What are your core values?

[Shoshanna]

Or, if you prefer, answer the question: What do you think makes a society successful? How do we measure its success? Your core values should naturally come up that way.

You know how people sometimes say "the wrong people win the lottery" or "the wrong people are born onto wealth."?

I just think if everyone truly treated other people the way they would like to be treated, society would be much better.

I mean. Nobody wants to be stolen from. Nobody wants to be murdered. Lied to, swindled. Most people just wish for enough to get by without struggling.

Meanwhile the billionaires take and take and what do they give? Meaningless low paying jobs people have to take or they won't make rent and be evicted from their billionaire-owned apartment complex.

Oh yes. They are philanthropists. They signed a promise to give away their wealth when they die. I almost forgot. Bill Gates has spent billions in Africa and other less fortunate countries. Good for him. What a benevolent thing he's doing there.

Here in America, though, it's mostly average people helping average people. Even all the social welfare programs. Funded by average American's money. Our tax money. I KNOW I KNOW! "The billionaires pay more taxes than us" I get it. I get that in some countries average people can't help other people because they can barely help themselves. I understand that we are very fortunate in America to have the opportunities we do.

I very very rarely go out to eat. When I do I always tip 100 percent. 20 percent is if you don't get me a drink refill or otherwise ignore me/forget something. I even do this when I take my friends out somewhere.

When I see a homeless person loitering outside my grocery store, I grab a cold Gatorade and water to give them on my way out and a deli sandwich and chips.

See someone walking? I offer them a ride.

See a confused elderly person out in public at the store or wherever? Talk to them. Trust me a lot of the elderly are lonely and it really makes their day when somebody talks to them

Have a friend who is down on their luck and needs help? Babysitting free of charge 5 days a week so she can work full time and not pay the extortion daycare prices.

Everybody can be somebody's hero. I wish a lot more people wanted to help others even in small ways. You can really make a stranger's day and they might think of it later and help someone else or brighten someone else's day.

[IdeomotorPrisoner]

Or, if you prefer, answer the question: What do you think makes a society successful? How do we measure its success? Your core values should naturally come up that way.

[DBCowboy]

Or, if you prefer, answer the question: What do you think makes a society successful? How do we measure its success? Your core values should naturally come up that way.

Freedom
Small government
Individual Rights
No infringement of individual rights

[KrustyKrab]

Sex, Drugs and Rock n Roll!   
Probably not the best morals to live by but damn I’ve had a lot of fun. 

[jonrgrover]

My core values are pretty far off the beaten path:

What do you think makes a society successful? 
> an uncorrupted Bible resulting a society underpinned by functional Christianity (which we do not presently have).

How do we measure its success?
> completely realized advancement in each age (as opposed to our present highly incomplete advancement).

History is divided into ages existing in objective reality. Each is twice as long or half as long as the one before it.
Each age develops some aspect of humanity. When that development is complete, humanity can continue to advance.
If not there is a dark age going back to the first age that was incomplete and re-doing history from that age
(not time travel, just trying to do the advancement again).

Today we live in an incomplete age. Completion started failing with an age starting in 1937. The most likely
reason for its failure was the rejection of the true Bible - the Textus Receptus. This rejection was institutionalized starting
in 1881 with Westcott and Hort's publication of a corrupted New Testament based on the corrupt Alexandrian texts.

Since then Christianity has been losing its teeth and the world has passed on to the control of the Satanists.
I predict the most likely resurgence of Christianity will 'begin' in 2099 or thereabouts. Until then we can wait and
do our best to keep a livable world.
 
So my core values are:
> Advancement
> Humanity
> Livability
> Functionality
> Jesus

[UltraBudgie]

Reposted with author's permission:

Don’t take instruction on how to live your life from a stark raving mad society.

This civilization is sick. It is genocidal. It is ecocidal. It is omnicidal. We are ruled by psychopaths, while the best among us are relegated to the fringes of the fringe. We are hurtling into totalitarianism and armageddon at breakneck pace while our attention is aggressively pulled toward the vapid and the inane.

