Category Archives: society

The fallacy of determinism

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The most qualified person is going to do the best job.

The best camera/lens is going to take the best picture.

The most beautiful woman is going to make the best wife.

The strongest guy in class is going to win at life.

The smartest kid at school is going to win at life.

The most hard working person is going to succeed.

I don’t even know how many times I encountered this expectation – that the inputs will somehow translate into results. However, life doesn’t exactly work that way. Raw capability and talent doesn’t linearly translate into results; in fact, it usually creates expectations, and expectations result in either pressure, which results in self-sabotage and failure, or hubris and failure. For instance, the worst thing that can happen to a kid seems to be early success. Early failure, however, is healthy, because if you crash early enough, you learn to deal with real life, which is for the most part failure, learning from it, changing, doing better, and eventually getting so used to the process that the psychological impact of failure no longer even registers for you. However, if success is expected for long enough, the devastating impact of failure can be such that you might never recover.

Also, “repeat success and victory until death” is a very poor approximation of life, and a very damaging lesson to teach people. The expectation that you’re going to keep doing well, keep winning, keep being successful, in a linear manner, is in fact so unrealistic that it borders on insanity. In fact, the healthy attitude would be that failure is so expected, that it’s in fact a necessary element of getting anything done, and if anything, failure is something that needs to be integrated in any process that eventually results in anything worthwhile. In fact, science does exactly that. In order to apply scientific method, you need to plan for all kinds of failure that will gather useful data, and that hopefully expands your knowledge enough to create a map of a wider, previously unknown reality. Usefulness of an experiment isn’t judged by whether it “succeeds”, but by whether it provides useful data. Failure to confirm a theory that is methodologically well done and provides solid data is in fact a scientific success. You now know something you didn’t know before.

In my experience, the best candidates for success in spiritual practice aren’t people who are in some top 1% of the most successful people in a group. In fact, they are the most likely to fail in the most dangerous ways possible, with the worst imaginable outcomes. The most likely ones to succeed are those who survived devastating trauma, loss, personal failure, and especially personal failure which they themselves caused by their foolishness, and the result broke their confidence, broke their entire world, and they look at you with eyes that have depth you can see in children who survived war, a terrible natural disaster, injury or disease. They were broken, they learned to shed the parts of life that don’t matter, they don’t have entitlement, expectation of success, expectation of survival, and they have awareness and intelligence far beyond expected in their peer group. Basically, the most likely person to become a buddha isn’t someone who lived life on easy mode, but someone who was broken by trauma and had to rebuild his entire world from ruin, because that’s what yoga is. It’s learning to break yourself by observation and analysis, learning to face the fundamental, painful truths, learning to bear the burden of suffering peacefully, without entitlement or expectation of success or pleasure. Surviving the process of yoga is failure. Being crushed, refined on a particle level, and reborn from trauma and suffering as much as from Divine insight and transcendental experience, dying and letting God be born from your ashes, is success in yoga.

This doesn’t mean that broken people of all kinds are good candidates for enlightenment. Far from it. Broken people who stay broken are not good candidates for anything; however, those beautiful, successful young people with perfect self-confidence that resulted from a life of success and admiration from others are in fact worse. They are beautiful in a way a brand new land mine is beautiful, because that thing is also perfect all the way until detonation, and then it’s all over. However, persistence built in terrible, prolonged suffering and humiliation, and hard work in resisting terrible circumstances and rebuilding your broken life by clinging to what matters and letting the water carry away the rest, that is someone who already made their first steps into yoga, and they just need to learn to be methodical about the process.

That’s something Christianity knows – if you’re trying to find God in the world, look at the crucifixion site, not the throne room. If you’re looking for the queen of heaven, look for someone crying under a cross. True success often looks like failure to worldly eyes, and true failure is often a result of repeated success. You can’t be rebuilt better if you’re not completely broken in the process. Surviving intact means failure. Building on apparent success with more success in fact enforces failure until everything is lost. Also, compassion is not necessarily a process of helping others succeed; sometimes it’s a process of allowing them to fail, be broken and lose their sense of self in order to start actually paying attention to reality. In order to be reborn, you need to learn how to die.

WTF?

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Those space fantasy stories I’ve been reading, something just struck me.

