Quote Originally Posted by Greyblades View Post
Technically I have been thinking about this over several days, I was referring to my revision between the sentiment that shame has no benefit to one of shame having benefit but the degree of despair rory showed is far too much for the amount of wrong our history bears, especially when compared to the shame of other nationalities with similar atrocity to thier names.
That would have been ideal, but ideals require consensus to be carried out painlessly, not even Bismark was able to wrestle germany from austria through diplomacy alone and what his successors did with the empire his generation left them does not detract from their accomplisments.
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The physical being that is husar might exist, but the culmination of education, ideals and experience that composes the person I'm talking to would be impossible without the influences of the societal changes brought on by the industrial revolution.
Eh, honestly didnt notice that one until after I posted.
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Random chance? I suppose, go down that path of thought long enough and you end up in the realm of predeterminism: that none of what you do is actually down to any self determination but merely a highly complex organic machine reacting to external stimuli. An automaton that has fooled itself into thinking it has any manner of choice. I am not that cynical just yet.

As for my involvment: yes, I wasnt there. There is however the comfort knowing that people like me, with the same language, manner and, to a degree, lineage managed to achieve greatness, and that they have left behind so much to provide my generation with even more potential than they had. If nothing else is a legitimate reason to be proud, it is knowing that so much is proven possible for the category I find myself a part.

The challenge will be living up to that potential without further burdening the conscience of the following generations.
I put these together to break through the ever-expanding number of quotes per post and because all of it is related in a way.
First of all, is it cynical to accept a reality? You say the person I am is a result of all the stimuli I got up to this point in life, yet you think we can determine who we are and what we do?
If the mistakes of those who follow us cannot be blamed upon us, yet they can take pride in being formed by our legacy, then I think we have a logical conflict.
Maybe you can take pride in what you do with the legacy of your forefathers, if you have any great say in what you do, but more likely you can be thankful for what they left you with and how they raised you, although that may not be their achievement either but just a function of the stimuli they received themselves. In the end though, even if your brain is an automaton, it is still you and you are your brain. If there were a soul without any physical manifestation that can make completely free decisions, then there would be a sane person behind every mentally ill person or person with brain damage that would be able to determine the damage on a meta-level, like a soul trapped inside a broken machine. This seems impossible to prove however and I'm not aware of any indicators that this may be the case. For all intents and purposes, a decision is the result of the working of the neural network we call our brain. Psychiatrics and others work with the repeatable and predictable patterns that most of these machines show in order to fix them if they have adopted thought patterns that are detrimental to the individual or society.

Pride is a mechanism of this machine that ultimately deludes the machine into thinking that it has reached some sort of superiority over the other machines of its kind, or at least, superiority over a subset. Therefore the fact that I blame Britain for this or that should in no way affect your thankfulness for the improvements your forefathers left you, it can only affect your sense of pride and therefore your feeling of superiority if you delude yourself into thinking, even if subconsciously, that you are somehow superior to e.g. me now because of the things your forefathers did or did not do and the things my forefathers did or did not do.
To me however, the things your forefathers did or did not do do not change my idea of overall equality between the two of us today. If you become a banker or lawyer for HSBC tomorrow, that may change however.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 
This post is a result of ongoing brain processes and was written without further refinement or self-review. If you find any fault in the logic of this post, please help my brain rewire and prevent such faulty behavior in the future by pointing out the fault. Thank you.