Atomization, homogenization, scientific echo chambers, psychology as tyranny
People talk a lot about democracy and the recent US elections because ultimately, this is a subject that we can talk about. Most people do not think about this, but there are in fact many subjects that are far harsher than politics, but so painful for the individual and collective egos of the world that the ideas cannot even be entertained.
The cluster of ideas I am pointing at revolves around anti-mimesis. If mimesis is about looking at the patterns in groups of human beings which are good at spreading, such as how crude tribalism spreads better than nuanced worldviews because having a clear "goody" and a clear "baddy" is far easier to navigate life with, then anti-mimesis is about analyzing patterns that are incredibly bad at spreading themselves. Some of the topics which are essentially impossible to talk about are: death, societal decline, the limitations of technology and society, how much exploitation—human or environmental—is required to maintain the prosperity of the West, how the ego constructs its own prison in the form of society and relishes in it, including the pain that it causes to itself!
In some sense all of those point to the same thing: the ego, whether the individual or the collective one, is limited, and maintains itself by unconsciousness and thus a blindness to its own limitations. It cannot survive forever, it cannot understand all of Reality, and ultimately it cannot solve all of its problems by itself without surrendering to the Reality which is outside of itself, which is why individual growth often involves a great deal of pain and learning how to alchemize it. 1
Creating taboos around this black hole of Void 2 can be done to some degree, such as how having “hope” in society is considered a virtue but looking for ways to live more locally is considered defeatist or backwards. But far better than repression or control is drowning people in utterly irrelevant bullshit. This is the Brave New World form of control, as opposed to 1984's approach of a boot stamping on a human face forever. As such, we have for instance:
The best way to keep people distracted is to always provide them with something new which is ultimately trivial when compared to the large dynamics of the system. As a result, I would say that anything which gets large amount of noise on social media is suspicious, not because this or that side might be influenced by propaganda—although it might be true—but because the noise itself is the propaganda. The entire dynamic of switching between isolated issues about society without paying attention to the larger trends is the Problem with an upper case 'P'.
And the other side of the Problem is the way in which people pay attention to anything except their ego and how it clouds their perception, because unconsciousness is the main way by which it maintains itself. At this point it's often better to not say anything, and instead to let silence and observation do their job.
Because it consists in using your finite time and energy, i.e. you real agency, in thinking and talking about politicians who ultimately do not care about you, and will probably make your life worse based on the self-interested policies they enact. Those who think and talk about politics all day are not in control of their attention, they're just playing propaganda games to convince others so that they may survive better, though in reality it is very dubious whether people benefit from the party they vote for. The thing is that this dynamic can never actually solve the landscape of problems, merely provide a nice temporary distraction for people to feel in control.
Ultimately it is the technological system and its direction for efficiency, homogenization and control which prevail, and of course it would want people to think that politics matters more than the system, the same way that the mind wants to convince itself that it is in control of your life.
Mining strikes me as inherently coercive and alienating, from oneself and from the environment. I can't ever imagine a world where someone engages in mining in full consent and consciousness. And to the extent that they somehow enjoy it—the only reasonable way for that to happen is at a very low level of technological development, and by taking one's time instead of aiming for any quota of production—then what? They might enjoy mining for a bit, but then that creates an expectation of metal tools for their group, which are so powerful that the latter might want to re-shape its entire social structure around mining, and force people if needed to go mine stuff in order to grow their power.
I say this because mining is vital to an industrial society, and I don't believe that any group could ever be both coercion-free and yield the power of advanced technology, and this tiny point is I find the easiest to explain outside of the context of my worldview. Of course like all isolated points, it can be addressed with enough creativity and faith in the myths of the system, which is why any genuine critique of the world we live in has to look at the entire dynamics, from top to bottom. 3
The removal of my headphones, in particular, has opened up my life; I'm convinced they are the most nefarious of our gadgets, aggressively trapping people inside their heads
From a comment on one of Darren Allen's previous Q&A. He deletes them so there is no permanent link unfortunately.
