What Now
Posted: Sat Nov 09, 2024 8:04 am
If you’re looking for a bright idea about where to go from here now that the tyranny of the majority (a phrase that will disappear from MAGA vocabulary until they find themselves on the wrong end of a vote) has sentenced all to live in Trumpland, I am sorry to disappoint you. I got nothing.
Well, I have something, but it’s not something I’m going to try and sell to anyone but myself. Despite my best efforts to the contrary, I cannot escape the conclusion that our civilization is terminal. I think that where we are right now is a living solution to the Fermi paradox. We are changing the world so fast that traits that were adaptive in the past are now maladaptive. And we can’t fix that because evolution takes time and we simply don’t have time for evolution to make us adaptive to the world in which we find ourselves.
Climate change sets us a hard deadline, although we can’t identify it exactly. The surface temperature is hotter now than at any time since human civilization developed. Our entire modern civilization was founded and developed during a period of stable climate — stability that we’ve now shattered.
That places our brains in unknown territory. The notion that we could destroy our civilization by just going about living our daily lives is a risk we’re not equipped to deal with in a rational manner. We don’t want to believe it. It requires us to put aside all the cognitive biases that we evolved to help us function in a very different world. Solving the problem requires us to put aside the in group cooperation/out group competition strategy that has served us for thousands of years and think of ourselves as belonging to a single global tribe. But we just aren’t wired for that.
What brought this home for me is the sheer number of people who are convinced that the US is in the midst of a crime wave when, by any objective measure, that’s 100% false. What that says to me is that what science has learned about how the brain works, our cognitive biases, and human psychology have been weaponized against us by smart people who know how easily our reasoning is hijacked. But our brains don’t want to believe that we can be manipulated like that. To do so, I’m guessing, would cripple us in terms of making quick, life or death decisions. Doubting our perceptions when we think we see evidence of a lion would turn us into a tasty meal. Too much uncertainty and doubt might have been fatal 100,000 years ago.
So, our brains tell ourselves that we perceive the world accurately and that anyone who sees it differently is wrong. We’re right because we just are. And anyone who disagrees must be defective in some way. But that’s false consciousness. We may need that confidence to stay sane, but it’s dooming us now.
Propaganda works. At least we think it works on the other guy. We can see it working. But we all think that we have some superpower that helps us cut through all the crap. But that’s false consciousness. It is very hard for an individual to set aside their cognitive biases and reason their way to a good answer. In fact, I don’t think it’s possible alone. Getting to a good answer is a team project. And the team has to view reasoning as a group project that requires each member to call BS on bad thinking and to respond without offense to having BS called on them. It requires a mutual trust in each other to do the best they can to problem solve and get to the best answer possible.
We can do that if we work hard at it, but we’re not wired for it. It requires not only acting in good faith but also presuming that others are also acting in good faith. That’s hard, even among like minded folks.
In the US, We have two huge political tribes at war with one another. Resolving differences generally requires starting from some common ground. But our tribes live in such different information ecosystems that finding common ground often feels impossible. We’re in the post-modern swamp where any claim can be a fact because I say it is. Everything is stories, with no grounding in any agreed facts. Conservatives who recoil in horror at the thought of postmodernism are actually trapped in it like everyone else.
How do we navigate through this postmodern morass? Just the way I said. The foundation is trust. And, sadly, there is money to be made and elections to be won by getting us to distrust each other. It’s not a shadowy conspiracy. It’s people with lots of money doing what comes naturally — making more money.
So, our scientific knowledge and technology have given us ways to create false worlds for each other. Social media algorithms are designed to get us to buy stuff. Gun manufacturers manipulate our fears in a way that gets us to buy stuff we don’t need. And campaigns microtarget specific demographics with advertising designed to make us angry and fearful. There are no problems, only crises.
There is a clip circulating of a student at ASU saying that she voted for Trump because he would not pass a national abortion bill. How did the guy that killed the constitutional right to an abortion become a protector of abortion rights? The answer is in survey results that showed a significant chunk of people think that Biden was responsible for the loss of the right to an abortion. You can almost imagine how this works: microtarget R women who are pro choice. Tell them that Roe was reversed on Biden’s watch and that Trump will leave the question to the states. Technically true, but leaves out the fact that Trump intentionally selected judges who would overturn Roe. And if your brain is predisposed to like Trump, that’s good enough.
