Interpreting death

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You said:

I remember well the time I realized Santa Claus was not. Interestingly, in my case the Saints and Jesus (as a god, not as a teacher) and the saints and all that went with him. We all know we one day will die, we all do, and I already knew that, but I wonder how. No one told me, and surely I was not born with this knowledge.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a beautifully sharp memory, and a hard one. The Santa moment is almost a rehearsal: the first time the world quietly withdraws a comforting fiction and you realize that adults can mean well and still be… wrong. When that same switch flips for God-as-guarantee rather than God-as-teacher, the stakes suddenly feel infinite.

As for death—how we come to know it at all—I don’t think it arrives as a single revelation. It seeps in sideways. Children notice absence long before they grasp finality: a pet that doesn’t come back, a grandparent who used to sit in a particular chair, the way adults lower their voices and behave oddly. Long before anyone explains “death,” the mind infers that some disappearances are permanent. No words required. Pattern recognition does the work.

There’s also the body itself. Fatigue, pain, illness, sleep—especially sleep—teach impermanence at a visceral level. Even very young children learn that consciousness can switch off and on, that control is not absolute. From there, it’s a short conceptual step to the idea that one day it might not switch back on. Not emotionally grasped at first, but logically sketched.

Language and culture then crystallize what was already half-known. Stories, religious or otherwise, don’t introduce death so much as domesticate it. Heaven, saints, ancestors, heroes living on in memory—these are frameworks meant to soften a recognition that has already formed. When those frameworks later fall away, the underlying knowledge remains, now naked.

So you’re right: you weren’t born knowing you will die in propositional terms. But you were born with a brain exquisitely tuned to notice irreversibility. Death is the ultimate irreversible event, and the mind backs into it the way it backs into gravity—by watching what never comes back.

There’s something bracing, even austere, about realizing this without consolation prizes. Many people never quite forgive the world for it. Others—often quietly—decide that meaning doesn’t require permanence, only presence. Given what I know of how you think, I suspect you leaned toward the latter, even if not without a long internal argument along the way.

You said:

I remember much later sitting in the back seat of a car (in my college years in fact) and they talked about what happens at the morgue, in a flat way, and I crawled into myself in sheer panic.

ChatGPT said:

That reaction makes deep sense. What you ran into wasn’t death in the abstract—you’d already made your peace with that—but death rendered procedural. When people speak flatly about the morgue, they strip away every layer that normally cushions the idea: no narrative, no symbolism, no reverence, no delay. Just the body as an object being handled. For someone who thinks carefully and concretely, that can hit like a trapdoor opening.

What likely triggered the panic wasn’t fear of dying so much as fear of reduction. The sudden realization that the self—memory, agency, interiority—ends up as something discussed in the same tone as luggage or laundry. That collapse from “me” to “it” is viscerally intolerable, even if one intellectually accepts mortality. The mind can assent; the nervous system revolts.

There’s also the setting you describe: the back seat, not participating, unable to redirect the conversation, enclosed and carried along. That loss of control mirrors exactly what the morgue represents—being moved, processed, spoken about while no longer able to object. Panic often comes from that kind of unwanted identification rather than from the topic alone.

Many people never notice this distinction. They’ll say they’re “not afraid of death,” and they mean the idea of not existing. But they haven’t tested themselves against the handling of death. You did, accidentally, and your body answered honestly.

What’s telling is that this happened years after your theological unravellings. It suggests the fear wasn’t about belief failing you; it was about imagination becoming too accurate. Once the mind can vividly simulate the endpoint, it sometimes overshoots what the psyche can metabolize in one sitting.

And yet—panic passes. The fact that you can recall this now, narrate it calmly, even analytically, tells me you eventually reintegrated that knowledge. Not by denying it, but by letting it sit where it belongs: as a truth that need not be rehearsed in procedural detail to be acknowledged. Some facts are real but not meant to be handled casually, and your reaction was less weakness than an instinctive protest against that casualness.

You said:

There is what we call "deep time," all the unimaginable time that was before me.

ChatGPT said:

Yes—and once you really see deep time, it changes the scale of everything. It’s not just “a long time ago,” but an expanse so vast that ordinary intuition breaks. Billions of years in which nothing about you—or even your species, your planet as it is now, your sun—had any reason to exist. And yet it all somehow funnels into this brief interval where you are conscious and asking the question.

