Over the years they were moments where I thought that I really knew something.
There were times that I thought really sucked into a one movement or another, that I really became a true believer.
The benefit of hindsight is something that you don't really get until you're much older and you get to see yourself making the same mistakes over and over again. Some people never bothered looking back and spend their days like an ant just following the trail left by the person in front of them. They never look back, they don't even look that far ahead. They live in the moment.
Carpe diem, seize the day in Latin, for the generation that came before me it was an extremely powerful command that before you know it if you weren't careful life would pass you by. There's definitely some wisdom in that, which is one reason why it was a saying that lasted all the way from the days of Latin until today. However, if you close your eyes and just listen to the order then your life is going to be a lot harder than it has to be.
People who sieze the day more than anyone would be criminals. If you see someone you don't like, you hit them. If you see something you want, you steal it. If you see someone you want to kiss, you kiss them. If you see something you want to do you do it and damn the consequences.
Doesn't matter how smart that command is, following it blindly will inevitably result in tragedy.
When I was younger, there were a number of political issues that were near and dear to my heart and I couldn't imagine ever believing that the movements around those causes could become a problem. I looked at other people's political issues and was able to see with an Eagle eye where a good idea had been pushed too far but I had simply imagined to that it couldn't happen to my pet issues. As I grew older I got to see people turn the ideals of tolerance into something dark. Whereas before it was always about simply letting other people into the fold, some of those people eventually turned and started seeking to exclude others in the name of inclusiveness. This came to be called cancel culture, but it wasn't anything new. When I was a child a young woman who had a comedy show on TV had giant boycotts against her. When I was a middle aged man, there were new boycotts against the same woman, now in her 60s, for a completely different reason. Nothing changed except the rationale behind it and the passage of time.
Even amongst good ideas, those ideas can be perverted. In my time, I saw the idea of equality between people as a very good and just cause. As I got older, I saw people twist this good and just cause into something evil. All you have to do is turn off all human empathy. Turn off all sense of fairness, make the punishment for violating the rule total destruction of your life, and even the most benevolent cause can become true unmitigated evil.
Power mongers will always seek out that which has power. It doesn't matter what that thing is, they'll simply go there because there's power to be had. the people who seek out that thing don't seek it out because they care about whatever it is, they seek it out because they seek power. In the process of taking that thing over, they will pervert it and turn it into whatever they need to turn it into to get what they want.
Besides the power mongers, there are also people who are just misguided. People who haven't fully thought through the consequences of what they propose yet propose it nonetheless. In my time, we have an entire movement dedicated to universal basic income. It sounds really great as long as you leave out all the important parts. The idea is that you would give everybody a certain amount of money. The problem of course is that the money has to come from somewhere. Not only that, but once you've taken away people's reason to go out and do something a lot of them won't do anything. There have been many examples of universal basic income over the years, from the poor people on reserves to the rich people who want to trust fund, and without very carefully managing those people to give them reason to go on they often end up destroying their lives. Good people with good intentions pushing an idea that sounds good that will inevitably lead to mass suffering.
If you're young when you read this, you're probably surrounded by a lot of things that you think will stop being so important. Everyone tells you that high school stops being important the day you graduate, and that's true, but for a lot of people they continue to carry whatever baggage they accumulate during high school and it becomes something that changes their perspective throughout their lives long after the events are over. When you're young you will hear things that you know at the time are childish and silly, but what you don't realize is that there isn't some age that people magically let go. I've seen people in their forties, fifties, even sixties, bringing up things from their youth that in retrospect seem really childish, but they take that with them as one of their guiding tenets. Old hatred, wrapped up in decades of rationalization until it looks like a completely different thing.
