CIRCLE WITH A DOT

A key fallacy of human instinct is that the solution is usually "MOAR".

I'm no Buddhist. But I admire the courage of a tradition that questions the very nature of suffering. Western culture decided long ago that it understood suffering, and how to address it. But we have been wrong the whole time. We will not escape our predicament until we admit and address our mistakes.

Our greatest misunderstanding is fear. Our greatest fear is annihilation. Without the cognitive tools to face it, to transcend it, we are kept under its control.

The source of most human tragedy is our ignorance and misunderstanding of our own emotions. Some of us used to know. But that wisdom was mostly destroyed by others, who chose competition, violence, and war.

@sol Excuses implies blame, implies punishment. To what end?

"Poverty of imagination": perhaps you mean "neglect"? I suggest an alternative: it is an issue of imagination being monopolized by fear. Which is natural.

Fear, and avoiding danger, is why imagination evolved in the first place. Learning to control it, and direct it to creative, productive, even loving ends, was probably the hardest thing humans ever did.

@petealexharris We have been anthropomorphizing computers since day one. The way we anthropomorphize virtually everything. Animism is the original religion. It is virtually wired in. A weird side effect of empathy and mirror neurons? Everything has a soul. Everything has desire and intentions. The more it looks or acts like a person, the more we believe it.

The deep goals of humanity are not material. Material reality is merely the substrate through which we work to satisfy them: they are *emotional*.

That is why we get derailed by addictive substances, or compulsive behaviours. They work on our emotional state. They "solve" the emotional problem, albeit briefly, and with decreasing effectiveness.

Getting rich, gaining power, enforcing totalitarian order—these are (ineffective) means to an unachievable end: emotional regulation.

Virtually everyone is emotionally disregulated. We are deprived. We have emotional malnutrition. We endure psychic suffocation. It is killing us, individually and collectively.

But we cannot, collectively, find the integrity to recognize it, or the courage to admit it. We put our faith in habits. We keep self-medicating. We get sadder, and angrier, because the treatments do not work. They only make things worse.

The idea of *changing the goal* is virtually incomprehensible to everyone. What other goal could there be? It's so remote that we must recognize even finding a better goal—a better purpose—is a prohibitively difficult goal on its own.

I've seen so many charts that describe wealth and income inequality. They demonstrate the mind-boggling power law relationship that has put the majority of wealth into the hands of a few oligarchs and their retinues. People who only want to abuse that power to speed up the process of increasing concentration.

But I have never seen a graph of desirable wealth distribution, let alone "ideal".

Granted, even if it existed, and people believed in it, it would likely become yet another metric that became the goal. But maybe it would be one step closer to defining the goal?

The default goal—relentless competition for its own sake—is a shitty one. Even though it has permeated nearly every aspect of our culture and society. It is the reason we have arrived at this point in history.

@codinghorror Funny how the big "solution" is "more cash", when there is already too much cash in the system. I suppose if the real solution—progressive taxation—is off the table, only absurd alternatives remain.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Aaronvegh/116044646952207828

I'm glad people are waking up to the reality of corporations, but damn I wish they would hurry up.

Apple fans (including me, for a while) were seduced by a *marketing image*. Jobs and Woz were coopted into that image (Jobs by choice). They were real people, but they were not Apple.

Apple, like all its ilk, seeks *moats*: soft and ersatz monopolies. When it cannot get absolute ones. Not out of generosity, but in search of power for insatiable shareholders. A monster from the collective id.

The brand is a lie.