Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Creating Reality Page 2 of 6

“Construction of Reality” Chapter 3: Being Aware

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On December 8, 2023

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This is the third chapter of my book “The Construction of Reality.” It’s first draft, so not completely edited, and is a reward for reaching a milestone in our fundraiser. The next milestone is $8,350 (a little over $2,000 from the last milestone), and will include chapters:

5. Identity and Identification (how we expand our bodies beyond our physical selves)

6. The Ritual (how we create identification)

7. Interaction ritual (how daily life creates identification and personality)

Being Aware

If you’re like most people, you have a memory which runs as follows. You left your home meaning to go somewhere, only to suddenly realize that you were actually heading to work, school or somewhere else you go often.

During the time you were travelling to the wrong place, you were conscious: your mind was preoccupied with something unrelated to where you were going.

What you weren’t, was aware of what you were doing. If you had been aware of where you were going, you wouldn’t have headed in the wrong direction. The sooner you became aware that you were going to the wrong place, the sooner you corrected.

Our bodies are automating machines. Perhaps you remember learning to tie your shoelaces? I don’t know about you, but I found it hard. Yet I don’t even think about it today. Every day I put on my shoes, and I can’t tell you which shoe I put on first, because I do it automatically.

Deliberate learning is about automating, and so is non-deliberate learning, as when we burn our hand on a stove and learn not to touch hot elements. Our bodies build it in.

The examples we’ve used so far are cases where if you want to be aware of what you’re doing, you can, but experts in how we use our body tell us that the body and brain are even more ruthless: if you aren’t using a perception, the body stops paying attention at a deeper level(x). Body-workers such as massage artists and physical therapists know that many people cannot feel parts of their body without extreme force applied and even when they can feel, it is extremely coarse.

Someone with good body sense may be able to pinpoint a pain exactly, while someone without it may simply have to say “my right upper back”. That’s all they can sense.

For them to learn to use their body in a better way, the first step is to teach them to sense the exact muscles. Thomas Hanna describes, in one example, pressing on the muscle around the shoulder blades, to bring those muscles into conscious awareness(x).

Awareness comes in grades. To really fix something, you need to not just know feel the problem, but to know the mechanics of the problem. “I tend to lean forward and hunch my shoulders.”

Until you know what you’re doing, you can’t change it. And generally, it helps to know why you’re doing something, as well.

Trying to change without awareness is as likely to make the problem worse as better.

This is just as true of what we call mental processes; of thoughts and feelings and beliefs, as it is of those we associate with the body.

We use the words emotion and feeling interchangeably because every emotion is actually a sensation in the body. It will be paired with an interpretation, which might be verbal. It’s quite possible to have a sensation and be confused. “Am I scared? Lightheaded? What is causing this feeling?” In many cases we have to learn what emotion a sensation is, and then we interpret if it’s good or bad. Desire for a carrot, good. Desire for black forest cake, maybe not so good.

Some of this is natural: a fear of heights seems wired in to humans, but most of our fears are learned. No one is born hating or fearing people with a different skin color, for example. No one is born a Muslim, Democrat, socialist or secularist.

Everything you once learned, you can change.

That doesn’t mean it is easy. It is often very hard, though there are techniques which make it easier. (If you really want to end your racism, go live where there are almost no people with your skin color or culture. Make yourself live there for a couple years, make friends with them and so on. That’ll do the trick for almost everyone.)

But before you can change something, you must be aware of it, and in most cases, to change it, you must be aware of its mechanics: of how it works now.

Humans tend to take how things are, for them or for others, as how things should be. Even when we don’t, we lack awareness of the processes which created the world we live in and which sustain it, and we lack belief that we can change those processes.

Much of this is poverty of imagination. We accept something like money as natural, though it isn’t. We accept all-day schooling of children by strangers even though the vast majority of humans never did any such thing. We are so used to buying everything we need that we can’t imagine producing it even though small groups of humans for most of human existence produced most of their own needs. If we have a religion it is almost certainly the religion of our parents, whether or not that religion would be best for us as individuals or for the world.

We… accept. And we often don’t really understand that our suffering is optional. We hate our jobs but every other job looks terrible or hard to get and we spend 40 years living for the weekends, then when we’re old, we retire and are often too sick or too used to working to enjoy the sudden influx of free time.

