Amerika

Most people hate changing their own consciousness more than anything else. As individualists, they want to limit what they let in from the world beyond, so they form a rigid view of themselves and the world and defend it by filtering out everything else.

For these people, their first contact with any problem or issue creates an impression of how it affects them personally. This relationship defines the issue for them, and they ignore any larger or wider implications.

In this way, they tear down complex issues to a maze of little rules designed to protect them and address their personal concerns. Everyone else has to navigate this maze, bogging them down and adding to their general resentment of the impositions of the outside world.

People react to life philosophically, but react competitively to other people. This is why jobs are so toxic: if you have to make something work in nature, there is no one to blame, but as soon as there is a boss, you have a scapegoat for all your failings.

This means that as time goes on, you have people who are treating issues personally but also treating civilization as if it were another person that they must either dominate or submit to.

It is ironic that they call for “equality” when this is the one thing that they will not extend to the world and other people. Inbetween dominance and submission there is equanimity, or allowing others to do what they wish, so long as it is not destructive even if passively so.

Instead they make extensive legal systems, moral codes, and social pretenses designed to manipulate and hurt others. For most human beings, “everyone loses” is an ideal solution, so long as they lose less than others.

This pathology propels them to disintegrate their own societies over time by insisting on their personal issues becoming law, which misses the underlying causes of those issues and the wider implications of those causes, as well as the most reasonable ways to address them.

People of this nature live in a talisman-scapegoat dichotomy where the talisman (like God or Utopia) represents not an ultimate good so much as a condition of absolute safety and lack of risk, and the scapegoat is whoever (Satan, Hitler, Musk) can be blamed for the lack of the talisman.

Since the talisman does not actually exist in the world we live in, its promise is unsullied and therefore infinite, which makes these people connect their personal outrage to something tangible they can superstitiously sacrifice to hope to reach infinite Utopia.

In human thinking, most of the time, whoever asserts something first dominates the debate. People react to that characterization of reality, and others react to those reactions, in an infinite chain.

If you have ever been in traffic and changed lanes only to find your new lane is standing still, consider this: you made the same decision others did at roughly the same time, and now each car in the line has to hit the brakes. That chain of braking requires the first car to slow for a fraction of a second, but by the fifth car, that car has to slow for its own fraction plus those of all the cars ahead of it, and eventually this reduces the lane to a standstill despite having open space ahead.

People reacting to an initial characterization — the “first mover” advantage — define what others will respond to, and this places others into a state of mind not unlike gridlock:

“First mover advantage” is a term used to describe the benefits of being the first company into a market segment. This plays a role in giving companies a competitive advantage.

The potential benefits of first mover advantage include learning, network effects, and economies of scale. The risks include market evolution and technological advancements causing potential disadvantage.

Many tech companies have enjoyed network effects by being the first to launch a particular platform, garnering the most users, and increasing the value to each user as the total user base grows. Mobile games are addictive for many reasons, but one of the reasons why the most popular games keep growing is that there is always someone to play against. The network effects apply to many of the online services we use, including dating sites, shopping sites, search engines, and so on — they improve in value as more people use them.

The first mover advantage in human society is that your move starts people talking about that move, and then they react to it and not the wider reality. However the first mover characterizes reality, subsequent people define their view of reality in reaction to that.

This forms the Hegelian Stepladder where humanity reacts to reality, then reacts to its reaction with further reactions and moral judgments, but does not return to look at the source back in reality.

Next, because people are addicted to the symbolism of the talisman-scapegoat dichotomy, they require answers that fit easily into that paradigm. These “easy answers” deliver Utopian promises and ward off imagined Devils.

All of this enables people to avoid the reason we are here as conscious life, namely to perceive reality, analyze it, and interact with it to improve its minor aspects; we are here to engage in actual thought, but that is semi-taboo because it requires us to change our thinking, which is controversial because most people think mostly in order to create a fiction-absolute or story in which they are the good guy doing the best that could be done with his situation in life. This is why Leftists and Abrahamists insist that people do not have inherent abilities or behaviors, but are the product of their environment; that allows them to keep blaming the environment for anything that goes wrong, scapegoating it.

