The infuriating thing about modern society is that it is based in one-way (and reversed) thought processes.
Reversed thought process is simple. Instead of studying reality and adapting to it, we project ourselves on it. We create a social group to affirm our reality and not outside reality, which is how individualism creates conformity.
One-way thought process is created by our need to fix reality to fit our expectations. It is uneven, not level, and as a result often shocking to us and unpredictable without intense study. Our lazy minds like the idea of leveling it, making it all equal, in a metaphysical process not unlike paving it all with concrete.
In a similar sense, we like the idea of creating equality through transfer of wealth, power or status. Imagine that you have two sticks of uneven lengths. One will be longer than the other, so you can either cut it down to the size of the other, or take off the extra wood and split the difference, so both sticks are the same length.
Notice that it is impossible to do the reverse, which is to cause one stick to grow longer to meet the other. All we can do is cut and redistribute. Those are the only mechanisms available to society, at least until genetic engineering gets more terrifying.
The fact of this inability — we can cut, but not grow — lies in the decentralized nature of society itself. Each person has their own abilities and only they can motivate themselves to rise to the top of their innate potential, and no one can push them past it.
What results from this inability is a one-way street. In our push for equality, we have only one method, which is to take from those with better outcomes and use that “excess” to stimulate the pre-outcome possessions of others. We cannot equalize outcome-to-outcome, but we can fake it, by removing and splitting the difference.
Much like all powerful tools however this ability shapes our minds. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you’re in a redistribution mode everything looks like a Robin Hood scenario. Even more, it’s popular to do that, and so if you do, your own fortunes will rise faster than they can be redistributed.
This one way path gives us no stop point. If our policies are not working, the solution is more redistribution; we have not redistributed enough. The means becomes the goal. Since any direction other than more redistribution is off the charts, we keep on the path and try qualitative efforts: faster, more, harder, broader.
As modern society winds down — all of the industrialized nations, with the West leading the pack — it will present an opportunity to break this single direction. Let us try redistributing nothing, and instead exile those who get wealth in corrupt ways, and take care of those who are without it.
That slightly old-fashioned idea does not make us feel as powerful and altruistic, but it does help the problem without rotting our society from within through a one-way path to dissolution.
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I see other people and know I have nothing in common with them.
I see society, in general, and feel the same way about it.
Animals, birds, trees…
This way, I do not forfeit whatever I am, to try to be like them, or drive myself crazy trying to make them like me. They are what they are, and I am what I am.
In this way, one may come to know what one is.
Without making a fetish of trying to know what everything else is.
…or how/what one is supposed to be :)
I was just reading a book about Jung today and was able to understand things better than in the past because now I keep a dictionary with me and look up terms I didn’t fully understand before. For example the terms ‘subjective’ and ‘objective.’
What you’re talking about, I think, is that people want to view the world subjectively. They want to believe their experience is reality.
Objectively we know that a sound is vibrations in the air and color is a split of the light spectrum that reflected off a surface. But if we only knew our subjective experience of sound and color, we’d have no idea that there was a basic explanation for them, and that our interpretation was only that.
So, a person of no objective reference would think that we can ignore what those stupid conservatives say and only pay attention to how we think things should go. Everyone should be happy and if they’re not, they aren’t visualizing it enough, or they haven’t been given what they need to live up to a vision of happiness.
Subjective vs. objective reality. Yes, very interesting. And I think you are starting to get that many people see their subjective views as objective, and in the process feel obligated to force them on everyone. Subjective vs. objective, there is a huge difference.
Now it does get interesting, because there are things that might still be somewhat subjective, yet conform more to the workings of things. Maybe more in line with what gets talked about here, that actions have consequences, cause and effect if you will, and those that accept such a thing are dealing with reality in a healthier way. I think a lot of the social and cultural degradation you see is a result of actions having effect, but people not taking responsibility for such things because it would interfere with their more selfish desires.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not perfect. If anything, I started to notice these things as I was trying to get honest with myself. I still have a ways to go in fact. But I am will to keep at it. I may never get it perfectly right. In fact, for me, there may not be such a thing. But to move more in that direction would be a healthier way to be as far as I am concerned.
Give me an example of getting wealth in a way other than the corrupt one.
And who are “those who are without it”, and why take care, if they are losers?
But first, how to get wealth in a noble way, please.
That slightly old-fashioned idea has already been tested in Russia in 1917. All those guys who were getting wealth in a corrupt way were exiled.
The economy was destroyed “without rotting”, and that’s it.
One way!
Or another!
i’m gona read ya read ya read ya read ya!
One way!
Or another!
i’m gona read ya read ya read ya read ya!
LOL YAY GO BRETT STEVENS!!!!STEVENS #1 LOL YAY LOL!!! YAY!!!