Most of them are normal stuff – a soldier saves a child buried in rubble, or a gravely injured woman belonging to the enemy species, and it changes his life because he finds purpose.

However, I just noticed a trend in some of those stories: huge corporations experimenting on children in illegal facilities. Then I remembered stories from American-occupied nations at war, children and adults being harvested for organs, or for the human slavery sex market, and I was like “oh, fuck”. Yeah. Who knows what those American soldiers saw or heard, other than wishing they saved women and children instead of ignoring or killing them.

Feral humans

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The weather here is still hot and humid, which means taking a hit to life expectancy if you’re engaging in any significant outdoor physical activities. The day before yesterday it was actually very nice… at 1AM when I opened the doors to change the air before we go to sleep. Not ideal time for going out for a walk, either. So, I’m basically under semi-voluntary lockdown under air conditioning, reading all sorts of stuff online, among which there are all kinds of 4chan and reddit stories about life situations of the American 4chan/reddit population.

My conclusion is that those people are for the most part completely feral. The entire thing is a warning of what happens when you remove God from the top of the pyramid of values, remove the next several layers of the said pyramid, containing things like knowledge, kindness, decency and other virtues, and leave only the basest materialism that reduces humans to a spec sheet of desirable properties that are scanned quickly online in a consumerist fashion, and replace periodically for a newer model. If I had to be specific, I’d say that 80% of women and the top 5% of the “most desirable” men have gone completely feral, and the rest of the populace is depressed into suicidal apathy. The bottom 50% of men, being completely ignored and rejected by the feral women, are in turn developing all kinds of social pathologies. The rest are just bitter, depressed and preoccupied with pointless work.

Basically, 80% of women are competing for the top 5% of men, those men go completely insane fucking all those women either successively or simultaneously, never committing to any of them, and women get a body count that was previously reserved for sexual workers, until they grow older than 30, at which point they get completely ignored at the sexual marketplace, they are completely unmarriable due to the damage incurred by ego inflation of too much perceived choice in their younger days, inflated sense of self worth that necessarily collapses into a black hole, and they are destined to die alone hating men and being surrounded by cats. Also, feral singe men and women appear to be working very hard at ruining everybody else’s lives – sluts are trying to make all other women into sluts by telling them “to live out their lives”, “enjoy freedom” and “avoid clingy cringeworthy men”, while unfuckable men, usually called incels (involuntary celibate), have all sorts of theories about women that serve the purpose of making everybody as miserable as they are. Essentially, it’s a lunatic asylum in which the patients have taken control. Since American women are feral and unmarriable, some percentage of men are turning to foreign women who are still normal, at least in comparison to the Americans, because they are not entitled enough to think that they can be overweight sluts with an entitled and nasty disposition, and zero chastity, dignity and honour, and bully men when they choose someone who actually brings them peace, kindness and home, instead of all the feminist argumentative and bossy bullshit. Basically, women worked hard to become low class men with vaginas, and are shocked that men don’t want that unless they are some kind of gay.

Virtues and chastity are seen as sinful, virginity is seen as a sign of something being really wrong with you, and whoredom is seen as freedom and a sign of being attractive. The whole thing looks like some ancient prophecy of human degradation before the end of the world. The most depressing are the nice stories with good endings, because they look fake, like someone’s coping mechanism.

Honestly, that whole place looks like something that should be put under quarantine, and fenced away from the rest of the world with walls, razor fence and warning signs, like a spiritual biohazard that it is. Well, at least we now know what an atheist heaven would look like. May dear Lord save us from it for all eternity.

Self medication

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I’ve been reading more of those “space operas” of American origin, because I had an impression that something important can be divined from it, and I was right; essentially, people write those stories as some kind of wish fulfilment or projection, trying to live out in fantasy what they can’t get in life. Sure, lots of that stuff looks as it was written by some AI, because my head would start hurting trying to process the illogical jumps between narratives and missing parts of the plot. However, the AI would work within the given parameters, and combine existing material, so my initial assumption applies.

The plot is always about a human male and an alien female. This, of course, translates as American male and non-American female. The man is always a competent, no-nonsense person, disillusioned by the world where the “higher-ups” work with immoral corporations to commit genocide and similar war crimes for profit, while ordinary people are sold the story about duty and country/species in order to keep them obedient and expendable. So, he has military background, active or former, and is currently either trying to have a peaceful solitary life in some outback, or is a smuggler, mercenary or a private security contractor; things you would expect from former military. Sometimes he’s an engineer within the military framework, or a combat medic.

