Life is a pain in the ass
What do you think? @Bitter Crank
Life is a pain in the ass...
But to deny it, people are wont to pass
On they go, children in toe
'Til the pain gets enlarged en masse
Life is a pain in the ass...
But to deny it, people are wont to pass
On they go, children in toe
'Til the pain gets enlarged en masse
Comments (83)
I don't sleep right, so being all full and sleeping hurts me.
Gotta go to work now... hopefully it just warms up and it's fine. The pain levels are pretty high.
How many countless people suffer from metabolism and sleep problems? Just add it to the pile of harms.. see here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/669/how-many-different-harms-can-you-name/p1
It's been really striking to me just how primary the 'way I feel' is. It seems to be what animates these otherwise hollow verbal exchanges. Sometimes it's obvious that life is fundamentally terrible. That seems to happen on its own from time to time, but there are some consistent ways to produce the outlook (e.g. opiate withdrawal). Anyway, for me, it's more common that I don't feel that way. And when I don't, there's something somehow more lucid about my inner world where it seems clear that the 'life is terrible' outlook is the dream to wake up from rather than vice versa.
The arguments, logic, words, are just byproducts. My view is that the anti-natalist simply overextends language beyond its context. The arguments are hollow when that's not your inner experience. You are doomed to only ever preach to the choir.
(Y)
This line is a bit confusing, especially the second clause. I think you're trying to say that people deny that life is a pain in the ass, but it doesn't quite read that way.
Here's a poem I wrote several years ago on a similar theme:
Were that I a bird
Free to fly above the herd
Were that I a snake
To slither away from hate
Were that I a rabbit
To hop as my habit
These and more I wish to be
For anything but human
Sounds better to me
What if you are merely escaping to your inner world to retreat from the disillusionment you feel toward the external world, which is ultimately contributing to this lucidity? It is not preaching, but calling out from this inner world with the hope that maybe someone will hear and see you for who you are, to have the void, that loneliness filled not by the withdrawal but rather the engagement. We're out here, you know, chasing the echo of the same desperate calls in the hope of capturing one to embrace and save from the terror. We will never hear you if you remain caught in your own illusions.
Yeah, I was wondering if I should use "prevent" rather than "deny" in that second line.
It's not that my inner world is more lucid than the external world. I'm saying I have experience (as I think most people do) with both kinds of inner states - (a)"life is obviously terrible" and (b)"everything is OK".
While experiencing (a) it feels undeniably true. If I only ever felt (a), the antinatalist arguments would be compelling. It's from the vantage point of (b) that (a) is clearly just a subset of a broader awareness (lucidity/richness) available to me.
Dreams can feel very real until you wake up. I'm wondering if Schop is stuck in a bad dream I've had before. I don't mean this in a patronizing way, like I know the truth about life's value and if you disagree you need to wake up. I'm saying the truth about life's value is fundamentally subjective and driven by your inner world, something primal and much more real than words and arguments. So, for example, I wouldn't try to convince Schop that life has value because I realize, no matter what combination of words I use, it won't take unless he already feels it.
The antinatalist argument, to the extent it's anything beyond preaching to the choir, is distastefully presumptuous about the ineffable inner worlds of others.
I'm too dumb for that. I'm better at manual labor.
It was fine though, I had to go in since I got most of the tools and ladder, but when I got there I told buddy about it (incidentally, he also hurt his sciatic just before I did the first time, when we first came back). I showed up, and said I was hurting, and they were like "so are you going home then", and I was all like, "nope, I'll just be shitty".
Feeling a lot better though now. Not like I hurt it working, I hurt it lay around and not working enough, eating too much, and things. Same thing that happened last time, I ate a bunch of pastry stuff, and slept. Then woke up like that. No more doing that...
Do you have a theory about how pie-eating behavior would affect you sciatic nerve?
Oh yes! Many! With lots of possible variables.
The main cause is fairly simple, but what to do about it, and how to make it better rather than worse is a little more complex. Almost everyone is bound up to their other side, and have lots of imbalances. The body is fairly simple, just make all the weight go through the joints, and not get cut off. The muscles just bull themselves tightly on to the bone, in order to maintain structural integrity, as it were. So all that is important is keeping form, basically. Only, when you're all fucked up, as most of us are, you gots to take some drastic measures.