As individuals we have broad latitude to choose what reality we live in. The first step is being aware it is possible. The second step is being aware of how reality was created and chosen for us. The third step is a deep awareness that in most respects, the reality we live in is arbitrary. Other people live or have lived in very different ones. Ones we might like a great deal more. Why not change?

Societies are recipients of the decisions, mostly unaware decisions, of those who came before us. We are often unhappy with our societies, but when we try and change them we often fail, and when we succeed we often change society in ways that make many of us worse off.

Actual awareness of the mechanics which make our societies as they are is lacking. We don’t, as a group, really know. We flail around in the darkness “tax cuts will make the wealthy create more and better jobs!”

We try that.

Nope.

We rarely ask, for example, “Should we organize our lives around jobs? Is that the best way for humans to live?”

If we wish, as societies, to create a better reality, we must understand how we create the realities we live in today.

This book, then, is about that awareness, both for individuals and groups.

Become aware of how reality is created, and you can change it. This is more true today for individuals than for society, but with enough understanding, we can make it true for society as well.

I’ll publish the next chapter on Monday or Tuesday and if we get to $8, 350, we’ll do the next three. At $10,500, there’ll be three more chapters.

9.The Ritual Masters (How rituals create different types and classes of people)

10. The Ideologues (How identity is tied into story, ideology and meaning)

11. Reign of the Ideologues (How ideology is used to create civilizations and the payoffs for ideologues)

If you’d like to subscribe or donate, I’d appreciate it greatly. This blog is 100% supported by its readers, though it’s free to all to read.

“The Construction of Reality” Introduction & “The Social Facts Which Rule Us”

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On December 6, 2023

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As part of the annual fundraiser I promised to share some of the chapters of my book “The Construction of Reality.” At $6,200, we have the first four chapters (originally it was 5, but I’ve done some editing and combined two), “The Introduction”, “The Social Facts Which Rule Us”, “Being Aware”, and “Human Alone.”

If we make $8,350 we’ll have:

5. Identity and Identification (how we expand our bodies beyond our physical selves)

6. The Ritual (how we create identification)

7. Interaction ritual (how daily life creates identification and personality)

SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE

Introduction

I wonder if you have a memory of when you first realized many people are miserable or suffering.

I don’t.

I remember the time before. When I was six or younger the world just seemed open and fascinating and almost everyone was really nice. Well, some of the other kids weren’t, but the adults were.

I remember after, around age seven or so. I knew a lot of people were in pain, even if they tried to conceal it. My father and mother were two of the sufferers.

Soon enough I became one of them, because what makes the world good or bad is largely other people. The people closest to me lived in Hell, and they took me with them.

But I do remember the day when I realized humans were making humans suffer.

I grew up in Vancouver, a lovely coastal city on the west coast of Canada. These were the days when it was still a working class port for lumber from the interior of BC and not a third class world city.

Like all cities, essentially everything in it was created by humans. The roads, the houses, the schools. The trees were planted where humans wanted them planted. The teachers were there because of human decisions; the booze my parents drank was made by humans; the jobs my father, a forester went to, because humans had decided to chop down trees.

I liked trees a lot more than humans. No tree had ever done me wrong.

So many of these people were miserable.

But we; we humans, had created all of this. Not just the physical world, with its ugly asphalt roads, but the daily lives that made them miserable: the schools; the businesses; the money they squabbled over; the booze they used to cover the pain.

When I was a teenager, my father took a job in Bangladesh, then possibly the poorest country in the world.

Vancouver and Bangladesh were different levels of Hell. One better than the other, but both Hell

I didn’t get it.

Why, when we made all the decisions, would we choose to create hell for ourselves? Didn’t we all want to be happy? Didn’t we like being around happy people instead of miserable people? Since we made it, if it was making people miserable, why didn’t we make it different? Better?

The book you are reading today is part of a life-long quest to find out the answer.

We create the reality we live in.

Since we created it, we can change it, but first we have to understand what it is, why and how we made it the way it is.

Let’s start with what. Let’s look at what we’ve constructed in more detail.

Chapter 2: The Social Facts Which Rule Us

Reality is constructed first by our bodies. By our senses and universal emotions like fear and lust, anger and love. Being human orders the world for us before we take our first breath.

This is true of all animals, who, like humans, also change the environment to suit themselves. But humans have created a reality far, far from that of our forebears who ran in bands on the Savannah.