So, how do we solve the climate problem before the bottom drops out? I don’t think we can. Getting people to recognize how easily we are fooled and how fragile our reasoning abilities are is a near impossible task. Our sense of being confidently right is just too strong. Building the necessary relationship based on trust takes time. If I can’t do that with Ajax or Ceeboo, how can I possibly do that with someone in Iran or Israel or Palestine or China or Burma or Uganda.
Evolution just didn’t equip us for that.
So, if human civilization is terminal, what is a poor sentient bit of carbon to do? What’s the point? And I think this is where atheism gives me a way forward. Like every other atheist, I’ve had to wrestle with “if death is permanent, life has no meaning.” I think most get to a similar place: we all give life its meaning. We all do it in basically the same way, even if some of us experience it as coming from an external source. We create the meaning.
The death of our civilization doesn’t change that. Everyone dies. Everything dies. Civilizations are borne and eventually die. That they have a finite lifetime doesn’t render them without meaning. Our civilization is terminal and that’s okay.
So, what should the sentient bit of carbon named Res Ipsa do in a terminal civilization? I think something like hospice care. I don’t think that civilization will go gently into that good night. I’m guessing it will be a slow and painful death. People are suffering and that will only get worse. So, my answer is to reduce suffering anywhere I can. Stop worrying about things I can never hope to change and do my own personal harm reduction where I can find the opportunity to do so. And, if I pay attention, there are all kinds of opportunities.
And if it turns out that Civilization is more resilient than I thought, the downside is that I will have given my life meaning through the interaction I have with others. And that’s enough for me.
Which is my long winded way of saying so long and thanks for all the fish. I can’t be a hospice worker hanging around the internet. I’ve got to get out of my head and start paying more attention to real life. Otherwise, I just miss stuff.
I suspect I’ll drop in from time to time to see how everyone’s doing. But I’ve asked to be released from my calling so I won’t have any duties here.
Being here has helped me think through lots of tough stuff that I’ve never expressly talked about. And every one of you that I’ve interacted with has been a part of that. I don’t think that there is anyone I’ve chatted or argued with that hasn’t changed me in some way for the good. So, thanks for that.
Some of you know where to find me. For those that don’t, you can e-mail me through the system. I’m not cancelling my account or anything.
And, as Shades says, see you tomorrow.
RI
Well, I have something, but it’s not something I’m going to try and sell to anyone but myself. Despite my best efforts to the contrary, I cannot escape the conclusion that our civilization is terminal. I think that where we are right now is a living solution to the Fermi paradox. We are changing the world so fast that traits that were adaptive in the past are now maladaptive. And we can’t fix that because evolution takes time and we simply don’t have time for evolution to make us adaptive to the world in which we find ourselves.
Climate change sets us a hard deadline, although we can’t identify it exactly. The surface temperature is hotter now than at any time since human civilization developed. Our entire modern civilization was founded and developed during a period of stable climate — stability that we’ve now shattered.
That places our brains in unknown territory. The notion that we could destroy our civilization by just going about living our daily lives is a risk we’re not equipped to deal with in a rational manner. We don’t want to believe it. It requires us to put aside all the cognitive biases that we evolved to help us function in a very different world. Solving the problem requires us to put aside the in group cooperation/out group competition strategy that has served us for thousands of years and think of ourselves as belonging to a single global tribe. But we just aren’t wired for that.
What brought this home for me is the sheer number of people who are convinced that the US is in the midst of a crime wave when, by any objective measure, that’s 100% false. What that says to me is that what science has learned about how the brain works, our cognitive biases, and human psychology have been weaponized against us by smart people who know how easily our reasoning is hijacked. But our brains don’t want to believe that we can be manipulated like that. To do so, I’m guessing, would cripple us in terms of making quick, life or death decisions. Doubting our perceptions when we think we see evidence of a lion would turn us into a tasty meal. Too much uncertainty and doubt might have been fatal 100,000 years ago.
So, our brains tell ourselves that we perceive the world accurately and that anyone who sees it differently is wrong. We’re right because we just are. And anyone who disagrees must be defective in some way. But that’s false consciousness. We may need that confidence to stay sane, but it’s dooming us now.