People can hold great postures standing up, but then when they bend over, they lean over, and hinge their weight at the hips in one of many ways. This hinging lengthens some muscles, and contracts others. A big one, which is what I did, was basically lift the opposing leg you're leaning over with. I'm all fucked up in all kinds of ways, but like, I said, I'm more sink or swim measures. See, all of that yoga has gave me pretty good physical awareness, and I can feel the tension, and places where things are bound up, so's that I just force a release, and see what happens. When you start to lengthen one side too much, and shorten the other one too much, you'll start to flex muscles in your neck, mainly, to hold the weight from hurting you, basically, from pulling too much on a nerve, probably for that reason, I figure. So, that giving me more movement between my shoulder blades, and widening my shoulders (people have told me that I'm getting thinner, but I've actually put on like fifteen pounds) also widened my lower back quickly.
Then, if I can't contain my lower abdomen, then that puts too much work on the lower back, which now has more movement range than it probably ought to. I sleep on my stomach, and like eating a lot and I'll lose structural integrity in my lower right ribs, and under my left bottom shoulder blade, and that combined with containing my core less cause I'm all stuffed, all makes my lower back contract too much when I'm sleeping... something like that...
Ass is a pain in this life
Exemplars of ass are rife.
Ass is a thing oft pursued
Ass often ass found it's rued.
Our wants so ever elastic
Give us illusory plastic.
Asstute observations on our asspirations
Lust, moot perturbations on constant frustrations
No dispute, desire the root of thwarted machinations
Truth for the sake of truth is said to be noble, but exposing people to pessimism without any additional advice or considerations seems to accomplish very little. Have you considered the ethics of promoting pessimism without prudential care or a substitute method of dealing with life for those who gain nothing and lose a lot from learning about the bleakness of existence?
I ask this because these posts, while certainly not excessive per se, seem to be repetitive cul-de-sacs that have no positive outcome: people leave without their beliefs being substantially changed, and/or now everyone is even more conscious of the collective suffering in the world than they were before. And for what?
I suppose I'm too pessimistic for pessimism.
I've made a similar argument in the past against anti-natalism. But anti-natalism is arguing against bringing more people into this life, not against lives already being lived, where you try to make the best of it.
I've asked myself the following thought experiment. If I could create another Earth-like planet, and put a new batch of humans on it, would I do it? Probably not if I gave ethics serious consideration. Because whatever inner value those humans experience, there is likely over time being a lot of war, injustice, rape, murder, discrimination, unfairness, disease, mental illness, misery, poverty, etc. Kind of like our world. And I'm not sure that world would be worth it. I'm not sure whether our world has been worth the terrible cost.
In fact, if I had to chose whether to experience my own life over again to this point, I'm not sure it would be worth it either, even though I've been spared the worst. Maybe when we wake from the nightmare of feeling that life is awful, we do so to the day dream of feeling that life is wonderful.
The issue here is that (a) being life is obviously terrible misrepresents reality and it also represents your state of mind and therefore my remark relating to the lucidity of your inner world reaches a new position of plausibility. A narcissist, for instance, though one would think that his/her state of mind may perhaps be viewed as entirely self-delusional, their narcissism in fact relies heavily on the opinions of others.
I totally agree with you vis-a-vis your argument on anti-natalism; life is not obviously terrible, but we subjectively create meaning with an external world and there will inevitably be contact with what is considered terrible. But to say that it either is completely terrible or completely beautiful is quite simply delusional and a flaw in reason. Whether we create meaning or not, there is still an external reality and within it good and bad.
To question the very foundation of why we cause others to exist questions our own very existence. I think this adds value in the idea that it is a palate cleanser in terms of forcing us to reckon with our own evaluation of what life itself means. Most people really do not grapple with life- the meaning there of. Existential issues, vis a vis Sartre, religions, or otherwise sidetrack the issue. Procreation brings it into sharp focus.
I wonder if Camus ever wrote about procreation. Is giving birth a form of rebellion against life's absurdity?
I think the endless possibilities are what makes it worth the going, but I agree that if this was it, if it couldn't get any better than this, then it wouldn't be worth all of the pain and suffering. But there is a very real possibility that in the not too distant future the situation could improve drastically and in the longer term it might even get good enough to justify the long bloody slog of life through the eons.