We have created a human world. Most of us live in cities; artificial environments created by us. We walk on streets laid out by humans, work and sleep and cook in buildings, drive in cars or take buses, trains and planes. We talk on cell phones and surf the internet. Even those who live in the country live on land which has been altered by agriculture and pasturing of animals humans domesticated. A farmer grows wheat which was bred over millennia (or genetically altered recently). The farmer raises animals humans have been raising for thousands of years. We eat the meat of cows and pigs and chicken; we dine on rice or wheat or vegetables we have tended for millennia and which we have bred to suit us.

As individuals we did not create almost any part of this physical world. We did not invent the techniques for caring for domesticated animals, growing vegetables or making smart phones.

We live in a physical world created by humans, many of whom are dead. Human life is human in a way that animal life is not animal. Animals have an effect on the environment, but it is minor compared to what humans have done to our world.

And this is just the physical side of the world. Just as important is the world of ideas: of social facts.

Look at the words you are reading right now. You didn’t invent writing, typing, any of these words or language itself. You spend your life thinking most of your thoughts in a language or languages created by humans, for humans and mostly by dead humans. The very structure of your thoughts was imposed on you.

You almost certainly receive your daily food in exchange for something called money which is probably either plastic woven to look like paper or electronic bits. Money has no intrinsic value, a million dollars in the middle of Antarctica would do nothing for you, most money isn’t even paper any more: you couldn’t burn it for heat. Yet most of us spend most of our waking day working for someone who gives us “money” and exchange it for most everything else we want.

In times of war and famine money may lose most of its value. Food, or cigarettes or sex may be worth more. Money’s value is a social fact.

When someone is killed by another human being, whether it was murder or not is a social fact. In war, if a soldier kills someone it is probably not murder. If the state is executing someone it is not murder. When police kill someone it is usually not considered murder. Social facts.

The quality and amount of health care provided to individuals is a social fact. It depends on where they live. In some countries it depends on how much money they have. In other countries it depends on how much power they have.

The amount of melanin in someone’s skin is a physical fact. That having a “black” name in America leads to half the interview requests for an identical resume compared to someone with a “white” name is a social fact(x).

Cannabis is almost certainly less physically harmful than tobacco or alcohol, but selling or possessing cannabis is far more likely to get you thrown in jail. In the US, during alcohol prohibition, this was not true. Alcohol is alcohol, its legal status is a social fact.

Social facts rule most of your life. They are layered on top of physical facts and tell you how to understand those facts, and how to act towards them. There are few more consequential decisions than “when should I kill someone?” or “when should someone receive health care and how good should it be? or, “should I hire someone and for how much?”

Not all ideas are social facts. You may believe something “ought” to be true, but often other people do not agree. You think your girlfriend or boyfriend shouldn’t cheat, they don’t agree; the state doesn’t care. But if you act on that idea, and so do other people, it’s a social fact. They may call her a cheater, ostracize her and so on. If no one acts on it, it is not a social fact.

A gang or mafia may believe that their members shouldn’t inform, and they may enforce this as best they can, but obviously the state does not. It is still a social fact if they can make it one, however.

You may also believe in ideas which are contrary to the ideas currently enforced by the state or other people. Perhaps you do not believe in intellectual property. Perhaps you think confessions obtained by torture shouldn’t be used in criminal proceedings. Perhaps you believe that women should or shouldn’t be able to have abortions.

These ideas may fall short of being social facts if no one acts on them. They are just ideas: how the world “ought” to be.

This social world is layered on top of the physical world created by our bodies and how they perceive and interact with objects around us. No amount of social facts will alter the solidity of a rock, or our need to breath.

Each of us lives inside these two worlds, worlds which were largely given to us.

Imposed on us.

At most we made a few choices from available worlds; available realities, but most of our choices were made for us.

The reality, I, a Canadian urban man live in is different from that of a woman Mexican subsistence farmer, let alone that of a plains Indian 700 years ago; a prole in the Roman Republic, or an Egyptian priest under the Pharoahs.

This is before we get to more differences that seem important to us today: say the difference between a conservative Republican Christian and his counterpart progressive Democratic atheist. A thousand years from now, those may seem like similar people, today they seem quite different.

Our bodies make us alive, but they make us different as well: to be tall or short is to experience the world differently. To have a strong constitution or a sickly one is to experience the world differently, as well.

And to be a woman or a man, likewise; so much so that men and women in some societies (Saudi Arabia today, Victorian England, or Manchu China) can be said to have such different experiences in life that they might as well live in different worlds: different realities.

