Amerika

History appears to have finally stopped. That is, the pace of relentless change has revealed that it is all surface, and underneath the twin forces of realism and individualism are still at war, with individualism winning even as it ruins just about everything.

We live in a sort of precog PTSD because we know that what we are doing is not working but because it is popular it will not change:

Pre-traumatic stress “results from reading the headlines and connecting the dots, imagining people being hurt and not surviving,” she explains. “It’s just like any other stress, but it’s exacerbated by a feeling of powerlessness. Chronic stress sends messages to your brain that you’re not safe, and when stress hormones [continuously] soar, that’s a health issue.”

“It’s good to be prepared, but this reaction is going too far because it paralyzes you, it adversely affects your life, and you don’t know what to do to get out of it,” Rubin says.

Or at least, it will not change until we get order back, which means a hierarchy based on ability for leadership not hoop-jumping at schools.

As things stand now we are ruled by the worst among us because they are proficient at lies and are able to flatter the narcissistic herd into supporting them for the promises that they make.

They intend to take only token action. They will respond to complaints by writing checks, go through the motions of government, and say all the right things, but in the end their first goal is keeping power. They know what happens when there are Revolutions; after all, Revolutions put them into power!

Realism requires we accept the world as it is and work within its language of methods to achieve our goals, which have to parallel its goals, not because we are subservient but because it is purely logical and we are trying to make our minds more logical so that we get better results.

To accept realism is to cut free from most of what people think about all of the time. You are no longer interested in popularity, morality, comfort, convenience, desires, or control of others. Instead you think about making human structures that resemble ecosystems and therefore are resilient and always grow to higher levels of complexity.

Complexity refers to systems that design themselves to build and then limit themselves through constant internal variation keyed to the same basic goals:

Complex and chaotic systems are both examples of nonlinear dynamical systems. A linear system is characterised by the satisfaction of the superposition principle. The superposition principle says that if A and B are both solutions for some system (ways in which the system could evolve), then so is their sum A + B—this implies that a linear system can be decomposed into its parts and each part solved separately to construct the full solution. For nonlinear systems, this is not possible because of the appearance of nonlinear terms, functions of the variables such as sin(x), x3 and xy. In this sense then, the whole here is more than the sum of its parts.

The behaviour of a chaotic system appears random, but is generated by simple, non‐random, deterministic processes: the complexity is in the dynamical evolution (the way the system changes over time driven by numerous iterations of some very simple rule), rather than the system itself.

With realism, we can stop imposing human linearity onto our conception of the world, and accept it as a non-linear system that therefore is beyond morality because its function alternates between extremes in order to preserve a mean, sort of like how night and day cycle to produce a self-refreshing ecosystem.

We live in fear right now because we are out of touch with reality. We perpetuate this by pursuing the Age of Symbolism over naturalism, or studying the world to find our part in it and its optimal structures. We know that until this changes we have nothing but dread in the long term.

Yes, we are addicted to distraction; anything to keep the void away for a few moments pleases us, especially trends and political currents that let us lose ourselves in details so we can avoid the big picture. But that only lessens the dread for a few moments, and then it returns, gathering intensity.

Tags: chaos theory, game theory, hierarchy, ptsd