Amerika

Ted Kaczynski thinks that society went wrong with technology; surely modern technology is part of it, but we have had technology of some form since our origins, so that cannot be it, even if technology has in part subsidized our decline.

Others believe it is the loss of religion, but this is based on the lie that Western Civilization is Christianity, when in fact the best parts of Western Civilization existed long before Christ. Clearly losing Jesus did not hurt the ancient Greeks or early Romans.

Still others think it is religion that did it to us, the egalitarian-ish Christian faith. However, the Greeks encountered all of our problems before Jesus, and most of the world runs on the third world system of warlords trading favors for an equal population, so that cannot be it.

Others want to blame the Jews. Despite seeing similar behaviors in other Asiatic-admixture groups, these anti-Jewish people want to blame this diversity group for the failure of the West. Yet there were no Jews in ancient Greece until after the fall began.

My supposition, which is that humanity began failing when it established proxies for nature through gods, laws, money, and most of all, procedures, shows us that social pressure rewards means-over-ends thinking which is inherently antirealistic and therefore leads to deliberate ignorance and decline.

It makes me think that mostly what went wrong with society was an inability to think clearly, and that reminds me of the country porch dilemma. Specifically, at some point there is nothing to talk about and we must lapse into silence and simply watch the world in action around us.

If you clear all of the distractions — newspapers, entertainment, television, speeches, advertisements, gossip, fractious anger — out of your head, there is nothing that compels chatter. There is merely the calm of knowing how the world works and how your inner self, as part of it, works in parallel.

The ability to keep a clear mind and simply enjoy life without distractions may be the essence of human thriving. The need for external entertainment or obsession removes our agency as individuals, since then we are simply reacting, whether to an authority in outrage or a trend in submission.

Neurosis, or the confusion of external cause with internal reaction, appears in human groups wherever doubt, fear, or external authorities exist. People assign their emotional state to what happens outside of them, and therefore become dependent on external activity for their mental state.

In groups, this becomes amplified. Soon people cannot function without deferring to an expert, pundit, bureaucrat, or professional. They read the news not so much for facts but for confirmation of their own decisions and biases. They can no longer think for themselves.

A country porch evening can change all this. There is only so much news, entertainment, drama, and gossip that one can discuss. Then the conversation lapses, the sounds of the night overwhelm, and one is lost in the conscious but non-verbal state of simply apprehending the world and appreciating it.

Tags: neurosis, proxies, sanity