Reality is inside-out, first, because we have bodies and senses which organize our experience of the world, and do so before the first drop of parental interference, training or culture.

But it is outside-in in most of the ways which make us different from each other and from other humans who have lived in the past.

Each of us is formed by time, place and position. Even if we were both male, with similar bodies, in Republican Rome, were I born to a Plebian family and you to a Patrician family, our worlds would part, and even if both of us were born to Patrician families the particulars of our parents, tutors and other incidentals would leave us different. Position within a place and time, added to different bodies makes up most of the individuality which divides us from our peers.

Even the thoughts we think, and many of the emotions we feel happen because of social facts and ideals. No one was born loving God and Country, or hating certain religions, or believing that people have a right to happiness or that we should obey teacher.

Our thoughts, our emotions, come from other people. From social facts and learning and conditioning. They may be the most intimate things we own, sometimes even more than our bodies, and yet… in a real way, they are not ours.

So to understand how reality has been constructed we will have to swoop from the heights of macro-history; of the effects of great ideas, of technologies like gunpowder and farming, or organization and vast tribal identities, to the depths of our inner experience: our thoughts, our feelings, our urges and beliefs.

Reality is an experience. Each of us lives in a reality, feels it and thinks about it. As we live we change the reality we live in, or it changes around us, and again, our experience of the world changes.

To write a book on the construction of reality while neglecting how we can change reality would be barren. Though careful examination reveals that most of human reality is imposed on us from outside, by time place and position: none of which we chose, we do not have to accept this passively.

While even the great struggle to change our shared world; our shared reality; all of us can change the reality we live in, by taking some control of our circumstances; or denied that: by changing how our bodies and brains interpret the world.

So we will cover the vast currents of history and pre-history. Of identity, organization, technology and ideology. We will speak of human empathy, human violence, and human limits, because it is human limits which have the greatest affect on the world we create and our acceptance of the world that we are given.

But in so doing, we will not neglect the personal.

Let us then, start from the inside. Let us start with you.

I’ll publish the next two chapters this week and if we get to $8, 350, we’ll do the next two. At $10,500, there’ll be three more chapters.

9.The Ritual Masters (How rituals create different types and classes of people)

10. The Ideologues (How identity is tied into story, ideology and meaning)

11. Reign of the Ideologues (How ideology is used to create civilizations and the payoffs for ideologues)

If you’d like to subscribe or donate, I’d appreciate it greatly. This blog is 100% supported by its readers, though it’s free to all to read.

Fundraising Update & New Rewards

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On November 27, 2023

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We’ve raised approximately $4,200.

I’ve recently been revising my book “The Creation of Reality” and it occurred to me that I’d like to release some chapters as part of this fundraiser. The book is written, just not completely edited, so rewards will be released during the fundraiser as the goals are reached.

The first five chapters at $6,200:

1. Introduction (why this matters);

2. Why do our societies make so many miserable?

3. The Social Facts Which Rule Us (Why and how the reality we created bends us to its will.)

4. Being Aware (Until you understand how reality is being created you can’t change it in beneficial ways.)

5. Human Alone (How are our personal reality is created)

Some of these chapters are short, thus five of them rather than the three in the other two tranches.

Chapters six through eight at $8,350.

6. Identity and Identification (how we expand our bodies beyond our physical selves)

7. The Ritual (how we create identification)

8. Interaction ritual (how daily life creates identification and personality)

Chapters nine thru eleven at $10,500

9.The Ritual Masters (How rituals create different types and classes of people)

10. The Ideologues (How identity is tied into story, ideology and meaning)

11. Reign of the Ideologues (How ideology is used to create civilizations and the payoffs for ideologues)

The book has 42 chapters, so this is about a quarter of it and includes about half of the fundamental principles.

If you’d like to read these pieces and support my writing in general please subscribe or donate.

The “It Can’t Be Done Because It’s Never Been Done” Problem

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On August 15, 2023

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This chart is going around:

This is a useful chart, in that it shows that we aren’t reducing absolute use of energy sources which increase global warming: the gains you constantly hear about, at a global level (there are country exceptions, such as Germany) are relative, not absolute and it’s absolute that matters.

But it’s a dangerous chart in the sense that it suggests that because we’ve never done something, we can’t. In the specific case it is misleading: we’ve never had any particular reason to not keeping old forms of energy, and energy revolutions are uneven: in Europe and America and Canada, biomass is used a lot less than it was in the past, but as population expands, especially in less developed countries, well, of course biomass keeps being used, especially for cooking, and as long as global population keeps increasing, even reduced per-capita energy use could easily lead to higher numbers.