I myself have stopped using headphones a long time ago, simply because they press on my ear and jaw which exacerbates my slight tinnitus. 4 But it is true that screens and the devices they plug with are particularly alienating, by making your entire attention narrow down to a small thing on the screen 5, or as the quote mentions, locking you inside your head without paying attention to anything around you.
As a result, is it surprising that people are 1) alienated from their body 2) unaware of much of what is going on around them, in their life, and in the people they spend time with 3) as a result alienated from one another 4) increasingly hedonistic and solipsistic? (more on that in the following sub-essay) I think they are all connected to one another, atomization in one aspect of your life promotes atomization in others, which is why in the modern world there isn't even a sense of a coherent all-encompassing reality, but instead a series of discrete separate bits which are connected together by linear transitions such as roads, elevators, hallways, highways.
Within the modern world, the way people think is a reflection of how they live, which is to say atomized. Here are some examples:
In the wake of the Death of God, it is quite common that people come to the conclusion that we shouldn't feel guilty about pleasure, to the point where they push this idea to its culmination by believing in hedonism and thereby aligning their entire life around the pursuit of pleasure. What is the problem with that? they ask. As long as I don't hurt anyone, why not pursue pleasure?
As I have mentioned with art at point number 2, these questions signal to me how deeply atomized people's thinking has become. They no longer consider the consequences of their actions to their relationships with other people, to the culture they're part of and the further consequences it will have on those after them.
One major reason of course is that people are increasingly isolated from other people—and to the extent that people are in the same room they might each be on their phone—that culture has essentially dissolved and been replaced by a network of algorithms 6 and that an increasing number of people aren't particularly keen on having children and thus don't have direct skin in the game in the future they are leaving behind.
There is nothing inherently wrong about pleasure, and it is true that the deeply repressive standards of religion left behind significant scars in individuals, since shame is a very sticky and damaging pattern, but the opposite of a bad idea is not a good one either. 7
My fundamental problem with hedonism is that it looks at pleasure isolated from any social consequences. There is no such thing as "harmless pleasure", because humans don't exist in isolation of other ones, no one does because at the very least you were born from your two parents.
For instance, having your life revolve around porn is a deeply anti-social thing because it replaces real sexual intimacy with a complete simulacrum of it, and it's just not the type of stuff you could talk about with real flesh and blood people. It's not merely a "social construct" that talking about porn with people is taboo, it's rather that, even if people cannot articulate why, there is just something really spiritually dead about it. And to the extent that you don't care about interacting with other people—which is probably a belief rooted in fear rather than a deep conviction—porn, and hedonism in general, makes you numb, constantly looking for the next hit of the hedonistic treadmill.
Porn for instance dissociates you from your body and fixates all your attention on a screen, a literal 2D image of a real thing, for the sole reason of deriving a very narrow form of pleasure—and escapism, my experience with porn addiction being that it is mostly a form of cope rather than genuinely being sexually aroused—only for the confines of your own ego 8, and the whole thing consistently feels empty. It's not that it is "wrong" to watch porn, it is rather that it creates a tremendous amount of suffering by the way it separates you from yourself, by treating your body as a mere tool for pleasure and wasting away your time and energy, and separates you from other people in the shame it induces in you and how it makes you look at sexual relationships.
Pleasure is great when it is aligned with things higher than mere ego games, such as genuine sexual intimacy with your partner, or the satisfaction of creating something which adds to the world, or the subtle peace that comes from letting go of the need to endlessly do things, or cooking and enjoying a meal with friends. But not so when the pleasure is purely informed by the unconscious ego. I think fundamentally there isn't much to say to someone who is a convinced hedonist, because words and ideas are merely a surface layer on one's ego dynamics. Life will sooner or later instruct them with the pain of separation, and perhaps in those moments, they will come to feel the importance of connection, and the difference between the more subtle forms of joy and the gross forms of pleasure sold to us by society.
