I am watching this video now, just over halfway. It’s just amazing how stupid ideas can captivate billions of people. It gave me an idea for a book about all the stupid ideas and people that have shaped our history. Religion is maybe the biggest mistake, but there are enough other stupid ideas like race and nationality. Imagine if some low-life painter never thought that a group of people were evil and needed to be erased. Or the war before that when a fool who believed in borders and groups killed a leader of another group and thus started the First World War that caused the Bolshevik Revolution and the Second World War that was followed by the Cold War that ended with a frustrated KGB officer who invaded a sovereign country 30 years later. Stupidy is the cause of a lot of suffering, and I have to admit that it is hard to know if you yourself are doing something stupid, but something should be learned from looking back.
I am a skeptic. I started asking questions when I started talking 50 years ago. I think that 99% of all the questions I ever asked were directed to myself in my head. Of all those questions I ever asked myself, I would guess that the top ten questions get asked over and over again as if we are addicted.
I found my reasoning, for my reasoning some years ago. As a good skeptic, I have learned the pitfalls we can step into if you let your mind go unattended. Reading Greek philosophers will get you a long way, and after that, there are endless philosophers and other thinkers who have put our behavior under a microscope. We are good at believing the things we live with, the thoughts that have been with us for a long time, and the stories we hear around us. Questioning yourself, your life, and the people around you who live the same direction is hard; saying goodbye to a world you know and know is not true because it claims to be true is hard.
Being skeptical and act on the consequences is not something you choose. I never wanted to ask all these irritating questions, as my siblings and friends did when they were 6 and 7, but it ebbed away in them. You can train to become more skeptical, but we all know it is primarily a character trade, a gift from nature like red hair or brown eyes. Most people are not skeptical or don’t act if the answers tell them to go another way; they are skeptics but of the cowardly kind.
So, I am skeptical about writing about this, about hoping it might change a few minds. As I said before, you can read and get educated by starting at the beginning of philosophy. These books have been lying around for thousands of years with little effect besides on a few who are already believers. What will my mediocre writing add to what is already said? I do it for the most part for myself. It keeps my mind organized, and it also keeps my faint hope that I will one day know what to write alive. And be honest, would it not be the best for this world if everybody wrote their ideas in a blog that no one reads.
I don’t know why I expect there to be a manual that explains how to live life. It seems that no one has written a convincing one, though it would be helpful to get one when you turn eighteen, for instance—a manual containing a what-to-do list, a FAQ section, and a troubleshooting chapter. And I know that thousands of religions and so-called truth-tellers tell their stories and make their manuals for how to live, but that is like having an endless amount of manuals for how to turn on your TV and switch channels. I guess that only the creator of the TV can make the correct manual, and we obviously don't have a creator. For me, it's amazing that so many people act as if they know, or do they just pretend like I do to get by? I wonder what life would be like if we all had learned from the beginning that finding a way (together) is better than leading the way.
Being honest with yourself is the most frustrating thing. I still remember the first time I learned something new that put what I thought before to shame. Maybe you have had that too; you were so sure about a fact of life, an important life choice, or your self-image that it got turned around to the point that you don’t understand you could have ever thought differently, let alone the way you felt before, the day before. I have had these moments in my life, and though I have gotten new beliefs instead of the old ones, the new ones stand on shakier ground. What if these new beliefs are also wrong? I didn’t doubt myself before, so the absence of doubt now is not a guarantee anymore.
If you are honest with yourself, you know that your opinions are not worth much. This strong opinion that I have about this subject is caught in some kind of contradiction. I have to doubt my opinion, which you have to doubt.
I have always known that life is just a play, and we all play a role. Most people probably don’t know that they play a role and that the script is handed to them when they are born. When I was around 16, my favorite teeshirt was one with Freddy Mercury on it with big letters saying “The Great Pretender.” Back then, I already knew that something fishy was going on, that I was just playing my role, one that people seemed to expect, or at least I thought they did. But it took another 10 years before I knew that what we think is true is just that, we think it is true, and the role I play is just that.
