The only things we can talk about

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:

• Surrogates for real agency in the form of playing and watching sports
• Videos of cute animals which are so utterly inoffensive that no one could dislike them
• Drowning the information ecology in a torrent of political measures which all consist in shuffling chairs on a sinking ship
• Getting people outraged at world events that people are utterly helpless to do anything about
• And of course, endless and endless amounts of porn and distractions like video games, TV shows and social media
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.

Footnotes

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.

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2024-11-30