Beliefs Versus Facts

 

Purples and reds in front of a corn field in Pennsylvania

Recently and repeatedly, I have come across friend after friend who has succumbed to narratives, stories, and rationalizations and who obviously haven't done their research to find the actual truth. These are folks I previously held in high regard. But their "beliefs" overpowered their critical thinking abilities and they have become the sheep that Tim Watkins has been writing about for years.

Andrew Beck posted recently about this situation, which mirrors my thoughts almost precisely, quote: 

"I honestly find it disturbing and a bit sad to watch friends who were once progressive in the best sense of the word start tumbling for right-wing rhetoric.

Rather than just learn to live with the uncertainty and the lack of easy answers that are, IMO, the real 'flavor' of this era. Rather than interrogate the old problem-reaction-solution paradigm that gets strongly activated by current events.

I don't even get the appeal of the fash [fascism] these days. I mean, they used to look spiffy enough in their heyday, thanks to sponsors like Hugo Boss. But not so much now.

I don't get the appeal of the major players of the movement either.

Now Trump does, or did, have a bit of charisma. But he's about the only one. The rest have less personality than a piece of dried chewing gum on a park bench. And they're not selling anything new, it's all rehashed nostalgia.

Not are there any saving graces balancing out the strong male archetype the Right embody with all the subtlety and finesse of John Wayne doing embroidery with a Gatling Gun.

There's no real intelligence, wit, charm, or even humor (except of the punching down, sneering kind). Nor self-awareness, humility, or ability to admit to wrongdoing. Zero kindness or compassion. Very little sense of history, except, again, a false history based on a nostalgic, whitewashed view of things.

So again - I don't get the appeal. It's basically a thug archetype, not a warrior archetype.

I do wonder if many people alive today would rather go through literal Hell on Earth and drag everyone with them than face the darkness in themselves?

I read an interesting study that found most modern people would rather be submitted to actual physical torture than left in a room alone with nothing to distract their attention other than their own thoughts.

If this is indicative of the average person, it's not reassuring. At all. It's as if the Blank Slate Theory has gone from implausible theory favored by Utilitarians to a fait accompli.

That might also explain why we're drowning in problems so extensive and unsolvable that formerly sensible people are now seriously considering voting for extremists to fake-solve them.

Maybe there really is nothing going on upstairs - except what the media and advertisers already stuffed in there over the years you were watching the goggle box in the living room, or scrolling your social media feed on an iPhone.

And I wonder - is this macho version of the male archetype still what people aspire to in the 21st century? Is this what 'real men' and 'real women' still think a man should be like?

Because I don't see it. I just see a swapping out of roles between the Left and Right, with the Right taking their place as the ones who hate Western civilization and want to tear it all down.

And I see a lot of soon-to-be former members of the Leopards Face Eating Party; another generation of washed-up, useful idiots who fell for the latest scam-artists and chased the last dance on the Titanic before collapse hit because - I guess because they are not done with the bargaining stage of collapse acceptance. Or it's not done with them.

As someone done with that stage, and with the denial stage, I admit to still keeping some small amounts aside as ballast for the journey ahead (because a small amount of denial or bargaining is, IMO, essential when staring too much into the void).

I don't even mind what stage people are in. As much as I mind what state of awareness they are willing to bring to the table.

I own my small measure of willful denial, and use it consciously and deliberately to take the edge of off the daily grind, the same way as people use coffee, drink, and drugs to do the same thing.

What I won't do, is pretend someone out there has a world-scale solution if we all just believe and click our heels three times.

And I won't roleplay this delusion out for the younger generation to see. Because I refuse to model the bullshit of prior generations just because it once passed for 'common sense'.

People used to force left-handers to switch hands when I was at school and even at age 5 I saw it for the idle superstition it was. It was a belief from another time, but no-one back then would let go of it, even though they could never, ever justify it when asked, beyond 'this is just how it's always done'.

Well guess what? It isn't how it's done anymore, because things change when enough people challenge them and force the defenders to make a case for the defense - which they invariably can't do, because such people are typically social conformists.

