"Cognitive dissonance. One of the most irritating human traits."
I Power
Scientific Research & Self-Development Activism
thoughts about humanity in the big picture
reposting from my blog-
It seems we're intelligent enough to manage our world economy properly overall.. we're not children.
Our society is pretty amazing overall actually, in terms of survival.
But we won't- our civilization won't survive much longer at this rate.
Nations locked in nuclear threats constantly; corporate espionage and plotting and corruption and world-government thinking, constantly.. environmental damage via passing the book; constantly... none of it is even conscious thought. And yet; this is what the world is about, to some major extent.
We just don't care, it seems. We don't see surviving as that valuable, today, simply put..
We have these aspects like addiction which run through our individual consciousness(es), our existence; but we don't organize these things and we don't approach life itself scientifically or logically; rationally. We invent rationalizations for the things we do; and we don't keep the world at large in check. Because of our biologically-emerged tendency to not notice threats invisible from the local space of our lives. Because it *appears* to be working- i.e. the criticisms that criticizing 'the current system' propose no alternate solution for directing society at large. Really, if we have a problem, which we clearly do, then surely we ought to work to solve it. Even if corruption and nation-building wasn't the problem and that we only faced poverty and deforestation (20% of the world's oxygen comes from the Amazon rainforest). Collectively, we are still blind to how the world really works and how those events even in the political and economic sphere are really happening; what they really influence and how uch- even in the best case we have specialized individuals in some field or another, analyzing society with a specific lens or frame of analysis. It is fundamentally bad that we don't have more people to look at the whole and try to explain it all- people like me. Humanity at large today is a very sad lesson of how to *not* do it. That's what I see in the big picture for humanity. That's the clearest thing that stands out by far. As we say- history, [for us,] seems to repeat itself.
Tags: critical-thinking, existence, humanity, philosophy, reality, society, world
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Sorlaize on -
*Line 5- that should be- "none of it is even conscious thought for almost all people."
typo: "how to not do it" -> "how not to do it"
also typo uch -> much. Fuck!
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Permalink Reply by Lore on -
"We just don't care..."
I think this is the big one. The people I talk to about how messed up the world is are too busy with the rat race to face these problems. Another thing is that a lot of people think that these things are out of their control.
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Permalink Reply by March E. on -
exactly, we are all chasing after the dollars. I wish it weren't this way, though. People do know about how bad things are, but a lot of them just say "fuck it, i give up, who cares anymore?" Even if you want to do something to help the problem, there are always those who would tell you that it's futile or that the alternatives you find are just not going to work. Not only that, the fact that people have the preconceived notion of human nature being inherently "evil" is also a big factor that prevents people from actively trying to work out solutions.
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Permalink Reply by Bart on -
Time to get yourself a big stick and beat those people. our ancestors made some effort to ensure our species survival. We shouldn`t just roll over and die, that would be unnatural.
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Permalink Reply by March E. on
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lol. I think that the guys benefiting on running our species into the ground like keeping us in the rat race. Wouldn't want to keep giving them that pleasure.
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Permalink Reply by Bart on
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keeping you fixed on the carrot in front of you will keep you from bothering important people with your "opinions"
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Permalink Reply by Sorlaize on
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yeah
With all the distractions we have today we don't think clearly about how the world is managed. But, who says it *isn't* all of our responsibility? Nobody can. I think we have to all have a conscious effort in changing the world or at least thinking that way. Otherwise, fundamentally, we are screwed as a civilization.So.. at the rate we are going, where we just escallate and escallate, everything - technology, use of electricity, wealth - at this rate, while we don't understand what we are doing, we are going to make a catastrophic failure at some point. The ability for us to understand the world for what it is, is all there, but the realization that that's the most important thing in the world, obviously isn't.
There is so much 'thinking ability' in all the people of the world, such that we'd be able to "get on top of the problem". But, we have created a society where it's normal to go to work and to shop and to talk & think about things far removed from worldly reality.. we have created a society that is about distracting us and disabling us from doing much at all. Sure, it can be changed.. if people are there to think about at least the starting point.. about understanding the world..
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Permalink Reply by Sorlaize on
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quotes from Paul Chefurka-
1. Humanity suffers from a pervasive sense of separation: self/other, us/them, body/mind, matter/spirit, humans/resources. This issue is very well addressed in Charles Eisenstein’s online book The Ascent of Humanity. I have concluded that this sense of separation is the inescapable Faustian price we have paid for the self-awareness granted by our neocortex.
2. Our brains evolved to favour immediate threats over distant ones. Immediate, visible threats merit a strong, emotional response; distant, abstract threats are ignored. This hyperbolic discount function is a good survival strategy out on the African veldt, but less so in the modern industrial world with its abstract and unseen threats -- our cleverness has far outrun our inbuilt caution.
3. Humans are not rational creatures, we are rationalizing creatures. We have a tendency to make most of our decisions at an unconscious leveland dress them up with socially acceptable rationalizations only post–facto, after they emerge into our awareness fully-formed.An urgent, voluntary reduction in world population might give us some slight chance to avoid a few of the worst effects of the converging crisis. Unfortunately, it takes a long time to reduce a population, and time is the one thing we don't have any more. There is also the question of enlisting people in such a program. If participation was voluntary, those most likely to sign up would probably be the caring, aware, altruistic ones we might prefer to have reproduce. This probability raises the spectre of an "Idiocracy Effect" on steroids. A global birth lottery would avoid that problem, but if you think instituting carbon taxes is a tough sell, just try promoting a "World Childbirth Lottery and Licensing Agency"...
some more quotes from this guy-
http://sanity-death.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/some-quotes-from-paul-ch...
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Permalink Reply by Tom Sawyer on -
EVERYONE BUY GREEN ENERGY! Corn crops should be worth more than oil, all it takes is a big shift of heart.
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Permalink Reply by Tom Sawyer on
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start a fucking ethanol fad in the stock market. BINGO! world economy stabalized, ecology saved, wars averted.
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Permalink Reply by Tom Sawyer on
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Cause and effect.
If u give a man a fish, he eats for one day. If u teach him to fish, he eats for a lifetime.
-that's why stimulus is such a joke.
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