Some people are just mentally ill. There are a lot of ways this can happen, chemical imbalances, bad experiences, sometimes mental patterns just develop in a way that is unhealthy. People with such illnesses can say things and sound completely convinced that they're true. Probably because they are convinced that they're true. Some mental illnesses have the unfortunate effect of helping the person look more charismatic. Individuals with borderline personality disorder start off by really liking you a lot. They can be so nice. But then their mental illness flips and instead of being idealized you're suddenly demonized. Sociopaths can tell lies that they know are lies and the way their brain is wired just makes them not care. It comes out so naturally.
There's also a thousand logical fallacies that can allow someone to jump a track at some point from good logic to bad logic. A simple false dichotomy can make a choice look a lot simpler than it really is. Attacking the person instead of the argument makes it very easy to ignore a real problem because it came from someone you don't like. Misrepresenting an opponents argument in order to make it easier to attack is oftentimes subtle but also very effective. Social proof which I will talk about in another post is a useful tool sometimes but it's not a logical tool. Just because a bunch of people believe something doesn't mean that it's true. Appeals to authority are also dangerous because almost every authority in the history of the world has been dramatically wrong about something important. There are people we consider intellectual Giants who nonetheless were simply wrong about something important. Albert Einstein was widely considered to be the top thinker of his day in physics, but he was very much against the findings that led to quantum mechanics. Unfortunately we've simply proven that quantum mechanics is real no matter how bizarre it looks, and world's most famous physicist or not he was simply wrong. Sometimes people are going to jump to conclusions before all the data is in, and in so doing come up with the wrong conclusion. Alternatively, once there's enough data to come to a reasonable conclusion there are people who keep on waiting thinking that there's going to be some Revelation in the 11th hour that vindicates their viewpoint. Some people think that because a couple of things happen at the same time they are related but that isn't always the case. Sometimes people think that one story is enough to prove a point when the real world is complicated enough that there is a story to prove anything, but that doesn't make it true. Sometimes people come back after everything is done and sculpt their argument to fit the exact circumstances that happened. Even in true science there's often cases where a meticulously crafted model can't predict the future because it was crafted to predict the past. If it's too specific it doesn't have any value, because the future isn't the past. Sometimes people think that there is a middle ground between two extremes. In fact, sometimes the actual middle ground is a completely different extreme. For example, if given the choice between killing Joe or killing Bob, a middle ground would be to just half kill both of them. In reality why are you off killing people? Calm it down. Sometimes their situations where people make a claim and they can't provide evidence for that claim, and they expect you to do it. If we're talking about something that isn't controversial like the sky is blue, that's probably fine. But if they're saying something like the sky is purple or green then that's on them to give evidence for that claim. I've also seen a child of this fallacy where people will make ridiculous claims and then act as if it's an uncontroversial claim and tell you to go find the evidence for yourself. I've even seen it where because the specific claims are so specific and so undisputed in the other direction, the only people specifically talking about it are the people making the ridiculous claim, and so in their Echo chamber they think that they've got something undisputed. There's also the idea that just because something isn't logical it can't be true. The world isn't always logical. Quantum mechanics is a perfect example where things that are basically undisputed in the macro world become bizarre and impossible in the micro world. It doesn't seem to make any sense, but that doesn't mean that it's not true.
I believe that I am putting together information for you that is if not entirely true at least in your best interests. I'm not spending my time on this to deceive, I've got no reason to want to deceive anybody. But it's simply true that I might be wrong. It's also simply true that I might have been right when I wrote it but I became wrong as the world changed. In ancient Japan taxes were paid with a years supply of rice. Today if you showed up at the Japanese tax office with a years supply of rice those officials might never stop laughing at you. Also some truths are not universal. The things I'm trying to pass on have worked for me, but maybe your personal attributes are different. Talking about public speaking, it took me a long time to be able to talk in front of a bunch of strangers or even worse a bunch of people that I know and to be comfortable with that. Most extroverts wouldn't have a problem with that whatsoever. I've always had to work in order to keep my body in shape, but people with more active interests or people with different genetics might have to really work to keep their weight on. It could be that something that I thought was true I thought was true because I was deceived. At every moment of every day there are powerful forces trying to deceive you into believing something that is useful for them. Nobody on this planet is immune. Finally, everyone on the planet is human and it's entirely possible to just be wrong. Recognizing this and accepting it is an important part of growing into your own.
