°
“No one wants to work anymore.”
Most people don’t mind work if it gets you somewhere: in physics, “work” is force multiplied by distance. That is to say, it is no longer “work” when apply effort and can’t move.
More accurately, “no one wants to be stuck anymore.”
This illuminates a core cynicism beyond hard luck: people no longer trust meritocratic truisms and consider the game rigged. Work will not save you, it is a suckers game.
°
Arguments rarely yield to logic because they are seldom logical. They are ego and emotion parading cleverly as reason.
What we mistake for “resolution through debate” is more accurately a process of exhaustion – the gradual, destructive burning away of emotional energy and attachment to fixed positions, to fixed identity.
True transformation comes from the long argument of brutal reality, not through winning debates but by the dissolution and dispersal of ego burned away by reality.
°
Truthful information is expensive; information that merely connects people is cheap. (factual and relevant analysis vs emotion, drama, stories)
We see a rise in connectivity due to technology, but there is not a commensurate rise in wisdom or truth. In fact, they are drowned out by the easier manipulative, connecting myths and fantasies that draw on emotion.
(from Yuval Noah Harrari)
°
If you truly believe, do you attempt to convert others? Do you proselytize your truth?
If truth is self-evident, there is no need: Your faith (your truth) will succeed on merit.
However, if there is a kernel of doubt in your faith, you must overcompensate both in the number of people and their fervency. Only zealotry and sycophancy can quell the occasional contradiction and squeamish dissenters. Your faith will succeed on tyranny.
Naturally, this simplification highlights the success of bad ideas and the failure of good ideas, but more importantly, is to consider the idea itself shifts over time to a new set of values carrying the faith but weaponizing it and deteriorating the founding principles.
°
The Protestant & Calvinist notion of working your way to heaven (earning your salvation) positions works over grace. This limits God. No longer omnipotent, His hands are bound by law, by ledgers and weights.
Consider the meritocratic future: you get what you earn; talent + work grants reward.
However, systemic privilege pervades society. To get closer to an equal start and better judge true merit, we can eliminate inheritance, good parents and teachers, and the benefits of a supportive, cultivated community. (For a true meritocracy, we can either flatten all to the lowest common denominator or provide grace and love equally to all, the latter seemingly impossible.)
Born into a meritocracy blessed with privilege is Heaven, a Utopia on earth: grace landed upon you, and sure, you worked, so you feel deserving. Still, humility is required when recognizing the benefits pre-bestowed.
°
It is a common truism that you ignore what too easily comes to you, taking it for granted to your detriment. (too much love, too much stability, too much confidence)
How about having too much information accessible too easily?
The reduced (pre-synthesized) data we access online atrophies our ability to think rationally and engage in healthy logic. Much like processed food, which diminishes health in favor of artificial, quick, excessive caloric uptake, informational sound bytes and scintillating headlines are a stand-in for the labor of intelligence.
In the infosphere, we no longer have to work to “make sense,” so we ingest ready-made nonsense: Hamburger-helper politics. The ease makes us lazy and forgetful, treating “convenience” as preferable to “quality” or “complexity.”
Many of us are looking for a return to gourmet intellect but no longer possess the palette after our fast-fact diet. It really is easier to shift positions against your own desires and claim McDonald’s is not just acceptable but preferable (tweeting a pithy line about anti-elitist class solidarity) than to learn, labor, and prepare your own meal.
We have been given a gift of too much, making us irrational and self-destructive, tasteless, and intellectually obese: bloated on empty facts.
°
Lying is knowing the truth while intentionally deceiving. Bullshitting is deceptive as well, yet is not so deliberately against truth. Bullshit casually bypasses truth altogether to achieve an effect.
Lying, perversely, subverts the truth: you must know the truth to lie. Bullshitters don’t care. Bullshit only concerns itself with achievement, making it more dangerous as it erodes the social foundation of truth-seeking and trust bias.
from Harry Frankfurt, “On Bullshit”
°
We claim to want the complete unvarnished truth, yet when something traumatic happens, if someone reports it too clearly and concisely—like a good informational report—they become suspect because of that very clarity. Their truth becomes suspicious because of its fidelity.
Instead, inconsistency (lack of fidelity) fits perfectly with human nature. Stories become lies when they’re over-embellished, or you can spot the lie by the absurd level of detail—they’re trying too hard to convince, no longer behaving naturally.
As Lacan said, “truth has the structure of a fiction.”
°
True faith often dissuades proselytizing because it holds that truth is self-evident and requires no external validation.
For instance, the Amish exemplify this belief by focusing on living their faith rather than converting others. If wrong, they harm no one else; if right, they attain their spiritual goals without coercion.
Conversely, within some faiths a kernel of doubt at the root can drive aggressive proselytizing, which manifests as social reinforcement.
This overcompensation arises from a need to suppress personal uncertainties by garnering collective validation. Hence, doubt fuels a collective delusion, creating a proportional façade of correctness through communal affirmation.
True faith, in contrast, remains steadfast and non-intrusive.
°
The truth and my truth should be the same, or at least passingly similar.
Only in a world where subjectivity is the height of power can objectivity be flipped into insignificance.
Oddly, objective truth (despite its denigration and claimed obsolescence) is still a primary source for building an irrational causal chain to uphold subjective hubris.