Propaganda works. At least we think it works on the other guy. We can see it working. But we all think that we have some superpower that helps us cut through all the crap. But that’s false consciousness. It is very hard for an individual to set aside their cognitive biases and reason their way to a good answer. In fact, I don’t think it’s possible alone. Getting to a good answer is a team project. And the team has to view reasoning as a group project that requires each member to call BS on bad thinking and to respond without offense to having BS called on them. It requires a mutual trust in each other to do the best they can to problem solve and get to the best answer possible.
We can do that if we work hard at it, but we’re not wired for it. It requires not only acting in good faith but also presuming that others are also acting in good faith. That’s hard, even among like minded folks.
In the US, We have two huge political tribes at war with one another. Resolving differences generally requires starting from some common ground. But our tribes live in such different information ecosystems that finding common ground often feels impossible. We’re in the post-modern swamp where any claim can be a fact because I say it is. Everything is stories, with no grounding in any agreed facts. Conservatives who recoil in horror at the thought of postmodernism are actually trapped in it like everyone else.
How do we navigate through this postmodern morass? Just the way I said. The foundation is trust. And, sadly, there is money to be made and elections to be won by getting us to distrust each other. It’s not a shadowy conspiracy. It’s people with lots of money doing what comes naturally — making more money.
So, our scientific knowledge and technology have given us ways to create false worlds for each other. Social media algorithms are designed to get us to buy stuff. Gun manufacturers manipulate our fears in a way that gets us to buy stuff we don’t need. And campaigns microtarget specific demographics with advertising designed to make us angry and fearful. There are no problems, only crises.
There is a clip circulating of a student at ASU saying that she voted for Trump because he would not pass a national abortion bill. How did the guy that killed the constitutional right to an abortion become a protector of abortion rights? The answer is in survey results that showed a significant chunk of people think that Biden was responsible for the loss of the right to an abortion. You can almost imagine how this works: microtarget R women who are pro choice. Tell them that Roe was reversed on Biden’s watch and that Trump will leave the question to the states. Technically true, but leaves out the fact that Trump intentionally selected judges who would overturn Roe. And if your brain is predisposed to like Trump, that’s good enough.
So, how do we solve the climate problem before the bottom drops out? I don’t think we can. Getting people to recognize how easily we are fooled and how fragile our reasoning abilities are is a near impossible task. Our sense of being confidently right is just too strong. Building the necessary relationship based on trust takes time. If I can’t do that with Ajax or Ceeboo, how can I possibly do that with someone in Iran or Israel or Palestine or China or Burma or Uganda.
Evolution just didn’t equip us for that.
So, if human civilization is terminal, what is a poor sentient bit of carbon to do? What’s the point? And I think this is where atheism gives me a way forward. Like every other atheist, I’ve had to wrestle with “if death is permanent, life has no meaning.” I think most get to a similar place: we all give life its meaning. We all do it in basically the same way, even if some of us experience it as coming from an external source. We create the meaning.
The death of our civilization doesn’t change that. Everyone dies. Everything dies. Civilizations are borne and eventually die. That they have a finite lifetime doesn’t render them without meaning. Our civilization is terminal and that’s okay.
So, what should the sentient bit of carbon named Res Ipsa do in a terminal civilization? I think something like hospice care. I don’t think that civilization will go gently into that good night. I’m guessing it will be a slow and painful death. People are suffering and that will only get worse. So, my answer is to reduce suffering anywhere I can. Stop worrying about things I can never hope to change and do my own personal harm reduction where I can find the opportunity to do so. And, if I pay attention, there are all kinds of opportunities.
And if it turns out that Civilization is more resilient than I thought, the downside is that I will have given my life meaning through the interaction I have with others. And that’s enough for me.
Which is my long winded way of saying so long and thanks for all the fish. I can’t be a hospice worker hanging around the internet. I’ve got to get out of my head and start paying more attention to real life. Otherwise, I just miss stuff.
I suspect I’ll drop in from time to time to see how everyone’s doing. But I’ve asked to be released from my calling so I won’t have any duties here.
Being here has helped me think through lots of tough stuff that I’ve never expressly talked about. And every one of you that I’ve interacted with has been a part of that. I don’t think that there is anyone I’ve chatted or argued with that hasn’t changed me in some way for the good. So, thanks for that.
Some of you know where to find me. For those that don’t, you can e-mail me through the system. I’m not cancelling my account or anything.
And, as Shades says, see you tomorrow.
RI