Innocence is basically a lack of understanding, or more precisely it seems to be a lack of negative connotations in ones understanding of the world. You can undo this process through mental alchemy, but I can not put the process into words very well.
To give an example: I might not want to buy a videogame, because the company which made it is big, and because big companies tend to be evil, and because I don’t want to support evil. Here, we see that a negative impression of mine is causing a bad feeling to appear on something mostly unrelated (4 jumps of distance away). This is a sort of corruption. I can love videogames and still hate large companies, they’re not mutually exclusive. But the naive person is just happy to play a video game, they don’t have personal battles against evil which pollute their mental associations, or at least not many. This inner grouping of things should be avoided, lest one creates a big knot which is triggered by basically everything. This is probably why stupid people are happier—they think more locally (and live more in the moment)
I doubt you will get many good answers on the topic on LW. Why was eating the forbidden fruit sin? Why was prometheus punished? Why is the devil generally regarded as intelligent? Why is self-reliance sometimes refered to as luciferian? Knowledge is generally bad for ones mental health, it just aids survival. So is knowledge possibly evil? I don’t expect other users to even entertain this thought. I will also add that it’s possible to know a lot and still be innocent, which is because intellectuals tend to live in ivory towers. The bad kind of intelligence so to speak is the one which looks beyond the surface too much. This is possibly related: https://gwern.net/doc/philosophy/epistemology/2012-sistery-tryingtoseethrough.html
There’s many reasons why innocence feels nice, the most important ones are: 1: Environments in which innocence can exist are good. Innocence is a finite resource, if you have too many people acting in bad faith in a population, they will exploit this innocence and destroy it in the process. It feels good for the same reason that it feels good to see a big beach without any plastic, glass bottles or billboards on it.
2: Innocence is beautiful. This is because it has high purity. This means that it has a low entropy. This means that it’s untouched, uncorrupted, and healthy. Life is a battle against entropy, is it any wonder that our instincts picked up on this?
3: Innocence can be exploited by us. There’s an old “rule of the internet” which says: The more beautiful and pure a thing is, the more satisfying it is to corrupt it, isn’t it?”. I think this is true, as grim as it sounds. Consider internet trolls and reaction channels on Youtube, what’s the goal here? It’s envoking reaction. But reactivity is a limited resource. One reacts less and less as their mental model is updated to destroy prediction-errors. This is also a reason why intellectuals tend to be so calm, and why a lot of us have problems with socializing as intensely as others, no?
4: Innocence allows us an escape from ugly things. A large amount of media, mostly Japanese, is simply escapism, “slice of life”, products made for “healing” us, i.e. purifying our mental associations so that our 12-hour workdays don’t destroy us. As a defense against mental corruption, we have created three additional memes in recent times, though I don’t think a lot of people are aware of the deeper motivations here. They’re “touch grass”, “return to monke” and “quit social media”. What does these translate to? “Get away from the negative, associate with the positive instead”.
I could write a whole sequence on this topic myself, but I should stop here, after explaining two things which generally genetally get in the way of peoples understanding of this topic: 1: There are no racist jokes. Things don’t hold attributes like “racist” or “degenerate”, instead, they exist in the minds of those telling them. Sometimes, as most accusations of these things are actually projections. “Anti-racists” tend to condemn everything within a distance of 4-5 associations of racism, which is why you might get called a nazi on Reddit if you say that you are against mass-immigration. (Every echo-chamber has people like this, it’s not unique to a specific ideology at all) Truly innocent people have no reaction, and shameless people have no reaction either. The former is thought to be the latter, and ironically it’s only because those who misunderstand this are ugly on the inside themselves. If I say something inappropriate, it’s likely because I don’t know that it might be inappropriate, and not because I’m an asshole who has gotten so used to being inappropriate that I made it who I am. 2: Consuming “corrupt” material doesn’t make you corrupt before you understand it. It’s indeed possible even to purify the material. Consider porn—is that degenerate? It often is, but animals engage in sex with absolute innocence. It’s only shameful and dirty once you make it. But again, the shameless and the innocent look much too similar, they’re misunderstood.
As an extra note of caution: Don’t fight against bad things, fight for good things instead. These two are not equal. The western world is basically collapsing into degeneracy because people don’t understand this. They keep engaging with everything they want to remove. “That which you resist, persists”, “He who fights monsters”, how many times does it need to be said for the population to get it?