Expanding on my discussions of the flattening of space and of the attention landscape, we could say that flat landscapes are unfair when you group together things which are fundamentally different. Here are some examples of what I mean:
Which is why if a student is actually interested in learning extra material by themselves, instead of going to class, they are simply not allowed to, because the demands of the institution matter more than what people get from it. This is also why the democratization of school is horrible for the highest performers, the brightest and most curious children, because they're homogenized under the weight of the average. Nothing more soul-crushing than to witness the flame of curiosity of a child be snuffed out by the dead bureaucracy of school.
The term 'alarm' is rather telling: you get yanked out of your bed from fear, so that you may start your day tense, which is perfect for someone to remain scared of authority and unconscious. The alarm is the first step of the domestication routine, and the reminder that one is ultimately not free.
I’ve come to believe that the real value of non-fiction consists in burning the bridges to the false world, so that one may set sail on the sea of the Unknown. I think when people try to map out too specifically what "Good" means is when the conceptual trickeries of the mind start getting involved, and you start thinking about trees instead of simply looking at them. On the other hand, you can point out the false world using the mind, but this can create a tendency to only focus on the hellish nature of our world when done improperly.
All that to say, I think non-fiction tends to deal with generalities, which are useful for seeing the limitations and problems of our world, but that Beauty, Goodness, Truth and all the important Qualities are better captured with fiction, because it deals with the specific, even if in the context of a constructed world, because they point to the specific Beauty and Strangeness of our experience nonetheless.
In French, the euphemism for a cleaner/janitor is “technicien de surface”, which literally translates to “surface technician”, a hilariously fancy term. If I didn't know what it referred to, I would think it would point to a job in engineering or something similar.
I wonder if you can do the same with other jobs. "Sex worker" is already a euphemism, but can you make it even fancier? Something like "Coital assistant" or "Carnal relief provider"? What about someone who moderates internet forums? You see sir, I am not a "reddit mod", I am more of an Internet discourse mediator.
A lot can be done in one week when someone is really focused. Hell, a lot can be done in a single day, which has 16 whole hours of waking time, and even within an hour, which has 60 whole minutes. Those numbers are not at all trivial when you really focus on something specific, and put away all the distractions. There is a lot of time in a day to get things done, or to simply pay attention to what’s around and one’s body.
There is no scientific backing for the concept of 'music'. So called musicians claim that the playing of special sounds, known as 'notes', can produce profound emotional states, feelings of awe or rapture. However, when we played these notes arranged in sets (known as "scores") to study participants, no clinically significant instances of awe or rapture were found
From this tweet
This is a fantastic analogy, which I would personally extend to things that have been helpful in my life but which I can't explain within the frameworks of materialistic science. Unblocking my chakras and the whole field of energy work in general, shadow work and most notably Existential Kink, and the value of directing your attention, especially to your own body, that your learn from meditation. 9
Science does this weird thing where on one hand, it completely acknowledges the existence of placebos because the experiments are designed such that we can detect a meaningful deviation from them, but on the other hand, it completely rejects them as a way of actually helping people. Don't get me wrong, if someone's leg is broken, we should treat it, not have some type of placebo that helps someone’s mind or emotions or whatever. But most problems in life are far more subtle than just a broken leg: they influence the way you interpret everything, they have ways of hiding themselves and resurfacing under different conditions, they create patterns of further problems if left unchecked, such that in total, they are difficult to make sense while you are inside them and are quite sticky. This highlights to me how trying to use the same methods to treat all problems is not just foolish, it's straight up insanity.
As a result, I think the idea that if we cannot assign some type of materialistic causal explanation for why something works or doesn't, then it must be bullshit, is incredibly destructive for individual lives. For instance, I don't think I have ever heard any scientist advocate for more embodiment. In fact, the word didn't even enter my vocabulary until I stumbled upon a book describing trauma and how to deal with it. Even though that recording—one of Peter Levine's books on trauma and somatic experiencing 10—would probably fall under the umbrella term of “psychology”, it is definitely not the type which can be quantified and analyzed through statistic tests and the likes, so the nature of its “scientific backing” is quite different from let's say Physics. 11
But still, it massively helped me feel better in my body, and really feel alive, and that effect is undeniable. Whether it is "just a placebo" or not is something that leaves me utterly indifferent. But perhaps I am conceding too much ground to the benefits of Science and its methods here, because the truth is that it is worse than useless at a lot of things, typically chronic complex problems as opposed to the ones we can intervene on with surgery or similar methods, which have a clear cause and effect relationship.