At some point he encounters an alien woman in trouble. She is either a designated enemy, or an ally, but mostly treated with suspicion or derision by humans. The trouble varies; sometime she’s a member of allied forces who survived a nasty combat mission with damage to her enhanced armour, which needs delicate skill to repair because it’s either a precious heritage item or it’s bonded to her mind with complex biotechnology. Sometimes she’s a gravely injured soldier left to die by others on the battlefield. Sometimes she’s a refugee escaping some Avatar-like scenario where some corporation strip mined and poisoned her world and most natives died. Sometimes she’s a warrior princess of a hostile warrior-culture that has him fight in an arena as a gladiator, and she’s the last challenge, as the undefeated champion.

At first, he just goes about his business as usual, but soon something changes; he thinks about following procedure and leaving the paralysed alien woman half buried in rubble to die, because that’s the procedure. However, then something clicks and he says “no, not again”, thinking about all the cases where he followed orders against his conscience and had to either kill innocents or watch them die while doing nothing, and he sees this as an opportunity to finally do the right thing, and then proceeds to carry the wounded woman across the battlefield to safety, under enemy fire, periodically stopping to treat her injuries or give her pain medications, all the while talking to her to keep her conscious. As they talk, the woman turns out to be smart, mentally strong, dedicated and honourable; basically, a worthy person he develops actual feelings for, and she’s sincerely grateful to him for saving her life and taking care of her. Through their banter, they develop real feelings for each other.

Or it’s an arrogant alien warrior princess who fights him in a duel, which he somehow manages to win and ends up married to her due to some tradition. She initially hates the whole situation and feels humiliated, but as time goes on she understands that he’s actually a honourable and highly competent individual, and as they are forced to work together solving some deadly problem, they develop real feelings for each other.

The next phase is either an alien healing capsule that heals the wounded woman by transferring something from the man to her, which ends with them being mentally bonded/imprinted, Avatar way. Or it’s some ritual, or something. In any case, those two people who were already properly bonded get connected telepathically into a larger whole. One would expect this to be an uncommon plot twist, but it’s not – human man and alien woman being mentally connected seems to be a major trope in those stories.

However, while I was browsing through those stories on YouTube, I was offered both stories based on real life, as well as copy-paste material from Reddit where people report actual stuff, and that stuff is universally terrible, in a sense that it showcases the depth of human capacity for depravity, sin and betrayal. People treating family members with contempt and neglect, wives mocking husbands publicly, causing divorce. Wives whoring around while their husbands are in the military in mortal danger. Interestingly, it’s mostly women acting like spoiled brats on an ego trip, acting in profoundly disrespectful and dishonourable ways, and causing destruction of the family. Also, women complaining that men stopped dating them, stopped talking to them, stopped giving them attention, ignoring them while they are in danger, and stories where some piece of human trash rapes a woman in public transportation while nobody lifts a finger to help her.

And then it becomes obvious why men write escapist stories about an American man and a non-American woman, both from different cultures, but both honourable, smart, attentive, respectful and grateful, and eventually developing a profound spiritual connection with their minds and emotions intertwined completely in a larger whole.

Basically, people in the West are treating others like a commodity or a utility, they lack discipline, respect, honour and loyalty, and they fail to establish a true and permanent spiritual connection, women are spoiled brats who act like absolute garbage, and men feel betrayed, unseen, disrespected and alone.

This is more than just a series of fantasy tropes, it’s an indicator of a profound spiritual crisis of the whole Western society, and especially America. In one case, I’ve seen a woman ask why men are not dating women, instead staying at home playing video games. A man answered: it’s because video games got better, and women got worse.

This is not going to end well, because I don’t see how such profoundly destructive trends can be reversed, since everybody keeps defending the causes as if they are the cornerstone of everything that’s good about this civilisation. Not only is this going to end up getting the civilisation destroyed and getting everybody killed, it’s going to produce lots of souls with profoundly inverted system of values that will be a problem to remedy in the afterlife. In this sense, those silly space romances I’ve been reading are not only a good indicator of the profound societal issues, but also a good attempt of self-medication by people who were hurt by this liberal dystopia.