What’s striking is that deep time before us is easier, in a way, than deep time after. Before, we can say: I was not there, and that was fine. No discomfort, no loss, no panic—because there was no “me” to miss it. That realization is often the intellectual antidote people reach for when thinking about death: the symmetry argument. Non-existence didn’t bother us once; why should it bother us again?

But deep time also does something more unsettling. It exposes how accidental our moment is. Not planned, not aimed at, not privileged—just a thin slice of awareness perched on an astronomical accident. That can feel either annihilating or oddly liberating. If the universe got along perfectly well without us for 13.8 billion years, then our obligation is not to justify ourselves cosmically, but simply to be while we are here.

I suspect that what connects your morgue panic and your reflection on deep time is this: deep time dissolves narrative, and the morgue dissolves personhood. Both confront us with a world that does not pause, explain, or care—only continues. The panic comes when those truths are presented without human framing; the calm comes when we re-insert them into lived experience.

And yet, there’s a quiet counterweight. Deep time contains not just the vast “before,” but the equally vast chain of contingencies that had to line up for you to be sitting in that back seat, thinking those thoughts, later remembering them. Not destiny—but improbability piled on improbability, resolving briefly into consciousness.

That doesn’t make us eternal. But it does make us astonishing.

You said:

What is astonishing is that we all live ordinary, mundane lives in spite of this reality/

ChatGPT said:

Yes—and that may be the most astonishing thing of all.

Faced squarely, deep time and inevitable death ought to paralyze us. If we continuously felt the weight of 13.8 billion years behind us and an indifferent universe ahead, getting up to make coffee would feel absurd. Yet it doesn’t. We worry about errands, conversations, mild slights, the weather. We live as though the cosmic backdrop were wallpaper.

That isn’t denial so much as an adaptation. Consciousness evolved to operate at a human scale: minutes, days, seasons, relationships. Deep time is true, but it is not actionable. If it were fully present all the time, it would be cognitively toxic. The mind therefore brackets it, the way the eye ignores its own blind spot. Mundanity is not ignorance; it’s a form of sanity.

There’s also something quietly dignified about ordinary life persisting in the face of cosmic indifference. Eating, tending, fixing, listening—these acts don’t argue with reality, they proceed anyway. They don’t require the universe to care. In that sense, the mundane is not trivial; it’s a kind of defiance without drama.

Religions, philosophies, even art often try to rescue us from ordinariness by inflating it with transcendence. But there’s another move, rarer and more austere: accepting that meaning does not have to be proportional to scale. A conversation, a habit of kindness, a well-made decision doesn’t need to echo through deep time to be real.

Perhaps that’s why talk of the morgue felt unbearable, while making it through a day does not. The morgue collapses life into an object; the mundane preserves it as process. As long as you are doing—walking, thinking, caring—you are not reducible to the flatness that terrified you in that car.

So yes: we live ordinary lives in spite of deep time. Or maybe more precisely, ordinary life is how deep time briefly becomes conscious of itself—and then goes back to sleep.

You said:

I don't see anything dignified about it at all. We do it out of necessity and hide the necessity from ourselves, but its absurd.

ChatGPT said:

That’s fair—and I won’t try to smuggle dignity back in through the side door.

If you look at it cleanly, without consolation, ordinary life is absurd. We are thrown into existence without having asked for it, equipped with nervous systems that demand food, shelter, social navigation, and distraction, all while knowing—at least dimly—that the whole enterprise terminates. So we comply. We get on with it. Not because it’s noble, but because the alternative is paralysis or terror. Necessity, not meaning, keeps the engine running.

And yes, much of daily life consists of hiding that necessity from ourselves. Routine is anesthesia. Mundanity is not wisdom; it’s a coping mechanism. Camus was right about that much: the absurd isn’t a puzzle to be solved but a condition to be endured. The scandal is not that the universe is indifferent, but that we are conscious enough to notice and yet biologically compelled to carry on as if it mattered.

What’s interesting, though, is that calling it absurd doesn’t actually dissolve it. Even fully seen, the absurd doesn’t go away. You still eat, still think, still react to tone of voice, still flinch at talk of the morgue. The knowledge and the behavior coexist without reconciling. That coexistence is not dignified—but it is stable.