For those problems, I have significantly more trust in practices which have a rich history of thousands of years behind them, such as meditation, energy work and holistic health systems such as Ayuverda and Traditional Chinese Medicine, than most of the things that have cropped from "Science". I use quotation marks because it groups up so many fields which have demonstrably different epistemologies, such as Physics and Psychology, that the label doesn't make any sense. Psychology as a field loves to bundle itself with the hard sciences because it gives it more credibility, but in truth they are not even close to being the same thing, and I would say that the move towards quantification and the “rigor” of statistical tests in psychology seems to have done very little when it comes to actually helping people, which isn’t surprising because the agenda of academia, like all institutions, is its own survival, not the well-being of people.
People want to build a "heaven" with technology, but even assuming that such a mission could be successful 12 the only foreseeable scenario I could see unfold is utter boredom everywhere. Because technology requires you to detach yourself from reality in order to focus on isolated parts—problems, concepts, models—this same move also leads you to become really, really bored when you don't have things to solve and ideas to think about. 13
But because a technological "heaven" would solve all problems that a human could possibly have, then what would they turn their time and attention towards? To selfless communion with other human beings? But this type of relating to the world and others is antithetical to the narrow-attention, utility-maximizing mode of being that the technological system requires of people.
No, all I can imagine a techno-heaven looking like is a really, really boring world of screens and people with no personality and aliveness, and technological solutions to cover up that nightmare, by drugging up people so that they do not become severely depressed or straight up insane.
Some ideas are great to improve your life, but they implicitly assume that you are in a prison and that there is no way to get out of it. For example:
§1. The focus on mental health as an isolated thing to focus on is somewhat useful, far better than doing nothing about people’s problems, but it also neglects other incredibly important aspects of life, such as a) emotions b) community c) living for something beyond just yourself—spirituality, love, etc. d) embodiment.
The commonality between those neglected aspects is that they cannot be addressed by manufacturing things or scaling a method, the same way that you can teach a bunch of psychiatrists to talk to people a certain way, or produce and distribute drugs to numb people's symptoms of deeper problems.
As such, trying to make someone more functional while they have no real relationships in their life, don’t have any interests besides playing video games and are utterly out of touch with their body is completely useless, because the problems will creep up again sooner or later.
§2. The focus on finding your passion for your job is useful, again it is better than giving up on any meaningful work entirely, but it also comes with the assumption that you are fine working within the system, which will impose massive limitations on several things.
For instance, on the impact of your job, since helping rich people is far, far more profitable than truly helping others, and building scalable systems is far more profitable than being there for the people in your local community. Or limitations on the freedom you have, since you will either take immediate commands from a superior, or at the very least need to conform to the standards and demands of the machine-world.
In my experience, those two aspects, impact and freedom, might be even more important than whether you are truly "passionate" about your job. I do not wake up from bed with a flaring interest for moving out furniture, but if a person close to me needs help for that, then I'll gladly help, because of the personal connection, and also because most tasks become significantly more enjoyable with a friend, and when you have the freedom to go at your own pace.
§3. The advice "Don't care what other people think" assumes that you should stay with those same people your entire life and become better at dealing with their sneering, when you could also simply … spend time with other people. Of course, even great people can overstep their boundary and meddle in your personal life when they really shouldn't, and as such being able to not care too much what others think is genuinely useful, but it is very interesting how few people talk about finding better company.