I am in a conundrum. I don’t believe that we have free will. What I mean by this is that we are born into certain circumstances that determine who we are for the rest of our lives. If you are a curious toddler, you will probably be curious for the rest of your life, especially when it is encouraged. If you don’t like learning history at school because it didn’t interest you, you might never pick up a history book in your free time when you are an adult. We are all different but stay the same for most of our lives. Remember your old friend, the one you have not seen in 30 years, there’s not much changed underneath besides the clothes and 30 years of history they wear.
So, I don’t believe in free will and that it is possible to really change another person. We are all a certain way; we have a character and a personality that is recognizable and belongs exclusively to us. We don’t change easily, like our eating habits or how to quit smoking, though that last one borders on an addictive personality that you will never get rid of; you can only replace this bad habit with another in most cases.
There is no free will, so I am doomed to try to figure out through study how we function and find a method to change the other. I am unsure if I want to change the other; many philosophers study life for the sake of studying and acquiring knowledge. I tell myself that I do it just for fun, like an addiction; I know theoretically that I can’t change others because we are determined, and I also live a life. I have a girlfriend, colleagues, and family, and am a boss. None of these people listen to what I want them to do. They just oblige me sometimes till I am around the corner again.
I cannot tell someone to have some discipline because discipline helped me through some rough spots in life if these people I want to help have no discipline. I cannot tell a coworker to be more accurate when they have never been accurate; I can only find another job for them to do.
The funny thing is that these kinds of awareness were already there three or four thousand years ago. People have always tried to find ways to make all of us better by offering wise tips on how to live a good life. They did this through secular means, and some religions even try to improve society here on Earth through helpful tips and tricks. And we live better together now than three thousand years ago, not by much, but we do. But I don’t think it comes because of the so-called lessons we have learned from history through actively studying it, with conclusions that we can use to teach the next generations. I think we learned like we do when we live in a new house, when we go to the toilet at night in the dark and bump our toes and knees at random corners. After a while, we avoid the corners while we sleepwalk to where we can relieve ourselves.
Humanity learns to walk like a baby does, and what can you teach a baby? You can only encourage it with gestures and sounds because the rest has no meaning to them.
They say that hunter-gatherers lived a pretty healthy life. They walked a lot, saw a lot, ate many different kinds of food, and, most of all, they lived in small groups. They moved from one era to the next, leaving enough animals and plants behind so they could return a few seasons later or another tribe could move in. Even among hunter-gatherers, there were centers of worship and meeting places, but no one stayed long enough to claim a throne or dictate a need. You might say that we all should live like that now, in 2024, with no large-scale politics, wars, or large companies where you are not more than a replaceable drone.
I suspected a problem, and that is space. If I remember correctly, a group of roaming gatherers and hunters needs around 400 times more space for their food supply than an agricultural society.
I asked the AI and this was the answer it gave: “Estimating the number of hunter-gatherers that could live on Earth involves various factors, including available resources, land use, and population density. Historically, hunter-gatherer societies typically required large territories to sustain themselves, as they relied on wild plants and animals for food.
Research suggests that a sustainable hunter-gatherer population density might range from 1 to 10 people per square mile, depending on the environment and resources available. Given the Earth’s land area of about 57 million square miles, this could imply a potential population of anywhere from approximately 57 million to over 570 million hunter-gatherers, assuming all land is equally suitable for such a lifestyle. However, it’s important to note that this is a theoretical estimate and does not account for current land use, urbanization, and agricultural practices that dominate today’s world”.
So, even if this answer is not completely accurate, it makes sense that no more than half a billion people could live as hunter-gatherers. There is no way that we can go back, even if we wanted. It would be a cool movie if we tried it. Maybe the other 7 billion go into hibernation with a VR set on, and we take turns. The movie should play a thousand years after we started this experiment. Can you imagine the overgrown cities where only the libraries are lit and airconditioned so all the knowledge we once had is still there to cherish and ignore as we do now?
We've all been in a line upwards to a horizon counting the steps we take as if we count for something
Infinity was, for a long time, a philosophical concept. We now live our lives as if we live forever, having a handful of genuine experiences at the end, where the rest is just meaningless time between these events, meaningless like a single drop is in a stream going down, part of it all but also not. We live as if life has no value because we still cannot believe that this is it; you don’t wash away hundreds of generations of indoctrination in the big promise of an afterlife or reincarnation.
