Risk-taking, anti-forgiveness, Theseus recipes and effective rebellion
A lot of advice seem to be about avoiding worst case scenarios, especially the ones that tell you what not to do, which are useful of course, but the best things in Life come from just going for something wholeheartedly, without restraint or care in the world. Love is not safe. Freedom is not safe. Living consciously is not safe.
It makes some sense that the society we live in tends to have so many safeguarding mechanisms, because it only takes one problem for an interconnected fragile system to experience a failure. For instance:
All of this to say that the dominant paradigm, and the structures downstream of it, is mainly concerned with maintaining itself through homogenization, rather than promoting excellence, which isn't particularly hard to understand why. Excellence is deviance, which is unpredictable, and so even though it can be celebrated after the results come in, very few (if any) aspects of our society actively promote the nurturing of excellence.
It is how it is, and there is no point in getting upset about it. Better focus on living rather than caring so much about what the vast majority of people think or do.
Because of this, the fact that they try to preserve themselves even if they no longer address the problems they are supposed to solve, when threatened to a significant degree, they will resort to crude actions such as:
All of this to say that institutions prioritize their survival above everything else, and will not hesitate to play dirty if the funds or support start running out. I am not talking here about conspiracy theories, I am talking about incentive structures in a world where one small group of people can optimize for its benefits at the expense of everyone else, and where not playing that game simply leads to someone else taking the place in power, i.e. the rules for rulers.
One of Jesus' core principle was forgiveness, probably because spirituality which devolves into a game of reaching “perfection” cannot embody the kind of Love needed to navigate life and its inevitable messiness, which is to say that everyone falls out of integrity, and constantly punishing and policing one another won't lead to anything constructive in the long term.
Interestingly, Jesus was also undeniably 3 against charging interests on any loan whatsoever, which at the time was considered usury, whereas nowadays it is considered a pillar of the growth economy.
And I wonder to what extent we could say that debt embodies a sort of “anti-forgiveness”. Whereas forgiveness doesn't count the hurts of the past and merely listens to the good of the present moment, anti-forgiveness scrupulously keeps track of all of them via a system of quantification, and even punishes the other side more and more via interests.
It's even worse when you consider that the biggest forms of debt taken by the average person are for 1) education, in the USA at least, and 2) housing, which is essential for the latter, and in many ways unavoidable for the former. 4 As such, the modern system is essentially an anti-forgiveness machine, one in which people get indebted just to function within. No wonder then that so many feel unsafe, and constantly worrying about the future, when the very structure of the system incentivizes having to take out loans just to get what you need.
Some people get stuck approaching life like a child, always looking for care from the cosmic parents. Some get stuck approaching life like a student, looking for approval & good grades from the cosmic teachers. Some get stuck approaching life like an employee, looking for duties and compensation from the cosmic boss. And some get stuck approaching life like a boss, trying to control and direct their cosmic employees/servants.
Very few manage to approach life like an artist, sensing and co-creating with their cosmic collaborator, which is also their cosmic medium, and which is also their own body and soul.
From this tweet. Noting here that the various categories besides “artist” are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to be a child, a student, an employee, and even a boss, like how people can be tyrannical with the people under them in the hierarchy, but ass-kissers with the ones who have power over them. To rephrase it with my own vocabulary,
None of them are really living though, they are all slaves, including the boss who cannot let go of his obsessive need for control.
Constantly scanning for threats, creating a baseline for anxiety. My parents were like stochastic emotional terrorists to me and my brother
From this tweet. This is my experience as well, where my parents would argue with one another, or my brother, in what felt to me like a completely random way, and as a result it has made me constantly scan for threats in my life, making me very anxious and tired due to me constantly being alerted. It is not just the random aspect, but also the sense of being caught in a crossfire which you are utterly helpless to do anything about, since it doesn't involve you, which made be anxious too.
Now that I am older, I have more agency over the type of environments I find myself in, which means I can afford to not spend my time with people who cannot deal gracefully with conflicts, and at the very least I can assert my boundaries.
The normie is not somehow “more sane” than the internet schizoid. The normie is in the grasp of a different psychosis, and the cure for both is the same: actual real grass touching, doing nothing, being capable of withstanding unmediated boredom.
From this tweet. I think there are forms of being schizoid which are undeniably worse than “normalcy”, such as the people stuck in their echo chamber of conspiracy theories and who cannot function in any way. But overall, I see what the original post refers to. Most people are not sane, even (and especially) if they fit well into the current system.
Normies are swarmed by anxiety-inducing propaganda, agit-prop, in the form of the news, which they take to be “informative”, without ever reflecting as to whether it truly adds to their life and makes them better at building towards what they care about. In truth, the news pacify people and make them predictable through the constant outrage and fear they induce, and I have personally never seen someone constantly plugged to that type of media do anything significant to change their own life.
The same can be said about the demands of work which tire and eat at people's lives, which they love to complain about of course, but do essentially nothing to outgrow. If they manage to get a decent amount of money to not have to work for a while, you find that a surprising amount of people have such empty inner lives that they feel compelled to outright go back to work as an employee even if they don't need the money.
And when most people aren't glued in front of a system-friendly piece of media, or working, then they are—and I truly dread using that word—consuming things, which is a rather suitable description of someone who wants to fill their time with whatever activity is within their reach. Buying things of course, but I think that these days, it has been replaced by a variety of time-fillers on the internet, from social media, to podcasts, to watching broadcasts, to zoning out in front of a show, to playing video games, or watching porn.
