Well, here's the deal.  I don't know about you guys, but I am pretty damn scared about the future of humanity over the next 50 years.  There's just a fucking lot of devistating technology and people and anger.  American economic status is going to be really, really challenged.  That's a bad mix.  Tension and threat thrusts people back to more basic (aggressive) psychologies.

But what really gets me - and I have stayed on the board because I wanted to observe how people think - is that the polariztion is so ideologically bound.  I just got a MoveOn email.  Well, what do you know.  They want the administation out of Terry Schivo.  I'd like just once for a MoveOn or a Rush Limbaugh to break ranks and say the emperor is stark naked.

So I've seen bright guys on this board argue their points - but why are they always on the same side of the fence no matter what the topic?  Mad cow disease run amok?  Are we all droolers? Even guys who can think enough for themselves to hang out here, hedonists all, are still a bunch of ideological droolers.  Want me to go do the regression analysis to prove it?  

I mean, are you so fucking sure you're right?  I'm pretty goddam smart, and I sure as hell am not.  And I also know that the information I get is really, really suspect.  It drives me nuts.  

Take this poor woman in Florida.  The clinical evaluation of her condition is a simple process.  And yet the information flows to the public about it are not simple.  How deep do you have to dig to believe you've got the data?  And this is just a tiny, tiny drop in the information bucket.  

But the rhetoric is still as predictable on this board as shit in the pen. Fall right in boys.  No need to be doing any thinking for yourself.  We'll do that for ya.

So what do we do? We infer motives because we really don't fucking know. There's a psychological term for when bad alcoholics make up stuff to fill in the blanks - confabulation? Maybe.  Anyway, that's what I see.  A bunch of confabulation. We grab a slanted perspective that appeals to us emotionally and stand certain as hell on it.   Bush is a nazi.  Clinton is a thief.  Neocons.  Traitors.  As if this were the truth.  We're just filling in the blanks so that it doesn't cause any cognitive dissonance.  It's like a fucking trial all the time, where the search for truth is not the point, but the drive to triumph is somehow moral.  The lawyers on both sides are lying and they know it.  The press is a heap of dung.  Only the flies have an excuse.  

Meanwhile, the world ticks along.  Remember Dr Strangelove and the Sterling Whathisname Wacko General character.  "Fluridation.  Saps the vital bodily fluids.  That's why I only drink branch water and whiskey" or however it went.  

That's our media.  It saps the vital bodily fluids.  The relentless marketing of life.  Shit, and meanwhile, the drumbeat is thumping.  

I'm too worried to be so cocksure of an ideology running around right now. It sounds too much like Orwell to me.

-- Modified on 3/23/2005 6:33:01 PM

If the country becomes an animal farm, well. The biggest, badest, smartest animals will win, and it will not necessarily be those that have accumulated the most guns and ammo. There are forces of physics and chemistry that infinitely more powerful than a gun, or advanced weapon can ever be.

We may well be headed for some rocky times but I am convinced that things are getting better over the long haul.

cheer up.

Thanks!  I also have had the flu for 2 weeks now and it wears me down.  

I agree - I mean the pressure & opportunity to evolve is right there. We have access to global wisdom for the first time, for example. But I don't see evidence of it in the public forum, not in America (and I don't have enough access to other cultures to have an opinion).  

But BK, aren't you also scared by a lot of the momentum you see?  I mean, both trends are in play.  And if we don't get the focus on the right issues (you can't solve a problem that you don't identify), and get through the utter crap of our current discourse - well, it just can't be a good thing.  

But I do have enormous faith in the human spirit.  I mean, it is made of the most inspiring of aspirations. But in times of stress, the data shows people drop down into a more primitive developmental world view, define "us" more narrowly, and are driven more by fear/anger survival needs.  

BTW, I want to recommend a book - Ken Wilber's The Marriage of Sense and Soul.  It's a stunning analysis of the integration of science and spiritual growth.

OK, back to work.

-- Modified on 3/24/2005 8:14:15 AM

anyone who tries to distill that shotgun blast, well, hat's off to ya.

...it's that absolutely nothing is guaranteed.  Part of evolving is extinction.

You need a vacation from the board.  But if you take one, please come back.  I, for one, really welcome you here.  Even if your posts are the hardest to answer and think about.

I'm scared, too, WmBlake.  And I'm afraid humanity might not have another chance to get things right.  With frightful weapons freely available, large-scale, environmental degradation, vulnerability to epidemics,  and the spectre of diminishing energy and signs of changes in global climate, humankind is still fighting over things that should have been settled 500 years ago.  Our main religion waits for the apocolypse, without any other plan, and looks to these as signs.  What will they do when they get an apocolypse without a rapture?  

Nevertheless, I will add that the good thing about being a pessimist is that you are often pleasantly surprised.  

For your question, are we all so sure we are right?  The answer for me is no.  Like all other human beings, I make terrible errors of all sorts, and all information I receive is incomplete.  For that reason alone, I will be in error.

However, it doesn't follow logically that this knowledge inclines me to be more in agreement with everybody else.  To explain, if one is in error and I'm fallible, why should anyone accede their will to peope who are just as prone to error and just as fallible?  What does that accomplish?  There's no gain to it.  The only thing that it will definitely accomplish is a reduction in status.  And, unfortunately, if people do that too easily, you create a social situation where the one most deluded about being always right and in touch with the truth rises to the top of the hierarchy.  

And, yes, it comes back to status and power.  Human beings are as hierarchical as any social species.  And we're adapted best to banding together with other human beings and killing the evil human beings.  If we want to evolve anywhere else, we need to surpress that tendency.  

You could apply discipline to your will, which is what I try to do. Don't look for agreement all the time, but be honest about where you got your information and how that source could have known.  Moreover, always know what fact you would need, what you would need to see or hear, to reach an agreement, and be truthful about it.  You're will is important in it.  Consensus circumventing your will does nothing good.

I'm as aware of "the issues" as I can be. I know what I have control over and what I don't.

At the end of the day, it's your life. Live how you like. I want to remain optomistic[sic] even if it's blissfully ignorant....

What's the reward of a life of pessimisism? You get told "you were right?

geeeezzz, i'd rather have a V8.

BK

Ah but I can!! You see it right there!!! It's on the internet!!!

Nah, just got the flu... and I am trying to insert a little perspective.  That the discussion about this woman in Florida lines up along ideological lines really strikes me as something broken in our public mindset.

I am not afraid of deeply dark emotions.  Existential dispair is one of the great hallmarks of a person's growth.  It provides the fuel to honesty.  

The question I am trying to raise is one about the most fundamental assumptions we make, which I think are a function of our developmental status - the model we hold of who we are and what the world we live in is like.  

And what I hope I do, if even just a little, is sensitize people to their own worry about what's going on, because when you trace it back to the question of what one can do, it leads to the urge to grow as a person.  

So when I see such absolute assertions in the Terry Schivo case by the usual suspects on this board, even when I discount the playful nature of the insult tossing, without any attempt to struggle with the ambiguity, I worry about how easily manipuated we are in the face of major and unique issues.

So I am not suggesting artificial consensus - but I am saying I fear the power of demogagory in the current media environment.

But, that's just me, and after two weeks of the flu.  

"...What will they do when they get an apocalypse without a rapture?..."

Call it a 'catastrophic success'.  

Though sometimes it's hard to admit it!

...or dare I say, 'mutation' of Colin Powell's "Pottery Barn" rule...."..They break it, we own it..."