They say that democracy is the best of all the bad ways of governing a large group of people.
It is mainly known as a quote from Churchill, but in the full quote, he admits that the source is unknown to him: “Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…” (Churchill by himself)
Xenophobia, fear and contempt of strangers or foreigners or of anything designated as foreign, or a conviction that certain foreign individuals and cultures represent a threat to the authentic identity of one’s own nation-state and cannot integrate into the local society peacefully. The term xenophobia derives from the ancient Greek words xenos (meaning “stranger”) and phobos (meaning “fear”). Xenophobia implies the perception that not only is it impossible for certain people designated as foreign to integrate into one’s own society but also that they pose a threat to the integrity of that society. (https://www.britannica.com/science/xenophobia)
The people who murdered in the name of the state just wanted a better life. They voted for the man with big ideas and were unaware of the path this blind obedience takes them. Their lives while working in a slaughterhouse for humans were not different than their lives when they worked in a slaughterhouse for animals. Daily life is daily life; we all filter out the world we don’t want to see.
We are all different in how we look and what we’ve been through and somewhat different in our wants and needs. Some of us want to find our own way, and others just want to follow. Most of us fall somewhere in between. We have to live together knowing that a quarter of the people in our society have no problems rounding up their neighbors if they are ordered to when shame is taken away. Those are the people who have no rationale for why they obey the strong man, the man who knows “the right words.”
Do you obey?
The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
People who don't know the whole story are often eager to fill in the details with added reasoning for the part they know. For most, having a partial opinion is more important than having no opinion.
What would happen to a person born today where it is possible to make a monitor into a mirror that, through clever manipulation, shows all your movements but as another person? What if that reflection was the image of you with another gender or ethnicity?
If people set out towards their opinion, what they believe or think to know, do they know where to go? Or do you believe that your opinion comes from within you, arising from somewhere deep?
Some observations
Understanding where our knowledge comes from is important in our highly opinionated world. When and when not to trust our knowledge, opinions, and beliefs is important, in my opinion.
We all can live with our truths and go as far as to say that we all have “a right to our own truths.” If you say that the sky is blue, you will be right because most of us will agree, but if you say that that particular person is the best person for that job, you might find out that others disagree. You still have your truth, but it might be wise to find out what qualities you rank high and which ones the others do. If you like the character and attitude of the person you prefer, but the others point out the lack of qualification, you might have a starting point from where you can find out what is more important instead of just stating your opinion. It is often not enough to state your opinion, so finding out the reason why you have these opinions can also be important.
There is a possibility that you end up endlessly questioning your beliefs. If the question is, like in the example above, if personality or adjudication is more important, you might have anecdotal stories where an uneducated new employee lifted a company’s morals. Still, the other might use common sense that education is usually used to decide who to hire. Anecdotal evidence needs more scrutiny, but what is expected is not always the road to follow, especially when change is needed. In this example, the two sides might have discovered that one side thought that change was needed, and the other just wanted a new employee. Now you’re on the road to finding out what the reasons are that part of the company wants to change and the other part does not. From here, you can only go deeper, and maybe you will find out that you didn’t even know what you wanted or what the question was.
You say the sky is blue, but it is more correct to say that the sky looks blue. This is what my friendly AI minion says about it: The sky appears blue due to a phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering. When sunlight enters the Earth’s atmosphere, it collides with molecules and small particles, scattering the shorter blue wavelengths of light more than the longer red wavelengths. This scattering causes us to perceive the sky as blue during the day.
This is what NASA’s Space Place tells us: Sunlight reaches Earth’s atmosphere and is scattered in all directions by all the gases and particles in the air. Blue light is scattered more than the other colors because it travels as shorter, smaller waves. This is why we see a blue sky most of the time.
