Amerika

Humans find themselves forever suspended between sensation and realization. The former uses our senses and emotions, and is strongest because it is a signal straight from the brain, while the latter requires us to explore the world and its cause-effect relationships, finding out how it works, and comes through subtler sensations of things clicking into place.

As said here before, the Left represents individualism, or the individual prioritizing himself over the world and seeking to control all that is before him. The Right cedes this control through its belief in Order, or patterns to reality that animate us, and views what we control as very little, therefore making it important to be consistent with reality.

The Leftist attitude contains a sneering superiority complex: “I know something you don’t know.” This eternal cry of every hipster represents the duality of Leftism: they win the social game, since what they say is popular, but it is also unstable, because it is conjectural a.k.a. not backed by reality; this makes it unstable and subject to attack.

We might thus define conservatives as the people concerned with effects, and Leftists as those concerned with sensations. The Leftist wants to feel good, but unlike an honest man he does not simply pursue alcohol, tobacco, and drugs; he invents ways to feel superior because he must in order to cover up how unrealistic his ideas are.

Some people want power, which comes from having clear intentions that correspond to realistic likely outcomes; others want the sensation of power, or inside a world of themselves feeling like they are above others. The former find themselves compelled to understand reality, and the latter to deny it.

We have entered an age when the incompatibility of these approaches under pluralism — tolerance of every viewpoint — has become painfully obvious. Realists and anti-realists want different worlds, and trying to make a compromise between these two views results in incoherence.

Those who are concerned about effects in reality are rising because those concerned about a sense of feeling power have botched everything. This sets the stage for the next level of human conflict: realism versus symbolism. More than politics, we will be fighting over basic philosophies of existence.

Senses are a different kind of effect: like a conclusion, an effect in the mind related to a cause in the world beyond. Because the mind is closer to us than the world, we take the effect as a cause, intention, and solution in itself. Instead of thinking about how to find food, we go to the grocery store; this is a closed loop of thought.

Those who live in the world of sense are dominated by emotions, judgments, and feelings about reality, instead of determination how reality works and why so that its wisdom can be understood. These are purposeless people and they assume a purposeless, random, blind, and idiotic universe.

Presumed conflict between “good” and “evil” has always been a fiction; the real conflict remains between the people who want to feel good and the people who want to create good. The latter are realists, and the former have become anti-realists who are outright hostile to any form of reality they cannot control with emotions.

Tags: anti-realism, cause-effect, realism, sensation