Amerika

For years a problem bedeviled me: The Republic, instead of being read as it was argued, was interpreted incorrectly as some kind of Utopian plan. The modern people projected their own framework of thought onto something entirely different and… somehow everyone seemed okay with this, despite it being obviously wrong.

And yet every week some toddler, educated or faking it like the internet people, staggered up to me and repeated the obviously wrong thing. It was as if they could not read. Then it became clear that most people repeat what others have told them until corrected, and they repeat lies hoping that enough repetition will make the lies come true.

After all, it makes everything much easier if Plato was a kind of Space Communist like the Star Trek zombies. Conservatives could write him off. Liberals could write him off. And then, because he was written off like a deplatformed victim of Political Correctness, we could ignore his critique of democracy.

Since early in my youth (back when I was young; just a little kid, wanting to have fun) it was clear to me that this society was fragile as a wineglass because it was built upon illusions. We all could see that democracy always picked the least offensive and most profitable illusion, right? And yet onward we toddled.

People love to blame “capitalism” these days, but nothing in market theory says that people should use the vote to seize all the money and then spend it on hopeless causes (drugs, alcohol, the poor, diversity) in order to prop up the failing state. Democracy made these choices and made your lives horrible.

Your average person will scream, lie, distort, and deflect rather than face the fact that his high rent comes from his high property taxes, high income taxes, excessive regulations, union labor, and socialized costs like diversity and poverty violence. He would rather die than shatter the wineglass of the illusion of reality.

This is part of the dodging of the obvious. The obvious does not need a mention, surely, because we all know it is true; that however becomes the aegis under which people avoid controversy, and in doing so, they avoid all of the really important issues. Humanity is a machine for denying the necessary because it is obvious and therefore controversial.

The human mind chafes and rebels against accumulated knowledge because that forces a binary on the individual. Truly, it is not fair. If the sky is blue and grass is green, you either accept this or reject it. Most humans throw a tantrum and engage in contrarian ironism, portraying green skies and blue grass to defy this imposition of reality on them.

Human thinking takes a linear, categorical, and binary nature as a result of this early outrage. It insists on linear causality, where — as if a human were behind it — objects cause other objects to do things. It rationalizes from categories like “good” and “evil,” shoehorning its desires under whatever is approved of.

An alternative, parallelism, suggests that instead of separating reality into many little human constructs, we view it as a whole in which very little is linear or categorical, and instead things occur in parallels or replicated but differently positioned structures in order to strengthen the whole.

We can explore parallelist causality using two classic examples from philosophy classes.

A boy kicks a ball. In the linear view, the boy causes the ball to move. In the parallelist view, the field needs to be there, the balmy day, the free time, the breakfast that fuels him, the health that keeps him flexible, the society that protects open fields, and so on. The boy kicking the ball is the last step in a causal chain of many parallels.

Similarly the chair has a form which occurs because of parallel influences on it. Gravity, the human form, the stability of the ground below, and the need for easy construction all come into play. The chair is simply an optimization of the intersection of these parallels, including efficiency and ability to be communicated and made cheaply enough.

In metaphysics, parallelism notes that the media of existence — matter, energy, information — exist in parallel. You do not have information without matter, or matter without information, and in the same way, without energy matter ceases to exist and information disperses to a point of meaninglessness.

In politics, parallelism means that many things are required to make a civilization, and there are not linear solutions like giving money directly to people or forcing them to do things at gunpoint as universal solves. In fact, there are not universal solutions for this reason; groups are different, and individuals even more different.

The Age of Symbolism requires linearity because symbols are categories without contexts. For them to work, we have to rationalize from the symbol: the category “good” exists, so if we want to do something, we must rationalize it as good, and then we “borrow” the power of the symbol.

As we see in the long calculus, the problem with this symbolism is that it leads to the suppression of what is obvious and real, and sends us spinning off into a dark neurotic delirium of our own desires (individualism), social pressures, and fears. This is the root of civilization decay as a psychology.

Tags: causality, crowdism, parallelism, psychology, realism