So then, what is it that we perceive when we perceive will?
And also, if we perceive our own will through introspection, are we deluding ourselves when we identify something external (like an animal) as having will? Are we simply projecting our own will-experience onto an external object and assuming it’s analogous to ourselves?

As for unlearning facts: I don’t have a problem with the implications of facts for conscious thought and there are no facts that I would like to unlearn from my consciousness. But the unconscious is different. To take an interesting example (which I’m still not completely sure how to relate to), there was a severe nuclear disaster in Japan on March 11 this year, and there has been and is still a lot of conflicting information going around from many different sources. To the extent that you can do something to protect yourself, having accurate information is very valuable. But if there is nothing that you can do at all, or if the outcome is not dangerous to you, then the mere fact of worrying about the implications of the disaster will be a heavy weight on your everyday life, a direct cost in terms of your overall capacity for life. I find, personally (and I assume that many are like me in this regard), that even when you decide to consciously put certain thoughts like this out of your mind, the subconscious thought will remain and keep popping up for a long period of time. I’m absolutely convinced that there is a huge hidden cost in terms of unconscious fear.

Another question: Is there really any facts that you would like to unlearn? Personally I can’t think of any fact about the world that I would like to be unaware of. Indeed there are pictures and movies I wish I had never seen, but there are no pure facts that I would like to forget. I guess people are different in this case, some want to know everything and some want only to know what is necessary to know for people like them. Which makes it difficult for society to give people the right amount of information.

Violence is not always negative. Isn’t sex a proof of that? It is a rather violent act, still most people like it and almost need it. I have studied BDSM (theoretically) a bit, and concluded that violence can both be of a destructive and communicative kind: It can destroy your body, but it can also be a communicative act with your body as a means of communication. Maybe it is the same for mental/soft violence: It can destroy your mind or it can be an act of communication with your mind.

This translation is not endorsed by Rasmus Fleischer and should be seen purely as my own hobby project. The main outcome for me has been to realise that translating a text is a totally different game from writing an original text. But I think at least some sections turned out fairly readable.

It is probably a good first step to stop watching TV if one wants to reduce the impact of this kind of external influence and “soft violence” (for want of a better word). I guess the point I was making above was that one can never be entirely sure that one has identified all forms of external influence that one is subject to, that one has seen all the forces that influence and manipulate one. And maybe it would not even be desirable to remove them all if one could identify them.

Maybe what I was trying to express here is something like this: I think that our identities are produced by our relationships to other entities, and violence might only one extreme special case in a continuum of such relationships.