And here is a Quote from the scientist who wrote all of this down for the first time in 1871, John William strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh:
This was just a 10-minute search on the internet to “debunk” something that most of us take for granted. It is, of course, enough to say that the sky is blue, but say at least to the younger people that there is a but after you stated the obvious because for young people, there is still hope.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Human, All Too Human II
Mixed Opinions and Maxims
6 Against visionaries. -The visionary denies the truth to himself, the liar only to others.
261 One weapon twice as good as two. -It is an unequal battle when one person speaks for his position with head and heart, the other only with his head: the first has the sun and wind against him, as it were, and his two weapons interfere with each other: he loses the prize-in the eyes of truth. Admittedly, the victory of the second with his one weapon is seldom a victory according to the heart of all the other spectators and costs him his popularity among them.
270 The eternal child. -We believe that fairy tales and games belong to childhood: shortsighted as we are! As if we would like to live without fairy tales and games at any age! Admittedly, we call it something else and experience it differently, but this is precisely what speaks for it being exactly the same thing – for the child, too, feels that games are his work and fairy tales his truth. The brevity of life should preserve us from pedantically separating the ages oflife – as if each one brought something new – and a poet should sometime present to us a human being two hundred years old who really does live without fairy tales and games.
There have been times in my life when I hit rock bottom. After the first few times, I learned how to brace myself when I found myself on a familiar trajectory. Being curious by nature, I never really judged the place; I also observed the joyous times in my life from an appropriate distance. I don’t try to judge. In some sense, all strong emotions have something in common, and that is that they are strong.
But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground
But are strong emotions of love, wonder, or winning not better than feelings of loss and depression, you might ask? Yes, of course, at first glance. What do all these emotions have in common? They are all finite; they start at a certain point and end eventually. The more a certain feeling repeats itself in your life, the more you get used to it, and its impact will slowly diminish. The reason why you feel that first strong emotion of love or loss that strong, is because you don’t know what follows; it might never end, is what you want to believe. The reason you feel it is so strong is unfamiliarity.
Feeling love is, at first glance, a more positive feeling than loss, but as we all know, after love, the break up comes eventually, even if it takes many years when death finally demands its toll. Loss, on the other hand, starts on a down note, but how good is the feeling of finding what was lost back? My point is that feelings have a whole spectrum that, on average, evens out. Emotions are there; in some sense, you should feel the joy and negativity; just feel them without too much judgment.
I do and have done this kind of rationalization whenever I am down, but also when I am up, and I can tell you when you are up and think about this stuff…then it doesn’t always help. But jokes aside, rationalizing your feelings does help you stay somewhat calm during a surge of emotions, but you have to be lucky to have that ability. I don’t know if it can be taught.
One ought to hold on to one’s heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too. Friedrich Nietzsche
Did you know that between 25 and 50 percent of the people of voting age living in the Netherlands and the USA think it is a good idea to deport people to wherever they can dump them? Two of the wealthiest countries in the world are too greedy to share some of their wealth: we want more, is what these people think, and I don’t care that you come from a war-torn country; we don’t want to give you a place where you can rest and start a new life. We want more stuff, and you mean nothing to me.
I guess education is not the solution to a better character. First, religion fails to make people care for each other, and now education. What now. Internet was supposed to share knowledge, you say. I guess that didn’t work either. Disappointing.
I’ve been a Dutch Marine for 3 years. Thirty years ago, and I still feel it. I still feel it, but not in a negative way. If I talk to an old colleague about the old days, we often also talk about what we do now and how we both miss the time when teamwork meant teamwork. As a Marine, you don’t have to tell your buddy to cover your ass; you know he does, just like any other member of the team; they all know what to do and what is expected.
The reason why we trained so hard to reach that level of cooperation is, of course, the danger that can be part of the job. I understand that, but I feel it is still part of me after 30 years. I often had and have too high of an expectation of the teams I worked in or led. I know that danger is not coming from the door in the corner of the office, but why don’t they close it when they know it’s a fire door? It sounds like a tiny thing, but for me, it is still a principle: attention to detail; in a combat situation, neglecting what is expected can harm you and others. I also understand the people who wonder why I bother; they have probably never bothered about things just outside of their reach. I have learned over the years to care less, but it eats at me.
Nochrisis 