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The most powerfool tool

December 12, 2023 //
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“If the only tool you have is a hammer,
you tend to see every problem as a nail.”
Abraham Maslow

Did you recognize him?
Yes, Sigmund Freud. Dr. Sigmund Freud, as depicted on http://www.marxists.org.

“While the different religions wrangle with one another as to which of them is in possession of the truth, in our view the truth of religion may be altogether disregarded.
Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities.
But it cannot achieve its end.
Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery.
The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief.
If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.”
[Sigmund Freud, “Moses and Monotheism”, 1932]

No, I’m not going to argue with Freud.
I’m not going to compare his opinion on religion with that of Durkheim. Which makes more sense to me. You may find them here, at #e., and compare them yourself. If you wish, of course.

What I’m trying to point out in this post is that reason is over-rated.
That reason is an extremely powerful tool but, like all other tools, the consequences of yielding it depend on the yielder.
On the person using reason in order to get somewhere.
To find the intended meaning…

Which is?

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology

Don’t worry, be happy

December 11, 2023 //
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The sound of one hand clapping…

While worrying is indeed a waste of time, it is also a very good pointer!
If not the only one…
The only one powerful enough to make us ‘move’!

Worry is a powerful attention grabber. Points us towards the things we feel the need to solve.

What we do after our attention has been pointed… that’s the most important thing!

Continue to worry or start doing things?
Meaningful things…
And the first meaningful thing to do while worrying is to stop.
Now, that the attention grabber had done its thing… to continue would be a waste of energy!

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Categories awareness, Choices we make, In English, man as a measure for all things, Psychology, teleology

The exception which tests the rule

December 4, 2023 //
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There is an old ‘rule’ which maintains that even a broken watch may be accurate.
From time to time, if it retains its arms…
Twice daily, to be precise!

Same thing is valid for people.
From time to time, each of us will utter something which actually makes sense!

Sort of, anyway…

The catch being that in order to ‘prove’ the temporary accuracy of the broken watch you need one in good working order. Or, alternatively, you need a good understanding of time.

Same thing with Peterson’s uttering.
On the face of it, the phrase is catchy.
In fact, it’s just as useful as a broken watch.
What solace will be felt by the victim of a tough tyrant when that person realizes that no tyrant, however tough, was ever capable of ‘achieving’ anything without the compliance of the weak? Without the compliance of those who had done, in their weakness, what the tyrant had told them to do…

So yes, broken watches are, sometime, accurate.
And yes, Petersen is right to tell us that both tough and weak people can wreak a lot of havoc.

But neither of these two pieces of trivia will be useful to us until we’ll understand it’s up to us to put them to good use. To understand the temporary nature of the accuracy displayed by the broken watch and the fact that no man, however tough, becomes really dangerous unless condoned, or even helped, by ultimately hapless weaklings.

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, teleology, Trust

Bluntly

November 24, 2023 //
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What’s wrong with them?
They know plenty and they have everything…
Yet they’re not even content, let alone happy!

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, effective communication, In English, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology, Transparency, yes but

Making sense

November 23, 2023 //
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The Universe has no other meaning
than that we attach to it.

How do we find that meaning? How do we make sense of things?

“The subjective and the objective,” writes the philosopher, (Schoppenhauer) “constitute no continuum, that which is immediately known is limited by the skin, or rather by the external end of the nerves which lead out from the cerebral system. Within lies a world of which we have no other knowledge than through pictures in our head.” Stephen S. Colvin, 1902

According to Schoppenhauer’s take on the matter, we make sense of the world by carefully (?) ruminating the “pictures in our head”. The information which has already reached our ‘inner forum’.
Which means that we should be very careful when letting something ‘in’!
When reading a text, for example…

‘You should follow science, not scientists. Because scientists can be sold.’

Logically speaking, the phrase makes a lot of sense. Right?

Practically… not so much.

Do we learn everything about medicine before taking the pill prescribed by the doctor? Simply because the doctor might have been sold to the big pharma?
Do we learn everything about microwaves before using a microwave oven? Simply because the physicist who had invented the thing might have been sold to the makers of household appliances?
Do we stop using planes because they are used to spray our skies?

Literary speaking, what do you make of “scientists can be sold to the highest bidder”?!?
Sold by whom? How can anybody sell a scientist?
I might understand the notion of a scientist being bought… of a scientist selling his soul, his scientific soul, to the highest bidder… but selling one… Is there a market for scientists?

only because it happens to resonate with something you are already inclined to believe.

