Beat me to the Matrix remark. I was thinking the same thing.
Regarding punishment for serial killers and the like, I'm a bit more ruthless in my inclinations. Or, from another perspective, more humane. To use the rabid animal analogy, we don't chuck the beast in a dark basement for the rest of its life, because we recognize that 'punishment' serves no moral purpose - the animal is incapable of learning not to bite kids faces off, for example. Instead we just put it down. I feel the same way about criminal sociopaths. They can't learn; ergo, putting them in a 'penitentiary' makes exactly no sense, since penitence is only sensible if it can lead to a change in outlook and behaviour. It's really just a form of psychological torture, which, since once again reform is impossible, is only being carried out to satisfy our own desire for revenge. The humane thing to do is to shoot them.
About the only case in which I'd agree that keeping them alive and locked up is the moral option, and this is a very utilitarian argument I'm going to make, is if we think we can learn something by placing them under observation and studying them. However, that instrumentalizes them in exactly the same fashion that a sociopath reduces others to mere objects, so it's a rather fraught line of reasoning.
I'm not sure what this says about consciousness. That no matter how strongly we identify with our beliefs, there will always be a gap between who we actually are and what we believe ourselves to be? I guess that's cause for hope that even the most committed wokeist can one day see the errors of their thinking and change their minds. It's interesting that the capacity for cognitive dissonance should be a distinguishing feature of conscious minds, and that makes me wonder what is behind that phenomenon, as in, if cognitive dissonance is a maladaptive use of some aspect of the mind, then what aspect of the mind is that, and what are its distinguishing characteristics when healthy and functioning in a beneficial way?
Very good. Here is something I wrote the other day, which also speaks to this:
The question remains why are so many folks unwilling or unable see the danger?
I watched a podcast yesterday, which gave me a framework for understanding this: "willful blindness". This was originally a legal term used
“to describe a situation in which a person seeks to avoid civil or criminal liability for a wrongful act by intentionally keeping themselves unaware of facts that would render them liable or implicated”,
but is now used more broadly to mean:
“any situation in which people intentionally turn their attention away from an ethical problem, for instance, because the problem is too disturbing for people to want it dominating their thoughts, or from the knowledge that solving the problem would require extensive effort”,
or
“deliberate failure to make a reasonable inquiry of wrongdoing despite suspicion or an awareness of the high probability of its existence”.
The synopsis of a book I found on the subject sums up the issue well.
“Why, after every major accident and blunder, do we look back and ask, how could we have been so blind? Why do some people see what others don't? Drawing on studies by psychologists and neuroscientists, and from interviews with business leaders, whistle blowers and white collar criminals… exploring the reasons that individuals and groups are blind to impending personal tragedies, corporate collapses, engineering failures – even crimes against humanity.”
“We turn a blind eye in order to feel safe, to avoid conflict, to reduce anxiety and to protect prestige. It makes us feel good at first, with consequences we don’t see”.
I think “wilful” can be bit of a misnomer here, as it implies voluntary, premediated or conscious inaction. It seems to me that in most cases this is an autonomic or subconscious or default psychological self-defence mechanism, which, at the least, takes a great deal of self-awareness or resistance to overcome. I will use the term "psychological blindness" instead, therefore. Indeed, I think psychological blindness is strongly linked with the self-delusions of left brain hemisphere over-activation induced by defensive Nervous System state.
One of the things I enjoy most about your writing is that, while we employ very different (and often mutually hostile/orthogonal) language models, I think we still understand and even often agree with each other. For instance, when you write:
"We can be emotionally motivated to block out or deny certain memories or facts. … We can selectively give preference to certain memories over others to create a biased representation of the thing being thought about. We can become creative with our memories, rewriting our own and others’ personal history and to create a more palatable and self-serving (or self-deprecating) version."
In this and similar sentiments, the subject of we/you/I can be construed as being the selector/chooser, even if the particular selections of thought obliterates the selecting agent (i.e. the "self," "soul" or "ultimate being"). In my depiction of the process, the Woke. the psychopath and other pathological forms of conversive thinking are best explained as an abstraction layer between ultimate being and the reflective aspect thought that precedes action (i.e. the "voice in our heads" that we conflate with thought, but which is in actuality the grammatical construct slammed together in its wake).
In my model. it isn't that the Woke (or a psychopath any other seemingly dogmatic or antisocial communicator) is literally a zombie incapable of choosing, but that they've confused the abstraction layer for the choice layer -- or perhaps convinced themselves that one or the other layer is an illusion.