You should share none of the values and priorities of this freak show. You should not let any aspect of this dystopia inform your decisions regarding who you should be and what kind of life you should live.

In this warped and twisted madhouse, we are trained to believe that “success” looks like making a lot of money, earning large amounts of esteem and adoration, having a certain body type, living in the right kind of neighborhood in the right kind of house full of the right kind of products to impress the right kind of people. We are trained to believe we need to rack up all kinds of accomplishments, academic achievements, promotions, impressive stories, social ascendence. We are trained to believe we must attract a certain type of partner who will be approved of by everyone whose approval we crave.

If we cannot achieve these goals, we are trained to believe we should feel bad about ourselves. That we don’t deserve happiness. That we should either spend our time stressing and striving for worthiness as defined by our crazy civilization, or go and join the ocean of miserable failures who couldn’t win the capitalism game and sedate ourselves with alcohol and entertainment waiting for death to carry us into the nothingness where we belong.

This is clearly insane. It’s a stupid game with stupid prizes. The only reason anyone takes it seriously is because we were raised and taught how to live by other people who take it seriously. Our parents have been indoctrinated into the power-serving worldview that has been forcibly imposed upon the denizens of the empire, and we want to make them proud. Our friends, families and acquaintances have been likewise brainwashed, and we want to impress them.

But to do so is to take lessons on how to live from a collective disease that is pointed at misery and dysfunction. It is impossible to lead a truly fulfilling life while also trying to live the way the people around us think we should live, because the society which shaped their ideas about how we should live is insane.

If you want to really live an awake and inspired life, you’ve got to blaze your own trail. You’ve got to unlearn everything you’ve been told about what a life properly lived would look like, and write your own rules. Because the rules everyone else has been playing by were written by madmen.

Find your own truth. Set your own values and priorities. Define your own idea of success. Define your own idea of sanity. Consider the possibility that just being present for the beauty of each moment on this wonderful planet is worth more than anything the imperial insane asylum has to offer you. Consider the possibility that your very next breath, deeply relished, would be enough.

We are destroying our planet and driving every living organism toward annihilation. The status quo has failed as spectacularly as anything could possibly fail. The old ways of doing things plainly do not work. So try some new ways.

Be different. Be strange. Be a freak. Do everything the wrong way. Disappoint your parents. Fail to live up to your potential. Transgress your family doctrine. Anger whatever gods you were taught to believe in. Nothing anyone has done has worked. It is therefore necessary to travel off the beaten path.

The world won’t get better until humanity changes its ways. Humanity won’t change its ways if it keeps insisting on trying the same failed approaches over and over again. Our survival as a species depends on diverging from our patterns.

Maybe we’ll succeed in surviving, and maybe we won’t. But at the very least we can rescue ourselves from spending one more day on this amazing blue world trying to live by the rules of lunatics.

source

"Define your own idea of sanity" is an interesting core tenet. Sanity, as usually defined, is a combination of two things. First, utility and ability to sustain a usably consistent world-view, for some subjective value of 'usable'. Second, a statistical measure of accessibility and coordinated understanding within one's peer group. It is a very challenging exercise, thus, to simultaneously expand one's empathy to encompass the world-view of others while ameliorating the ego-structures that define 'all the things you are not' and all the people you don't want to be. That I believe is the key to bringing sanity to an insane world, and to a definition of one's self that is not 'built on sand', as it were.

[Ignorant]

Don’t take instruction on how to live your life from a stark raving mad society.

This civilization is sick. It is genocidal. It is ecocidal. It is omnicidal. We are ruled by psychopaths, while the best among us are relegated to the fringes of the fringe. We are hurtling into totalitarianism and armageddon at breakneck pace while our attention is aggressively pulled toward the vapid and the inane.

You should share none of the values and priorities of this freak show. You should not let any aspect of this dystopia inform your decisions regarding who you should be and what kind of life you should live.

