denis bider

On further reflection of the $20 billion puppy, I realize I subscribe to a "The buck stops here" principle. Which is to say, a person is not responsible to seek out and eliminate all suffering. But when a person can stop wrongdoing in a decision that's in front of them, the person is responsible.

The law takes a similar point of view. If someone offered you $20 billion to torture and murder an orphan, and you did it, you're going to prison. It does not matter if you spent all of it to save millions of orphans elsewhere. Your responsibility is to stop the buck when the decision is in front of you.

When you realize that something is an important principle, it becomes increasingly hard to justify ever violating it. It's not your duty to seek out and stop all suffering. But if you integrate the principle that, when a buck is being passed, it must stop somewhere; and that it must stop with you; then violating this principle comes at the cost of integrity. Even if no o…

Let's talk about sadism.

Sadism is an expression of service-to-self. Service-to-self is a spiritual and philosophical orientation whose fundamental trait is that only one's own subjective experience matters. The conscious experience of other persons and creatures is not perceived to be a thing. Instead, such other creatures are perceived to be phenomena, which are judged in good shape if they serve the individual's self; and are in need of control and coercion when they fail to serve properly.

Sadism, in particular, is the enjoyment of the practical application of the methods of control and coercion, whose purpose is to obliterate the individuality of the other-self. The ultimate goal is to force the other-self to accept that it is only an object in the mind of the sadist. The sadist believes he or she is all that exists. Their pleasure is in taming you so that you too accept that they are everything. The climax of this experience for them may involve destroying you physic…