Here's a couple of assumptions:

1. You are somehow ultimately physical in nature. You are your body, or you are inside your body, or your body is inside you, or you possess a body.
2. You can avoid death.

Claim: If you attach to either of these positions, that is suffering. What more, if you attach with violent fervor, you will kill in order to preserve your position. This results in more suffering.

If you're unwilling to question these assumptions, then this post is not for you. I'm not available for discussing these matters with fundamentalists. I know it is a waste of time.

LessWrong / EA is full of very compassionate people. I am deeply touched by, in particular, Eliezer's compassion, but also that of Anna Salamon, Nate Soares, Duncan Sabien, Andrew Critch, Davidad, and others.

Part of the compassion I see among some rationalists / EAs manifests as a war against death.

This post is for those people who are tired of fighting an endless war against death.

To be tired of this fight, you must first have been initiated into the horror of death to begin with. It cannot be a distant dream to you ("Cancer is what happens to other people"). No, death is personal; it is maddeningly, outrageously tragic.

If you don't deeply know this, then you may be in a pre-tragic state of mind. (I think a lot of inexperienced youngsters read Eliezer and think they 'get' death as a terrible thing, but in truth they are parroting. They have become mindless, anti-death soldiers like children in a crusade. But I would count this as pre-tragic as well.)

That initiation into the tragic may or may not come for you, but it is a rite of passage for the human being.

The devastation of this modern world is robbing people of that rite of passage, by shielding people from facing the tragedy of death. This is not an accident. It is the culmination of many choices made by us humans over centuries. We have kept ourselves and our children from going through this, but the result has been disabling, enfeebling, crippling. This is why children are sometimes so angry at their parents, seemingly without reason or cause.

It is not a coincidence that the people we oft admire are those who have faced—to some degree—the tragedy of death and have actually decided to do something about it.

Maybe this is just me, but I also find that people who haven't faced this, while they may want to be helpful in all kinds of ways, are often missing some important perspective or drive. And thus end up being nuisances in rooms where adults are talking. No offense. I mean, I was exactly that for decades—a whining nuisance who thwarted the mission.

Good news is, you CAN go through the process and come out the other side as an adult with caring and courage and wisdom. But it is not easy, and almost no one chooses to do it if they can get away with staying in an infantile or adolescent state of helplessness / arrogance / complacence. Actual kicking and screaming may be involved as you get dragged through the birth canal to Responsible Adult.

People blame my community (MAPLE) for dragging people through this process, but this is a misplaced ire. People come here to Grow Up (and they're already fully grown adults, so it's happening late, but that's civilization's status quo nowadays), and when we actually take them through it, some of them fail. The results are not always pretty. But for the process to work, failure has to be real. It can't be a cushioned landing no matter what. It is possible to land on your ass. The question is—how do you respond to your own failure? Do you try to destroy the hand that feeds you? Or do you use it to mature past the personal?

Concern over 'cults' is almost always directed toward keeping people in a child-like state of dependence. It's about controlling power, through fear. People who empower others (by having faith in people) are often seen as dangerous, disturbed, and culty. 'Liberation' is seen as an enemy. Why? It's not a limited resource and cannot be managed or used to control people. "Conflict" minded people create a world where everyone is hateful and selfish—we are here to consume or be consumed. "Mistake" minded people create a world where everyone's helplessly and meaninglessly destructive, and the only nourishment is God's forgiveness. "Liberation" minded people create a very different world, but it comes with so much responsibility, sacrifice, love, and freedom that we shun it like cave-dwellers shun sunlight.

To sum up:

• Death is a problem, but not the one most people think it is.
• To initiate into responsible adulthood, you must face the tragedy of death and take action. This is compassionate.
• Compassion can be misguided and deluded.
• Clinging to an idea (delusion) causes suffering and kills people. E.g. a person becomes willing to kill when they cling to the idea that they MUST not physically die. Then they will extract as much resource from the earth, animals, humans, etc. as necessary to preserve themselves or their loved ones. (See richest people on earth building extremely resource-intense bunkers or attempting to discover immortality via unethical means.)
• Both wrong: A hungry, conflict-oriented mind. A helpless, mistake-oriented mind.
• Liberation from those minds is a radical approach that most people shun and many attempt to disable or attack. Liberation from clinging frees and empowers people, but it takes courage and adult responsibility and uncompromising ethics.
• Monasteries are good places to grow up into adult responsibility. It doesn't have to have a 100% success rate to be better than what most people end up doing with their lives. The mainstream path is highly questionable and has lost moral credibility.

Conclusive remarks:

You're suffering, and you're causing others suffering. This is not because you are inherently bad or evil (this includes if you actively DO or THINK or PERPETUATE evil things -- you're still not inherently evil). This is not because you are helpless, like a baby flailing its arms around and knocking things over. You're not stuck in some deterministic, inevitable universe. You have power. You can wield power responsibly.

Your own actions have causal, moral effects on the world, especially what views you cling to. That means your mental actions (beliefs) have huge weight.

If you fear death or avoid facing the tragedy of death, you will not be a helpful person. You will be a nuisance. You do not have to be a nuisance. Stop being a nuisance.

If you fight death and treat it like a war, you will create war. You will experience no peace. You will cause harm and enable others to cause harm. (You will allow AI to destroy the world, for the sake of self-preservation, which should strike you as moronic. Rationalists/EAs have enabled this and continue to accelerate this.)

Please stop destroying what is sacred and precious.

Please be dissatisfied, and don't forget the taste of dissatisfaction.

Follow the uncomfortable scent of being perturbed, having an unanswerable question, needing something more than explanations and yet another juicy model or stable belief system.

Get out of complacency. You can be done with lying in bed and watching TV.

If you feel anxious, please take care of yourself.