Standardization is effective in the realm of technology because it allows for economies of scale, since you can produce a lot of the same parts knowing they can be used in a variety of different cases. Looking at the parts of my office chair, I can tell that many of them are standardized, such as the pneumatic cylinder, the wheels, the bolts that screw the arm rests to the chair, and so on.
But the same principle doesn't lead to more conscious human beings, instead producing people whose conscious discernment and qualities are subsumed by homogenizing ideologies. The problem with ideologies is that they are far too rigid to deal with the complexity and ever-changing nature of the situations we find ourselves in, which is why the question "what is the best ideology" is nonsensical, all of them have good ideas in some situations, and all of them are terrible if you try to apply them in every situation whatsoever.
The success of the market, and the system at large, is due to decentralization and standardization 1 but this cannot work for the development of mature human beings. Standardization is the exact opposite of what is necessary for a genius to arise, as can be seen by the fact that all of them are very different from one another. Beethoven doesn't sound the same as Bach, Van Gogh doesn't paint like Rembrandt or Paul Rubens, Balzac doesn't write like Dostoevsky or Melville, and so on.
I am not talking here of mere formal differences, but fundamental differences in quality, which our society is mostly empty of, whereas we are inundated by the former, constantly affirming to ourselves and others how 'special' we are based on trivial differences. Our world is good at quantitative utility, but not at conscious quality, because the first enables power and control, whereas the second simply is. This is why in our times we can find many artists who are technically great but don't have any soul in their work, no passion in their speech or ideas, but on the other hand, the opposite type is exceedingly rare.
Technology is able to scale because it can be standardized, as opposed to what is unique and local, because it is mechanical, as opposed to conscious, and because it is useful, as opposed to truthful, or even auric. 2
Those who think that we can address the way in which most people are unconscious, the same way that an engineer might address the inefficiency in the design of a car, are sharply mistaken. In fact, this mistake is rarely an accident, since people do not perceive the distinction between consciousness and mechanicalness because they themselves are not conscious.
The fundamental problem of discernment is that you yourself need discernment to evaluate whether other people around you have any. You cannot outsource this. Notice what happens if you try to do so. To state that you trust someone else, you need to trust yourself enough so that you can feel confident that your evaluation of that person is accurate. If you didn't trust yourself at all, you couldn't trust other people, because how would you know that your trust is not founded on self-delusion? After all, if you knew that someone was insane, and they said that Mr. X is a very intelligent person, you wouldn't pay much attention to Mr. X's words would you? (even if it isn't proof that Mr. X himself isn't intelligent, even the insane can see something in the greats)
Discernment cannot be outsourced, it has to come from within. This does not mean that anything is true as long as I believe in it, the position of the solipsist. But it means that it is possible to believe in something true from a naive position, which we call dogma, which from the point of view of discernment is further away from embodying the truth than simple ignorance is.
Those who know nothing are not attached to any frame, or conclusion, or prejudice, the literal meaning of which is "prior judgement", which means they are more likely to examine things as they are, from a place of curiosity, rather than a need to validate what the group believes is true.
And thus we circle back to the initial topic of standardization. A world built on scaling itself as fast as possible, which is the world we live in, is more than fine with short-circuiting the process of discernment as long as the people in it have the right beliefs. This is why dogma shows up over and over again, and not just in religious contexts.
In school for instance, what is judged is not your ability to embody the truth, but simply your ability to recite the information given during the lessons, which most people pass by memorizing stuff a few days before the test anyway. If your immediate reaction to this is that there is no time to accurately evaluate someone's understanding, something which is quite nebulous anyway, then that is precisely my point. There is no time because the entire direction of school, and our world at large, is about scaling as quickly as we can, not about the truth.
The truth of your life couldn't be evaluated by something as narrow as a school test of course, the latter is far too narrow to contain the breadth and depth of the former, which is a sign that the problems of our world are far deeper than how individual parts operate, it also lies in the division into parts itself.
As a result of this incentive structure, what happens? People become dogmatic, because obedience is significantly faster than the process of building your personal understanding. This is how we get people who have gone through more than 15 years of maths "education", and who do not understand how fractions work, and deeper than that, what they represent. 3
But this is not limited to what some might think of as the "lower spheres", the stuff before university. This also applies to academia as a whole, which is incredibly dogmatic. Again, the way in which obedience is incentivized over personal understanding is just as true here. Many academics perform what we might call the "null ritual", going through the motion of setting up a statistical test, its null hypothesis, computing the p-value, and reporting the result if the p-value is lower than a fixed value.
All the assumptions related to the underlying distribution are ignored. Not just the assumption of normality, which many people take for granted simply because it is the only distribution they really know about, but also that of homogeneity of variance. And that's not counting all the practices related to p-hacking, which admitedly academic rigor is supposed to rule out but don't in practice, such as selecting the results which are convenient to the author, playing with the sample size, or hypothesizing after the results are known (HARKing).
Academia is very dogmatic, which is of course its own subject and which I sort of addressed in my mini-series covering some of the blindspots of Science, although there is a difference between Science and academia, the same way that there is a difference between religion and the worldly institutions which mediate it.
But the point remains that dogma is prevalent everywhere, even and especially in the circles that present themselves as non-dogmatic. Dogma is a reflection of the basic reality that our world is geared towards scaling and power, not the truth. Having someone who obeys your every commands and believes in the same things as everyone else is much more useful than someone who takes the time to hone their own discernment.
The masses might repeat the creed of "thinking for yourself", but as their lives show very clearly, they are not interested in individual responsibility. They prefer to stay in the comfortable, but also miserable center of mass, looking at anyone who strays too far from it with an ironic smirk. "Who does he think he is for talking about love, morality, freedom and even God? Doesn't he know that those things don't exist?" or likewise, "What credentials does he have to talk about those subjects?"
Standardization kills the exceptional, the unique, the mysterious, the ineffable, which are precisely the best things in our life. Is your love a standardized relationship? Is your passion a matter of standardized tasks? Is your free time spent on standardized time fillers? I hope not, that would be dreadful.
As is often the case, there comes a point where reflection on such matters hits a wall, the limits of literacy. Not that what is beyond is unintelligible, it's just that it's better to let life speak rather than dictate what it should look like. Those who navigate from their discernment only need a few gestures, whereas those who only understand the crude, the useful and the literal will never see the extents of their blindness, and certainly not past it. As Christ himself said, "Whoever has ears, let them hear" because not everyone has ears to hear.
1 Neither of which would be enough if we didn't have a garguantan supply of energy provided by nature, in the form of fossil fuels, and cheap human labor as a result of the coercive forces of our world, a remnant of the colonial nature of the Western world, but this is outside of the topic at hand.
2 A term sometimes used by Darren Allen, to contrast with the didactic and the pornographic, the two main poles of the self which manifest in the two forms of writing most popular in our time. We have the aura of Beethoven's work, or the aura of someone's speech, or the aura of my partner which I carry with me as I go through my day.
3 The difference being that most people treat fractions in a formal way, as symbols you manipulate according to certain rules you need to memorize, as opposed to a convenient way to write multiplication and division. The subject of maths education requires more specific treatment compared to the other school subjects, because it is also traumatizing, but that's for another piece.
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Standardization Scale Economyscale Economics Market Utility Quality Discernment Ineffable
2026-01-13