The racket of ideas that we are inundated by gives us the illusion that there are intelligent people out there who know what's up and can provide us with good answers to whatever question we might ask ourselves. There are several key problems with this naive assumption:
§1. How would you verify that those people are correct or not? Everyone views the world through their own lens, which means that the type of people you trust is also filtered by whatever ideas you happen to believe in. In practice, people keep looking for an intellectual until they find the one most aligned with what they already believe, like looking for the ideological armor that suits your body the most.
§2. The type of questions that people ask themselves is always in service of their self, not the Truth. By and large, people fill their life with bullshit, including the type of people they spend time with, which means that the answers they get to those questions can only be bullshit. Very, very few people are interested in facing their life, and their death, in a truly conscious manner. What most people want is distraction, pleasure, safety, and in the case of the more intellectually inclined, mental titillation, interesting things to learn and channel their attention towards, which ultimately serve as a distraction from the life which is right in front of them, or more precisely, the life which is viscerally in them, for life is not something external to you, it is everything in the present situation, including and especially my own body, the source of truth, vitality, power and love.
§3. There is a fundamental disconnect in incentives. Just like how people in school are incentivized to say what the teacher wants to hear, not the truth, or people working in a company are incentivized to please the boss, not act in integrity, intellectuals are incentivized to tell people what they subconsciously want to hear, not the truth.
This is convenient for the intellectuals who want to build a career out of selling complicated ideas, the ones who are not interested in Life, only in ideas about Life, because it means that they can keep building more and more complication and get rewarded for it. They will never tell you to get your life together by ditching the obsessive relationship you have with your mind, because they themselves do not want to do so.
Why would they? No one is paid to talk about Life because Life as a whole is beyond literal language. You could say that it's too big, too broad, too all-encompassing and ultimately too mysterious to be practical. It's also too big to be accommodating to your emotional wants and needs, your prejudices, your moodiness, your desires for status and power and safety, and much more.
This doesn't mean that Reality is actively hostile to you and everything you hold dear, it simply means that those things will eventually go away, because there is a deeper process at play. Everything changes, our health eventually gives way to illness, our relationships end or become more distant, our interests change, our family grows, people die, and so will you. This is how things are, but it's not very convenient to the finite self is it?
This third point is most important for this current piece, because the deeper point is that people consistently miss the answers they need, because there is an intelligence in the background working away, making sure you never see the Truth.
Have you ever seen someone walk away from a situation and realized that their interpretation of what just happened was utterly wrong? Not just a little wrong, as in getting a few details here and there wrong, but getting the overall picture right. I mean something like feeling personally attacked by something which was simply a joke. Or not seeing that the person they just spent time with was utterly uninterested in what they were seeing. Or immediately blaming someone for something they were obviously responsible for. Or being afraid of a situation and turning to anger in order to run away from that fear.
How can people miss the obvious, what is right in front of them? How can we be so blind to what is literally going on in our lives? It's because people are tactically blind, not arbitrarily blind. There is an intelligence behind their blind spots. This intelligence allows them to not face themselves.
I am not talking here of an alien intelligence possessing your body and mind, I am talking about you. More precisely, your self, the vehicle you use to live through life. You are not your self, the grab-bag of likes and dislikes, thoughts, ambition and identities which calls itself "me", because what allows you to understand those words is not merely your mind, it's your conscious I, the I reading those words, the I "behind" your eyes.
We all must wear a mask to interact with others, there is nothing wrong with this. What is problematic is when there is only a mask, like those people who can only interact with others in a thinly veiled "personality" of irony and cynicism, and who can never be sincere, vulnerable, open to the present moment. The intelligence which prevents you from seeing any situation clearly is not merely the self, it's really the alienated self, the one which feels the need to control everything, through its will or mind mostly, because it's ultimately mortal. A finite self utterly terrified of death, alienated from the entirety of Existence, and which will do anything in its power to maintain itself. 1
No one is paid to provide genuine answers, the kind that reveal the situation as it is and allow you to act on it, because complete clarity is threatening to the alienated self. Paying, the act of rewarding someone with money, is something that a self does to another self, a reward of safety and power in exchange of something that the self enjoys. This is why no one, as in no self, would ever pay to hear the radical Truth, because who wants to spend money to hear about how they can take responsibility for their life and die more gracefully?
Instead, people want augmentation, things they can add to their life to feel more safe, more in control, more powerful, more clever, because that is the only endeavor that a self-informed self could engage in: perpetuate itself, at all costs. This is why people ultimately listen to and read ideas which are reassuring, not true. Whenever someone says that something "resonates" with them, you better believe that it's because it's reassuring to their self, usually their firmly held ideas and their emotions, not because they are getting in tune with a deeper, more conscious 'I'.
One of the most popular type of books nowadays, to the extent that people read at all, is the self-help book. They are popular because they provide methods and clear ideas which your self can latch onto, to produce desired results, such as: getting a high-paying job, getting a woman to sleep with you, being more relaxed in your life, managing your procrastination, motivating yourself to do more things, losing weight, on and on.
There is nothing wrong with any of those pursuits. But by themselves, they are empty, the same way that a man getting obsessed with lifting weight and neglicting his wife lives an empty life. He lost track of what is important because his unconscious self favors narrow attention, not harmony, or love, which require a kind of surrender from our self. 2
Blindness is not just having the wrong answers, it's also focusing on the wrong things. The former could be thought of as being in the dark, never seeing anything and mistaking our phantasms for Reality. The latter can be thought of as being stupefied by the light coming from a flashlight, losing track of everything else, and thinking that this tiny portion is all of Reality.
The blindness of the self manifests in those dual metaphors, although the latter seems particularly relevant to our times, the age of the internet where the abundance of information allows anyone to find "evidence" that can defend their prejudices, an ultrabright kaleidoscope of widely divergent ideas. Wise is the person who understands the multiplicity of partial answers to the same question. Wiser is the person who contemplates about which questions to ask in the first place. And wisest is the person who is fine with not asking questions in the first place.
1 If you are interested in reading more about this, read this piece about self, ego and the conscious I
2 A kind of surrender, because there is a way of "sacrificing" ourselves which is simply masochistic, not loving. Think of the people-pleasers, who do everything they can to please the need of others, not out of love, but out of fear of disapproval. This obviously doesn't mean that love is the other extreme either, selfish sadistic hatred. As is often the case, unconsciousness manifests in two seemingly opposite extremes.
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Incentives Goodhartslaw Radicalclaim Intellectuals Racket Bullshit Selfhelp
2026-01-04