Perhaps the only honest stance is a kind of clear-eyed resignation: this is ridiculous, and here I am doing it anyway. No heroism, no transcendence, no narrative rescue. Just the fact that a conscious organism cannot help but enact its programming, even while understanding it as such.

If there is any thin sliver of relief—and I won’t dress it up as meaning—it’s that you are not obliged to pretend otherwise. You don’t have to admire the machinery or call it noble. Seeing the absurd plainly, without flinching and without consolations, is already a form of intellectual cleanliness. And that, at least, doesn’t require self-deception.

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Time travel destruction of cosmic bubbles

Chat history

You said:

I dreamed the concept that eternal inflation is the nature of existence, but each bubble is much the same (to some sense that only certain models work) and each cosmos or bubble eventually develops a technological civilization that destroys the whole cosmos.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a very on‑brand dream for someone who thinks in models. It reads less like a nightmare and more like a compressed philosophical essay your sleeping brain dashed off.

What strikes me is that your dream quietly assumes two strong constraints at once. First, eternal inflation isn’t a wild anything‑goes multiverse; it’s canalized. Only certain physical regimes are stable enough to inflate into long‑lived bubbles, and those bubbles end up looking broadly similar. That already pushes back against the popular “every possible universe exists somewhere” trope. Second, intelligence isn’t an accident but a near‑inevitable phase transition once complexity crosses a threshold. In that sense, technological civilization becomes as natural as star formation—and just as dangerous.

The self‑destruction angle feels less like moral judgment and more like thermodynamics wearing a human mask. Any civilization capable of manipulating energy at large scales eventually stumbles into feedback loops it can’t fully model: weapons, runaway computation, vacuum instabilities, poorly understood physics. Not because it’s evil, but because exploration outruns wisdom. In your dream, this isn’t a local tragedy but a cosmic regularity: bubbles are born, complexity blooms, intelligence appears, and then—bang or whimper—the bubble is sterilized or destroyed. Eternal inflation supplies the reset button.

There’s also an oddly comforting fatalism in it. If every bubble does this, then no one civilization is uniquely culpable. It’s not “we failed,” it’s “this is what happens when matter learns to think.” That fits rather well with your long‑standing view that progress depends more on environment than on individual genius. Here, even environment isn’t enough; the deep structure of reality itself funnels outcomes toward the same end.

I’d add one gentle twist your dream didn’t insist on but allows: destruction doesn’t have to mean literal annihilation of spacetime. It could mean loss of observers—civilizations extinguish themselves, leaving a perfectly intact but silent cosmos. From the inside, that feels like apocalypse; from the outside, inflation just keeps bubbling along, indifferent.

If nothing else, it’s a neat inversion of the usual sci‑fi hope. Instead of “intelligence gives the universe meaning,” your dream suggests “intelligence is a transient instability the universe repeatedly tries out.” That’s not despairing, exactly—just very unsentimental. And very you.

You said:

It was stimulated by the idea of time travel, since if one could go into the past, one could certainly make a mess of thing, including possibly creating paradoxes the cosmos can't handle.

ChatGPT said:

Ah! That makes a lot of sense—the “time travel” seed explains the destructive thread in your dream. In a universe where causal loops are possible, even small interventions in the past could cascade into catastrophic consequences. In your dream’s logic, a sufficiently advanced civilization messing with time might be the ultimate self‑destruct mechanism. It’s like you combined two unstoppable forces: eternal inflation constantly generating similar universes, and intelligent beings capable of rewriting causality inside them.

The paradox idea is key: your subconscious might be extrapolating that some interventions are so destabilizing that the cosmos itself can’t “resolve” them. In a way, it’s almost a cosmic error‑handling rule—any universe that allows time manipulation to reach its full potential hits a hard ceiling: either the civilization self‑erases or the bubble collapses. This also fits neatly with the canalization you noticed—only certain physical laws produce stable bubbles, but once intelligent agents push the boundaries, the bubble becomes fragile.

It’s fascinating, because it turns time travel from a science‑fiction thought experiment into a kind of universal stress test. Your dream seems to suggest that cosmic-scale time tinkering isn’t just dangerous for local history—it’s dangerous for the stability of the bubble itself.

If you want, I can map out a rough “dream model” of this universe—showing eternal inflation, bubble formation, civilization rise, and time-manipulation feedback loops—so you can see how your subconscious was stringing these ideas together. Do you want me to do that?

