Tradition is always the worst reason to do something.
If you had any other reason to do something, you would use that as an excuse.
I can come up with worse reasons than tradition.
Like, to satisfy a sadistic urge or to cause suffering.
Traditions can and often do serve some purpose even if we don’t see them in such a light.
Just as evolutionary traits, only beneficial ones tend to survive the test of time. (Not necessarily beneficial to the individual, but the group)
You’ve disconnected reason from the action and outcome. Killing someone will have bad outcome regardless of reason, but if your reason for the murder was some sort of tradition, it would imply that it’s justified in your eyes and you’d do it again, and also teach your children and community to do it, and normalise it, fight against legislation that would stop it etc. I believe it would be difficult, though probably not impossible, to formulate a reason worse than tradition without referencing tradition or custom in some way. And then there is also the frequency of how often traditions are used as reason or excuse to achieve a cruel outcome to consider. If baby pandas were no. 1 reason for human death in the world by few orders of magnitude, we would probably consider them “the worst” in some way.
What tradition are you talking about?
For example funeral rites help prevent disease from corpses. Without knowing anything about germs.
Or the taboo of incest can avoid genetic defects, without knowing anything about genes.
Traditions formed for a reason. And that reason is way more ancient and more natural than modern logic. It is simply survival.
The people with traditions that helped them survived more often.
Satisfying a sadistic urge will generally have a bad outcome (unless your target is a masochist), but as a reason, it is actually better than tradition.
If murdering people and rearranging their body parts was just “tradition”, it would be infinitely worse than someone doing it out of self satisfaction.
Traditions do often serve purpose, take for instance the birthday song. We say we do it for “tradition”, but the real reason is because it’s a familiar song everyone can participate in singing, to direct cheer at the birthday-twat. It’s generally fun.
I wouldn’t go that far. Some traditions can be a positive that help give people a sense of shared community: christmas trees, presents and gluhwein for christmas, turkey for thanksgiving, etc
There are better reasons for all those things.
“Because the decorating the Christmas tree is fun and it looks pretty”
“Because it’s nice for me to give and receive gifts”
“Because Turkey tastes good”
Those are also all the reasons those things became traditional in the first place.
This is fantastic. Was not expecting the punchline.
Young me would have missed the personal interaction. Older, less hormonally-motivated me would be fine if the accommodations were nice, reasonably large, and contained a good, Linux-based, powerful computer, a copy of the entire Library of Congress archives, and deep clones of Github and Sourcehut. A decent, fast, current generation AI setup would go a long way to filling any gaps. I think I could probably live for several decades - maybe centuries - left to my own devices. Until the literature and media ran out.
I’d like to be able to work with AI systems to generate movies from my favorite sci-fi books. Just, throw literature at it, give it some direction, tweak the output, have a ton of dedicated processing power and a lot of free time, and no copyrights to worry about.
Until the literature and media ran out.
Man, I easily completely forget shit from 10 or 20 years ago, I bet if you just keep creating you could entertain yourself for a lot longer!
I would love you and others to find and watch this classic episode of the Twilight Zone: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_at_Last My guts tell me there’d always be something missing like that.
I had thoughts of landing in a solitary confinement. Having media, tools, manuals and even internet at hand would make it pretty bearable, but I’d still probe the question of waking up another clone to have a company. Being there with their asses in a cryogenic sleep for decades would make me think about it thousands of times and it’d be really hard not to question the guidelines and test this opportunity.
For my trip I’ll take this fine list above, plus a copy of all of the legal ethically made pornography.
my 30-year* life cycle
Traditions = Generational Trauma
Ever see the movie “Moon”?