I say - learn to let it all go. Including the social conformity, the 'groupthink' that makes a Borg collective out of us. Let go of the certitudes of politics in this age.

Quit making Grand Plans to solve Big Problems. It's the wrong era for all that.

It won't help you to keep chasing rainbows down the yellow brick road. It won't bring the dead back to life, it won't save dying species, it won't save the economy.

Remember the line from William Butler Yeats' poem The Second Coming:

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

Just how convinced are you of your solutions to problems?

What rough beast are you helping slouch towards Bethlehem? Or Gaza? Ukraine? On whose authority do you claim to know what's best for the people in these areas you don't even live in?

I'm f*cking determined to hold the line for this level of understanding while others lose their sh** and go from materialists to spiritualists and back again,

or from progressive to fash and back again,

or mainstream Xtianity to the New Age and back again...

and never learn a goddamned thing from their experience,

nor even spot the repetitive patterns it leaves in its wake down through the generations.

None of this is our first rodeo. Some of it isn't even our 2nd rodeo. And we've forgotten - everything - we ought to have learned from our own history. We are becoming masters at organised forgetting, and we enforce this forgetting with every attempt to police online conversations within 'respectable' parameters.

This 'respectability' can be found just as often in 'alternative' circles as in mainstream ones, with its own appeal to authority.

Noam Chomsky may as well be Jesus the way some people on the Left hang on his every word uncritically and accept his version of current affairs as gospel.

The history books show what happened to the cult leaders of yesteryear. The 'stronk' leaders people idolize today will have feet of clay tomorrow, and those who flirted with them out of fascination or despair will suddenly be embarrassed at all the shite on their timelines, because it won't have aged well.

And all they will have done is to have switched sides in the endless debate between two bald men over who owns the planetary comb.

A comb that is on fire, no less.

The followers of leaders with advanced stage wetiko are just hungry ghosts in training.

And the leader of a dying culture is the leader of nothing.

Take away all the posturing and iconography and what's left are a bunch of scared wee boys whistling in the dark.

They're making all the wrong plans - and the irony is, those wrong plans are the unconscious mind's attempt to get the conscious mind to accept and pay attention to the predicament we're in.

The real trick is to embrace reality without succumbing to the inertia it brings, the uncertainty it breeds, and the loss of power and prestige that goes with realizing you are a tiny being in a vast and ancient Universe that may well love you unconditionally but may well remain perfectly indifferent to your species' fate and may not be about to save it from the consequences of its own insatiable appetite for growth.

But that's a hard hoe to row, as they say - so people circle back around the early stages of acceptance and bargain away their real sense, and their lives, for cheap and shoddy 'answers'. They want reassuring lies rather than inconvenient truths.

Oh boy were you ever born in the wrong era on the wrong planet if that's how you roll!

But go ahead, chase those expiring dreams if you are compelled to.

We'll reconvene, those of us still alive and well enough to do so, in 2 or 3 years time and compare notes."

It IS a bit saddening, albeit perfectly predictable as we tumble down the Seneca Cliff. I think that many people simply don't understand overshoot and collapse and the fact that civilization itself is unsustainable, meaning that ultimately all the infrastructural and most anthropocentric systems which surround us are slowly disappearing. Technology use has had very negative effects upon the environment surrounding us but also on us directly. Have you ever heard the maxim, "Use it or lose it!"? Well, because technology use replaces human work, we now must find other sources of exercise to replace what we previously did as part of life itself. This also includes thinking, which computers often now do for us. Critical thinking is now no longer as popular as it once was. Another aspect of technology use is our fading ability to focus and concentrate on one thing at a time.