This is very important- women in a relationship with a psychopath become borderline, display their own version of narcissistic traits and because they haven’t developed the mask, it’s easy to blame them, because they are acting in ways that lack empathy and feel like they are losing their minds. I know I did, and it’s very difficult to pick up the pieces. And the left-handed son, also with suspected adhd/asd w high intelligence bcs he has poor social skills, seems to lack empathy, is demanding and persistent in getting his own way with no consideration of fairness or impact on others is the reason you stay with his psychopathic father who will lie in court, steal from you and make any co-parenting impossible. There has to be a way to humanely deal with psychopaths so that they don’t hurt others but it’s also really not their fault. I’m a way we should consider ourselves their carers rather than punish them. That makes us psychopathic. They ARE human and dehumanising people is never justified. Education + holding our own behaviour to rigorous account, insisting on codes of high conduct and maturity exposes them but then what? Even going ‘no contact’ is impossible. Compassion in crucial otherwise it’s just going to be more of the same.
“… because to do otherwise would be mean and potentially conservative.”
How much of this is simply tribalism though? Someone pointed out the other day that it’s probably a good thing that Trump is still pro vax. Otherwise, the Western press and intelligentsia would be forever locked in their dungeon of COVID apologia.
Of course, the fact that those circles are so much in lockstep is due to something darker and deeper going on.
Harrison, you should really read Dianetics! I don't need you to become a Scientologist, but someone has to start talking about Hubbard's concepts of how the mind works.
If you are going to extol people to become more rational (less conversive, less dissociative, less reactive) then you have to offer them a way forward. Most people simply cannot do this by themselves. It takes, at the minimum, a conversation, as is explained in Hubbard's 1950 book.
You may be slightly familiar with the research done on past life recall by Ian Stevenson's group at University of Virginia School of Medicine. He and his associates verified the past life recalls of quite a large number of children. They also verified that those past lives had an emotional impact on the present lives of those kids. Think of all the people who have absolutely no recall of a past life at all. All that experience impacts their current lives to various degrees, yet in ways that must be entirely subconscious. Now what would happen if the most important past life experiences could be fully remembered? That is the basic therapeutic mechanism of "subjective" therapies, even the crude psychoanalysis that has been practiced by therapists. Hubbard also developed therapies that rely on more basic mental mechanisms that we call "objective." It is a very rich body of knowledge and I urge you to become more familiar with it.
"This may come as a shock to some, but there is such a thing as clear thinking" Indeed, ratiocination is real, and is a worthy goal. Acceptance of polylogism precludes clear thinking of any kind and is of course central to wokism. The fact that the resulting conversive thinking obliterates performance in the long run is what makes me so confident that we will ultimately win this culture war.
Speaking of the death-saturated matrix that now actually controls the entire world, especially in the USA check out the Counterpunch essay by Howard Lisnoff titled War Is as Popular as Cherry Pie. Among other things he refers to a book by Jeremy Kuzmarov titled The Trillion Dollar Silencer,
You also have to remember that humankind altogether is now living in the very dark end of the Kali Yuga epoque in which every aspect of human culture has been corrupted and darkened.
And wherein the collective Wetiko psychosis is now in full toxic "bloom" as described in this essay;
This assessment of our collective situation was given by another clear-eyed Buddhist philosopher who was acutely sensitive to the state of the world.
"The current world-situation offers only the entropic end-pattern for the disintegration of the human species, which will inevitably become the catastrophic and complete failure of the human species and the total demise of the human species.
The entire pattern and trend of current human culture, including scientific materialism, all modes of false philosophy, and everything relating to the current domain of consumer based politics, social egoity, competitive social systems, tribalistic religious and national systems (and conventional religion altogether), un-regulated economics, is about death.
The Earth-world and all of the global human domain have already collapsed far enough. If the pattern of the whole collapses much further, the human life-sphere will not be retrievable."
Never mind that the two most destructive forms of pathological (even psychotic) cultural and political group-think in the US were and are still being dramatized by the Tea Party movement and of course the trumpen-fuhrer inspired MAGA movement.
And of course by psychotic crazies such as Ted Cruz, Newt Gingrich, and the gun-toting (loving) members of Congress who sent their admirers Christmas greetings featuring their armed-to-the-teeth family members "lovingly" holding their assault rifles. And what about Kylie Rittenhouse too!
Beat me to the Matrix remark. I was thinking the same thing.
