Amerika

People generally look for easy answers. The most common failing of humans seems to be “cherry-picking,” or having a thesis in search of data instead of data in search of a thesis, meaning that you decide what you want to believe and then look for data that confirms that view.

This makes for a stupid species, not because people are stupid, but because they have decided not to seek holistic and realistic answers, preferring instead whatever makes their mental state feel settled. This is called individualism.

Individualism presents a problem because it prioritizes the individual above reality; the other view, which is inherently Darwinistic, is to prioritize reality and adapting to it over individual thoughts, feelings, judgments, and emotions.

In an individualistic time, people seek out “easy answers” that make their mental states feel complete because they do not challenge previous assumptions of the individual. This creates a confirmation bias feedback loop:

Confirmation bias, in which an investor’s predisposition toward consuming information that only confirms their own bias, creates a circuitous vacuum of information that continues to reinforce and confirm their beliefs in an escalating manner. It’s natural for this to happen and hard to resist.

It joins availability bias as one of the most common human errors in thinking:

For investors, availability bias affects the trading decisions that people make based on recent events or headlines, expecting such events to be more frequent than they actually are. During a market crash, people may adopt a negative outlook that assumes a bear trend will continue, even though the drawdown may merely be a correction. On the other hand, during asset bubbles, when prices reach levels that are no longer supported by fundamentals, people may continue buying under the false belief that the rally can only continue.

Combine these two, and you get individualism: someone who does something that serves the self more than the order around him, and gets away with it, will keep doing it, and will eventually become addicted to the high of getting away with it.

This is a formula for a criminal pathology. The parasitic person enjoys taking from others, having them know this has been done, and having them be unable to do anything about it. They are the ultimate individualists, which is why they like socialism as well.

“Easy answers” arise from this same combination of availability bias and confirmation bias. The person “cherry-picks” data for what confirms their bias, and then picks out of whatever pops up in a relatively short time window.

This produces endless simplistic answers floating around the internet. People want to blame the rich, convert everyone to Jesus, shoot the homosexuals, or other scapegoating nonsense. What they really want is to avoid having to deal with ambiguity and difficult questions.

One recent explosion of simplistic answers was the hijacking of traditionalism into pop-trad, or whatever we might call the merger of crunchy conservatism and traditionalist aesthetics. Suddenly e-girls and social media chads were competing to be the most orthodox Catholics ever.

With that, came all sorts of “easy answers” reasoning. Catholicism is the real deal, they said, and protestantism is fake. To be a trad, you have to be super-religious, and the more obscure and original the sect of Catholicism, the better.

Protestantism, they claimed, was not even really Christianity. It was a heresy, probably involved with The Jew™ somehow, and it rejected the actual god in favor of pagan symbols and an abstraction, modernistic concept of the divine.

But this was a cope and a social identity, not an actual study of comparative religions.

Protestantism can be viewed as a re-interpretation of Christianity in the light of earlier knowledge, namely the ancient Greek, Roman, and Nordic-Germanic myths. It took Christianity from middle eastern superstition to more of a modern descriptive religion.

This was as big of a break as the split between original Christianity and the idol-worshipers. Christianity made the gods abstract; protestantism made them analytical by bringing in the nature-worship of the ancients with a modern sensibility linked to science and philosophy.

In the protestant churches, they celebrate the tension between Athens and Jerusalem by interpreting the latter in the style of the former. Christianity, they say, cannot be fully at odds with its world or common sense, but an extension of those things.

Not only analytical, but abstract, protestantism pushed back against the superstitious and mystical Catholicism. It asserted a world of order in which disciplined thought revealed what must be real and actual, not dogma itself or a trance-like state of submission.

The rest of the world will never forgive that step, nor the necessary one which capped off the protestant revolution, namely Calvinism. Although not in the exact same language, Calvinism encoded Darwinism and ancestral worship into Christianity.

At the current time, Christianity is busy perishing, both Catholic and protestant forms. It is dying of being foreign, mostly, but also from its dualism, which made it an enemy of realism and closer to herd emotion than to nature.

That defeats the point of religion, which is to connect us to something larger than ourselves so that we can believe in the world again, connect to it, and exercise our roles in it with clean mental health and a positive, forward-oriented attitude.

The only growing religion in our age seems to be “spiritual but not religious,” which converts into a simple nature-based faith without many firm beliefs. It is a vague apprehension of a benevolent universe, an eternity to the soul, and a reward for goodness and excellence.

Catholicism will live on, of course, but mostly as thousands of little regional faiths which will slowly recapture it with their own traditions, imagery, gods, and morals. It will endure in name only, much like the big protestant churches.

The farthest-seeing Christians are already incorporating pagan notions into their teachings. They are planning for a transition from a church of the Bible to a church of tradition in which the most ancient types of belief take precedence over pre-modern ones.

When that happens, the thesis finally fits the data instead of the other way around. The answers are not hard, but not easy either. And our fundamental human faith in the goodness of life will simply take on a new form with fewer complications.

Tags: catholicism, christianity, crunchy conservatism, protestantism, traditionalism