guilt or responsibility propels them into the catharsis of self-destruction.
I basically agree with your perspective, but I wanted to comment on the difference that “killing yourself to help others” at least actually helps others, even if the price is too high, while “killing yourself for purely psychological reasons” helps no one.
Or let me put it this way: If someone worked themselves to death in order to save millions of people (in some way that would make his motivation and impact completely obvious to everyone), such person would be celebrated as a hero. So it’s a question of degree: how many people saved, with how much certainty, how directly… before most people declare that it’s not worth it.
Yeah, makes sense. Something else I failed to mention is that pathology also requires that we’re not simply dealing with a reasoned decision of someone who could’ve just as soon decided something else, but with a decision that is so multiply overdetermined by traumatic adaptations that it’s almost impossible for the person to do anything else. So the type of decision process also makes a difference.