Amerika

We live in a relative universe, but people forget the final and most important detail: any object is relative to anything it interacts with, which includes everything, since it distantly interacts with everything else in the system.

Thus we get a kind of holistic realism where we can accept relativity, but also the whole, and in it realize the necessity of paying attention to the consequences of our actions. As people say, “what kind of world will we leave?” — but do not wait until death, ask this of every decision.

Our current society lives in a kind of safety cult. Having dispensed with any believe in the sacrality of life, and of course any idea of an afterlife, it leaves us terrified of ever dying because nothing is worth dying or living for, except ourselves.

This is how you know individualism has taken over. The individual is beyond reproach. Anything that destabilizes the mental state of the individual is hostile and must be destroyed, including too much realism or nature.

Individualists in groups create a safety cult. Their primary goal is bourgeois, or the idea that no one needs to work and take risks to keep civilization going. Pay your taxes, go to your job, and mow your lawn… and you are a good citizen!

But those who are at risk of losing what they have show us the need to act, such as how dark-skinned Caucasians are most likely to be aware of what will be lost if Whites are replaced:

We theorize that Whites with darker skin will be motivated to protect the boundaries of Whiteness due to the loss of status they would face from blurring racial boundaries. Consistent with growing evidence of skin color’s importance for Whites, we demonstrate that darker-skinned Whites — measured via a light-reflectance spectrophotometer — identify more strongly with their White racial identity and are more likely to hold conservative political views on racialized issues than lighter-skinned Whites.

When they see what is about to be lost, they pay attention. When they are safe in their little worlds of careers and money, they see no reason to worry about the tide rising all around them. After all, they have already made it to safety and plenty.

What happens is that people have mental maps formed early in life. They perceive the world, form interconnected memories of it, and then live as if that was what they are perceiving at ay moment. They live through memories and conclusions drawn long ago.

Until something shocks them, people do not update their mental maps. When they encounter tragedy or loss, they suddenly update their knowledge of the world:

The prefrontal cortex, a brain region long associated with learning more flexible behaviors, can sometimes block the ability to think outside the box, a new study in mice shows. The finding by biologists at Emory University was published in Science Advances.

Animals, like people, often stick with what worked well in the past to achieve a goal — a win-stay strategy. When a smarter strategy comes along, ideally, they learn to adopt it.

New poker players, Lu explains, focus more on mathematical probabilities and the value of the cards in their hands and on the table. For optimal play, however, they need to learn to adapt their strategy during each game, based on subtle cues from other players, to factor in the possibility of a bluff.

While one strategy is based primarily on memory, the other relies more on external sensory cues.

Your average White person is concerned with his family, job, friends, community, and shopping. His favorite restaurants and movies feature highly too. He is living in the small for what he finds relevant that he personally understands through direct experience.

The problem is that this world of his is relative to the larger world, and when something goes awry in the larger world, eventually it invades his bubble and he is forced to readjust his mental map, usually too late to fix anything.

Tags: diversity, mental maps, prefrontal cortex, whites