ith all the flooding this season, I'm too tired from dealing with water to work on my
research grant. It's a shame,
but I have to spend all my time digging ditches instead of curing diseases and stuff.
Whatever happened to division of labor? There's not much in evidence. Around here, it's
hard even to find a plumber.
I'm too worn out to finish reading Jordan Peterson's books (Maps of Meaning and Twelve Rules for Life). That's also a shame: so far they look like thought-provoking and insightful books. And, as you can probably tell, I'm even too tired to proofread this article.
Peterson is a psychologist, but he talks a lot about ethics. Discarding our ancient value systems, he says, has led to chaos and meaningless in peoples' lives. As Aristotle said, there's a connection between science—knowledge—and ethics. Biology and psychology are slowly starting to fill the vacuum left in the West by religion.
Ethics are nothing more than a set of rules that experience shows are necessary to achieve a specific goal in a society. By that definition, they're dependent on what you value. Many people believe that morality is obsolete or even oppressive, and that every individual has their own. In fact, different moral systems exist because different people have different goals. The goal of most Western religions, like Christianity and Judaism, is to live a decent life. But living a decent life is not just for one's own sake. The real goal is to help one's civilization to survive. A civilization full of corrupt individuals won't survive for long.
Water, too much of a good thing
This is why the SJW religion is so hard to understand. It is an extremely rigid moral system, but it appears to have no goal. As one person puts it, without a posited utopia it's hard to see what the SJWs would do with power if they ever got it.
They must have a goal, so we have to assume it is so terrible that their leaders must conceal it from the population and from their naive followers. All their actions: their demonization of men and of white people, their determination to flood their countries with immigrants whose avowed goal is colonization, their rejection of all forms of energy—oil, gas, nuclear—and of capitalism itself, make it appear that their goal is simply to destroy, like an angry baby throwing all its toys out of the playpen. But even the baby wants something: all behavior is goal-directed.
One commentator says the goal is simply to create cultural disorder and chaos:
It is the perpetual movement that gives a shot of ideological elixir into the otherwise lifeless zombies that roam in America. The constant agitation is the drug that an ideologue craves. It provides the necessary release until another fix can be obtained.
The naive college kids who follow them know nothing of this, of course, since they're largely uneducated and naive about the evil of humans, and they've been deprived of knowledge of reasoning skills.
Most of them simply want a life free of risk. They were told from infancy that everyone was special. It's an inverted type of egalitarianism which actually means that no one is special, and therefore everyone is mediocre. So they believe they are mediocre, and therefore they're attracted to an ideology that's designed to prop up mediocrity by creating safe spaces for it and giving subsidies and regulations to cushion them in a life of total risk aversion.
Life ensconced in a gigantic pillow, a bubble boy kind of life, and the rage that its inhabitants feel when they encounter an idea that challenges it, is no life at all. Rage comes from deeply felt feelings of worthlessness and impotence. That is what egalitarianism teaches: you are worthless, you cannot succeed, you will fail because you are mediocre because everyone is the same. They look around and see the truth of it. They know it's fake ideology, which is why it can only be imposed by force. But how could isolating oneself in falsehoods free one from feelings of worthlessness that one has been taught one's entire life? Those college professors who create this ideology know the answer, but they will not tell the students: the goal is totalitarianism, a form of annihilation of the mind.
Most kids are not totalitarians, and they're sincerely looking for answers. When Peterson says that happiness is not the goal of life, it's something that strikes one as being profoundly true, which is why their leaders try to slap labels on it to frighten the cannon fodder away. We discover our true nature not when we are happy, but in times of crisis, and it is then that we learn what parts of our personality we ought to cultivate and which we should throw out.
Our motivations are rarely what we believe them to be. It is when we are despondent and depressed that our synapses dissolve, like those in the lobster brain, which dissolves after it is defeated by a bigger lobster. Loss of synapses is what happens in depression. Alzheimer patients also lose synapses, which may be why they become profoundly depressed. It's as if in certain diseases depression goes out of control, and our brain tries to rebuild itself, but fails.
Indeed, researcher Stephen Scheff[1] is finding evidence that the number of neurons and synapses remains constant until age 90 in normal individuals. He is one of many scientists who are concluding that dementia has nothing to do with amyloid plaques or tau-containing tangles, but is caused by a loss of synapses.
Nothing happens in biology without a reason. The purpose of depression may be to give us an opportunity to rebuild our thought processes and values, those things that make up our personality, to make it easier to avoid the next crisis that could be even worse. It's a way of getting us to let go of the harmful path that we're on.
If so, those who cushion themselves, becoming bubble boys (and bubble girls) by insulating their belief systems from the real world, are setting themselves up for a much bigger crisis. Sooner or later the bubble will burst, and they're manifestly unprepared for the consequences.
Practitioners of social justice warfare say they're all about restructuring society. That's about as far from creating a safe space as you can get. Which will the SJW religion destroy first: Western civilization or the lives of its adherents? Since I have water on my mind these days, I'll just say it's a wash.
1. Scheff SW 2006. Synaptic Pathology in Dementia. In Molecular Mechanisms of Synaptogenesis, Dityatev and El-Husseini, eds., Springer, 2006, pp. 431–443.
mar 04 2018, 5:20 am
