We Are All Bags Containing Skeletons

Yeah, I forgive him the least because it's clearly driven by his forebrain and not his endocrine system.

When Nathan Goldwag, the man with a black hole where his soul should be, is managing to be the voice of reason and moderation against despair compared to you... I dont know.

Someone can be right about the facts and wrong about the level of fear and alarm that is appropriate, in both directions.

And sometimes the mob is right! But the mob isn't right because it's the mob.

The issue is that we are social animals and thus panic spreads. The more people around us panic, the more we instinctively want to panic out of an evolutionary caution and also to enforce belongingness. It is mob mentality.

If you are talking to someone over a wireless communication protocol and that is how you came to know them they are in the swamp with the rest of us and soaking up the same toxins. Them flipping out and shitting their pants is not surprising.

Taking "people are freaking the fuck out" as a signal instead of noise is unwise at this point. We spill megabytes of data on the reality that social media has created an environment that specifically cultivates panic and FUD, and then we think "But what if it's just me, what if they're immune?"

Because I am cribbing from a previous series of posts I made which emphasized the 19th because that is much *closer in time* and thus more relatable to most people than the 17th century.

Despite everything, this is still true. I said something like this around this time last year, but- the next six months will be hard. They will be painful. It will not be fair we have to get through them. But we will get through them, and we will live to see a better world.

Fair enough. I'm glad I could do that, if nothing else.

I disagree with the first clause. I think this is very close to, if not directly at, the nadir. I would like to hear what you think "it getting worse" is and what "it getting better" is.

The human brain is capable of doing this even when the technology is highly centralized and captured by hostile forces.
The current iteration of the technology is decentralized and harder to capture.

You insist it is not that we have contrary views on human nature. Then what is it?

Right, then. We have these same foundational theories. But I believe this is a solvable problem and in fact is currently in the process of being solved socially, while you have a self-described pessimisstic view on things. What is the factor that splits the two?

The odds of losing the schema now is extremely low- the very technology that causes so much concern in you has also allowed the recording and reproduction of the exact schemas and technologies faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Your belief is that, because all of this, we are entering, and I quote, "a hard-to-escape dystopia".
I disagree it is hard to escape now for the same reasons it is only hard to invent the first lightbulb. Once the schema is made and production has been done, reproduction is easier.

However. *However*. The human brain has shown itself to be resilient to the technology. The human brain has shown itself to be able to distinguish between the hologram and reality. The human brain can attenuate and cut through the noise to the signal.

It is also shown, and is being shown right now, that people respond to material conditions and are capable of learning and changing, even with what you've asserted.

You're right. I don't know you, but I know what you've said, and what you've said, in my eyes, is a theory that requires a profoundly misanthropic worldview to have serious legs.

Your belief hinges entirely on the electorate being gormless, incurious, possessed of sub-goldfish memories, and unable to respond to the environment around them.

It was. Twice. The second time because there were enough sane people the first time to prevent the depth of consequence.
You must be profoundly misanthropic.

Language is a technology that parasitizes the human brain. Written language furthers the parasitization. The rapid reproduction of written language enables the manufacturing of holographic realities through control of the means of production and reproduction.

I'm afraid I simply disagree entirely with your premise, as someone who has, due to coming from the most recent culture to go from preliterate to literate without external imposition, been interested in these matters for my entire life.

Okay. Race riots in America were once a bimonthly thing and were largely the result of billionaire papers conjuring a holographic reality to justify those race riots. We broke out of that too.

I believe it makes them koalas in a burning rainforest. It is a maladaptation, not a healthy one, that is right now sealing their fate, because they do not believe the real reality is real.

If the holographic reality was as powerful as you believe Trump would have 70%+ approval ratings across the board. His entire party is specialized at this point in controlling the hologram. You believe this is a superior evolution that makes them the inheritors of the Earth.

Then we have a far, far larger contingent of people with weaker addictive tendencies, or addictive tendencies that are not hooked by SM, who simply do not partake in that reality at all. The holographic reality can influence real reality, but it is a very weak influence.

Like, what we are actually seeing, and by "we" I mean "me, with my own two eyes" is that there is a bifrucation of society between a small minority of people with strong addictive tendencies, of which we both as powerusers fall into, who live at least part of our lives in a holographic reality.

A) isn't really true at all, B) goes back to everything I said above, C) only doesn't go back to everything I said above because the economy was also built on destroying human bodies.

Mass literacy was also a cognitive assault by private interests. You are drawing a line where none exists.