Aside from “rights”, the words that we have to start stepping away from are consent, choice, and freedom.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with these words per se. But we have turned them into idols. No other consideration is allowed or even occurs when something is claimed to be a result of “a freely consented choice that is everybody’s right.”
None of these things are absolutes because nobody can even define them. What’s a free choice? What is it free of? Self-awareness is extremely rare. Today I think I freely consented and tomorrow I feel differently. Who’s to say what’s more freely chosen, yesterday’s enthusiasm or today’s repentance?
We had the whole #MeToo quagmire because first they consented, and then they un-consented, or they consented to one part but not the other, and we are sitting there, parsing who chose what at which point. As Juan Manuel de Prada correctly said, we are so stuck on “free choice” that we aren’t even asking why people are leading these weird, miserable lifestyles at all. The whole set-up is wrong. Remember the Mattress Girl who consented to anal sex with a random dude because she thought this activity, which she clearly didn’t enjoy, was going to get her a boyfriend? She un-consented and destroyed his life when he refused to provide the payment she expected for this unpleasant act. There’s so much wrong here, aside from how anybody expressed consent. Why can’t she openly say she wants a boyfriend? Why is he finagling an unwanted sex act out of a clearly desperate young woman? Why are they both using sex as a substitute for every other form of communication?
The deification of consent has already given us transed grade-schoolers and is leading us straight to the legalization of pedophilia. This is not to say we should abolish consent. It simply shouldn’t be the only category of analysis.
Social media are filled with stories of adult detransers who are sharing absolute horrors about the mutilation inflicted on them. And every time, there’s a chorus of, “but you wanted this. You chose this. You consented. So what’s the problem?” There’s a 30yo man who had his penis cut off. This is a terrible tragedy. He’s devastated. But people are chirping on and on about how he chose it himself as if they weren’t choosing the most bizarre things themselves during COVID out of artificially stoked anxiety and politically induced ignorance.
Humans are not hyper-rational creatures who are always calculating the most optimal choices. We aren’t robots. We are emotional, fallible, easily led astray, often confused. Life is a lot more complicated than a series of calculated free choices.
Clarissa's Blog 
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Legally speaking, in common-law jurisdictions, the only thing you cannot consent to is voluntary servitude, and, historically, that only after slavery was abolished.
Apparently, in the presence of a “valid contract”, everything else goes. Blame it on the other Idol of common-law countries: civil litigation.
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Oh, look, let me add the one word missing from this entire first page of your blog then …
CONSEQUENCES.
It’s as if a huge hunk of humanity lacks significant time binding skills.
So let’s try this then: you take the infamous Feynman diagram of particle flow (which is on Wikipedia, BTW) and consider that the anti-particle flow backwards in time that could flow to a specific point in the past may also annihilate choice out of necessity.
Therefore unless you know otherwise, all choices are irreversible, and maybe those choices that aren’t simply have ways to remedy the irreversible aspects so that you’re not stuck with them.
And so “free choice” as an absolute or abstract concept would then imply that backwards flow into the past doesn’t exist and so you can act in the present on the future with impunity …
Which is to say: without consequences.
So the only “free choices” you have are actually “choices with acceptable costs”, above which they are not in any way free at all.
Ah, but you did use a certain word almost like the word consequences: repentance.
That’s merely petitioning the divine with prayers for relief from reality for choices made in the past, often the ones that people wanted without having to own the consequences.
As the great rabbi Jim Morrison once said, you may not petition the Lord with prayer. 🙂
Without accepting the inevitability of consequences, you also don’t have responsibility, which is an acceptance of that inevitability.
This all isn’t even a problem of “worshipping words”.
This is a problem with a fundamental failure of a huge hunk of humanity to fail at time binding and to lack a usable future time orientation, without which people can hallucinate the reality around them as a “permanent present”, believing it to be pliable with word spells rather than something determined by fact and temporality.
And that’s why “self-awareness” is extremely rare.
I’ve recently read a story that has an unusual temporal self-awareness over at the SCP Foundation’s SCP-8000 contest, and it’s called “TIME PERVERT”.
One of the huge reasons I love it despite some serious construction flaws is that a fictional version of Eliezer Yudkowsky has set himself up as the Scarlet King who has the power of temporal control across multiple realities, serving as a horrible cross-reality version of James Clerk Maxwell’s sorting daemon.
And so in the realities this sorting daemon controls, everything flows through a single temporal gradient moment, at which time the Foundation’s ability to sense what’s going on got triggered and was quickly rendered useless by the wave of unreality spreading out from the center point of control, after which the Foundation has found itself mostly but not completely trapped.
Or for those of you who don’t like sci-fi explanations: it seizes control of present and future reality and then loops the past back to itself so you can’t escape its “time prison”.
Nasty bit of work there.
Sound like anything you’ve seen lately?
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The concept of hyper-rational decision making was debunked a long time ago in economics.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing
Any claims that such a thing exists in social science sounds more like physics envy than a realistic theory.
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“nothing wrong with these words per se. But we have turned them into idols”
Couple o’ things…
first – Infantilization: There seem to be few (if any) incentives at present for people to actually grow up and mature past some insufferable stage of childhood…. is this a side effect of neoliberalism? regressing people to a stage where they want what they want NOW!!!!!!!
a simple adult approach to these words clears up lots of problems
freedom: the ability to make certain life decisions for oneself, not others
choice: one choice can preclude others, some choices have consequences that are not fun, some people make bad choices that cannot be undone.
consent: can be revoked going forward, it cannot be revoked retro-actively…
And add:
regret: every adult human being makes decisions that they later regret, it might be minor, it might be major, it may affect others. Learning to live with regret and not let it destroy you or others is a major hallmark of adulthood
second – power of words: We are in an age where people mistake words for reality. russia continues to try to manifest victory simply by declaring that they’ve already won…
people think they can overcome the biological reality of their bodies by saying they’re the opposite sex
infants do not have responsibility and they cannot build or maintain anything of value….
We need adulthood again.
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We form language, but language also forms us.
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