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, Frames of mind, In English, manipulation, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology

Yet another set of tools

November 16, 2023 //
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The first ‘virtual’ tool invented by Man, language made it possible for humans to become conscious.
By sharing information among them, individual human beings learned to speak to themselves. To think. To evaluate their activity. To evaluate themselves. Their own selves.
Speaking to each-other, people have developed self-awareness.

The process is a work in progress.

Words are ‘stamps’.
Images.
‘Commodified snapshots’ of the thing we call reality.

Which reality is simultaneously a word and the place we live in.

A word/concept into which – like in all other words – we’ve crammed everything we know about the thing itself. Which everything is nowhere near enough to actually cover the entire thing.

Reality, the word, covers everything we know about the thing but the thing itself, the thing we call reality, is far wider/deeper than that.

Hence the problem we’re stuck with.

We instinctively consider that words are apt representations for the things we attempt to describe using those words. Which, most of the time, isn’t exactly true.
We – most of us, most of the time – consider that those of us we talk to understand the words we share in the same way we understand them. Which is never the case!

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology

The need to state the obvious.

November 11, 2023 //
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I’ve been watching this, on and off, for three days now.
And I still can’t make up my mind. Whom to admire more.

The one who performs what he believes to be normal. And somehow manages to include, into that
normalcy, the negative feedback he is been dished out by the most powerful agent in his world.
Or the other one.
Who pursues his side of normal. Who finds in him to investigate when he realizes the
two normals don’t fit. And the courage to make amends.

Thank you Elvis Naçi for this conundrum.
I’m a better person now.
Now that I’ve stated my impotence.

“I can’t make up my mind on this one!”

But maybe I don’t have to.

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mindset, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

Beyond

November 8, 2023 //
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Regardless of our individual beliefs,
it would be rather naive
to consider there’s nothing but the here and now.
Internet wisdom

What have you done since graduating into awareness?

Worrying about tomorrow?

Welcome to being a human.
And how do you assuage your fear?

Put your faith into an exterior agent?
Trust your fellow humans to bail you out if necessary?
Make sure you’ll never depend on anybody else but you?

Each of these three strategies presumes differently about what happens outside yourself.

The more responsibility you transfer to the outside agent – currently known as God in certain circles – the more serene your life. You don’t have to change anything except putting your faith in the outside agent of your choice. If that works for you. Only by transferring the ultimate responsibility to ‘the outside’, no matter how hard you continue to do whatever you were doing before the epiphany, you embrace the fact that your fate is determined outside of you.
If you expect your mates to do ‘the right’ thing, you must prime them first. You have to behave in a manner conducive to ‘community’. You and those around you. The community itself has to behave as a community.
To make sure you’ll never depend on anybody else, you need to know everything that might happen to you. In fact, you have to know everything.

Each of these three strategies, or any combination thereof, mandates that there are things happening beyond here and now. Beyond what each of us might know and control.

Are there any other alternatives?

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology, Trust

But do we read it right?

November 4, 2023 //
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Let me put it the other way.

We make history.
We write history.
We read the history we wrote about the things we’ve done.

Then we keep ruminating about what we (don’t) learn from and about history…

Are we nuts?

But is there anything to be learned from history?

Yep!
What happens when we fail to learn from the mistakes which keep shouting at us from the history books our ancestors had written for us. Had written to warn us…

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, altruism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, colaborare, collective identity, complementary ways of attending knowlege, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, teleology

Heads Up

November 3, 2023 //
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Some people argue that ‘truth lies somewhere in between’ while others maintain that ‘truth is where it is, not somewhere in the middle’.

Well, both sides are right.

Truth is, indeed, “where it is”.
The problem being that ‘that place’ is ‘out there’. Not necessarily ‘out of reach’ but definitely out of anybody’s realm.
Hence finding ‘that place’ needs a collective effort. In this sense, the truth is, indeed, somewhere ‘in the middle’. In the middle of our converging efforts, if our efforts are honestly targeted.

On the other hand, truth is not ‘somewhere in the middle’. In the sense that truth is not something we can negotiate. We can indeed pursue truth individually but we cannot negotiate the results.

We can settle for a less than perfect truth, if we’re not able to reach ‘the absolute’, but it must be a workable version, not a lukewarm mean.
The result of our quest, even if ‘only for a while’, must serve the goal we’ve been trying to reach!
If we settle for something only because that something titillates the ego of the majority amongst us… then our efforts have been wasted!

Allow me to conclude that the truth is not somewhere between us but above us.
It makes a lot of sense to thread carefully when trying to reach it – lest we stumble during our quest – but we nevertheless need to broaden our perspective. Lest the truth remains hanging just outside of where we’re looking for it.

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology
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