In this warped and twisted madhouse, we are trained to believe that “success” looks like making a lot of money, earning large amounts of esteem and adoration, having a certain body type, living in the right kind of neighborhood in the right kind of house full of the right kind of products to impress the right kind of people. We are trained to believe we need to rack up all kinds of accomplishments, academic achievements, promotions, impressive stories, social ascendence. We are trained to believe we must attract a certain type of partner who will be approved of by everyone whose approval we crave.

If we cannot achieve these goals, we are trained to believe we should feel bad about ourselves. That we don’t deserve happiness. That we should either spend our time stressing and striving for worthiness as defined by our crazy civilization, or go and join the ocean of miserable failures who couldn’t win the capitalism game and sedate ourselves with alcohol and entertainment waiting for death to carry us into the nothingness where we belong.

This is clearly insane. It’s a stupid game with stupid prizes. The only reason anyone takes it seriously is because we were raised and taught how to live by other people who take it seriously. Our parents have been indoctrinated into the power-serving worldview that has been forcibly imposed upon the denizens of the empire, and we want to make them proud. Our friends, families and acquaintances have been likewise brainwashed, and we want to impress them.

But to do so is to take lessons on how to live from a collective disease that is pointed at misery and dysfunction. It is impossible to lead a truly fulfilling life while also trying to live the way the people around us think we should live, because the society which shaped their ideas about how we should live is insane.

If you want to really live an awake and inspired life, you’ve got to blaze your own trail. You’ve got to unlearn everything you’ve been told about what a life properly lived would look like, and write your own rules. Because the rules everyone else has been playing by were written by madmen.

Find your own truth. Set your own values and priorities. Define your own idea of success. Define your own idea of sanity. Consider the possibility that just being present for the beauty of each moment on this wonderful planet is worth more than anything the imperial insane asylum has to offer you. Consider the possibility that your very next breath, deeply relished, would be enough.

We are destroying our planet and driving every living organism toward annihilation. The status quo has failed as spectacularly as anything could possibly fail. The old ways of doing things plainly do not work. So try some new ways.

Be different. Be strange. Be a freak. Do everything the wrong way. Disappoint your parents. Fail to live up to your potential. Transgress your family doctrine. Anger whatever gods you were taught to believe in. Nothing anyone has done has worked. It is therefore necessary to travel off the beaten path.

The world won’t get better until humanity changes its ways. Humanity won’t change its ways if it keeps insisting on trying the same failed approaches over and over again. Our survival as a species depends on diverging from our patterns.

Maybe we’ll succeed in surviving, and maybe we won’t. But at the very least we can rescue ourselves from spending one more day on this amazing blue world trying to live by the rules of lunatics.

Unreadable. People who, in their writing, just can't help but sound like they're seething all day and wouldn't recognize fun if it slapped them in the face are insufferable, particularly when they're trying to make a point about how to be happy (clearly, they're unqualified). This person is making a perfectly good point but it gets lost in the over-reliance on hyperbole and ridiculous sweeping statements. Yes, some people need to hear that they get to decide how to live their life and how to define success, but if we tell them this while also telling them to hate everything, we're (ironically) setting them up to fail.

[Ignorant]

"Define your own idea of sanity" is an interesting core tenet.

I think it works okay, with the caveat that we shouldn't discard millennia of observations about what makes people happy. Sure, it's different for each of us and and a lot of the answer can be found by introspection, but there is also a lot to learn from others, from history, from science. Discarding all that and going off completely on our own may sound like an interesting spiritual journey but we shouldn't pretend it's the way to happiness.

I don't mean to sound like a boring normie here, but if I had one piece of advice for people on how to find happiness, it's to go find a good therapist.

[UltraBudgie]

it seems somewhat risky to put "be happy" as a core value. obviously, one doesn't want to end up in soma-land. there is also the conflation of sensory infatuation ("fun") with happiness, especially in a materialistic society. so is "find happiness" a core value, or can it be stated more precisely?

[Ignorant]

You say obviously one doesn't want to end up in soma-land. Why not?

This thread was intended to be about politics so I didn't mention it before, but I think "find happiness" absolutely can and should be the (singular) goal for everyone. Everything else is just a means to that end. It's a lot easier said than done, of course.