I entirely agree - but what help is this to those who already exist? Might someone be better off not knowing their existential predicament, or at least exacerbating it through critical philosophical analysis? Why expose people to the pessimistic worldview?
The answer, from what I can tell, would be that the knowledge of the human condition, although difficult to bear, is a requirement in order to be a responsible human being. Understanding the predicament we are in can, hypothetically at least, lead to a change in character and expression. We become more compassionate and patient, appreciate the goods in life more and most of all refuse to procreate.
Without any ethical foundation, truth for the sake of truth is irresponsible. If our goal is to convince people to not procreate, then this provides a solid reason to shine light on the structural issues of life. Any other motivation, however, must be primarily self-serving, if only through catharsis or sublimation. I don't think we're doing anyone any benefit by pointing out these features of life for the sake of pointing them out. There needs to be some sort of positive reason or benefit to understanding the human condition that overrides the toll such an understanding has on a person. In the absence of such a reason, it is best that we just don't say anything. Nothing positive will have been accomplished and all we will have done is make the problem worse.
I leave it to you and others to figure it out from there. You already came up with some interesting conclusions: more compassionate and patient, appreciate the goods in life more, don't procreate. I have stated similar positions in the past, as you know.
What is productive in your mind? Again, you already came up with some conclusions yourself. Others have to work to justify why life is worth it. Even if simply to defend why human lives and the human project in general is good, means existential questions are at least being grappled with and not taken as a given.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Completely agree with that, with the possible exception of politicians. Until they too are replaced by machines. Oh wait... that sounds even worse, like a Philip K. Dick story. ;)
So you think it's too aggressive? Have you seen the debates on this forum? Also, most people have strong positions that require others to justify. I'm doing it right now! Why pick on this? Finally, the point again is to grapple with existential issues. This is fundamental and foundational to a comprehensive worldview. It feeds into all sorts of issues, including metaphysics, ethics, and social science.
My ex-fiancé used to say "Life's a bitch and then you die" which was a catch phrase back in the late 80's but that attitude was his mantra and I got tired of trying to swim upstream to change him. It wasn't too far after that, that he said, you deserve better than me. Which true or not was one hell of a statement coming from him.
Life is a pleasure in the groin...
It's what keeps our species going,
If we all thought life was only a pain in the ass,
we'd all kill ourselves en masse
I would think it's the opposite. Preventing birth is a rebellion against the life of the absurd. It's a middle finger to "more existence".
Are humans just fodder for some future utopia though?
Many people confuse the issue you see
About the difference in what it is to be
Life worth continuing not worth parting
Different than life not worth starting
Thus dear lad its not 'bout the end
Its about new life, and whether to send
I wouldn't say fodder, human existence has some intrinsic positives, it's just not entirely an end in itself. We're an evolutionary pathway for a process with the potential to develop into something unimaginably profound.
The thing to keep in mind is that this process can't be stopped, history has demonstrated that even a mass extinction is only a temporary interruption, and the process is likely occurring on billions of worlds throughout the universe. So there's no sense in resisting it, the only rational thing to do is to embrace it, fully engage with it, and make the best of it.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Quite succinct. Here's
Dear Boy lyrics
PANGLOSS
Dear boy, you will not hear me speak
With sorrow or with rancor
Of what has shrivelled up my cheek
And blasted it with canker; [syphillis has rotted away his nose already]
Twas Love, great Love, that did the deed,
Through Nature's gentle laws,
And how should ill effects proceed
From so divine a cause?
Dear boy:
Sweet honey comes from bees that sting,
As you are well aware;
To one adept in reasoning,
Whatever pains disease may bring
Are but the tangy seasoning
To Love's delicious fare.
Dear boy.
CHORUS
Sweet honey comes from bees that sting.
PANGLOSS
Columbus and his men, they say,
Conveyed the virus hither,
Whereby my features rot away
And vital powers wither;
Yet had they not traversed the seas
And come infected back,
Why, think of all the luxuries
That modern life would lack!
Dear boy:
All bitter things conduce to sweet,
As this example shows;
Without the little spirochete,
We'd have no chocolate to eat
Nor would tobacco's fragrance greet
The European nose.
