Amerika

As the twentieth century recedes, we are starting to see that the problem of humanity is more like sin and less like an external force: humans are self-destructive because they tend toward delusional thought in order to make themselves feel better.

Who needs to feel better? Someone who feels bad, or thinks they should feel bad because that explains their failures not as failings, but as victimizations. When there is no one to blame but ourselves, we find someone to blame and distract ourselves in trying to destroy them not fix ourselves.

The best of us overcome this early on by having forward goals: they want to achieve things, create things, improve things, in the sense of adding to or organizing what is there so that it works better in reality, i.e. the world out there that exists even when we sleep or die.

Others fall into the black hole. This hole has two parts, a self-pity within the individual and a group which echoes and amplifies this self-pity. The group seeks to justify its own lack of mental organization, and the individual wants to “feel better” about having chosen to avoid mental organization.

Mental organization in this case refers to disciplined thinking enough to find a way to adapt to a world beyond human social interaction; since we are human as individuals, and others are human, we can share a human-only world between us through language tokens and emotional appearance, despite these being inherently manipulative.

Burroughs famously said, “Language is a virus.” He might have been better served to say: socializing is a virus. People share surface impressions in order to make each other feel better, and in doing so, drift further from reality through a process called Crowdism.

Societies that focus on the negative — who is poor, sad, lonely, etc. — have given in to the black hole. Their individuals pity themselves, then form groups to make this pity the accepted norm, at which point society becomes oriented toward the negative.

When a society directs all of its care toward the poor, sick, sad, homeless, and so on, it has given up on moving forward. It has substituted self-pity for achievement. It has changed its values from rewarding success to glorifying failure.

Self-pity in individuals and groups gives us a reason to fall within and live in our human-only world, denying reality which is at that point simply irrelevant.

This distracts us from the real goal of life, which is to adapt and maximize our position. With humans, this involves self-actualization, or coming to know ourselves to the point that we can weed out pathologies and replace them with deliberate, constructive behaviors.

Tags: self-actualization, self-pity