Amerika

We are coming out of the Age of Symbolism; it naturally gives way to an Age of Organicism where, on the far side of a technological boom, we have to ask ourselves what is really good that we want to keep from the last age and the ages before.

After all, our technologies begin with language and symbol, which are powerful magic in themselves, and that enabled us to make a vast array of gadgets and potions that in theory make life better. However, the disadvantages of these technologies are now showing themselves, and people are craving an alternative.

Contemporary people often aspire to something like this: a small cabin in the woods, on a big plot of land, with clean air and clean water in a quiet environment. They would like to leave the “rat race,” the urban wasteland, commuting, and corporate living behind.

This tells us that technology, like the modern lifestyle afforded by bureaucracy and its institutions, has peaked and people are backing away from seeing it as an ultimate good that should be a goal. Instead they want a middle path: technology and bureaucracy where they work, but otherwise, life as it always has been.

When facing something new, however, the risk is in importing the now into that future. We can only conceive of something different in the terms and methods of today, and if we let that run away with us, it will deliver a version of the same. What troubles us here is that very few people can think.

Philosophers and spiritualists talk about “thinking” and mean something different than what modern people do. To a modern person, thinking means scrolling through your brain for a method that can be argued to address the need. The goodness of the event is rationalized from its social acceptability.

It resembles mathematical proofs in geometry. You need to find a way to claim that you have the ability to know something, based on theories that other people support. Once you have a plausible option, you derive broad conclusions from minimal data based on the precedents you assume are absolutely true.

This is most people think, even if it is fraudulent. Their analysis is strictly about selecting options from a menu and using them to make a socially-acceptable vision of truth that is always a simpler model than the reality. They think backwards from convention to method and claim whatever they get was their goal all along.

This type of means-over-ends or method-over-logic mental processing does not involve an actual end, or consequences in reality. It is not designed to be applied; it is designed to convince others, and requires cherry-picking the elements of reality that are considered in its model, ignoring the oversimplification.

They come up with the conclusion they want, then find ways to argue for it, and then do their best to explain the result as something good. This is calculation, for sure, and it requires some skill, but it is not thinking, which requires creative analysis of both reality and what will produce a good outcome.

Thinking in the traditional sense is transcendental. It seeks to exclude nothing and consider everything, and accepts “imperfection” and “inequality” in life because those things lead to positive ends. It concerns itself with mirroring such ends in its own contribution, and finds methods to match.

When we speak about thinking, we mean finding a way to balance inner intuition with the outside world and the best possible version of our needs within it; this allows us to have actual goals (or “ends”). At that point, we choose whatever methods will make that happen, instead of starting with methods that are socially acceptable.

You will find many people who can rationalize, but few who can actually think, in a dying society.

Tags: backward thinking, logic, means over ends, rationalization, thinking