As AI (Artificial Intelligence) becomes more prevalent, many people's thinking abilities will suffer further. I think I have mentioned The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster in this space before. It outlines very well what can be expected with regard to societal thinking. I've seen many articles that one can tell have either been written by AI or have been written using voice dictation transcribing (speech-to-text software) - both notoriously filled with spelling errors and/or missing words and/or proper grammar and punctuation and/or proper syntax. Many years ago I thought about getting speech-to-text software before I realized the inherent problems with needing to check commonly misspelled words (there, they're, and their, for instance). I never actually purchased it and now I'm glad I didn't. Likewise, I have never used ChatGPT or any of the other LLMs or AI systems of any type, and I am just as equally glad I have never used any of them to write my articles.

AI, unlike it's name, is not really intelligent at all. It's no different than any other computerized system - it suffers from GIGO - Garbage in = Garbage out. It's just another form of anthropocentric hubris.

Speaking of hubris, I wrote an article quite some time back about it combined with stupidity and ignorance. Even though I knew and predicted that denial of reality, stupidity, and ignorance were going to be huge issues, I seriously underestimated just HOW bad those three were going to be. Given what I now know, the ideas still proliferating around about "fixing" and/or "saving" and/or "restoring" and/or "regenerating" nature, soils, the planet, and on and on just look like completely ridiculous ideas at this point, not that they ever stood a chance in hell anyway. Still, there were times I actually gave them a small chance of being adopted or at least worked upon on a scale that might matter. I just can no longer even think for a minute that any of those ideas have any credibility at attaining a scale that would matter beyond a potentially small, local benefit. 

That fact is what I continue to try to point out, if only a very small community of people are willing to open their eyes to these facts. I continue to try to help folks deal with the predicaments we face with reality, but there literally is no way to synthesize everything I have spent the last four years writing into a "bite-sized" article. Once one comprehends a small portion of what I spend my time communicating, there is always more to understand. For me, the exact same scenario plays out all the time. There is still a small part of me that wishes for my assessment to be completely (or even just partially!) wrong. But what I discover time after time after time is that even my worst fears didn't match up with the darkness of the reality unfolding all around us. 

I can't seem to get people to comprehend that we lack agency to be able to make much of a dent in reducing overshoot voluntarily. The systems we're up against are hyperobjects that we do not control. People can "take action" all they want, but unless and until they are ready and prepared to abandon civilization, none of it really matters. ALL ANTHROPOCENTRIC SYSTEMS SURROUNDING US ARE UNSUSTAINABLE. Look at any human-produced infrastructure. Our houses, our buildings, our roads, our electrical grids, and on and on...every last bit of it is unsustainable - which is why over the past 10,000 years every civilization that has emerged has likewise collapsed. 

Part of the issue that most people cannot see is that even if we were ready to give up civilization and return to a sustainable way of life, we wouldn't be able to survive very long. What would be required for us to have potable water to drink? How about safe food? How would we eliminate/remove our waste from our living quarters? How many megacities would have to be abandoned and how many people would be displaced as a result? Of course, all of this is impractical at best. It's just not going to happen. That is the meaning of predicament, as one can easily see that this all has an outcome rather than a solution or answer. Yet, I still see folks talking about non-existent "solutions" or "mitigations" or other so-called "actions" that are supposed to have some positive effect. Of course, these ideas are all reductionistic which do not have a holistic impact. Without said holistic impact, all those ideas put together equal a big, fat nothing burger. 

I've spent a considerable amount of time reading articles about ways to avoid collapse, to maintain civilization, and to take action where we can. The bottom line with all of it is that at the end of the day, it's all bargaining. What's the point of "taking action" when the stated goals simply cannot possibly be met, regardless of what those goals are? When will society come to understand that WE™ are not in control? When one takes into consideration the actual reality of the habitat which surrounds us and provides our necessities (water for one, biodiversity for another), one can see that collapse is inevitable. Thanks to Tristan, Kate, and Dr. Tadzio Müller for the presentation and links.

Enough for today; how about something a bit more fun? In the three weeks since my last article, three new sets of pictures have been published (these publish every Wednesday regardless of whether or not I publish an article here); Hickory Lodge and Alto Pass is the most recent set. Previously, Giant City State Park and Makanda were also published. Enjoy!