But the larger issue is the “we can’t do what we’ve never done” before idea. It’s obviously untrue technologically.  Back in the 19th century many leading scientists believed powered flight was impossible, to give just one of thousands of example. But it’s also true socially: we never had universal sufferage states, for example. Older Democracies had very sharp limits on the franchise. Modern corporations are a new form of social organization though they have some similarities to older forms (primarily religious: temples and, in particular, monasteries). Double entry book-keeping had massive social effects, so did various religious innovations and so on.

“We’ve never done it so we can’t do it”, with standard excuses of “it’s just human nature” (as if human nature isn’t very plastic) is the true doomerism.

We have changed how we live, socially, culturally and technologically, over and over again and we can do it again.

If we can’t, if we are nothing but larger versions of bacteria multiplying in a petri dish, only pretending to sentient, then we are doomed and in a certain sense, deserve to be doomed.

Only if we can change and take conscious control of how we change, recognizing that most (but definitely not all) of the constraints we have put on our ability to change are cultural and created by us, can we have an expectation of a good future ahead of us.

I’m betting we can do things we’ve never done before because any other bet leads places we really don’t want to go.

This is a donor supported site, so if you value the writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

How Religions Go Wrong (Fire From The Gods 3)

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On July 20, 2023

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Back in February I started a series on how the great solutions like Christianity, Buddhism, Capitalism, Marxism and many more have tried to fix the problems created by our ability to invent creations, like agriculture, industrialization and, indeed, the internet, which wind up doing us vast harm.

Start by reading:

Fire From The Gods: the Original Sins of Agriculture and Industrialism And Hope For The Future

Then read the first post, about Buddha’s quixotic quest to end suffering.

“Fuck Suffering”, The Buddhist Solution (Part One)

Then I wrote the third article on how Buddhism goes wrong and realized that most of what I was writing about what actually applicable to most religions and I stalled out: perhaps I had been wrong or perhaps I didn’t understand the situation as well as I thought (not quite the same thing.)

So I’m going to continue this series now with the ways that religions, in general, go wrong, before returning to how specific ideologies (remember, religions are just a subset of ideology) go wrong. Since I’ve already started, I’ll make Buddhism the primary example religion.

I was caught on the horns of another dilemma before even the first attempt.. If one is going to talk honestly about mysticism, not just religion, and great religions are born from mysticism even if they often lose it over time, one can’t adopt a secular materialistic worldview. And when it comes to this I have a particular problem: I’ve done a lot of work and had experiences that standard materialism, as a metaphysics, can’t explain and that “skeptics” would consider bullshit.

The problem with religion in actual practice is that “weird shit” happens. I can’t think of any advanced practitioner who I’m friends enough with to allow honesty (because talking about this is a bad idea) who hasn’t dealt with world-view shattering weirdness.

To write this article without talking about that at least a bit would be dishonest. At the end of the day, I have only one rule of blogging, I tell the truth as I know it. I may be wrong; I might be full of shit, but I don’t write what I don’t believe to be true.

So let’s get to it. Since I know that most people won’t have clicked thru to the articles I linked, I’m going to quote a chunk of the Buddhist piece, on what the Buddha was trying to do.

…the essence of the Buddha’s question is heroic to the point of being quixotic. Siddhartha saw suffering and instead of saying “well, it’s inevitable, I just have to accept it” instead determined:

Fuck suffering. I refuse to accept it is inevitable and I will dedicate my life to finding a way to end suffering.

Now that’s heroic to the extent of imbecility, except that he seems to have succeeded.

This is the core of all great ideologies, of which religions are a subset. The are based on a heroic ideal: a heroic conception of what it is possible for humans to achieve. Something extremely idealistic, often to the point of near insanity.

Now the first thing to note is that Buddhism, as preached by the Buddha, is based on genuine belief in reincarnation. The Buddha famously refused to discuss almost all metaphysics, but rebirth was baked into Buddhism at the start. You’ve been born before and you’re going to be born again. This was horrifying to Indians of the time, and rightfully so. I’ve never understood why people who believe in only one life think reincarnation is a cop-out mechanism: nothing says you’re coming back to nothing but good lives or that horrible things won’t happen. And each time, you start over from near scratch.