The average person is not sane. They do not know what they want, they barely do anything to change their situation. They are not in touch with the present moment, nor are they really intelligent. They might be nice people, very nice in fact, but what dictates their life is not sanity or goodness or freedom or love, it is the convenience of going with the flow of whatever is around them, which is decidedly not a good influence, merely a common form of psychosis.
Speaking of the news, if we look up the definition of “terrorism”, then we get from Google that it is “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.”
It is then fair to say that the news are broadly speaking a form of emotional terrorism. They are lawful, but then again, this doesn't mean much considering the sheer exploitation, constant coercion and scandalous inequality of our world, all of which are perfectly legal. 5
The point of Agitprop, agitation propaganda, is not so much in its content, though of course it matters a great deal as well, but more so the state of being it induces. The news use a more subtle form of violence, one that affects the energetic body such that its listeners are utterly disembodied, and far more prone to being reactive and thus mechanically reaching to their preconceived ideas. 6
As a result, it doesn't really matter if you see through a fake news or a stupid idea, if you still feel compelled to share it to other people. The way that type of pattern replicates is precisely by making people angry, so angry that they can't help but comment on it, which draws more and more attention to it. Most people might not learn, but individuals can, and ultimately we are all responsible for getting pulled into that unconscious game, even if we aren't at fault for its existence. As always, better to focus on what you want to see more of.
While I do not believe in “should”, i.e. coercion and self-coercion, I believe nonetheless that:
My mom does something interesting with recipes, showing her answer to the question regarding Theseus' ship in philosophy. 8 She starts by following the recipe and does a good job, and is praised for it. Then she slowly starts replacing ingredients, either out of complacency or because she doesn't have the right ingredients at hand. After enough time, the recipe devolves into something completely different, and is much worse as a result.
I don't care about thought experiments in general, but if I had to give an answer, it is clear to me that the resulting dish is entirely different, as is Theseus' ship. People don't like that answer because you cannot easily point out when the change happened, similar to how you cannot tell when a group of grains of sand becomes a “pile”, but this feels like an arbitrary word game to me. We split reality into categories because it is useful, not because it is true. Obsess too much about the details and you lose track of what's important.
The greatest rebellion in a loveless world is to embody love, as opposed to getting caught in narrative wars which consist in fighting the Big Bad(TM). The dominant worldview and its counter-responses are both fighting an old war, and both do not lead to anything constructive because the dominants only want to maintain the status quo, such as work, school, and in general the technological system and its physical and mental offshoots. The opposition on the other hand simply want to oppose whatever it is, partially or totally, much like a teenager rebelling against their parents for no reason other than to assert their agency.
I am not implying a naive “Love will save the world” type of narrative, because I fully believe that the technological system is on its decline and many of its institutions and much of its infrastructure are going to severely decline in power and influence in the coming decades. Love will not save the world with a lower case 'w', society, but it is what conscious human beings are aligned with, in their relationships or in their work, and as such it is the only direction which can be sustained no matter how difficult things get. When the material conditions are good, then Love is great, and when they are awful, then Love is even more important.
1 Source: this tweet
2 I am not denying that antropogenic climate change is a thing. It very much is, and anecdotally, my house got hit by a flood which can reasonably be attributed to climate change, considering that nothing as intense hit the area for more than 80 years. But just because something is a problem doesn't mean it is the single biggest problem of our system. As always, Darren Allen provides a very good big-picture overview, in his essay called The Collapse
3 Of course there is never any guarantee with the far past, but considering that the 4 Gospels which remain in the Biblical canon have been selected out of a wider list—see the Non-canonical gospels for instance_gospels)—very likely with a worldly bias, which is to say favoring civilization and its institutions, it's fair to say that if the version of Jesus' teaching which remains to this day was against charging interests, then so was the real one
4 At least in the old paradigm of getting a degree to then get a job, which some people avoid in fields like programming. It could be argued that because so many people have a degree, they have become significantly less valuable, though they still signal some minimum level of commitment to employers still, so they aren't completely worthless either
5 I think it's a fairly common realization as a teenager to see how the rules within a classroom or one's family are all dictated by whatever is convenient for the one in charge, the teacher or the parent. Which is to say that it doesn't matter if the rules aren't consistently followed, or if they apply to you but not them, or if the punishment is outsized compared to the offence, or if they don't even accomplish anything useful, because you don't have a say in them anyway, since you are not the one in power. It is a rather stark realization to then see the same dynamic unfold in all of society, because of course, those in power aren't divine immaculate beings materializing on Earth to insure the balance of the world, but other human beings with their selfish agenda trying to maintain their power and possessions
6 See also my essay on Somatic hazards
7 Not necessarily in the sense of having to teach them how to talk or walk, because toddlers who are allowed to explore and do things want to participate in the world, and naturally try to walk around and understand their parents are saying. But by “healthier behavior”, I simply mean removing excessive danger from their life, the kind which creates permanent consequences, not the kind which hurts them for a bit and from which they can heal, and promoting healthy habits in terms of eating and communicating for instance
8 Or rather the kind of philosophy that deals with thought experiments, not the contemplative kind which changes your life
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2025-02-09