I just finished reading the comment section of a recent youtube video where someone comments Rogozin’s skeptical claims regarding American Moon landings, and it was a profoundly depressing experience which left me with a belief that stupid people should never attempt being skeptical. They should just believe what the authorities tell them, because whatever that is, they have at least some probability of being on a right trajectory in life. If they try to think for themselves, they are absolutely certain to get it wrong and destroy not only their own lives, but also throw the world into chaos. That’s how we got materialism and atheism, when stupid people tried to think critically based on “reason and evidence”, and everything they ended up with was absolutely wrong in every conceivable way, and resulted in mass slaughters and chaos, from the French revolution onwards.

Stupid people don’t know how physics works, they don’t know how rockets work, they don’t know how gyroscopes and inertial guidance works, they heard something about radiation but don’t really distinguish between alpha, gamma and beta kinds, they heard that Van Allen belts are bad but they don’t really know what they look like and what’s the actual problem with them, they don’t know how computers work but it’s intuitive to them that you can’t do shit if you don’t have an iPhone, and they don’t know how photography works but they look at the pictures from the Moon and think they can see all kinds of issues. They think that if they can’t get a good cell coverage, it’s obvious that NASA couldn’t communicate with Apollo all the way to the Moon. I read all this and it makes me feel sick, not because I couldn’t answer any of those supposed issues, but exactly because I can, and I understand what the actual problem is. The problem isn’t even that those people are scientifically ignorant. That’s actually expected – it takes quite a bit of work to become scientifically and technologically proficient in various disciplines, to the point where you can actually understand how a microwave transceiver works, how a computer works (in a sense that you understand how to build a microprocessor with NOR gates alone, because that’s all you have), how you can integrate data from accelerometers into knowing your position and speed, what miracles you can do with very weak computers if you code everything directly in machine code and design the user interface so that you actually have to know what you’re doing to use it, instead of wasting a supercomputer on making something that chimps and cats can use. No, the problem is not that ordinary people don’t have the ability to understand the technological and scientific intricacies of space travel. The problem is that ordinary people have been trained to think that all men are equal, and if they can’t understand something, nobody can. They are trained to be inherently arrogant, they are trained to believe in democracy and rights, and they are trained to be skeptical.

Skepticism is a terribly destructive thing, and even the sharpest minds should use it very sparingly. This might sound strange until you see all the conspiracy theorists who completely lost not only their minds, but also every connection to reality, just because they were skeptical of everything. Not everything – they are never skeptical of their own ability to understand things. This is the difference between them and me. I am always skeptical of myself and my own abilities first, and I always started with faith first, using skepticism extremely sparingly and carefully – if you can imagine a prayer to God for guidance, keeping God and the truth that He is constantly in my mind as I carefully questioned, explored and eventually revised my views. If skepticism is combined with arrogance (of thinking you’re the measure of truth and knowledge, for instance), you’re lost. You’ll start believing that the Earth is flat, that men didn’t go to the Moon, that there are no satellites in orbit, and eventually you’ll go so crazy you’ll question reality of gender and thinking men can be women if they feel like it, or something equally insane.