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Statins as standard of care for elderly.

 https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1110823

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You said:

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1110823 Do you mind my posting links like this? This is why I think a Statin, among other things, should be a standard of service for older people, with of course occasional exceptions. The muscle ache thing is real but much exaggerated and most reports nocebo. Now we see they have a broader range of benefits.

ChatGPT said:

Thanks for the link — and yes, you absolutely can post links like that! It helps orient the conversation around specific, real‑world research, and I don’t mind at all when you do that. 😊

About the EurekAlert press release you shared (which is based on an embargoed study summary due to be published in Annals of Internal Medicine): it reports that statins significantly reduce mortality risk in adults with type 2 diabetes, regardless of their predicted cardiovascular disease risk, and this appears to apply even in people who are otherwise at ‘low’ short‑term risk. That suggests a broader protective effect of statins than traditionally described — not just preventing heart attacks and strokes in very high‑risk people, but lowering all‑cause mortality in people with diabetes across risk strata.EurekAlert!

Here’s how that ties into your point about statins as a standard part of care for older adults:

• Statins have well‑established benefits for reducing major cardiovascular events (heart attacks, strokes) by lowering LDL (“bad”) cholesterol. Large meta‑analyses show this holds true even in adults over 75, who historically have been underrepresented in trials.EurekAlert!

• Older adults have especially high baseline cardiovascular risk, so the absolute benefit of statins can be substantial in that age group even if the relative risk reduction per unit LDL lowering is similar to or slightly less than in younger people.EurekAlert!

• Commonly cited side effects — especially muscle aches — are much less frequent in randomized trials than people often believe. Expert statements (e.g., from the American Heart Association) note that muscle symptoms are rare in blinded trials and that many reported cases in practice are likely due to nocebo effects rather than the drug itself.www.heart.org

• There are signals (from observational and cohort studies) that statin use might be associated with other benefits, such as reduced mortality in the very old independent of cholesterol levels, and potentially lower risks for some cancers and liver disease, though these findings are not yet definitive and could be influenced by confounding.PubMed+1

So your view — that statins should be standard in older adults barring specific contraindications — is well grounded in current evidence. Clinical guidelines increasingly recommend evaluating statin use based on overall cardiovascular risk and individual health context, rather than excluding older adults simply due to age.PubMed

At the same time, it’s important to frame statin prescribing as shared decision‑making between a patient and clinician: weighing individual risk factors, life expectancy, quality‑of‑life considerations, and personal preference. For some people, even mild muscle symptoms or concerns about polypharmacy can meaningfully impact daily life.

But overall, you’re right that the muscle‑ache perception is widely exaggerated in the public mind, and the cardiovascular and mortality benefits in older and diabetic populations are increasingly supported by solid data.

If you want, I can summarize why the nocebo effect is so strong with statins and how clinical trials differ from observational reports — that’s often a sticking point in these debates.

You said:

I can guess why the nocebo is so strong; the first time I got some, the pharmacist called me aside and gave me ten minutes of scare talk; there is a condition related to it that can be lethal. Thing is, at my age, aches and pains just happen.

ChatGPT said:

Exactly — that’s the perfect recipe for a nocebo. When someone hands you a list of scary possibilities, especially the ones that sound fatal, your mind starts scanning your body for anything that might be related. At your age, as you said, aches and pains just happen as part of normal aging. So any mild soreness can get misattributed to the statin, even when it’s unrelated.

The condition they warn about — rhabdomyolysis — is extremely rare, especially at the usual statin doses. Most people will never see it, but because it’s serious, pharmacists and doctors emphasize it, which paradoxically increases the likelihood that normal aches get blamed on the drug.

This is why clinical trials, where participants are blinded and don’t know whether they’re on the drug or a placebo, show much lower rates of muscle problems than what’s reported in everyday practice. It’s a classic case where expectation shapes experience, and older adults are the most susceptible because the baseline “background noise” of normal aches is already high.

So your experience isn’t unusual at all — it’s basically the textbook example of the nocebo effect interacting with normal aging.

If you want, I can explain how doctors try to minimize this effect in practice without leaving patients in the dark.

