Amerika

When telling a story, you leave out the obvious. Your audience already knows how people brush their teeth, use the bathroom, make an omelette, and drive a car. But to a reader from another age, these things might be mysteries and the solutions to those needs presumed to be some kind of magic.

We ignore what everybody knows and focus on the exceptions, the rarities, and the anomalies. The erratic and threatening is more interesting than the mundane and stable. The problem with this is that the things on which there is the biggest agreement are then forgotten as the ages roll by.

“What everybody knows” therefore becomes unknown, and the rare exceptions to the rule seem to be the norm to anyone reading at a future date. This is how, for example, we became convinced that the Greeks were all sodomizing each other; they talked about sodomy a lot because it was a contentious issue, and less so about what the other 98.6% of the population did.

Making this worse is the problem behind political correctness, censorship, and euphemism. That is: humans assiduously avoid controversial issues whenever possible. For this reason, the biggest and most obvious things we learn and ways we live are not recorded.

This affects us even a decade later, looking back. It is hard to tell what people were thinking when they made decisions in the 2010s, much less so the 1990s and 1980s. Those might as well be from another planet. In a large part, this is because we can no longer talk about issues that were more open back then.

Censorship erases history. It removes from our understanding the most vital issues that we face. For this reason, it is always the tool of the destroyers.

Many on the Right argue for censorship, thinking it makes for strong leadership. We should ban pornography, deplatform people who applaud the Trump assassination, or remove certain materials from libraries.

To my mind, this is simply giving in to entropy. Our biggest problem is that with all the chatter, almost no one talks about the actually vital issues, and so our discussion focuses mainly on irrelevancies.

Censorship is our second-biggest issue as a species. The first issue is insanity. Most people are either born insane from mutation load, or become insane by absorbing lies. Censorship accelerates the process of lies by reducing all truths to partial truths, at which point those partial truths take the place of whole truths.

In my view, flirting with any of it is a path to ruin. Naturally, this creates a false dilemma and false binary: you can either oppose censorship of pornography because you like pornography or because you oppose censorship. There are three positions here, then — pro-pornography, anti-pornography, and “use another method” of dealing with it — to consider.

Societies alternate forever between individualism and realism. When humans have enough power, the ego takes control and they suppress realism in order to be individualistic (hybris, narcissism, solipsism, egotism, selfishness, collectivism). When realism rules, people adapt their behavior to the environment and thrive.

Religious dualism exists to enable individualism. It censors the complexity of reality and turns our thoughts exclusively toward judgment of reality through moralization. We no longer care about what works, but what we think/feel/judge about the different options. This is not real. It exists within human minds and their shared social tokens like words.

All of these paths lead to the destruction of civilization. This hurts us as individuals because then we live in a third-world style dystopia.

While it may seem tempting to censor known bad things like pornography and calls for murder, the cost is too high, and the process of censorship accelerates the decay of society. Censorship is not a moral wrong, but a practical wrong, and a path to failure no matter how well-intended.

Tags: censorship, forgetting, individualism, insanity, metaphysical dualism, noticing