This belief in reincarnation is important, it is part of the social contract between Buddhist monks, who often did not have monasteries, but wandered around like medieval European friars, begging for food and owning nothing they couldn’t carry, and the lay people who supported them, kept them alive and if they did have monasteries, were often the ones who built them.

I remember reading about how when a forest monk was found to have left the forest near a Thai village, the villagers decided that he was enlightened and holy and built a monastery for him. They built it because they felt they received something from having a monastery with an enlightened master in charge.

In the same book, the author, who was trying out to see if he wanted to become a monk, and thus following some of the rules, when begging for food said “thank you”. The woman who gave him the food was so offended she went to the Abbot (no longer the original master) and told him she and her family would never give food to the monastery’s monks ever again.

She wasn’t giving food to the monks out of charity. It was a bargain: I give you food, and your lineage owes me. Thank you was considered an attempt to make her act into charity.

This is based on the idea that monks who make actual progress get powers. They owe the people who supported them while they were working, and their lineage owes those people as well. In exchange they use their powers to help those people, perhaps in this life and perhaps in future lives, including helping them have future better lives and, when they are read, to become enlightened themselves.

Christian monks had the same deal going in many cases: huge amounts of money, land, treasure and people were given to monasteries because they prayed for the souls of the dead and their prayers were held to help those alive.

Now to a materialist, this is obviously a crock of shit, and intended to defraud the lay people into supporting monks who can then just laze around. And often enough it is.

But, again, if you do enough spiritual work, weird shit starts to happen or you see weird shit. I knew a guru who could pluck specific words and phrases out of my mind, even over the phone. He wasn’t cold reading me, the knowledge was exact and precise, not just “you’re thinking about X”, but the precise words in my head. I’ve seen other things.

Weird shit is real, and people who do a lot of spiritual work often develop what might as well be called powers. This isn’t D&D or movie magic, they don’t throw fireballs, but it’s stuff that the materialist paradigm doesn’t explain.

So the social deal in a lot of communities is “we support the monks, and they help us.” Some of that is absolutely basic stuff like giving good advice, teaching the lay members and so on, but some of it is “we help you, you use your magic powers to help us and even if we don’t get enlightened in this life, you’ll help us get enlightened in a future life.” This was especially true in the past, but it is still true in some of the most Buddhist countries in the world, like Thailand and Burma.

This goes wrong in a lot of ways. The simplest is that many monasteries and monks are not sincerely working to get enlightened. Thai monasteries are famous for fat, lazy and greedy monks; for entire monasteries full of people just looking for an easy life. This has been a problem all thru Buddhist history.

In Christian monasteries, drunk monks were common, corruption was common, in some particularly egregious cases nuns were prostitutes, though in general, as time went on, the nuns had a better reputation than the monks.

The second is something that Buddhist literature brings up again and again: magic isn’t enlightenment. Having powers does not mean you are enlightened in the sense of “not suffering.” It sure as  hell does not mean you are compassionate or good.

People do a bit of spiritual work and they get powers, some of which are not magic, but simply applied psychology based on remarkable feats of control over consciousness, and people who are suffering go to them for help. But as they aren’t good people or enlightened, what they do may be better for them than for the people looking for that help, or it may be well- meaning but ineffective.

This is especially a problem in Buddhism because Buddhism isn’t about getting “powers”, it is about ending suffering. In Christianity this is dealt with as the dichotomy of those who get their powers from God and those who get them from Satan.

As is always the case, there are a lot of people who are unhappy and suffering and looking for a savior or saviors. It’s hard to make any big gains, to radically change your life for the better in a way that doesn’t fall pray to falling back to your “normal” level of happiness. When that does happen, people tend to get fixated on whatever or whoever they feel was responsible.

It’s easy to leverage “spiritual” attainments into worldly power and wealth. In the modern world this is greatly on display with the Indian “God Men”, who are some of the richest and most powerful people in India and whose support is one of the main factors in the current Prime Minister’s rise to power, which he has used to embrace xenophobic and fascist policies and to oppress Muslims and other non Hindu inhabitants of India, of whom there are hundreds of millions.

Tibet was a feudal theocratic, complete with horribly mistreated serfs and nasty dungeons. “We have special knowledge and/or powers and/or virtues you must serve us” is a way that all major religions go bad and Buddhism is not an exception.