Finally, sometimes you even have to question questioning things. There reaches a certain point where a certain thing is simply useful enough that even if it's wrong that's fine. To see the world completely without any blinders on sounds like a beautiful ideal, but if you're not careful in seeking truth you can become despondent. The world is not always a nice place, and there are definitely corners of the universe that are essential to your survival that are just best left unexplored. To realize the sheer amount of suffering that is required for your life to go on the way that it does and there's nothing you can do about it is sometimes a bridge too far. Pushing down this road isn't productive, you're spending a bunch of time chasing stuff down that's going to make you want to save the world. You can't save the world until you can save yourself. If you're ever on an airplane and there is a drop in cabin pressure a fix your own mask before putting the mask of someone else on, because if you don't you're going to die and you won't be able to help anyone. The forces in the world that I spoke of before also have a stake in this. Far from wanting to have you question everything so you can determine with open eyes what needs to be kept in the past and what needs to be brought forward into the future, they want you questioning everything important to the point that you are paralyzed and can't act against them when they work against your interests. As I said before, anything with power can be turned from something good into something bad, and that includes the noble pursuit of seeking truth. Sometimes people are asking you to look at something important again and again and again hoping that if you redo it enough times you'll come up with the answer they want, not the answer that's true.
Regardless, this simple first principle is important because over the course of your life you will be exposed to dozens of major mainstream philosophies that are mutually exclusive, but each of them holds a little piece of wisdom that you should nonetheless take up. Besides that you'll come across a different ideology in every single individual person you've ever meet based on their own experiences and thinking, and each of those individual people may have something of value to contribute as well, but they might also have something dangerous that will negatively contribute and so by staying focused, questioning everything, making sure that everything follows, and having an intuition about when it's time to stop questioning things you will be best equipped to take in the new information and take what's good and reject what's bad on your own terms.
There were times that I thought really sucked into a one movement or another, that I really became a true believer.
The benefit of hindsight is something that you don't really get until you're much older and you get to see yourself making the same mistakes over and over again. Some people never bothered looking back and spend their days like an ant just following the trail left by the person in front of them. They never look back, they don't even look that far ahead. They live in the moment.
Carpe diem, seize the day in Latin, for the generation that came before me it was an extremely powerful command that before you know it if you weren't careful life would pass you by. There's definitely some wisdom in that, which is one reason why it was a saying that lasted all the way from the days of Latin until today. However, if you close your eyes and just listen to the order then your life is going to be a lot harder than it has to be.
People who sieze the day more than anyone would be criminals. If you see someone you don't like, you hit them. If you see something you want, you steal it. If you see someone you want to kiss, you kiss them. If you see something you want to do you do it and damn the consequences.
Doesn't matter how smart that command is, following it blindly will inevitably result in tragedy.
When I was younger, there were a number of political issues that were near and dear to my heart and I couldn't imagine ever believing that the movements around those causes could become a problem. I looked at other people's political issues and was able to see with an Eagle eye where a good idea had been pushed too far but I had simply imagined to that it couldn't happen to my pet issues. As I grew older I got to see people turn the ideals of tolerance into something dark. Whereas before it was always about simply letting other people into the fold, some of those people eventually turned and started seeking to exclude others in the name of inclusiveness. This came to be called cancel culture, but it wasn't anything new. When I was a child a young woman who had a comedy show on TV had giant boycotts against her. When I was a middle aged man, there were new boycotts against the same woman, now in her 60s, for a completely different reason. Nothing changed except the rationale behind it and the passage of time.
Even amongst good ideas, those ideas can be perverted. In my time, I saw the idea of equality between people as a very good and just cause. As I got older, I saw people twist this good and just cause into something evil. All you have to do is turn off all human empathy. Turn off all sense of fairness, make the punishment for violating the rule total destruction of your life, and even the most benevolent cause can become true unmitigated evil.
