Gutlessness Never Helped Anyone Avoid Embarrassment

There exist people who are unable and unwilling to process intense negative emotions. Emotions like contempt, disgust, loathing, and murderous. Since they can't process feeling murderous, their answer to the question of what kinds of people they would kill and for what reasons, is nobody, at any time and for any reason, under any circumstance whatsoever. And for this reason, many of them feel virtuous.

Of course, the consequence of being unable to process disgust is that they cannot stay away from people who disgust them, people who are bad for them. That's a mental catastrophe waiting to happen because they'll let themselves get close to parasites and leechers who will drain them dry financially and emotionally. So effectively, gutless people are passively suicidal since disgust is necessary to mental stability just as much as pain is necessary to physical well-being.

Pain doesn't tell you when your body is being damaged and about to die, nor does it teach any such thing. By that point in time, the point where a lion has his claws in you, it's far too late to do anything about it. No, pain teaches you when YOU are hurting your own body. By pinching yourself too hard, by nicking yourself with a knife, by sleeping on one side constantly. Those things cause pain because if you do them on a long-term basis you will kill yourself.

So too disgust teaches you not to avoid mental torture at the hands of others, but rather to avoid hurting yourself emotionally, mentally, and psychologically. By staying away from people and jobs and companies and situations which you are disgusted by. It isn't the narcissist that is hurting you and taking advantage of you, it is yourself that is hurting you by staying in a relationship with the narcissist. You can blame gutlessness for such pathetic victim stories.

But let's set aside the fact that gutlessness is contrary to mental self-preservation and is passively suicidal. Or that the unwillingness to act negatively in negative circumstances is pathetic as fuck to witness. We will focus on something infinitely more prosaic and ordinary and yet infinitely more important precisely for its ordinariness. The avoidance of embarrassment by making mistakes.

After all, let's say you kill a psychopathic serial killer like the Joker but it turns out they killed only in self-defense and aren't psychopathic and they're not even the Joker but a tied up hostage wearing a mask the Joker put on them. Killing is a bit extreme, final, and irreversible so what if you make a mistake? Wouldn't you feel dumb? Or ashamed or guilty or something else? Isn't the consequence of making a terrible mistake inevitably some kind of intense negative emotion? Shouldn't intense negative emotions be avoided entirely in order to reduce the chances of mistakes?

But mistakes happen in a probabilistic complex universe. You're afraid of them? They're fucking inevitable! And if you believe that feeling certain of yourself and then later on your course of action turning out to be completely wrong makes you feel dumb, that's because you're not looking at it correctly. Because inaction brings no surety. false uncertainty brings no safety. It's impossible for a 2 liter brain to thoroughly think through a 10^89 liter physical universe.

After all, do you feel dumb if the laws of physics change under you? Would you feel dumb if someone appeared and said, and proved, that the universe is a game simulation in a 100 dimensional universe run by aliens? It's not about factoring in what you know versus what you don't know, it's about the fact everything is a probability distribution and there's no reason to factor in things with infinitesimal probability.

So you make a mistake, so what? You move on and deal with it. your mistakes are just obstacles like in parkour, things to run over. There's a world of difference between being dumb and making a mistake. mistakes you learn from. being dumb you generally don't. and gutless people are being very dumb in how they approach facts and embarrassment.

You don't feel bad for not accounting for an infinitesimal probability.
You don't feel bad for not having the time to account for a small probability.
You SHOULD feel dumb if you act all shy and awkward and uncertain that you can't own up to your major-probability approximation after one hour's calculation.
You SHOULD feel dumb if you never voice what you know to be true because you're worried about the 1% or 0.1% or 1 in a million probability of being wrong

You make mistakes. It happens. It's an inevitable fact of living in a probabilistic universe. An inevitable fact of being a finite being in a much, MUCH bigger universe than itself. The universe is fucking 10^53 kilos when your brain is 1 kilo. So you should feel very, very dumb for ever expecting your 1 kg brain to grasp the entire 10^53 kg universe before it decides on courses of action. This is not a functional way to approach reality.

Let's say you kill 1000 people for being psychopaths, and 10 of them turn out to be innocents and 1 of them turns out to be an anti-psychopath. How many people would those 989 psychopaths have murdered if you hadn't killed them? I call this a win. It doesn't mean you don't IMPROVE your detection mechanisms if you're bothered they're so poor, but it doesn't mean you lose any sleep over it either.

Doing nothing doesn't mean the universe is on hold or on pause around you. The universe keeps going and people keep dying while it keeps going, and psychopaths keep killing while you worry about who's a psychopath and who isn't. While you worry about not killing innocent people, innocent people are dying due to your inactions. Because inaction is a type of action after all, just a despicable kind of action that denies all agency and personhood. A type of action that revels in humans' atavistic nature and makes them no better than animals.

That said, doing nothing is fairly acceptable if you judge the universe to be wholly and entirely positive. After all, what needs to be changed in that circumstance? Just enjoy it while it lasts. But then, people don't resort to violence unless they judge things to be negative, and usually very negative. It's not true that people are gutless because they're scared of being wrong or scared of violence. It's the reverse. Gutlessness causes fear of being wrong and fear of violence.

When you're capable of processing intense negative emotions, intensely negative things like mistakes and errors in judgement and innocent people dying are just a fact of life. (And here the Gaian says Aha, shrugs their shoulders and is happy that people die, because it's a "fact of life" and life is sacred to them. Okay, screw this.) So as I said, they're facts of the universe and facts of reality. And your job is to optimize or maximin or equalize the negatives, not to avoid them entirely. You can avoid the negatives once you possess full control over the physical universe, and not one second earlier.

Yet another salient point is that when bad things happen, or even when you cause bad things to happen, the emotional response is NOT generally speaking embarrassment or shame or stupefaction or things like that. There are a LOT more negative emotions than that! There's rage, frustration, anger, determination, grimness, resignation, depression ... and those things are a lot closer to victory than happiness is. You know what negativity tastes like? It tastes like potential victory. I enjoy victory.

So think about this. You want to avoid embarrassment? You're not going to succeed by avoiding negative emotions, a field which is much MUCH vaster than embarrassment. But I can guarantee you WILL succeed, eventually, if you dive into that field and your emotional profile will change, maybe even to including murderous. Transforming your mind and your actions until you feel only the emotions you want is a long and involved and exacting process, but there is no substitute. Dumb and mindless avoidance of all negative emotions merely ensures you remain a pathetic wretch who never gets what he wants in life.

I wanted to be able to dish out violence online and make enemies while never feeling humiliation caused by anyone else's or my own actions, and I succeeded totally. So I do believe your own much more pathetic emotional goals are entirely achievable so long as you know the math behind it and follow it scrupulously.