Subj : Re: Perplexed
To   : Cozmo
From : DustCouncil
Date : Fri Jul 16 2021 00:01:54

I think of the main problems we have is this tendency to regard every problem 
as political.  Political radicals always suggest replacing the operating system 
of society with a new one.

Analyses of the current situation starting in the 1970s with Toffler's Future 
Shock suggested that the problem was too much information, and that we'd have 
problems processing it: overload.

This analysis evolved to a concern with disinformation and propaganda: too much 
"fake news," and we seem to be stuck at this analysis point.

Seems to me that the bigger problem is garbage-in/garbage-out, combined with 
hardware problems.  

While it is easy to understand propaganda, profit-driven news agencies 
pandering to various demographics, and outright lies in service to one agenda 
or another, what I did not see coming was the deluge of information giving 
people license to *disbelieve anything which makes them uncomfortable.*  The 
logic goes that since there's so much fallacious information out there, every 
piece of information is suspect.  Any proposition may not merely be questioned, 
but easily rejected: simply find a safe space which confirms what you want to 
believe.  There's always literature, always a "rap," always pre-packaged 
arguments ready to challenge any idea or trend that upsets someone.

Accordingly, the problem of our age lies at the intersection of philosophy and 
psychology: it is fundamentally *epistemological*: By what process shall we 
come to understand truth, and facts, and objective reality itself?  Years of 
postmodernism has pushed the idea of purely contextual thinking and 
deconstruction in which the obvious truth that most people do not apprehend 
objective reality well, is replaced with "there is no objective reality."  
Occult thinking has a similar concept: "All is mind."

This problem is atomic, in that it is ultimately suffered by individuals: not 
social classes, or races, or even the state or corporatism/capitalism, or 
whatever is convenient to blame.  The world "out there" is an effect, or 
symtom, of the deeper problems of individual consciousness.  

You can abolish (pick your ideological poison): The state, capitalism, the 
military, the media, but like cutting a weed off at its base and leaving the 
root, it will simply re-grow.  

I have read very little about attacking this problem: how can we (a) know what 
is true, and (b) prioritize knowing objective facts and the way they fit 
together over (c) what it is convenient to believe, or what relieves us of the 
cognitive dissonance all intellectually honest people must feel when that 
nagging doubt about their own politics, worldview, or reality tunnel keeps them 
awake at night?

How many people have had a static belief system all of their lives?  Consider 
only politics (we could talk about religion or other things too) -- how many 
people first developed political consciousness, only to change or evolve on 
certain issues or topics (or even make an about-face?)

A more interesting question is this: if indeed most people have changed their 
minds in light of better evidence or arguments, how many people are likely to 
express the same opinions they hold today, 20 years from now?

And if it is true that our thinking evolves, and that we have in the fact been 
wrong about one thing or another in the past, does it not hold true that we are 
probably wrong about something today?  

Why is everyone screaming at each other?

Why is everyone afraid to admit that while we have a sense of justice and 
morality (we should), ultimately reality is complex enough that most of us 
don't have much of an idea of what we are talking about.

One thing I have noticed about people who are always at war with the status quo 
is there is no access to an alternate timeline in which their ideological 
fetishes were instituted, and the consequences of those policies measured 
against the status quo.  How awfully convenient it is for the perpetually 
ideologically aggrieved to never have have to put up or shut up.

I became increasingly apolitical after my political science degree in large 
part because I started noticing that people on my own side (I had a particular 
ideological posture in those years) barely understood their opponents' 
arguments.  I'd hear commentary on books, thinkers, authors, and ideas I knew 
they were unfamiliar with, plagiarizing someone else's commentary on those 
subjects.

This is difficult to tackle.  It's a whole lot more difficult than simply 
saying, "Hey, we should snap our fingers and try this *ism rather than the 
current *ism and that would fix everything," as if there isn't a butterfly 
effect-like chain of largely unintended consequences of nearly any political 
policy or lens through which we see the world.  People seem to indicate they 
*really know what things would look like* if they put their ideas into 
practice; an arrogant presumption largely because we have only ever walked in 
our own shoes and most people barely understand themselves, much less the 
billions of people on the planet and how they think and what motivates them.

Even the big things: sex, power, greed/money.  We know these motivate people 
but they sure seem to motivate some people more than others.  Some stand up 
against them as vices and others turn them into religions.

I have no desire to pick on anarchists but it was the anarchists who made me 
lose my composure first: I read an argument, I think, in Red Emma Speaks, about 
how crime is mainly a product of an exploitative economic system and the state 
which supports it.  Abolish the state, create participatory democracy, and 
crime will cease.

I have no doubt *some crime* would cease.  People who don't worry about losing 
a roof over their heads (as would be the case in anarchism) are less likely to 
engage in robbery (itself an absurdity since property is abolished and only 
"possessions" in the anarchist sense) remain.

I don't know if this idea strikes anyone else as ludicrous, but it does to me.  
You can abolish the state, abolish the police, burn the jackboots, and yet, in 
the end, you will wind up with with what we had here in Tucson in the Old West: 
vigilance committees.  Someone to "put a bit of stick about," and in all 
likelihood a mob.

Because for want of basic things, is not the only, or main reason, people 
engage in robbery.  How often do you read your local police blotter sections in 
newspapers which involve people stealing food, diapers, baby formula, and warm 
blankets?

This is just one example, but there are many others.  Ideology cannot save us, 
in large part because ideology is an *emergent* phenomenon, created by the 
aggregate effects of individual human consciousness.  But if individual human 
consciousness is broken (I'd argue it is), how can it produce a workable 
universally-applied system (like a guiding ideology and a state or equivalent 
to enforce its edicts?)

Garbage in is bad human consciousness, and garbage out, is the political system 
and its parts: police, military, and the state itself.

Anyway just kidding about all of the above; this is what happens when I am 
jonesing for a good root beer.

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