Three guesses as to what I chose!
To unpack why I wrote what I wrote we first have to go back and cover one of the few things that our society holds in common: the moral imperative. The link takes you to the Encyclopedia Britannica, but I'll sum up my understanding here: some things are just obviously good and bad, on a universal level, if you take them up to a universal constant. The assumption is that the mind can figure this out, and that rationality is sufficient for morality. The mind should be able to figure it out. This idea is at the base of every single moral argument of today, particularly the gay marriage and identity issues.
Like the rest of the Enlightenment, it's manifestly and obviously wrong. Because the mind relies on the brain and the brain is ridiculous and stupid.
This is so obvious a child can disprove it: ask him to stop punching his brother in the face because he wouldn't want everyone to be hit, including himself. Assuming you can get the child out of his temper, he will probably just shrug and keep hammering away at his brother, because the statement obviously doesn't apply to his situation, right then and there. "But what if I help him think better?" you may ask. Or "He can't know better! This is a bad example!" may be said as well.
We'll get back to that in a minute. You won't like the answer.
Well, I hope you won't.
Yeesh if you do.
So the first problem is that the brain is extremely hackable. In fact one could argue it's one of the weakest parts of our nature. Ask Joost Merloo or anyone else who has studied menticide, or just read 1984 again. If you apply enough constant pressure through media, whether it be radio, TV, or y'know social media, thebrain will eventually accept whatever it's told by sheer weight of volume. Obvious things can be trained out. It's done all the time. This is a fact of the brain. And torture is remarkably effective, if you can throw that in too, because the brain wants the world to make sense and, given enough unpleasantness, will rewrite its own law of morality to where the unpleasant thing will stop. This is not even a controversial statement, we figured this out 70 years ago, if not longer.
Heck, you can figure out if this was done to you. Look back at your worldview in 2012. No, I don't mean look at it and shudder. Really get back into it. Embody it. Empathize with yourself from ten years ago. Let yourself, for five minutes, go back to what you were before. Odds are that it was ridiculously different than it is now. Ask yourself "Why on earth did it change?"
I'm not saying your views on things shouldn't change. They should.
But if your answer includes social media stop. Social media applies the rules of menticide, openly and baldly. We know for a fact that Facebook manipulates its feeds for their own purposes. The same is true of Reddit. The people who designed the apps have been caught, time and again, intentionally monkeying with their algorithms to get a "desirable result".
There is no mechanical difference between having someone stand on their feet without shoes until they rat out their friends and changing your mind because you keep seeing the same thing on an app designed to addict your brain, over and over again over years.
None.
Both apply constant pressure through manipulating your environment. Now, granted, one is the Soviet gulag and one is your cell phone, so the goals are.... I suppose they're different enough. But the mechanics of those actions are the same. Constant pressure has been proven to change your brain's processes.
The second problem is that the brain is just dumb. The damn thing barely works, and it turns out that perceptions of even the most basic nature are not just overly selective, but that perception itself changes your environment. The brain cannot perceive with 100% objectivity and thus cannot be trusted to make even the most basic of mental processes without some form of ideology to help you paper over the processing errors.
Here:
If you failed, then all I'll ask is: how do you know you're not fucking up much bigger things?
You don't.
But I can assure you that you are.
Now the thing is that our forebearers knew these things. The Odyssey, one of the earliest stories we have, features more than a few scenes where there are open disagreements about the meaning of specific portents. One group says it's the gods trying to tell them something, the other group (the suitors) scoffs and says the gods don't speak.
You know what happens to the people who scoff?
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| Hint: It ain't the suitors doing the killing. |
One group had an ideological instrument that allowed them to the see that the actions of birds were the actions of the gods. And to them it was clear as day. The other didn't. You can argue whether or not that's true today, but you can't argue that one group survived and the other didn't. Because, as it turns out, ideology helps you paper over the gaps and get out of bed in the morning, and not all ideologies are equal. The Odyssey, one of the earliest works we have, not only knows the difference, but calls it out. And hell, you could argue the Iliad does it too, by having people misinterpret the gods' intentions with distressing frequency. Their mythology, their ideology, was inadequate, and so therefore couldn't help them see things as they were.
The categorical imperative is a mythological statement. It comes from the "story" that the mind is sufficient for figuring out the truth. I don't know if any myth is true, but some myths are useful. The categorical imperative is not. It leaves minds wide open to menticide (because the brain can be hacked more easily than Windows), doesn't mistrust the mind nearly enough (because the brain takes shortcuts when perceiving), and it assumes no other myth is needed. Like all atheistic myths, it is poison.
Now for the worst part about the categorical imperative. Yes, we're circling back now. Now, if morality is merely a function of the mind, if the mind can see these things inherently (something no pre-Enlightenment myth would be stupid enough to say) then if you don't see it your mind is clearly broken and needs to be re-educated. Your actions aren't the problem, your mind is! You're nuts! Or just so bad that we can't do anything with you. 2+2=5 if sufficient pressure is applied. You will love Big Brother. And since the brain is so plastic it's going to change. Yay, we fixed him! He's no longer a spreader of disinformation! It's not reason that was applied to the person, but sheer power and he was forcibly overriden. In the old days we'd call it a punishment and tell the person that if they kept up the wrong action we'd keep punishing them.
But now?
