Amerika

Humans like every other form of life seek to adapt and thrive. The first part means not dying, and the second part means enjoying the process enough that you do not self-destruct.

For intelligent beings, adaptation involves understanding the who and why of what we are, and therefore what we should be doing. For this we have philosophy and religion; while we treat those as garnish, they may in fact be the main course, since they regulate our own actual power, which is the ability to make choices.

This means that we face three primary goals: first, mental clarity; second, self-discipline; third, fixing civilization and building it so that it can run in perpetuity, since most human civilizations self-destruct from a fundamental confusion about the primary goals.

Such things were obvious to your ancestors’ ancestors and, like most things on the Right, therefore are relegated to elephant-in-the-room status, meaning that obvious thing that no one talks about because we do not like the answers we hear.

When your high school teacher said, “there are no stupid questions,” what he or she was telling you was that we are more likely to die from unasked questions and stupid answers, since these are the norm.

When questions get avoided, cults result, because you have created a small group dedicated to the worship of avoiding the unpopular question. This group is bound together by Need, which means that it will be under Control by a popular leader.

Cults rule by superstition, or taking symbolism — including categorical logic — literally. That is, they tell you that all of group X uniformly has Y intentions (not Z range of attributes, like a Bell Curve would) and therefore that some groups are bad and some are good in a universal context.

For example, the anti-Semite says that all Jews are evil and horrible no matter where they are, so we should nuke Israel. If Jews are so evil and horrible, why not have a place for them to be evil and horrible to each other?

Even more, we are assuming that evil is a universal term. To a tapeworm, it is not evil at all that it takes up residence in our gut, even if the host later dies from lack of nutrition. The tapeworm needed that, and saw an opportunity and took it.

To the Ukrainians, the invading Russians are evil; to Russians, the Ukrainian defectors to the hated West who beat them in the last war are traitors who must be punished because they are evil.

Is this relativism? No, it is relativity. Relativism means we apply a universal judgment to a relative situation. Relativity means that we recognize that what niche one occupies in the natural order determines what is seen as good and bad.

We expect pawn shop owners to be cheapskates who rip us off. Why? That is their niche: cannibalizing what is left of failed lives. The profession either attracts cheapskates or, more likely, filters out anyone who is not penny-pinching mean because it makes its money on the margins.

To a Jew, Nazis are evil, but in reality, Nazis simply wanted a German free of diversity. They went about it clumsily and that always leads to tragedy because the clumsy act occurs from an unfocused mind, i.e. one swimming in superstition.

Superstition holds that groups have a collective soul that extends to all members, sort of like the New Age idea of “we are all one” and “the collective consciousness.” Nothing could be less accurate.

Each group consists of an ecosystem. It has pawn shop owners and high school teachers, each with their own places in a niche. A group reacts logically, limited only by its position in the natural order, its abilities, and its knowledge.

This means that our greatest risks occur from low ability people and those with low knowledge, recognizing that the two overlap because low ability people lack the ability to have much knowledge.

In other words, another elephant in the room: our risk is from lack of knowledge and stupidity.

Right now you are being subjected to wartime propaganda. X group uniformly has Y intentions, instead of seeing them as having Z range of abilities on the Bell Curve, in other words.

The Russians, we are told, are fighting for Ukraine because Putin is an evil bastard who just wants to seize territory.

More likely, he is doing what appears logical to him, given his abilities and situation as quasi-dictator of an unstable peasant nation, in the context of a tenuous political situation:

The Russian view may be labeled uniquely “Eurasian,” using the term of one colleague, having to take simultaneous account of Russia’s security situation in both Europe and Asia. No other nation is so positioned and so potentially vulnerable.

In other words, we are looking at people who suffer from disadvantages and perspectives that we do not, namely being close to China and having a mixed-race population of Eurasians.

From the Putinic view, Ukraine defected from Russia to the West, who are bastards for not having defeated China so that Russia can exist in relative security, although he can never trust us because we might invade him again.

From the Ukrainian view, NATO is more desirable than Russia because despite being blighted by world democratic liberalism, the West is still higher IQ and more functional than Russia, i.e. wealthier and less dystopian.

This is not to make the West out to be paradise; it is a dying regime. However, it is dying more slowly and less catastrophically than Russia and the rest of the third world, a.k.a. countries without functional institutions and high enough IQs to be net producers.

Applying good and evil to most things fails because good and evil themselves are scapegoating. We say that God/gods is good and Satan/demons is evil, but we are just casting aside our responsibility for choice of sanity over insanity.

In realityland, we realize that people act for their own advantage. If they can take something better, they will; if they can gain a power, they will use it. This is the nature of reality.

Once you accept this, it becomes easier to wade through all the wartime propaganda — which just like the diversity propaganda is binary and religious in nature — and look at the more nuanced reality in which there are no good guys and bad guys, only less competent guys and less competent situations threatening our ability to achieve sanity, health, wisdom, balance, and clarity above all else.

Tags: cults, russia, sanity, ukraine