Communication

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I was reading some American space opera stories, because I’m not dignifying that with the term SciFi. One thing seems to be a constant – “humans” in those stories are in fact a metaphor for Americans, and “aliens” are a metaphor for various non-American human nations of Earth. If you watched enough Star Trek, you’ll know what I mean. Also, how do you know that an American wrote a certain story? Because they implicitly assume that every language is basically English, but spoken with different words, that can be translated 1:1.

The only exception to that nonsense that I can remember was the “Darmok” episode of TNG, where they encounter a civilisation that keeps referencing their myths to explain current experience, for instance “Darmok and Jalad on Tanagra”, or “Shaka, when the walls fell”. Basically, it’s like a reference to “Achilles’ heel”, “opening the Pandora’s box”, or “David and Goliath”. This is actually a great example of why translating things between very different cultures while retaining the nuance of meaning is hard, and in order to understand what a Chinese would mean by “jade mind”, you need to do quite a bit of reading of their mythology and symbolism; also, good luck translating kitsune or qilin.

Basically, in order for an American to truly understand some fundamentally un-American culture, such as Chinese or Indian, they would have to do so much reading and abandoning their own mental position in order to get into another’s skin, that they would stop being Americans, because what seems to define Americans assuming that they are the top of the world and the only valid measurement of value and achievement. And we are talking about understanding merely another human culture, not something profoundly alien, like an octopus that communicates through chromatophores and tentacles, or a dolphin that probably thinks in idiom that would be as foreign to us as phrases such as “bitter anguish” or “sweet recollection” to someone who lacks a sense of taste because they feed on sunlight.

I was asked, many times, why I use sanskrit or Tibetan terms to describe certain states of consciousness or spiritual substances, and the underlying assumption is that those words can be translated to English or Croatian for that matter, and I’m just making it difficult. The thing is, if I’m not translating it, it means that there is no word or phrase of equivalent meaning in the target language, and I’m leaving it in the original because that’s how it works. The people who discover something get to name it. The Americans discovered certain elements such as Americium, Berkelium and Californium, and they got to name them. What are the names of those elements in Chinese? There aren’t any, because they were unknown to the Chinese. Every language has names for copper, tin and iron, though; guess why. So, now that the Americans discovered those elements, everybody in every other culture will use those words to reference them, because that’s how it works. That’s also why there aren’t translations for brahman, kundalini, vajra, mantra, mudra or mandala. It’s not because I’m making it hard for no reason, but for the same reason the Mongols have no word for Einsteinium. Your language has no word for vajra because no member of your culture had enough experience with it to try to conceptualise it; as Wittgenstein would say, if you don’t have a word for it, it is beyond the limits of your world.

Sometimes, in order for you to be able to understand something really alien, you need to leave your own skin and become an alien being with an alien understanding, and leave your words, cognition and feelings behind completely. Then, you will possibly formulate new words for those experiences, and thus make them something within your world, and maybe you’ll abandon words completely. Some things are, in fact, more efficient for conveying emotion or meaning; just listen to cats formulating a long whining tirade of complaint and you’ll see what I mean. So, in order to express emotion, Cat might be more suitable than English, because it expresses emotion directly rather than just map and reference it.

Explanation of real things that are beyond the experience of the audience is a serious problem, and a good example is Pliny the Younger describing the eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompei and Herculaneum in 79 AD. He made an incredibly accurate and specific description of the eruption and the ash cloud, and yet it was historically seen as a metaphor of some kind because people in the West didn’t actually experience a pyroclastic eruption of that kind until Mt. Pinatubo, at which point they saw the ash cloud that looked like a pine tree, and said, hey, this looks exactly like Pliny the Younger’s description. Now, that type of volcanism is called a Plinian eruption, in his honour.

That’s another problem in describing things: you can be extremely accurate and specific in your description, but if your audience doesn’t have the experience you can invoke in order to form understanding, they will think you’re using metaphors or just talking about things that aren’t real, like fairies and unicorns. So that’s another very real limit of symbolic communication – it works by referencing another’s experience, and if there isn’t any to reference, you have a problem. Try describing some kind of an exotic fruit such as cherimoya or durian to someone who hasn’t seen and tasted it, and you’ll see the problem. Have them see and taste it and then give them the word for it, and now suddenly you have understanding and communication.