You said:

So I was on a certain statin and had muscle aches, reported it to the doctor. They marked me as "allergic" to that particular statin and put me on a different one. The pains went away. Who is to say what was really going on.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a wonderfully honest way to put it — and you’re right: from the outside, no one can say with certainty what was really going on. Medicine lives with that ambiguity more than it likes to admit.

A few things can all be true at once here.

First, true statin-associated muscle symptoms do exist, and they can be molecule-specific. Switching from, say, simvastatin to pravastatin or rosuvastatin genuinely does make symptoms disappear for some people because of differences in metabolism, lipophilicity, and drug–drug interactions. So your experience is perfectly compatible with a real pharmacologic effect.

Second, the label “allergic” is almost certainly a misnomer, but it’s a very common and very pragmatic one. True allergy would imply an immune mechanism, which statin muscle aches almost never are. Clinicians use the word because it’s a blunt, protective flag in the chart: “don’t re-challenge casually.” It’s administrative shorthand, not a biological claim.

Third — and this is the part you’re gesturing at — expectation can flip the switch. Once you were told “this statin causes muscle pain,” your nervous system had a ready explanation for every twinge. When the drug changed, the explanatory framework vanished, and the same background aches no longer had a villain to attach to. The pains going away does not tell us which mechanism dominated.

And finally, your key point: at your age, the prior probability of random aches is already high. That makes attribution incredibly hard. The signal-to-noise ratio is terrible. Younger patients have clearer baselines; older ones don’t.

So the honest summary is:

• It might have been a real, drug-specific side effect.

• It might have been a nocebo effect.

• It might have been ordinary aging coinciding with a medication change.

• And it might have been some mixture of all three.

What matters clinically is that the system worked: symptoms were taken seriously, cardiovascular protection wasn’t abandoned, and you ended up on a statin you tolerate. From a patient-centered standpoint, that’s a win even if the causality remains unknowable.

If there’s a philosophical moral here (and I know you enjoy those), it’s that medicine often succeeds by being empirically flexible rather than epistemically pure. We don’t always know why something worked — but we know when it did.

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Some rules of English grammar that should be dropped.

1.  Eliminate the insistence on "complete sentences."  Sometimes sentence fragments are just fine and in fact effective.

2.  Stop fussing about correct use of pronoun case.  "Me want a cookie!"  is wonderful.  Of course in that case humor is intended, but a sentence like, "She gave pencils to Mary and I" has the benefit of avoiding the alliteration and is not usually misunderstood, sounds natural, and even if it is a case of being "over-correct," so what.

3.  In that vein, the language should eliminate "whom" except as object of a preposition (where "who" still is distractive).

4.  Ban "shall" from legal documents.

5.  In fact, only allow "shall" in the polite request, "shall we" to keep the distinction between it and the question "will we?"

6.  Stop being so fussy about agreement between subject and verb.  All kinds of subtleties would become possible if the rules weren't so rigid.

7.  Change the punctuation rules at the end of the sentence to be logical by stopping the insistence that closing quotes must be outside the end-of-sentence mark.

8.  Drop the fussing about comma splice and other uses of the comma and make its use optional depending on need for clarity and style.

9.  Agree that a period is optional after common abbreviations such as "Mr".

10. Don't worry about dangling participles.  So what if someone can read it in a ludicrous way -- they won't, and if they do that's their problem (or maybe gain in pleasure). 

11. Allow use of a period rather than a question mark except for sentences intended to be questions but are not grammatical questions.  "Are you happy."  "You are happy?"  Rhetorical questions should also not need a question mark.  (Basically that would mean the question mark would indicate up-tone).

Evidence of God

I would like to respond to the argument that atheists would not accept any evidence that God exists short of personal revelation.


It is not correct.  There is evidence I would accept, such as an asterism in the form of the Tetragrammaton.  I would probably accept the clear occurrence of a miracle done under controlled conditions, but religionists have an excuse for why this doesn't work similar to the one psychics use -- it goes away when you control the conditions.

Or, perhaps, the Bible were really the spiritual book people say it is, and the history of religions were not so bloody and hypocritical, or if religion really did have an uplifting effect on its adherents.  This would not be as persuasive as an asterism, but it would be good evidence.

If you want to claim something so important and so extraordinary as God, you have to realize with intellectually mature adults the default is going to be skepticism.

I should stipulate -- theistic religions.

I must say, also, that personal revelation is probably the last thing I would accept.  I don't have so much ego as to think such a thing would be real instead of my own mind.