My suspicion is that people secretly love being the odd one out, because it makes them oh so special. To be the one that no one in the entire world of 8 billion people can understand because their mind and feelings are so deep and subtle. But at the same time they do not have the courage to simply leave their current social circle and search for other people. 14 As a result, the resentment of others becomes the odd one out's pride, i.e. they feel superior by being cast away, and leaving those people would make them lose their feeling of being special.
Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well.
— Aldous Huxley
I guess we could call this the fallacy of intervention, which I also discussed in this journal entry about things getting more complex. The idea that spending time thinking and "addressing" problems within a system will always improve the situation, when in reality doing nothing can actually be better. For instance, the belief that putting more regulations on the road will reduce accidents and make driving a smoother experience, or that spending more on healthcare will make people more healthy.
Ignoring the opportunity cost of the investment, more intervention can be actively bad, because the fundamental problem with institutions is that they have their own agenda, meaning that pouring more money into them has no guarantee that human quality of life will actually improve, since it is decoupled from what maintains the institution, which is funding and staffing.
A world where people can diagnose and heal themselves, and only need professionals for specific interventions would be amazing for individuals, but it would be disastrous for health institutions, which is why the direction has always been towards more disempowerment of the individual, specialized knowledge reserved to an elite, and black box "solutions" to symptoms rather than addressing the roots of the issue, in the form of pills. 15
A condition is only called a mental illness if it is socially problematic, i.e. not good for being productive within the system. If your predispositions don't help the machine, or you could live well within another context—agrarian, hunter gatherer—but cannot cope within the modern world, then you are considered mentally ill. But if your neuroses help contribute to the machine, even if you are a monster in many ways, then you are considered "successful" and perhaps even called a genius.
The main reason I am suspicious of the surge in interest in "mental health" is that ultimately, the system always wins. This means that if there is a lack of fit between an individual and the system we live under, then the individual will always be blamed or attempts will be made to "fix" them, whereas the system keeps growing as it would, no matter the damages it causes to the environment and human beings.
Mental health within the system must always be in its service, which is why "health" and "sanity" must constantly be distorted so as to be favorable to the machine. If you cannot pay attention to the dull lessons from a boring teacher in a classroom, at an age where your body constantly prompts you to explore the world instead of sitting in a chair for 8 hours a day, then there is something wrong with you. You have an attention deficit disorder. It isn't the teacher who is at fault, or the schooling system, no, it is the child.
The current paradigm of mental health is one of management, not of healing. It is about sorting those who can contribute to the technological system from those who can’t, not about insuring a more harmonious relationship between individuals and one another, as well as their environment. The same way that jail is about sorting the trouble-makers from the rest, that school is about sorting the obedient children from the others, and the office is about rewarding the most compliant workers, and not necessarily the brightest, kindest, or most productive. Sorting and control, not health, beauty or love, is the name of the game for the system.
There are many ways in which I think the mass popularization of psychology concepts we’ve seen over the last 10-15 years has been fantastically unhelpful for actually understanding and loving one another.
From this tweet
In a sense, it has never been easier to objectify people, because the game of identity, labeling an entire person as a discrete list of traits, is incredibly conducive to that, and arises from the decontextualized communication which is favored in our world, mainly through the internet. I am not sure why identity dominates so much in our current world, since it isn’t exclusive to the internet, but if I had to guess, it would be a combination of
The game of identity then links up to an adjacent one, again very popular on the internet, which is the game of being constantly right. It is not just that there are a bajillion possible mental illnesses and subtleties of what autism really means, it's that if you misuse those words then you clearly must be a bigot and need to be censored.
But at the end of the day, who really cares about understanding those games in precise details? Ultimately, if your concepts about human beings don't give you understanding or more compassion, then what are they good for? As Michael Smith puts it very well 16:
People matter more than ideas
1 Though sometimes we cause pain to ourselves and others by being unconscious in smaller ways, such as how improper breathing compounds into an inability to regulate one's emotions properly, which might spiral to problems in one's love life and one's body. I am not claiming that growth always necessitates pain, but at the same time I am suspicious of people who look for every way possible to avoid pain.
