I have left this blog sitting untouched for a while. My picture of the world I am living in has been so drastically damaged, that I sort of view every day now as a bonus. I've been spending most of my time either working on projects for money, or working on my music with the help of some very inspiring new tools.
So, I'm not depressed in the clinical sense. I actually feel more confident in who I am, as seeing so many brainwashed lynch mob members makes me appreciate my analytical/skeptical nature. I do feel very alone though. Not alone in the sense of being without others in my life, but alone in feeling that the individuals are scarce who share my respect for facts and my weariness of the pitfalls of superstition. This time I'm not just talking about the right-wing fools.
Around the election time, I felt like half of us were in the same boat, valuing facts over appeals to fear. Valuing real causal explanations of terrorism and poverty, over emotional appeals and blaming. We were people who did not see ourselves as the grand design of God/the universe, but as one of the Earth's many creatures. We valued evidence, and clear reasoning. Wrong.
The fact is some people are "left" aligned for the same reason others are "right" aligned. They identify with the people around them who happen to think a certain way, and import their beliefs for social currency. Many of them are just as superstitious and unprincipled as their right wing counterparts, their conclusions just so happen to fall on the left. I will say that their emotional concern for others seems greater at times, but these things are impotent without any constructive thinking patterns. What I'm talking about here are the people who believe in UFO's, karma, "mother nature" as essentially an intelligent god - and spend more time focusing on these completely impotent ideas than on the real inner workings of repression/destruction.
I'm not part of some cult that believes in eating only raw foods while playing a kazoo during certain moon cycles - and then wondering why there aren't many others like me. I don't have some radical theories of the way that things work, other than the ones you might find in Discover or Scientific American. When I have a theory about the way things work, I treat it as a hypothesis, and I respect the methodology of science to reveal whether the "hunch" is correct or not. I don't go around making all sorts of random associations, treating them as absolute truth, blaming who I see fit, and exploding with anger when I am questioned about these personal revelations. That's it. That's all I want to find in people. A real concern for life, along with an understanding that magical thinking has never stopped anyone's suffering. In fact, it has been the cause, or the means of much human suffering.
I was cultivating a false sense of respect for the people of other countries as well. I definitely think most Americans don't respect other countries' opinions nearly enough - don't get me wrong. However, I had started to idealize the people in other industrialized countries, and to think that they were all so much more intellectually advanced. There governments might be more progressive, but that doesn't mean that they think about the big-picture any more than your average American. The fact is, most people are concerned largely with their own practical existence. That's totally understandable, but it doesn't make the apathetic in Europe morally superior to the apathetic in America. Furthermore, people the world over create their world views in as equally a sloppy manner as the religious fanatics over here. It just so happens that the people around them, and the cultural tide where they live is less violent. If it were to shift, I think we'd see that most people worldwide do not have the necessary respect for facts to ward off power hungry leaders' appeals to groupthink. It's easy to seem progressive when all you have to do is nod your head with everyone else. I'm starting to think that, although I'd rather live in a lovely country with progressive government, the best social thinkers often come out of repressive countries. (I've read some incredibly morally advanced ideas from thinkers coming out of India & Saudi Arabia, as turning against their repression required a lot of conscious examination of the principles underlying it.)
In order to protect freedom/limit suffering, we need to not only agree on what the problems are, but be capable of discerning between constructive actions, and simply flailing our arms in the air, shouting "The end is near!!" Now I'm not saying anything against ranting, I'm just saying that some people don't seem to understand when they are ranting and when they are saying something constructive. Many don't seem to understand when they are making the same superstitious associations as religious zealots. For instance, an acquaintance recently made the assertion that the tsunami's wiping out 114,000 people (& counting) were Mother Nature kicking our asses for overpopulation. I merely asked what this was based on, what research, which prompted an almost wholesale rejection of the very scientific methodology that allowed the person to know about environmental devastation in the first place. This is no different from Pat Robertson or some other fundamentalist saying that "Aids cures gays." Some disaster strikes, and people pop out of the woodwork and say "I told you so!", which is not only heartless, but illegitimate and useless. And then they go on to insult those who actually spend 18 hour days working on the problem as "number-crunchers" who don't "get it." Meanwhile, the fact that science is the only reason life has gotten better for mankind is completely lost, as is the fact that the only effective humanitarians are those who seek to find the real causes of problems, rather than just pointing a finger based on a gut-feeling.
So we've mostly got people on both sides of the spectrum, using the same irrational thinking patterns, and disregarding the need for evidence to back up one's claims. We have people that talk about GWB's lack of evidence for going to war, and then start talking about the evils of genetically modified foods, when the evidence related to them only shows that they save millions of lives, are better for us & the environment than pesticides, and are no more harmful than the "genetic modification" we started 12,000 years ago by breeding the best crops. When they are shown this evidence, some environmentalists change their minds, but others just say the data is meaningless because they know "evil" when they see it. Well, so does W. If you are going to be in the camp that says "evidence & scientific objectivity don't matter, we're going to base our thoughts/actions upon our personal intuitions," you should know whose company you share, and that you are opposed to the revolutionary thinkers who have found a way to better this existence.
People are always bringing up Nazism when one starts talking about the biological roots of behavior, or the importance of trusting science. If we start finding out about our genetic makeup, surely tomorrow we will be cloning nazi's and sterilizing those who are "inferior," right? Let us reflect, that had the German public been more fact-based, they might have said "Wait a second, there's absolutely no evidence that the Jews are responsible for any of our problems. To hell with you and your crackpot ideas, Hitler!" But alas, they were just like the vast majority of Americans, and the vast majority of people in general. Someone gave them something to blame, and they joined the mob, rather than examining the truth of their fantastic claims.
So many great social thinkers & philosophers have made these observations much more eloquently than me. Try Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the list goes on.
Many people simply haven't been exposed to any real information about who we are, where we come from, and how we work. If you are interested in starting to understand these things from a factual perspective, rather than a faith-based one, here are just a few books I highly recommend. They are very enjoyable and enriching reads, and moreover, they do not contain the armchair hunches of the authors, but the vast amounts of knowledge from the tons of research being done day and night, with the very same methodology that cures disease and makes the world a better place:
Religion Explained - Pascal Boyer
The Red Queen - Matt Ridley
Genome - Matt Ridley
The Blank Slate - Stephen Pinker
Descartes' Error - Antonio Damasio
The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins
These are at the top of my list, but check out anything by Ridley, Pinker, Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, E.O. Wilson, and of course Darwin. If you have any books to suggest to me, please do, but know that I don't have time to read any more evolution vs. design, theism vs. atheism books. These things are child's play, and for first-year philosophy students, and life is too short to keep talking about whether or not Santa Claus exists.