Power mongers will always seek out that which has power. It doesn't matter what that thing is, they'll simply go there because there's power to be had. the people who seek out that thing don't seek it out because they care about whatever it is, they seek it out because they seek power. In the process of taking that thing over, they will pervert it and turn it into whatever they need to turn it into to get what they want.
Besides the power mongers, there are also people who are just misguided. People who haven't fully thought through the consequences of what they propose yet propose it nonetheless. In my time, we have an entire movement dedicated to universal basic income. It sounds really great as long as you leave out all the important parts. The idea is that you would give everybody a certain amount of money. The problem of course is that the money has to come from somewhere. Not only that, but once you've taken away people's reason to go out and do something a lot of them won't do anything. There have been many examples of universal basic income over the years, from the poor people on reserves to the rich people who want to trust fund, and without very carefully managing those people to give them reason to go on they often end up destroying their lives. Good people with good intentions pushing an idea that sounds good that will inevitably lead to mass suffering.
If you're young when you read this, you're probably surrounded by a lot of things that you think will stop being so important. Everyone tells you that high school stops being important the day you graduate, and that's true, but for a lot of people they continue to carry whatever baggage they accumulate during high school and it becomes something that changes their perspective throughout their lives long after the events are over. When you're young you will hear things that you know at the time are childish and silly, but what you don't realize is that there isn't some age that people magically let go. I've seen people in their forties, fifties, even sixties, bringing up things from their youth that in retrospect seem really childish, but they take that with them as one of their guiding tenets. Old hatred, wrapped up in decades of rationalization until it looks like a completely different thing.
Some people are just mentally ill. There are a lot of ways this can happen, chemical imbalances, bad experiences, sometimes mental patterns just develop in a way that is unhealthy. People with such illnesses can say things and sound completely convinced that they're true. Probably because they are convinced that they're true. Some mental illnesses have the unfortunate effect of helping the person look more charismatic. Individuals with borderline personality disorder start off by really liking you a lot. They can be so nice. But then their mental illness flips and instead of being idealized you're suddenly demonized. Sociopaths can tell lies that they know are lies and the way their brain is wired just makes them not care. It comes out so naturally.
There's also a thousand logical fallacies that can allow someone to jump a track at some point from good logic to bad logic. A simple false dichotomy can make a choice look a lot simpler than it really is. Attacking the person instead of the argument makes it very easy to ignore a real problem because it came from someone you don't like. Misrepresenting an opponents argument in order to make it easier to attack is oftentimes subtle but also very effective. Social proof which I will talk about in another post is a useful tool sometimes but it's not a logical tool. Just because a bunch of people believe something doesn't mean that it's true. Appeals to authority are also dangerous because almost every authority in the history of the world has been dramatically wrong about something important. There are people we consider intellectual Giants who nonetheless were simply wrong about something important. Albert Einstein was widely considered to be the top thinker of his day in physics, but he was very much against the findings that led to quantum mechanics. Unfortunately we've simply proven that quantum mechanics is real no matter how bizarre it looks, and world's most famous physicist or not he was simply wrong. Sometimes people are going to jump to conclusions before all the data is in, and in so doing come up with the wrong conclusion. Alternatively, once there's enough data to come to a reasonable conclusion there are people who keep on waiting thinking that there's going to be some Revelation in the 11th hour that vindicates their viewpoint. Some people think that because a couple of things happen at the same time they are related but that isn't always the case. Sometimes people think that one story is enough to prove a point when the real world is complicated enough that there is a story to prove anything, but that doesn't make it true. Sometimes people come back after everything is done and sculpt their argument to fit the exact circumstances that happened. Even in true science there's often cases where a meticulously crafted model can't predict the future because it was crafted to predict the past. If it's too specific it doesn't have any value, because the future isn't the past. Sometimes people think that there is a middle ground between two extremes. In fact, sometimes the actual middle ground is a completely different extreme. For example, if given the choice between killing Joe or killing Bob, a middle ground would be to just half kill both of them. In reality why are you off killing people? Calm it down. Sometimes their situations where people make a claim and they can't provide evidence for that claim, and they expect you to do it. If we're talking about something that isn't controversial like the sky is blue, that's probably fine. But if they're saying something like the sky is purple or green then that's on them to give evidence for that claim. I've also seen a child of this fallacy where people will make ridiculous claims and then act as if it's an uncontroversial claim and tell you to go find the evidence for yourself. I've even seen it where because the specific claims are so specific and so undisputed in the other direction, the only people specifically talking about it are the people making the ridiculous claim, and so in their Echo chamber they think that they've got something undisputed. There's also the idea that just because something isn't logical it can't be true. The world isn't always logical. Quantum mechanics is a perfect example where things that are basically undisputed in the macro world become bizarre and impossible in the micro world. It doesn't seem to make any sense, but that doesn't mean that it's not true.