Innocence is basically a lack of understanding, or more precisely it seems to be a lack of negative connotations in ones understanding of the world.
You can undo this process through mental alchemy, but I can not put the process into words very well.
To give an example: I might not want to buy a videogame, because the company which made it is big, and because big companies tend to be evil, and because I don’t want to support evil. Here, we see that a negative impression of mine is causing a bad feeling to appear on something mostly unrelated (4 jumps of distance away). This is a sort of corruption.
I can love videogames and still hate large companies, they’re not mutually exclusive. But the naive person is just happy to play a video game, they don’t have personal battles against evil which pollute their mental associations, or at least not many. This inner grouping of things should be avoided, lest one creates a big knot which is triggered by basically everything. This is probably why stupid people are happier—they think more locally (and live more in the moment)
I doubt you will get many good answers on the topic on LW. Why was eating the forbidden fruit sin? Why was prometheus punished? Why is the devil generally regarded as intelligent? Why is self-reliance sometimes refered to as luciferian? Knowledge is generally bad for ones mental health, it just aids survival. So is knowledge possibly evil? I don’t expect other users to even entertain this thought. I will also add that it’s possible to know a lot and still be innocent, which is because intellectuals tend to live in ivory towers. The bad kind of intelligence so to speak is the one which looks beyond the surface too much. This is possibly related: https://gwern.net/doc/philosophy/epistemology/2012-sistery-tryingtoseethrough.html
There’s many reasons why innocence feels nice, the most important ones are:
1: Environments in which innocence can exist are good. Innocence is a finite resource, if you have too many people acting in bad faith in a population, they will exploit this innocence and destroy it in the process. It feels good for the same reason that it feels good to see a big beach without any plastic, glass bottles or billboards on it.
2: Innocence is beautiful. This is because it has high purity. This means that it has a low entropy. This means that it’s untouched, uncorrupted, and healthy. Life is a battle against entropy, is it any wonder that our instincts picked up on this?
3: Innocence can be exploited by us. There’s an old “rule of the internet” which says: The more beautiful and pure a thing is, the more satisfying it is to corrupt it, isn’t it?”. I think this is true, as grim as it sounds. Consider internet trolls and reaction channels on Youtube, what’s the goal here? It’s envoking reaction. But reactivity is a limited resource. One reacts less and less as their mental model is updated to destroy prediction-errors. This is also a reason why intellectuals tend to be so calm, and why a lot of us have problems with socializing as intensely as others, no?
4: Innocence allows us an escape from ugly things. A large amount of media, mostly Japanese, is simply escapism, “slice of life”, products made for “healing” us, i.e. purifying our mental associations so that our 12-hour workdays don’t destroy us. As a defense against mental corruption, we have created three additional memes in recent times, though I don’t think a lot of people are aware of the deeper motivations here. They’re “touch grass”, “return to monke” and “quit social media”. What does these translate to? “Get away from the negative, associate with the positive instead”.
I could write a whole sequence on this topic myself, but I should stop here, after explaining two things which generally genetally get in the way of peoples understanding of this topic:
1: There are no racist jokes. Things don’t hold attributes like “racist” or “degenerate”, instead, they exist in the minds of those telling them. Sometimes, as most accusations of these things are actually projections. “Anti-racists” tend to condemn everything within a distance of 4-5 associations of racism, which is why you might get called a nazi on Reddit if you say that you are against mass-immigration. (Every echo-chamber has people like this, it’s not unique to a specific ideology at all)
Truly innocent people have no reaction, and shameless people have no reaction either. The former is thought to be the latter, and ironically it’s only because those who misunderstand this are ugly on the inside themselves. If I say something inappropriate, it’s likely because I don’t know that it might be inappropriate, and not because I’m an asshole who has gotten so used to being inappropriate that I made it who I am.
2: Consuming “corrupt” material doesn’t make you corrupt before you understand it. It’s indeed possible even to purify the material. Consider porn—is that degenerate? It often is, but animals engage in sex with absolute innocence. It’s only shameful and dirty once you make it. But again, the shameless and the innocent look much too similar, they’re misunderstood.
As an extra note of caution: Don’t fight against bad things, fight for good things instead. These two are not equal. The western world is basically collapsing into degeneracy because people don’t understand this. They keep engaging with everything they want to remove. “That which you resist, persists”, “He who fights monsters”, how many times does it need to be said for the population to get it?