Dear boy.
CHORUSA
ll bitter things conduce to sweet.
PANGLOSS
Each nation guards its native land
With cannon and with sentry,
Inspectors look for contraband
At every point of entry,
Yet nothing can prevent the spread
Of Love's divine disease;
It rounds the world from bed to bed
As pretty as you please.
Dear boy:
Men worship Venus everywhere,
As may be plainly seen;
Her decorations which I bear
Are nobler than the croix de guerre,
And gained in service of our fair
And universal Queen.Dear boy.
CHORUS
Men worship Venus everywhere.Dear boy!
Yeah, given all the natural and man-made existential threats our species is confronted with, and in light of the fermi paradox, the long term survival of intelligent life might really be a matter of threading the needle. The thing we have to be aware of though when considering propositions like anti-natalism, is that life, along with all the pain and suffering that it entails, is most likely a constant feature of this universe. Life is very hard to eradicate, even after the most destructive global cataclysms it always comes roaring back. And even if this planet was permanently sterilized of all life, life would still exist elsewhere in space and time. So since the issue of suffering can't be resolved through voluntary extinction, it becomes an ethical imperative for some species or entity to thread that needle and reach something like Tippler's Omega Point and overwrite the current cruel and indifferent natural order and establish a much more benign cosmos in its place.
Voluntary extinction was never realistic for humans, either. Best the anti-natalists manage is to convince some people not to breed. Not as if that will be a problem for continuing the species.
Then ask the new life - the children,
"Would you prefer that you had never been?"
Their response might be something like,
"Life is but a game. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.
One thing we look forward to,
when we reach a certain age, is the fun with booze."
[quote=Catcher in the Rye]Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.”
“Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it.”
Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game, all right—I’ll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren’t any hot-shots, then what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game.[/quote]
If all resources were divided equally among all citizens of the world, everyone would only receive about $16,000 annually, and even then most of that is tied up in commodities and property. In other words, we can make life a pain in the ass for everyone, or we can make life better for some. Which would be the greater good?
What's the source for this? It doesn't really make sense to value the total resources of the planet in terms of dollars. There's definitely enough for everyone to live comfortably, we have the technology and the resources to provide a high standard of living for every person on the planet, it's our current system of dollars and cents that creates the massive disparity. We could have a post-scarcity world now if we really wanted it, but most people prefer the zero-sum game of winners and losers because they believe it offers them the chance to become rich.
Maybe in theory, but what in practice will motivate enough people to be average to make this post-scarcity world work? A lot of incentive comes from being able to start your own business, or rise to the top of a company, etc. And a lot of people do want to own more than the Smiths, or live in a nicer location, etc. Status is important to human beings.
Also, without money, how do the markets know what resources to allocate? How many widgets from factory X should be produced to be delivered to stores Y & Z? Is the government going to determine production?
And then you have to problem with different political, religious, and cultural practices. Maybe untouchables or women aren't allowed to have equal stuff. Perhaps the local leaders would rather keep their power, etc. Maybe the natives don't want to plant crop XYZ for the good of people living in region ABC.
Quoting Marchesk
Capitalism has enormous allocation problems of its own. In addition to being prone to a range of market failures, it produces mountains of waste and useless crap, it leads to massive inequality and poverty, and it ignores many problems that don't offer a strong profit motive(pharma r+d for orphan diseases is a good example). But it's not necessary to abandon the market mechanism, there are many types of market socialism which do rely on it.
There are other ways to achieve a high social status that don't require conspicuous consumption, it just depends on the ethos of the society. And even without the possibility of making lots of money there are still incentives for starting a business or excelling in your profession, in fact profit usually works as a perverse incentive which corrupts and distorts the process and product of most fields of work.
Google, "what is the GDP of the world".
Quoting SivadOf course it does. Dollars is how we measure wealth.
Quoting Sivad
No, there isn't. You seem to think that the world population can keep growing at the same pace and we can just make more dollars, but that just makes dollars worth less, which makes everything else cost more. We could have a post-scarcity world if we killed off half the world's population say, in a nuclear war. At that point we could afford to pay raise the minimum wage to $15/hr. Right now, we can only afford $8/hr. What offers people the chance to become rich is the freedom to do with your money as you please without the elites in govt. controlling your choices of what you can spend and can't spend and on what.