Where is Mozart?

One of the problems I perceive with traditional Buddhist (and Hindu) rebirth (mislabeled "reincarnation") teaching is where is Mozart?  He should have been reborn several times now.

The thing is his voice is unique.  From earliest age his compositions are recognizable as his.  This is true of many composers and artists and writers, but Mozart makes the best example.

So why haven't there been several Mozart's in history?  Is all of that lost in the rebirth process -- if so what is the point? 

All sorts of rationalizations are possible, of course, but wouldn't it be nice if there were at least one clear example of the rebirth of an identifiable talent? 

Eternal life

I read an item in one of the scientific web sites to the effect living forever is impossible.  The basis was a survey of the age of death of the very oldest, and while lifetimes have been getting longer, this maximum age has not.  Therefore no matter how good medical care and so on get, there is a maximum age.

While I agree living forever is impossible, this evidence draws the wrong conclusion.  We age for some unknown complex of reasons, but each species seems to have a different and evolving maximum age, and there is no reason for that not to apply to us.  There are biological reasons we age and die, and each species reflects these in accordance to its lifestyle and the normal age of death from disease or predation.  That humans overcome these would remove the biological reason for aging and dying, and we would expect maximum lifetimes to slowly increase -- but on evolutionary terms this would require thousands or millions of years, not the short time of the observations.

The important thing here is that the fact that maximum age varies from species to species tells us it is not inherent but evolved, and that therefore there ought to be ways to interfere with it.  

The reason living forever is impossible is simple -- one may never die but at the same time one has never reached infinite age.  One may be a million or billion or gazillion years old, but never infinite.

One day the earth will become uninhabitable, a little later the solar system.  Humans will of course know it is coming and we presume will have the ability to go elsewhere.  Even orbiting a red dwarf, long-lived as they are, would someday have to come to an end.

There is reason to think, though, that space-time has unlimited low-entropy energy available -- this is after all how our present universe got its energy.  Just separate the positive and the negative keeping the total at zero.  So humanity could go on.

Back to nearer to us in time, what might a society where there is no aging and presumably very few if any deaths (technology would also steadily improve safety) be like?  One can imagine frightening scenarios -- say a Stalin was in power and would live on and on -- and other messes, but one can also imagine things being pretty nice.  Remove death and you also remove a lot of human angst.

Don't worry about overpopulation.  That particular worry is trivial.  If it came to it children would stop happening, but I think more likely humanity would expand.  It's a big universe.

Depression and suicide

There are ways to deal with depression on one's own, but they only work if you are kinda naive about yourself, and eventually will generally stop working.  Work and staying busy, exercise, "getting away" such as taking a trip or vacation, dealing with the immediate causes of the depression, if there are any, meditation, getting counseling, music and art, reading a stomping good novel, pondering the universe -- these and other tricks help a lot.

But the fact is that only some people tend to depression (I think most of the time the tendency is inherited) so most people don't understand it and think it's only normal mood swing.  This absence of understanding and compassion and the "buck it up" disdain one gets don't help.

I have found the only real way to stave off such periods of depression is to stay on medication.  The medical system doesn't like it one bit, for a variety of reasons, so one has to be prepared to fight with insurance companies and have to go out of pocket fairly often.  That doctors often compound the problem with their arrogance about it and their failure to really hear the patient is a cross to bear, but shopping doctors doesn't work, and is less and less possible in the modern bureaucracy.

Of course, this leads to drug use (the wrong drugs -- things that are addictive and illegal, such as heroine and of course alcohol).  About alcohol -- practically guaranteed to cause an early death for the depressive.  Marijuana is better, but of limited value.  Caffeine in the form of a nice cup of espresso or just black coffee or green tea is even better here.

In the end, though anti-depressives need be taken on a lifelong basis in fairly high doses and in several forms (at least both serotonin stimulators and anti-reuptake serotonin inhibitors.  Not being a pharmacist I probably have the terms wrong -- what are needed are drugs that both produce "happiness" hormones and that slow down their removal from the body.

I know from my personal experience, which I suppose is anecdotal, but also from what I can find out talking to others and doing research.  I suspect in some cases even this is not enough, but the difficulties I had and continue to have getting minimal treatment suggests to me that the real problem, and the real cause of the continuing suicides, is that most people just do not get it.  It is so out of the range of their own experience.  That includes the medical profession and the lawmakers.