Regarding punishment for serial killers and the like, I'm a bit more ruthless in my inclinations. Or, from another perspective, more humane. To use the rabid animal analogy, we don't chuck the beast in a dark basement for the rest of its life, because we recognize that 'punishment' serves no moral purpose - the animal is incapable of learning not to bite kids faces off, for example. Instead we just put it down. I feel the same way about criminal sociopaths. They can't learn; ergo, putting them in a 'penitentiary' makes exactly no sense, since penitence is only sensible if it can lead to a change in outlook and behaviour. It's really just a form of psychological torture, which, since once again reform is impossible, is only being carried out to satisfy our own desire for revenge. The humane thing to do is to shoot them.
About the only case in which I'd agree that keeping them alive and locked up is the moral option, and this is a very utilitarian argument I'm going to make, is if we think we can learn something by placing them under observation and studying them. However, that instrumentalizes them in exactly the same fashion that a sociopath reduces others to mere objects, so it's a rather fraught line of reasoning.
Great analysis, and the memes you used are hilarious and spot on!
It's interesting to compare the woke NPC humans' thought patterns to those of AI software with woke programming: whereas humans avoid the feeling of cognitive dissonance by refusing to see evidence that would undermine their worldview, the AI programs simply break down and return fatal errors (as Mark Bisone has shown in his series on ChatGPT https://open.substack.com/pub/markbisone/p/mark-vs-chatgpt-session-1?utm_source=direct&r=sow8t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web).
I'm not sure what this says about consciousness. That no matter how strongly we identify with our beliefs, there will always be a gap between who we actually are and what we believe ourselves to be? I guess that's cause for hope that even the most committed wokeist can one day see the errors of their thinking and change their minds. It's interesting that the capacity for cognitive dissonance should be a distinguishing feature of conscious minds, and that makes me wonder what is behind that phenomenon, as in, if cognitive dissonance is a maladaptive use of some aspect of the mind, then what aspect of the mind is that, and what are its distinguishing characteristics when healthy and functioning in a beneficial way?
Very good. Here is something I wrote the other day, which also speaks to this:
The question remains why are so many folks unwilling or unable see the danger?
I watched a podcast yesterday, which gave me a framework for understanding this: "willful blindness". This was originally a legal term used
“to describe a situation in which a person seeks to avoid civil or criminal liability for a wrongful act by intentionally keeping themselves unaware of facts that would render them liable or implicated”,
but is now used more broadly to mean:
“any situation in which people intentionally turn their attention away from an ethical problem, for instance, because the problem is too disturbing for people to want it dominating their thoughts, or from the knowledge that solving the problem would require extensive effort”,
or
“deliberate failure to make a reasonable inquiry of wrongdoing despite suspicion or an awareness of the high probability of its existence”.
The synopsis of a book I found on the subject sums up the issue well.
“Why, after every major accident and blunder, do we look back and ask, how could we have been so blind? Why do some people see what others don't? Drawing on studies by psychologists and neuroscientists, and from interviews with business leaders, whistle blowers and white collar criminals… exploring the reasons that individuals and groups are blind to impending personal tragedies, corporate collapses, engineering failures – even crimes against humanity.”
“We turn a blind eye in order to feel safe, to avoid conflict, to reduce anxiety and to protect prestige. It makes us feel good at first, with consequences we don’t see”.
I think “wilful” can be bit of a misnomer here, as it implies voluntary, premediated or conscious inaction. It seems to me that in most cases this is an autonomic or subconscious or default psychological self-defence mechanism, which, at the least, takes a great deal of self-awareness or resistance to overcome. I will use the term "psychological blindness" instead, therefore. Indeed, I think psychological blindness is strongly linked with the self-delusions of left brain hemisphere over-activation induced by defensive Nervous System state.
One of the things I enjoy most about your writing is that, while we employ very different (and often mutually hostile/orthogonal) language models, I think we still understand and even often agree with each other. For instance, when you write:
"We can be emotionally motivated to block out or deny certain memories or facts. … We can selectively give preference to certain memories over others to create a biased representation of the thing being thought about. We can become creative with our memories, rewriting our own and others’ personal history and to create a more palatable and self-serving (or self-deprecating) version."
In this and similar sentiments, the subject of we/you/I can be construed as being the selector/chooser, even if the particular selections of thought obliterates the selecting agent (i.e. the "self," "soul" or "ultimate being"). In my depiction of the process, the Woke. the psychopath and other pathological forms of conversive thinking are best explained as an abstraction layer between ultimate being and the reflective aspect thought that precedes action (i.e. the "voice in our heads" that we conflate with thought, but which is in actuality the grammatical construct slammed together in its wake).
In my model. it isn't that the Woke (or a psychopath any other seemingly dogmatic or antisocial communicator) is literally a zombie incapable of choosing, but that they've confused the abstraction layer for the choice layer -- or perhaps convinced themselves that one or the other layer is an illusion.