I think that because it's true. The money supply has to expand with the economy or deflation sets in.
Even if that were true the obvious solution would be to cut compensation for shareholders and executives rather than working people for less than a living wage. That would be happening if people had an effective labor movement. That's how it was not so long ago, the size of the current wealth gap is unprecedented in modern history. We can afford it, we just opt to allow the obscenely rich to keep the lion's share of the surplus.
Dollars are worthless when there aren't enough resources to sustain the population. Even if everyone had a million dollars, it would do them no good when there isn't enough food and living space for everyone. The ink and the paper to print money has to come from somewhere and that isn't infinite. The problem is that socialists seem to think that resources are infinite. How "idealistic".
Even then, there isn't enough money that we can take away from the obscenely rich to pull everyone out of poverty. Who do you choose to keep in poverty? Like I said, we either make everyone poor, or keep things like they are with some tweaks.
Do you have any actual evidence to support this contention?
There's a difference between money and wealth. Wealth is the real tangible resource, money is just an abstraction. Putting a dollar value on the world's wealth is sort of asinine, the dollar is the vehicle of an inefficient, wasteful system of artificial scarcity driven by pathological greed. The dollar is the symbol of a tyrannical inequity, it's not an objective measure of the Earth's abundance.
Quoting Harry Hindu
There's not enough money to make everyone rich but the wealth of the world is vast, there's more than enough for everyone to be comfortable and secure. Nobody has to be kept in poverty, mass poverty is the result of pathological avarice run amok.
Quoting Harry Hindu
The problem is that socialism depends on people not being giant A-holes, that's all that's "idealistic" about socialism. I'm not a socialist because I know people are incorrigible assholes that can't be saved from themselves, and I'm over it. Socialism is the rational way to go, unfortunately we're a race of fuckheads with fucked up priorities.
Liquidating the wealth of the rich and distributing it evenly among 7 billion people isn't what is being proposed. Certainly, the rich would lose their wealth, especially capital assets like land, factories, shipping, retail properties, etc. They will also be divested of any interests they have in capital assets. What they will be left with is a box of personal property (i.e., their favorite blanket) an outbuilding to live in, and odds and ends.
The capital assets of the formerly rich will be turned to produce for the needs of the people. Food, clothing, housing, mass transit, cultural goods (books, music, etc.), and such basic things. The People will need to take charge of this production, because the rich will no longer be hiring overseers. This presents no problem. Hired hands already perform all of the labor that creates wealth. Everyone from managers to janitors is already at work in the plants.
The tricky part will be coordination. Resources, factories, and needs will have to be sorted out and matched up. This can be done through a sort of market system.
Some socialists seem to think this, and some capitalists also think so.
Human ingenuity is a great thing, but we should have learned by now that there are serious costs to using up resources that are readily available, and going after resources that aren't so readily available. Surely, the planet still contains a lot of resources. Just as surely, the easy materials have been extracted.
Good one.
So, it's a "no", then?
Are you serious? Can you cite any instance of life having been totally wiped out by a cataclysm and then having come 'roaring back", or not?
Where are you getting that from?
For something to "come roaring back" suggests that it has either been destroyed and then arisen again or at least very nearly destroyed, and then very quickly resurged.
Do you have even one example of the latter to at least provide almost no support for your contention that life "always comes roaring back".
>:O >:O >:O
Quoting schopenhauer1
It may sometimes be a pain in the anoos, but stop complaining about it for God's sake! >:O
Most people would just apologize and move on but you're doubling down, so your issues seem to go beyond a general ignorance of the history of life. Go find someone else to troll, I'm not playing.
The pessimistic philosophy is a static one. Life, on the other hand, is dynamic - it moves (so to speak). The present is drastically different from the past - we live longer, less disease, etc. The present is better than the past. I think this trend will continue and the future will be even better. So, as a philosophy, pessimism is backward and unproductive.
This is a stupid way to think about things. The present is better than the past IF you don't live in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.
Pessimism and optimism has to do with attitudes, which are local and not global in nature. "We live longer, etc." is bullshit. The average human may live longer, but that doesn't mean that YOU will live longer. So there's no reason to be jumping up and down with joy at the progress of an abstract construct like "the human race". The average human may have access to better medical care. But YOU may not, because you don't live in a country providing great medical care, or you lack the money necessary, etc.