2 To the ego that is, in truth it is merely a rejected aspect of Reality.
3 As always, I would recommend Darren Allen's the Technological System
4 My tinnitus is caused by accumulated tension in my jaw. The exercises in Jack Willis’ Reichian Therapy: A Practical Guide for Home Use have greatly helped with tension in my face and my jaw, so I would recommend it to anyone who experiences that form of tinnitus—or anyone really because growing up in the West is basically guaranteed to leave you with quite a lot of tension in your body.
5 This habit of tunnel vision also contributes to myopia by the way. See the channel Myopia is Mental on Youtube which describes how it happens, and how you can revert it naturally!
6 See more from me in a mini-essay titled rootless pseudo-culture
7 In many ways it might be worse because the initial idea had enough validity and stability to be the status quo for a while, enough so that it generates corruption and dissatisfaction and thus revolts and the need for change, while the opposite of the status quo dives into uncharted territory, making it possibly far less sustainable than what it replaced.
8 I keep using the word "ego" from that point onward, which should be kept distinct from "self", using the terms as Darren Allen would. Self is the sense of “you” as a human being, which is separate from other things, and which allows you to feel the external world, think about it and act upon reality through your body and will. Self is a tool which helps you navigate life, and as such there is nothing wrong with it, but when the tool becomes a machine and no longer has a conscious user, that is when self becomes ego and troubles begin. Ego cannot turn itself off, and as such it believes to be you and will do everything to maintain itself, which is why it is so insensitive, power-hungry and prone to addictions.
9 I'm listing those ones because I have personally experimented with them and they have greatly improved my life. This doesn't mean that anything that falls outside of this tiny list is ineffective.
10 I'm not sure if I would recommend it now that I have more experience of what is going on in my life, but it was certainly a good stepping stone. I think Pete Walker's book “Complex PTSD: from surviving to thriving” and “Eastern body, Western Mind” (this one deals with chakras but in a very approcheable way) have been more helpful for me at this point.
11 Which again isn’t a bad thing, it just means we cannot apply the same methodology and expect equally good results.
12 Very questionable considering that complex technology requires so much maintenance in terms of energy and resources that the priority shifts to maintaining the system, and not helping out human beings. See again Darren Allen's The Technological System for a great overview of the Problem with an uppercase P.
13 The scenario of boredom becomes even more apparent in the case of interstellar travel—again, assuming it is possible is quite a stretch already, considering how many orders of magnitude harder it is than interplanetary travel—which would require years, if not decades or centuries, of travel through empty space. If you thought commuting was boring, then oh boy you are in for a treat!
14 This type of dynamic is typically a game, as described in the book “Games people play” by Eric Berne. I haven't gone through enough of the book to label most games, but it feels very similar to—if not a downright good example—the game “If it weren't for you”. Someone pretends that their freedom is being restricted by someone else, and talks about “if it weren’t for you, I could do (…)” when in reality, they are afraid of that freedom because it could expose their lack of skill, or confront them with scary situations, and so on. The game thus allows the person to resolve their cognitive dissonance without having to do anything difficult, and can even be a good bonding experience, such as how women love to talk with one another about how their husband is terrible, while also doing nothing to improve, or leave, the relationship.
15 I have been exploring Ayurveda, the holistic health system from India, and the sense that I get is that we are essentially in the dark Ages when it comes to health, compared to what the tradition could bring in the world. I don't know enough to feel comfortable sharing anything specific, but in general, learning to address your health issues through: 1) sleep 2) diet 3) physical exercises—often soft ones, like stretching and such, more so than intense workouts 4) a less busy lifestyle, amongst many lifestyle changes, is far more effective than taking medicine, which has a way of creating secondary effects and also never addresses the origin of your problems anyway. That being said, Western medicine is rather effective at emergency, such as surgery and addressing very specific narrow conditions, but for chronic ills, making changes to your day to day habits is far more effective in my experience.
16 It's a title of one of his videos, but it's a good sentence nonetheless
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2024-11-30