Point 1: People don’t know what they want
Time and again, psychological studies have found that we overestimate how happy we will be after winning a prize, starting a new relationship or taking revenge against those who have wronged us. We also overrate our disappointment at bad test results, disability or failure to progress at work. Try as we might, we consistently fail to forecast our own emotional reactions, and we even fail to accurately remember our past experiences to be used as guides.
Gilbert says that the main reason for this is an inability to accurately imagine future events. We can close our eyes and try to picture ourselves in the future but we focus on the wrong things, we predict that our emotions will last longer than they do, and so on. Some scientists have tried to improve things by training people to mentally time-travel with more accuracy but these attempts have been largely unsuccessful.
Us trying to understand ourselves is a risky proposition. First, it freaks us out that our consciousness arises from our bodies, because our consciousness “feels” more like a gift from the gods. Second, we don’t know ourselves that well. Third, because we’re accustomed to measuring everything by impact on ourselves, we reduce the world to a binary: me versus It. The result is a paranoid, weird, self-important overestimation of all emotional effects.
Point 2: Everyone has something to lose
A landmark effort to transform Southern California’s coastal waters into a network of havens for marine life has sparked a fierce debate over where to locate no-fishing zones that ecologists believe are needed to replenish the surrounding seas.
“Every square foot of the Southern California coastline is somebody’s favorite fishing spot,” said Steve Benavides, a tax attorney and diver of 40 years who is among the group of stakeholders hashing out their differences.
That’s right: you cannot make an omelette without breaking some eggs.
To make intelligent decisions, you need to ruin someone’s dream. Oh well — their dream was probably unrealistic then. Move on, instead of wallowing.
Wallowing is to demand that everyone be represented, which dooms us by another process: the arrival of the stupid.
Stupid people destroy any political system they get their hands on. Whether it’s democratic, or autocratic, at some point stupidity prevails. We need more people who can recognize stupidity and beat it down.
Otherwise, when they arrive, as they inevitably do, they wreck the whole process.
IMO, this entire article could be equally tagged: ‘Preparing The Gullible For Submissive Group Think’.
First off, how do we know that we do not think as the God/s intended us to? Human biologic norms have proven to be substantially hardier than the deviant steering effects that society would have us assume are ‘against our nature’ because they are -socially inconvenient-.
Yet if a transcendant clairvoyancy of ourselves as object separated from ourselves as much as environment is not useful, then why did man not begin to paint symbols of himself, his enemies and his -perceptions of power outside each- on cave walls?
Where did we come up with the notion (prevalent in very primitive tribes) that what we consume from nature is more than the gift of the flesh but of life itself?
IMO, the reality of life is that conscience is a single-neuron theory spark of awareness (synapse to synapse, firing as instants of identity to which we cling, madly) ONLY in the very young or mentally deficient.
As we age, we naturally begin to ‘tune’ (through saturation) the tubicle filaments in our deep neurosynaptic memories and these in turn quantum tunnel to create a symbolic reality against which we paint our life experiences like a living movie screen.
Such a _symbologic_ ability to reason (not abstractly for our lives are very much ‘real’ to us and use real analogs of understanding) being inherent to what brought us to sapience from the mean level of mere sentiency.
That this capability is inherently dependant ‘not on the processor but the bus speed’ is a function of keeping the mind clear yet -not too much focussed- so that we see what we see rather than as self-specialized fragments of immediate utility. Because like a lite-brite picture viewer our sense of ourselves as transquantum awareness’ is based on having ALL the lights flashing, not just one at a time, dedicated to specialist awareness.
Homo Habilus was the handyman. The tool user. Homo Sapiens _is the wise man_. Able to separate experience from a core understanding of what is VALUABLE in reality. And thus able to shape reality itself. But to know the difference, you must selfishly, ruthlessly, create an -independent- understanding of what that reality is.
As an example of how not to do this in preference for group think conformity: ‘beating down’ someone, stupid or not, for wanting to come out and have a beer and just drop the facade of practiced thought that is societal expectation of attitude, action and understanding is WRONG. Because society is the support mechanism for man. Not the other way around.
But at the same time, thinking that any one action of abstenance or indulgence in repopulating a depleted fishery is the answer is stupid.
Because if HUMAN populations continue to rise, then as soon as those who are allowed to do so return; the fisheries will be depleted again. While those who lost their chance at individuality only to see it taken over by commercial interests whose profit motive was merely stood in for by eco-responsible propoganda, will have no reason to ever yield anything else again.
And now even society fails because you are at moral deadlock.
Those who are too smart for politics are ruled by those who are not. Unless they refuse to submit to anyone. And then you have anarchy.
Yet the true nature of politics is threefold:
Honesty.
That you ask for what you know you want not what you think you can lie about trading for it.
Topicality.
That you focus on the key element, sifted from your understanding of the one synergistic symbolism ‘big picture’ to create a working solution for.
Mergence.
Less a condition of synergy than of means to a given end.
If the problem is overuse of a fishery. The solution is not the fish population. But the human one.
Admit that the difference between thinking about yourself and thinking about the planet as society is one of not -caring- about how many little-you’s followon to experience what you did, thus becomes both a socially responsible and ultimately self-interest serving merged understanding of the topic at hand and the honesty solution to it’s problem resolution.
Fish More = Breed Less.
We will never approach that kind of understanding if we continually render stupidity as an act of ‘beat down’ suppression. Or indulgence as it’s own, inconsequential, reward.
KPl.
Did you run this post through babelfish before posting it or something?
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