However, note that pessimistic philosophy speaks in generals i.e. they commit, according to you, the same "error" you accuse me of. If it's a matter of individual taste pessimism has no basis.
Yes, they are equally stupid. However, even the pessimistic philosophy is often framed in terms of the individual, not in terms of the direction of mankind.
Quoting TheMadFool
I don't care about trends. I don't live in trends. I live in a specific and concrete situation. And so does everyone else. Nobody lives in trends.
If this is true why preach pessimism, as the OP is quite obviously doing?
Quoting Agustino
You do ''live in a specific and concrete situation'' but you contribute to the measurement of trends e.g. life expectancy of the country you live in. It's not that ''trends'' are so abstract as to lose all meaning in the real world. These ''trends'' you seem to be demonizing are derived off of you too.
So what? I still don't care about the trends. My purpose is to maximise my health - I don't care if the trends are that everyone else is getting sick. To maximise my health - do better than others - means doing what others aren't doing anyways. So trends only give me information on what not to do, where not to be, etc.
Caring about trends is still a sign of pessimism and mediocrity.
No it isn't. It's giving due weightage to what many define as ''progress'' - to reinstate (so to speak) the element of time to its rightful place in our reality and this is exactly what pessimists fail to do (to their peril).
Trends represent average (the status quo). Optimists want to be better than average. Therefore optimists are always ahead of trends (or seek to be). They are the ones who push the world forward.
You're mistaken if you think I was trolling. You made a statement, and I asked you to support it. I called you out for indulging in hyperbole. If all you wanted to say is that living organisms have shown themselves to be adaptable to a relatively wide range of conditions, then I would not have objected. Why not just admit that you were speaking hyperbolically instead of rigorously, instead of asking me for gratuitous apologies? :-}
To be fair, the poem started out as a little clever ditty. However, to answer your point, Pessimism is not about material progress; it's about the burden of being in the first place. Think of it more in the metaphysical sense of being itself. There are moments of repose (calm/repose/flow/intense concentration). Much of it is not though- even in the most materially abundant settings. What is this burden of being in the first place? Why is it necessary? Is progress itself some sort of assumption that is thrown in the equation? Progress is a product of what we do, but is that the justification for being, or is it circular reasoning to conclude that we must exist to increase progress? Unless we understand why existence is good in and of itself over not being in the first place, there will be no "progress" in this debate. Why put more people into the world in the first place? No one needed anything to begin with. No one needed progress to begin with.
To answer my own questions, perhaps we are an inevitable determined factor in the universe. There is a case that we are already wrapped up in existence. There is no escape. However, the temptation to exist must be answered. What is it about existence that it needs to be borne (born) out in the first place?
From a religious point of view, life is a "gift". It's supposed to be lived out in service of the divine - not just in some abstract manner but through loving service to our fellow man.
My own perspective on the matter is based on the infinite potential of what we call the future. Think of life as a relay race. Granted that as of now we don't have a good answer to the question you pose but our job is to pass on the baton to future generations - give them a chance to find the answer. It seems rather arrogant, malicious and foolish(?) to devalue life like that.
Why?
Quoting TheMadFool
Why? Sounds like you're watching too much TV optimism. If there was a movie to reference though, it's 2001.. Relay into the abyss of the alien monolith.. In the end it's just the space baby..
Quoting TheMadFool
Why? Would the infinite of "people not born" really care?
Also, it may be arrogant, malicious, and foolish to procreate. Though, it may be seen as an appropriate/right/good/justified stance by some. Same is this one.
I don't know how far this is relevant but, if I recall correctly, there's a psychological notion called ''loss aversion''. People prefer not losing to winning. It's based on a biased evaluation of the same value e.g. one prefers not to lose $5 than win $5. The connection I see here is the over-valuation of suffering vis-a-vis happiness, which is the bedrock of pessimistic philosophy. What some may say is that such a biased outlook (suffering greater than happiness) is fallacious.
Good save.
Oh my goodness. That's so touching. It just totally normalized the inferior position of women for me.
And...it's holy. Sacred.
It makes me want to submit. "Muslim" means those who submit.