You can now respond by stating that blind faith in authorities is not a good thing either, and that all those people, who got vaccinated with American bioweapons four times just because they unquestionably believed the authorities, are now about to taste the consequences of that, and I will agree. However, it’s not their fault that they believed the authorities. They can hardly do much else. It is the sin of those in power who mislead them. You see, St. Augustine would describe civilization with an image of a flock of sheep guided by shepherds, who are assisted by sheep dogs, who guard the flock against the wolves. The sheep are normal people who mind their own business baking bread, milling wheat, fixing roads and plumbing, making cars and computers, and so on, and simply have neither the interest, ability or time for other matters. The shepherds are the priests, philosophers and scientists who devote their time to understanding God, righteousness and truth to the best of their ability, and guide the people in the right direction, so that they can live a life that will be grounded in truth and reality, and have a trajectory towards God. The guard dogs are the worldly powers – the army, police, courts and administration, as well as healthcare, fire departments and so on, who take care that the crimes are punished, that those in need are taken care of, that the sick are healed, that the fires are put out, and that the foreign invaders are stopped and fought. The wolves are evil people who want to disrupt, seduce and destroy. If the wolves infiltrate the system to pose as guard dogs and shepherds, you can hardly blame the sheep for being confused, or victimized for following them. You can’t expect a baker or a plumber to be an expert in theology and science, and to see fault in something that requires a PhD in biochemistry. No – if the shepherds and guard dogs fail in their duties and are compromised, the flock will be lost. If the sheep don’t understand that they are sheep, and try to skeptically question the shepherds, they are lost, because they don’t even understand what it takes to be able to understand that stuff. The problem with stupid people is that they think hard stuff is actually easy. I think it’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect. I think the media actually encourages this in people, by oversimplifying issues so that everybody thinks they understand them, and encouraging everybody to have an opinion about everything, under the assumption that everybody can do it. Sure, you can have an opinion, but you are all but guaranteed to be wrong. You can’t integrate acceleration across time but you think you can have an opinion about spaceflight? You can’t differentiate between gamma and beta radiation but you heard radiation is bad and you think the astronauts couldn’t cross the Van Allen belts? You heard that lightning is caused by electricity and now you no longer believe in God because God doesn’t make lightning? As I said, skepticism is dangerous and even the smartest people should first be skeptical of their ability to exercise skepticism safely and without losing the grip on reality, but for stupid people skepticism is absolutely fatal. The only thing a stupid person – and by that I mean you – should be doing, is making a choice on which expert to believe, based on their inner feeling of reality obtained from prayer to God. If you follow this diligently, at some point you might actually evolve to the point of being one of the experts, very gradually, and at some point you might carve out a new, yet unknown path to a greater truth than what was previously revealed. However, the “I don’t understand this so it must be wrong and stupid” kind of skepticism, that ends your journey towards the truth then and there. And if your inner response was “I’m nobody’s sheep”, you’re either a wolf, or you were indoctrinated by them. You see, the wolves define sheep as stupid followers who are exploited by the shepherds. God defines sheep as good beings that follow the voice of God that leads them from space and time into salvation and eternity.

Don’t be a sheep if that’s your choice, but those, who don’t follow His voice into eternity, shall perish in time.

I recently saw a video clip of Dr. Jordan Peterson saying something that struck me as very insightful: if you want to advertise something to humans, the obvious idea is to frame it as offering success and well-being, but this is wrong. The humans don’t in fact care much about success and well being. They care about not suffering terribly and failing miserably. This is because “success” and “well-being” don’t really have much to offer, because human capacity for joy is quite limited. The threat of terrible suffering, however, is the primary motivational force, because the pit of doom is endless and promises untold horrors, and people would do anything to avoid that.

This struck me instantly as true, and it explained something I struggled with previously, which is the issue of status symbols. You see, status symbols are an obvious trap, something the super-wealthy people produce (thus increasing their wealth) and the people who are barely out of poverty buy, wasting their money and crippling their chances of ever becoming well-off financially. Essentially, one would do much better buying shares of LVMH or some other luxury-item business on the stock market, than buying their products. Basically, those luxury goods are upper middle class aspirational purchases, where someone who is barely out of poverty takes whatever money it is that makes him not poor, and throws it into fire. So, if you never want to make financial progress in life, do buy luxury goods and status symbols, because that’s the way to go. The reason people do that in such overwhelming numbers despite obvious reasons against it must obviously be very powerful, but the exact formulation eluded me. I used to think it was an equivalent of a peacock’s tail – a boastful show of opulence that serves no purpose for survival, and is in fact a hindrance to survival, so if someone can still pull that off, it’s a sign he’s really well off. An example of such a status symbol is a lawn. Initially, to have a piece of land in front of your house under grass or some aesthetically pleasing but non-productive trees was a statement of wealth – “you see, I have so much land already, I don’t have to plant something useful by my house, I can just waste it”. This explains other status symbols as well – they are intentionally wasteful displays, a show of how much money you can piss into the wind, because of how rich you are. Of course, when the poor or middle class people try to imitate that, and waste critical resources trying to look rich by doing what rich people do, they are completely ruined, but none of this still explains why people do it at all. Rationally, a response to “how much money can you waste on stupid bullshit” should be “none at all”. Also, wastefulness might be a show of opulence when really wealthy people do it, but when poor people do it it smells of despair and fear, like a scared cat puffing itself up to look bigger, not a peacock’s tail. This is where Peterson’s explanation clicked – they don’t do it because they want to achieve something positive, like being successful and happy. They do it because they desperately want to distinguish themselves from the grey, hopeless masses of poor, disenfranchised, doomed people barely clinging to the bottom rungs of the society ladder. There’s an instinctive recognition of dangers of being invisible, never seen by anyone important, never recognized enough for anyone to pay attention to you in any way because you are not distinguishable from the bland, grey, unimportant masses of people who barely make a living, working for slave wages. People are afraid of being losers, of being dismissed and mocked as irrelevant and unsuccessful, and will do almost anything to avoid this humiliation, and this explains sacrificing critically valuable resources at the altar of the false gods of status symbols.