This is very important- women in a relationship with a psychopath become borderline, display their own version of narcissistic traits and because they haven’t developed the mask, it’s easy to blame them, because they are acting in ways that lack empathy and feel like they are losing their minds. I know I did, and it’s very difficult to pick up the pieces. And the left-handed son, also with suspected adhd/asd w high intelligence bcs he has poor social skills, seems to lack empathy, is demanding and persistent in getting his own way with no consideration of fairness or impact on others is the reason you stay with his psychopathic father who will lie in court, steal from you and make any co-parenting impossible. There has to be a way to humanely deal with psychopaths so that they don’t hurt others but it’s also really not their fault. I’m a way we should consider ourselves their carers rather than punish them. That makes us psychopathic. They ARE human and dehumanising people is never justified. Education + holding our own behaviour to rigorous account, insisting on codes of high conduct and maturity exposes them but then what? Even going ‘no contact’ is impossible. Compassion in crucial otherwise it’s just going to be more of the same.
Excellent piece
“… because to do otherwise would be mean and potentially conservative.”
How much of this is simply tribalism though? Someone pointed out the other day that it’s probably a good thing that Trump is still pro vax. Otherwise, the Western press and intelligentsia would be forever locked in their dungeon of COVID apologia.
Of course, the fact that those circles are so much in lockstep is due to something darker and deeper going on.
Harrison, you should really read Dianetics! I don't need you to become a Scientologist, but someone has to start talking about Hubbard's concepts of how the mind works.
If you are going to extol people to become more rational (less conversive, less dissociative, less reactive) then you have to offer them a way forward. Most people simply cannot do this by themselves. It takes, at the minimum, a conversation, as is explained in Hubbard's 1950 book.
You may be slightly familiar with the research done on past life recall by Ian Stevenson's group at University of Virginia School of Medicine. He and his associates verified the past life recalls of quite a large number of children. They also verified that those past lives had an emotional impact on the present lives of those kids. Think of all the people who have absolutely no recall of a past life at all. All that experience impacts their current lives to various degrees, yet in ways that must be entirely subconscious. Now what would happen if the most important past life experiences could be fully remembered? That is the basic therapeutic mechanism of "subjective" therapies, even the crude psychoanalysis that has been practiced by therapists. Hubbard also developed therapies that rely on more basic mental mechanisms that we call "objective." It is a very rich body of knowledge and I urge you to become more familiar with it.
"This may come as a shock to some, but there is such a thing as clear thinking" Indeed, ratiocination is real, and is a worthy goal. Acceptance of polylogism precludes clear thinking of any kind and is of course central to wokism. The fact that the resulting conversive thinking obliterates performance in the long run is what makes me so confident that we will ultimately win this culture war.
Speaking of the death-saturated matrix that now actually controls the entire world, especially in the USA check out the Counterpunch essay by Howard Lisnoff titled War Is as Popular as Cherry Pie. Among other things he refers to a book by Jeremy Kuzmarov titled The Trillion Dollar Silencer,
You also have to remember that humankind altogether is now living in the very dark end of the Kali Yuga epoque in which every aspect of human culture has been corrupted and darkened.
And wherein the collective Wetiko psychosis is now in full toxic "bloom" as described in this essay;
http://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/seeing-wetiko-on-capitalism-mind-viruses-and-antidotes-for-a-world-in-transition.
This assessment of our collective situation was given by another clear-eyed Buddhist philosopher who was acutely sensitive to the state of the world.
"The current world-situation offers only the entropic end-pattern for the disintegration of the human species, which will inevitably become the catastrophic and complete failure of the human species and the total demise of the human species.
The entire pattern and trend of current human culture, including scientific materialism, all modes of false philosophy, and everything relating to the current domain of consumer based politics, social egoity, competitive social systems, tribalistic religious and national systems (and conventional religion altogether), un-regulated economics, is about death.
The Earth-world and all of the global human domain have already collapsed far enough. If the pattern of the whole collapses much further, the human life-sphere will not be retrievable."
Never mind that the two most destructive forms of pathological (even psychotic) cultural and political group-think in the US were and are still being dramatized by the Tea Party movement and of course the trumpen-fuhrer inspired MAGA movement.
And of course by psychotic crazies such as Ted Cruz, Newt Gingrich, and the gun-toting (loving) members of Congress who sent their admirers Christmas greetings featuring their armed-to-the-teeth family members "lovingly" holding their assault rifles. And what about Kylie Rittenhouse too!