Amerika

Sane people think this way: “I want X result so I use Y method which has produced Z similar results to what I want in the past.” Linear, cause-effect, ends-over-means.

Insane people manipulate: “I want Y method, so I alter goal X until I find some reason to get Y, which I hope will make me feel good even if it does not produce Z results.”

Realists are the former sort; symbolists are the latter. To a symbolist, the only goal is maintaining positive mental state, which a symbol does because to the human mind it seems absolute, universal, all-powerful, and most of all, complete.

A hard symbol like “equality” seems to our big delusional echoing brains complete enough and simple enough to solve everything. We now have a method that works to make our minds feel better, so we cling to it like we eat sugar, gamble, drink, drug, and shop as a distraction.

Symbols replace reality as a concern in our minds. The symbol controls others, so we must obey it first, and only after that, look to reality. This creates an inversion of the thinking process:

• Cause-to-effect: find a problem, adopt a solution based on the outcomes of past attempts.
• Effect-to-Cause: identify what you want, find a problem that you can claim it solves.

The latter is manipulative. It has no goal, only a method it wants, so it adopts that in lieu of a goal and rationalizes a goal later in order to justify the method. For example, liberals come up with a hundred reasons why they need public schools, none related to actual results.

These methods tend to be symbolic. For example, they argue that schools increase “equality,” but never show that this actually makes life better. It is all conjecture. Then they argue that schools make people smarter, anchor the community, or promote peace. All of these are methods.

In contrast, a goal would involve an actual real-world state like “a competent population,” and obviously, schools cannot do that because the raw material is not capable of much in most cases. The best schools can do is make sure that most people can read, but do we ever see proof that this produces a better society?

Socializing — getting along with others — always involves deference to method. “Well, this is how people do things” or “Jake wants to do it this way, so if you want to get along with Jake, accept it.” This replaces a goal, or why you are doing the things you do.

Many of us left Leftism because we saw that our methods were not producing the results we claimed they would. We argued that equality would make a Utopia, but all evidence went contrary to this, so we argued that equality was a moral imperative. Then that it was good for the economy. It was a conclusion in search of reasoning.

We often talk on this site about the difference between “data in search of a thesis” and “a thesis in search of data.” In the former, we survey all the data and draw conclusions about it; in the latter, we make a conclusion, then cherry-pick the data until we find something that will support it.

Cognitive inversion occurs with effect-to-cause reasoning. People find an effect they want, and then argue that it will achieve something that others agree is good, but never state a goal. “Equality” for example is a method, not a goal. The goal is assumed to be some kind of Utopia.

This kind of wag-the-dog reasoning persists in “wet streets make rain” thinking. Someone notices that the streets are wet during the rain, and wants public hydrants, so he argues for wetting the streets daily in order to bring rain. This gets him his hidden objective, the public hydrants.

Socializing inverts our reasoning, but it does so because socializing reinforces the lowest common denominator in any group, namely their desire not only for self-interest but for the fiction-absolute, or the notion that their lives are the best possible outcome they could have had.

This requires scapegoating someone for any of their failures and preserving sacred illusions about how good they are, usually signaled through public altruism or demonstrative empathy. The manipulation occurs because the seemingly selfless acts are only done as gestures for the assembled group.

Instead of the world as a goal, in which we attempt to have positive influences, this type of thinking makes the individual its goal: it aims to manipulate others in order to allow the individual to pursue its own agenda without interference from reality or those who know better, so that the individual can maintain a pleasant mental state.

The mental state is the goal; this occludes, obstructs, and replaces reality as a goal. Instead, the big brain soothes itself with pleasant mental sensations, even while doing so at the expense of external reality, which gets trashed when such unrealistic and narcissistic thinking is applied to real-world activity.

Humanity attempted to control this psychology with religion, which posited a “whole” of everything that was more important than the self, but humans simply abstracted this into symbols for gods and followed the rules those purportedly set forth instead of trying to make anything functional or improved.

Because religion is conjectural, it leads to the same place of unreality that other forms of individualism do, and no matter how good the intentions behind it, it becomes a tool for administering collectivized individualism. Through this manipulation, human groups destroy themselves.

Tags: causality, cause-effect confusion, cause-to-effect, effect-to-cause, ends-over-means, means over ends