Amerika

They call them “first world problems,” which is their way of trying to make us feel guilty for not failing hard like the third world, but these little glitches in modern life remind us of what we still have to get right before we are moving on to something even better.

If you have ever opened a refrigerator at night, you are probably familiar with the temporary blindness that followed. Your average refrigerator can probably connect to Twitter at this point, but it has no photocell or ability to turn its brightness down in the dark of night.

We have known about this problem for decades. The higher-end fridges would do it, back in the day, including commercial units. But the average person still suffered a few minutes of night blindness any time they needed a glass of milk at 4am.

This situation serves as a useful metaphor: as a species, we specialize in missing the obvious. When we are in dying Fall-of-Rome times like Late Stage Democracy, we become absolute experts in looking past obvious, real-world needs so that we can lose ourselves in feelgood fictions.

What are feelgood fictions? Anything you think about to make your mental state pleasant that is not related to reality as it is constitutes a mental fiction. Like when you are in the dentist’s chair or bent over your proctologist’s table, and you think of a vacation you had once.

Humans focus on the things they can do that make them feel powerful. Whatever does not make them feel powerful is a weakness and scares them, so they edit that out of the semi-pornographic fantasy of our individual importance that our brains present to us.

This means that we ignore what we should fear, and instead focus on false fears and false hopes. We create a reality inhabited by things that make us feel better, including easily-defeated scapegoats and Utopian talismans.

People focus on what they can control, which means they are obsessed with (a) what is in their power and (b) methods they use to control it. By definition, that means they ignore things out of their control and the goals behind those methods.

In human society, especially in the third world, no one is focused on the connection between cause-effect and goal. A sane thought looks at cause-effect for a list of likely consequences to actions, and then picks which of those is closest to what is needed.

For example, in response to the problem of crops drying up, we have a list of A_X -> B_X events, such as dancing for the gods and whether or not it brought rain. Actions pair to results.

When we see that only irrigation works to routinely keep crops moisturized, we can discard the other stuff for now and try what we know works. That way, the crops grow and we do not starve while we look for even better options.

Rationalists, on the other hand, try to argue for what they desire as something that either produces B_X directly or is a subset of it, which means that it is “good” and should be adopted.

In their view, rain produces irrigation, so why bother with an irrigation system, when you can simply directly invoke the rain with idol worship, rain dances, social welfare systems, or midnight rallies in cool uniforms?

An honest chain of thought is this: transcendental goals -> immediate goals -> known desired outcome (B_X) -> known action that produces it (A_X).

That is to say, before we can choose any goals, we have to have a matrix of values, aesthetics, and purposes that determine which methods we will use; the alternative is the other way around, namely clinging to “safe” methods like irrigation and demonizing everything else.

However, that approach denies context. Irrigation is great for getting crops watered, but maybe a better way is to find regions that are naturally overwatered and grow there, and irrigation is only part of the picture, since fertilizer and weeding also come into play.

Rationalists on the other hand specialize in cherry-picking. They rationalize what they desire as good, which means that they are hostile to both goals and a historical A_X -> B_X database. They want what they want and they will say whatever is needed to convince others to do that.

Since in a group the lowest common denominator is fear, and people respond to fear by clinging to their desires, we end up with the commonality of everyone wanting to do what they desire and to have everyone else subsidize them.

They want the individual to be more powerful than the goal of their culture. In fact, they want the individual to be more powerful than nature. Since this is obviously not true, they have committed themselves to insanity, but this is how most humans behave!

Contrary to what the hipsters tell us, the problem in humanity is not “analysis paralysis” but that no one is looking at the actual issues, therefore we go round and round in circles arguing over non-issues because those make everyone feel powerful and “in control.”

In reality, no one is “in control.” Nature is larger than us, and it does what it must, which will seem arbitrary and capricious to us. Luckily we are not gods or nature, so that opinion does not matter.

Those of us who embrace “irrationalism” start with the premise that human reason cannot conquer nature. At best, we can influence outcomes, but we cannot change the basics. We are still subject to its rules no matter how much we try.

We can see society divided roughly as follows:

• Left/Dualist/Rationalist (focus on: self)
  • Individualist
  • Maintain mental state
  • Peer pressure
  • Control nature
  • Means-over-ends
• Right/Monist/Irrationalist (focus on: order)
  • Duty/Service/Culture
  • Sanity through goal, excellence (arete), transcendentals
  • Reality over herd
  • Accept nature incl Darwinism
  • Ends-over-means

An irrationalist chooses from the methods of nature and enhances them with technology, but does not hope for Utopia or to change the basic patterns of nature. It is a form of intellectual maturity and since most humans oppose it, we need wise leaders who can understand it despite its unpopularity.

Tags: irrationalism, justification, means over ends, rationalism, rationalization