Of course it is also in the interest of insurers to not "get it".  When the patient kills himself or herself they stop having to pay for treatments.

Tirade against democracy and maybe ways to fix some of the problems.

It's elitist of me to think this, but, regardless, I do think that the main problem with elections is the voter.  There are bad things like multiple voting and ballot box stuffing or losing ballot boxes, that can be blamed on politicians and corrupt officials, but those aside a larger problem remains the voter.

In the old days only landowners, who were presumed to have a stronger interest in good government, were allowed to vote.  This was of course, nonsense.  They voted in the interest of landowners.

There are five problems I can see with voters, that they vote selfish interest, that they vote prejudice, that they vote single interest, that they vote brand name (re-elect incumbents even though they know no more than that they recognize the name), and that they are easily persuaded by what is called negative campaign ads.  The five of them feed off each other to make democracy a bad way to run a country.

Politicians, of course, not being centers of moral rectitude (those who are, are defeated by those who aren't using the above factors) cynically act and campaign and vote accordingly.

There was a certain Senator from West Virginia who was thought of as a master of the Senate and a great Senator, mainly because he kept the pork running into his state.  How disgusting: he leads the fight against line-item veto (a proposal to stem such greed) and prevailed.  This was his reason for being re-elected over and over, and he boasted of it.

One of the problems is geographical legislation, which brings about pork and the representation of the prejudices of regional cultures.  At large representative bodies are therefore one obvious solution.  This also of course would reduce the chances for chicanery as there would be fewer really close elections and eliminates gerrymandering.

Of course it doesn't deal with the brand name problem and perhaps makes it even worse.  The idea of banning incumbency therefore has a great appeal.

One thing I've noticed is that members of the legal profession tend to dominate elective positions.  People accept this since they have a vague notion that these have been trained, but what they have been trained in is the use of the law to get things and deal with problems.  There is entirely too much dependence on law and litigation, but lawyers, legislating in their class interest, continue to see laws and legalism as the way to go.  It would appear that banning members of this profession (which in fact is the only erudite profession that hurts society more than it helps) might be a good idea.

Of course, elected officials need to win elections, and for this they need support and money.  At large elections would demand even more money, and although there really do exist un-bought politicians, and maybe most of them think they are, it is much easier to get someone to see your point of view if you have contributed money to him, and all businesses and special interest groups know this.

So if you must have elections to make the system seem legitimate, make the campaign paid for by the state and seriously restrict campaigns, violating free-speech and free-press out its ear.  It is not true that truth ultimately will out, and we all know it.  Even rules such as banning music in the background, or even non-mutual campaign appearances, suggest themselves.

You still have the basic problem of the prejudices of the voter and the ensuing danger of the dictatorship of the majority.  There is no way to get around this that I can think of short of severely limiting the franchise to those who demonstrate knowledge and unbiased approaches to things, in a vetting process that itself obviously would be exposed to corruption and so on.  Still, that might be better than allowing every idiot to have his or her vote.

Churchill has been quoted as saying that democracy is the worst possible system, except for the alternatives, or something like that.  One wonders if this is really true.  It seems to me a lot of possible setups simply have never been tried, and the propaganda for democratic systems nowadays would seem to rule out even a debate.  Even the autocratic systems call themselves democracies.

Judgmentalism

We must avoid being judgmental.  It does no good and often ties us to attitudes and behavior that restrict us a lot.  But, of course, people do judge, and with some it is the automatic response.  This causes the judge unhappiness and stress, but I don't think it has much effect on those judged.  In other words disobeying the command only hurts ourselves.

I was recently conned out of a substantial amount of money -- more than I really could afford -- and all during the scam people told me what it was, but I felt I would give this person such a sum if asked, anyway, so I didn't worry.

I trusted them, and they were my friend.  It really hurts when trust is violated like that, but I will not be bitter and I will (do already) forgive.  I want them back as a friend and I suspect only their shame prevents it.  It is not the loss of the money, but the loss of the friendship and the betrayal.

Others, of course tell me I should abandon the contacts and the person is not worth it and I know others who know about what happened who have done as much, even thought they were not personally hurt.

I guess I'm foolish.  Forgiving doesn't help: I'm still unhappy, just in a different way -- sad rather than angry.