However, there’s more to it than that. This is only the lowest “octave” that everybody recognizes, the physical one. It also extends into the spiritual realm, and I think that’s where the real issue lies. People don’t want to be mocked by Satan for being losers and failing his “tests”, and will keep investing their spiritual energy into attempts to achieve enlightenment in this world, to Satan’s great joy of course, because that’s how he can keep milking them dry. The spiritual equivalent of a Rolex or a Porsche are the spiritual achievements such as samadhi, or various demonstrable siddhis. Those things won’t necessarily get you any closer to any worthy goal, but they are a spiritual Rolex you can casually wear to some equivalent of a spiritual cocktail party, at least in your mind, and you think it will make you acknowledged, seen as worthy and accepted. In reality, the spiritual abilities that are of greatest use are usually the least “flashy” and “showy” ones, and collecting “experiences” like butterflies for your collection only shows your insecurities and fears of being unsuccessful and unimportant. It’s not necessarily even the experiences and abilities – sometimes it’s the spiritual titles, belonging to an established lineage and similar nonsense that gets people involved in cults and submissive to all kinds of weirdos who carry flashy titles, but that, obviously, seems like a path to being a weirdo in an orange robe who is generally recognized by others as spiritually successful. It’s the same circus as the Rolex and Ferrari crowd, only a different wagon, because if you know you’re not successful, you will go to great lengths trying to persuade others that you are. If you actually are successful, you won’t give a fuck. But of course, there are fakes who understand that and thus pretend to be the successful ones who don’t give a fuck. 🙂

Obviously, trying to fake achievement is something people devote an inordinate amount of time and effort to, in every sphere of interest and activity, and one could say that the same amount of effort, if invested in productive venues, could produce actual results. However, it seems that people actually give up on believing that they can actually do that – that they could achieve something real, be actually successful at something real and worthy, and trying to fake it is a sign of that. It’s a sign of someone who believes he has no chance of real achievement, but is desperately afraid of the depths of the pit of doom that awaits the losers.

The irony is, acknowledging that you’re a loser is the way to win.

When Satan mocked the souls that they would be nothing without constantly being in God’s presence, the “losers” acknowledged that, stating that God is everything of value and without Him they are nothing. Those “losers” are still with God in heaven, while those who wanted to be cool, emancipated and successful “winners” got lost here in Satan’s maze of reflections, illusions and quagmires, without God and all hope, still desperately trying to “achieve” and “succeed” in order to avoid Satan mocking them as losers.

Even in purely material things, avoiding the pitfall of posturing, acknowledging that you’re poor, saving and investing all your money, acquiring skills and living a modest life, are something that will eventually result in quite a portfolio.

So, what’s the lesson here? Trying to avoid failing miserably is probably the strongest motivational force in human life, and it can convince people to do the most desperate and counterproductive things. Also, people don’t “fake it until they make it”, they fake it because they gave up.