You're sick and we're going to cure you.
Don't worry, we'll take the rats away! We know you're afraid of them, but you're sick and we have to cure the illness, so if you just sell out your true love we'll make sure the rats don't eat your face! Love Big Brother, you sick terrorist.
Now, Huxley disagreed with Orwell about this. He said, given sufficient pleasure, people would kill their own minds themselves.
Huxley was right: pleasure and dopamine actually work a lot better. Pain works, sure, but with pleasure the subject does it to himself. Look at your feed, assuming you didn't check it while reading this blog post.
Did you come out of a weird "What the hell have I been doing?" window just now?
Yeah, that's on purpose.
Over the last few years I have been slowly and deliberately learning to nuke the categorical imperative from my brain. And it has helped me immensely. The question of universal "shoulds" has become less and less a problem, and instead completely different ways of approaching problems have begun to present themselves to me. And it's been refreshing!
This doesn't mean I've decided to not have an ideology. I can't not have one. There has to be some form of procedures I can follow when it's not inherently obvious what it is I'm supposed to do. And I've gone through a fair bit of experience that seems to prove that the Christian ideology, as I've experienced it, is more than just a good idea: it's answered questions that have allowed me to heal in ways that plain ole shouldn't be possible... but here I am. I'm alive. I have a family who love me. I'm not alone. I used the framework of Christianity to keep going in spots where I should have just collapsed. And that had everything to do with the idea that, if you trusted in this God who somehow will take care of things and love those around you, that you will make it. I did not have to ask if the myriad weird things happening in my brain were real, it didn't matter, love what you perceive, do what you can for what you see (or don't), and all will work out.
And someone may say "But that makes you dependent on an old man in the sky!" I mean, we're all dependent on something. No one is independent. But I know the people who push the modern ideology are liars and frauds and want to make a quick buck. At least with Christianity the people trying to push it are (overall) saying that there is something greater than themselves, that they are inherently failures in living up to what that eternally loving Being has taught them. And there's over two thousand years of sources to check against their claims. So it's not like I'm abdicating my responsibility to think, but once something is figured out I can file it away into the framework and make it stronger, as opposed to the constant dopamine tear down and rebuild of wokeism.
No, wokies, feeling constantly tired and discouraged is not a universal thing. It's perfectly possible to have an ideology that doesn't destroy your faith in humanity from the inside out. If you're a straight white male you don't' have to unconsciously hate yourself every single second of your life.
There's two thousand years of sources that prove the lie of that nonsense.
With the brain freed from having to figure out moral issues all the time and thus losing an intentionally rigged game, more room is freed up for perception. It also allows me to take moral descriptors off a good deal of actions that, quite frankly, never should have had those descriptors in the first place. "The Gamble Paid Off" is fundamentally a post about a moment when I realized that something that I had absolutely no issue with doing had been categorically denied me, because the feed and dopamine it engendered blinded me to what I thought I felt I had to do. That doesn't mean I communicated my point well. I know I didn't, it's why this post exists. I'm not going to defend the post, but I'm also not going to take it down. Even if I disagree with what I chose to do then, I chose it. Tough shit for me! It's up!
Here's what I was attempting to communicate then:
Children were getting killed, and I know that I had no mythological/ideological problem at the time with using a complete and utter tool of a human being for a chance to stack the Supreme Court's bench. On the one hand stood failing to save those lives and on the other was hastening the destruction of the corpse of a culture that's clearly been dead for years.
To me? Now? The choice is obvious.
Sorry folks, our culture has been obviously dead to me since at least 2012. It ain't comin' back.
And, given what I've just been writing about, it became obvious that my decision not to vote for Trump at the time was not a free choice on my part. My brain broke under pressure. That's not a defense. It's not something I blame others for. But I was distraught to realize that I hadn't been acting freely. As someone who spent months being groomed into being raped at the age of six I value my autonomy, and any attempts to override it will always result in a vicious reaction from me. I realized I was in the soup I'd not anticipated.
Maybe those little souls we're not killing now can help us figure out a way out of this mess.
Because something new, something outside of the blinders that we've had on for so long, is needed. I don't know what it is. But I trust that if we give God the chance to bring in people whose senses haven't been massively fucked to help see new things that He will respond to that faith. To that hope.
It's a fool's hope, that someone will see the things I'm missing because they weren't immured in my garbage.
Oh wait, no it's not.
That's just life. That's how it's always worked.
And that beats out any abstract concept of how to get back to allowing life to provide us new chances to start over. And those chances have never been a new ideology, they're not some stupid politician that has been immured in the system for years and should be in jail (or in Biden's case a nursing home for dementia), nor are they any tool we now possess. We're in the soup. We can't see out of it.
But maybe she can.
I can only hope.
Psalm 126 (127)
Vain is the builder’s toil, if the house is not of the Lord’s building; vainly the guard keeps watch, if the city has not the Lord for its guardian.Vain, that you should be astir before daybreak, and sit on over your tasks late into the night, you whose bread is so hardly won; is it not in the hours of sleep that he blesses the men he loves?Fatherhood itself is the Lord’s gift, the fruitful womb is a reward that comes from him.Crown of thy youth, children are like arrows in a warrior’s hand.Happy, whose quiver is well filled with these; their cause will not be set aside when they plead against their enemies at the gate.
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