Actual thought requires setting aside both ego and social herd in order to focus on the whole of reality. That means all data, over all time, and all of its implications. This requires paying attention to both details and the big picture, and to track things from cause to effect and, because we most commonly experience effect first (like those personal effects mentioned earlier), tracking that back to cause. This is mental work that requires self-discipline and offers no tangible value, so most people avoid it like an ugly lawyer with the plague.

Life has no purpose; however, it has an agenda. Nature created conscious life because consciousness was needed. Consciousness can perceive, analyze, make choices, and then change its thinking and edit those choices. Actual thought is part of healthy life for every creature on Earth, but only humans deal with language and symbols. Life, without a purpose, simply grows to fill all possibilities and in doing so, hammers itself into higher degrees of quality, resilience, and efficiency.

People who engage in actual thought tend to believe in something like the scientific method or A/B tests. You try something, and then observe the results in reality, setting aside your judgments, feelings, desires, and symbolic ideology or superstitions.

These people are called “consequentialists” because they are interested in the end of the cause-effect chain and how this can be used to predict the results of any potential actions they might take:

In ethics, the doctrine that actions should be judged right or wrong on the basis of their consequences.

Of course, humans immediately ruined that by re-incorporating individual rationalization back into the equation:

The simplest form of consequentialism is classical (or hedonistic) utilitarianism, which asserts that an action is right or wrong according to whether it maximizes the net balance of pleasure over pain in the universe…According to the “preference utilitarianism” of R.M. Hare (1919–2002), actions are right if they maximize the satisfaction of preferences or desires, no matter what the preferences may be for.

Interesting how consequentialism is under siege by human preference:

Consequentialism, as its name suggests, is simply the view that normative properties depend only on consequences. This historically important and still popular theory embodies the basic intuition that what is best or right is whatever makes the world best in the future, because we cannot change the past, so worrying about the past is no more useful than crying over spilled milk. This general approach can be applied at different levels to different normative properties of different kinds of things, but the most prominent example is probably consequentialism about the moral rightness of acts, which holds that whether an act is morally right depends only on the consequences of that act or of something related to that act, such as the motive behind the act or a general rule requiring acts of the same kind.

The emphasis above is mine. Notice how the definition is inverted entirely in the last phrase by importing what consequentialism was designed to avoid. Utilitarianism is not consequentialism, but like democracy, consists of polling of humans regarding their personal feelings regarding a thought or action, something that is both based on varying degrees of imperfect knowledge and rationalized to fit the fiction-absolute of the individual.

As with anything, when you insert the individual or social group, meaning is inverted to fit the demands of the audience, not the needs of the idea itself. Maybe this is the “capitalism” everyone complains about: any product will cater to its audience, even changing itself in the process, something we call The Metallica Problem.

Notice the misdirect here:

A definition solely in terms of consequences might seem too broad, because it includes absurd theories such as the theory that an act is morally right if it increases the number of goats in Texas. Of course, such theories are implausible.

This depends on whether increasing the number of goats in Texas is actually a positive consequence, which implicates questions of scope and alternatives (“competition”). No wonder people think philosophers are useless.

If we write a history of failing human civilizations, it might be very simple. People got “freedom” and abused it, as usual. They reacted to fear and risk, not opportunity and beauty. While the founders of civilization were the “gold and silver types” Plato writes about, who were oriented toward transcendental goals (like excellence, beauty, goodness, realism, health), those who came later followed the Hegelian pattern and reacted to the earlier groups, not to the reality in which they like all living things were expected to adapt.

Somewhere in there people became dedicated to jobs as government and social groups became too important and pervasive, and now everyone is both a submissive employee and a raging brat acting out perpetual rebellion against anyone who knows more than they do.

This places society into a battle between realists (transcendental consequentialists) and anti-realists (individualists, herd followers, brats). The latter group realize that reality undoes their thinking like antimatter obliterates matter, so they introduce taboos and other forms of Control.

Resentment, envy, revenge… most humans steal defeat from the jaws of victory with this simple individualistic approach. Every attempt at Control must suppress realism, and by doing so, make us delusional and angry, which is why every society has imploded in a flurry of insane and perverse behavior.

Tags: actual thought, control, crowdism, easy answers, fiction absolute, first mover, gold and silver types, hegelian stepladder, talisman-scapegoat dichotomy, the metallica problem