I believe that I am putting together information for you that is if not entirely true at least in your best interests. I'm not spending my time on this to deceive, I've got no reason to want to deceive anybody. But it's simply true that I might be wrong. It's also simply true that I might have been right when I wrote it but I became wrong as the world changed. In ancient Japan taxes were paid with a years supply of rice. Today if you showed up at the Japanese tax office with a years supply of rice those officials might never stop laughing at you. Also some truths are not universal. The things I'm trying to pass on have worked for me, but maybe your personal attributes are different. Talking about public speaking, it took me a long time to be able to talk in front of a bunch of strangers or even worse a bunch of people that I know and to be comfortable with that. Most extroverts wouldn't have a problem with that whatsoever. I've always had to work in order to keep my body in shape, but people with more active interests or people with different genetics might have to really work to keep their weight on. It could be that something that I thought was true I thought was true because I was deceived. At every moment of every day there are powerful forces trying to deceive you into believing something that is useful for them. Nobody on this planet is immune. Finally, everyone on the planet is human and it's entirely possible to just be wrong. Recognizing this and accepting it is an important part of growing into your own.
Finally, sometimes you even have to question questioning things. There reaches a certain point where a certain thing is simply useful enough that even if it's wrong that's fine. To see the world completely without any blinders on sounds like a beautiful ideal, but if you're not careful in seeking truth you can become despondent. The world is not always a nice place, and there are definitely corners of the universe that are essential to your survival that are just best left unexplored. To realize the sheer amount of suffering that is required for your life to go on the way that it does and there's nothing you can do about it is sometimes a bridge too far. Pushing down this road isn't productive, you're spending a bunch of time chasing stuff down that's going to make you want to save the world. You can't save the world until you can save yourself. If you're ever on an airplane and there is a drop in cabin pressure a fix your own mask before putting the mask of someone else on, because if you don't you're going to die and you won't be able to help anyone. The forces in the world that I spoke of before also have a stake in this. Far from wanting to have you question everything so you can determine with open eyes what needs to be kept in the past and what needs to be brought forward into the future, they want you questioning everything important to the point that you are paralyzed and can't act against them when they work against your interests. As I said before, anything with power can be turned from something good into something bad, and that includes the noble pursuit of seeking truth. Sometimes people are asking you to look at something important again and again and again hoping that if you redo it enough times you'll come up with the answer they want, not the answer that's true.
Regardless, this simple first principle is important because over the course of your life you will be exposed to dozens of major mainstream philosophies that are mutually exclusive, but each of them holds a little piece of wisdom that you should nonetheless take up. Besides that you'll come across a different ideology in every single individual person you've ever meet based on their own experiences and thinking, and each of those individual people may have something of value to contribute as well, but they might also have something dangerous that will negatively contribute and so by staying focused, questioning everything, making sure that everything follows, and having an intuition about when it's time to stop questioning things you will be best equipped to take in the new information and take what's good and reject what's bad on your own terms.
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