But most of what we’re talking about here applies to all religions, not just Buddhism. The monastic abuses happened in Christianity as in Buddhism: it’s an issue with the form. Christian monks were absolutely trading divine blessings for secular support, and if those blessings were often of a different form than Buddhist ones, the problems were essentially the same: monks without attainments, fat and lazy; or monks who were not holy but had some accomplishments abusing those accomplishments.

In all these cases, however, the central goal is forgotten or perverted. Buddhism’s goal is to end suffering and when it’s not possible (yet) to end it, to reduce it. Thus the Buddhist Indian emperor Asoka instituted laws against abuse of animals, for example, and in Tibet excavation for buildings would include carefully removing the dirt then sorting thru it to remove all the insects and worms so as to not harm them. Vegetarianism is often associated with sincere Buddhism in places where it’s possible (it’s not in Tibet) and for the same reason: to reduce suffering of animals.

In Christianity the goal includes certain moral attainments, including certain actions. If you get powers and you aren’t a good person, well, you’ve missed the boat. In Buddhism, the goal is to end suffering, and if you haven’t done that for yourself  or you aren’t at least reducing suffering in others and yourself, you’re off the boat.

Implicit in Buddhism, and a problem it shares with other religions which seek enlightenment, is the idea that enlightenment is the “best thing”, better than anything else you can ever have. As with Spanish conquistadors and priests burning pagans to death because they believed that would allow them to avoid Hell and the torment is nothing compared to an eternity in Hell, Buddhism is prone to abuses in the name of getting people enlightened.

The doctrine of “expedient means”, which is not something the Buddha ever said himself, allows one to lie to and mislead people. The metaphor is that if children are in a burning building and lying to them is necessary to get them out of the building, you do it. Enlightenment is the best thing, lying is justified.

This is different from the more standard Buddhist test for what to say, “is it both true and helpful.”

In Christianity, we have the crusades and the inquisition, and it is hard to see how one can justify that from a religion worshipping a man-god who said “love they enemies” and “turn the other cheek.”

Likewise, while a lot of guru abuse is because of Gurus looking out for themselves, some of it is because the Guru genuinely thinks that the abuse will help the student become enlightened.  (Gurus are particularly a thing in Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism, but Zen Buddhism has often had a real problem with masters beating students. A rap with a stick and a beating are quite different.)

Any religion or ideology which believes in a redeemed state will lead to otherwise evil or immoral acts being considered acceptable in the name of the cause. Of course this is true of every major ideology: capitalism, Marxism, and democracy, among others.

The “best thing” problem exists in all great ideologies I can think of: there is a type of life; type of person, or both, who is best and that person is idealized and allowed to do things no one else is. In our modern world it might be the “job creators” in the European Middle Ages it was rulers (chosen by God), knights and monks/priests/hermits. The best life was either the life of glory and honor, or a life dedicated to God.

Some of these best people will always abuse their power and privilege and the percentage of them who do so is a good indicator of how corrupt a society is and how far an ideology has fallen.

Likewise the best life sucks energy and resources away from other lifestyles and hurts the people who are not in the best life. Tibetan serfs were treated abominably, as were European ones. Low caste and casteless Hindus are treated worse than cows. In our modern world those who don’t make much or any money are generally treated terribly, and since the suburbs was (and still is, to many) the ideal life, other types of life were sacrificed to create those houses with white picket fences.

At the base of any ideology; an religion, is a heroic view of the world. A great dream. But by prioritizing towards that great dream, classes of good people are created. Classes of good lives are created. Creating those good lives denigrates other lives. This isn’t automatically bad, but it’s very easy for it to go bad. “Good” people are entitled, we feel, to more power and resources. Bad people to less. It is the nature of the process, you can’t create the good without creating the bad. (This includes fairly simple things like being peaceful is good therefore being violent is bad, so don’t believe that creating the bad is always, well, bad.)

We’ve talked about religions here, but we’ll return to show, even more, how the common failure points of religions have their failure points in ideologies. (One that some readers may have picked up on is the similarity between monastries and corporations.)

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The Disastrous Rise of STEM

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On May 1, 2023

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STEM includes the natural sciences, math, engineering, and technology-related fields. It’s all the rage, and at the same time universities are shutting down or reducing humanities and social science faculties and offerings.

In one sense this is a simple result of market forces: university is ludicrously expensive, especially in the US (but tuition has risen massively in many other countries) and the “degree premium” has declined. Once just having a bachelor’s degree was enough to get you a good job, now it’s enough to let you apply, competing against a ludicrous number of other candidates, for a wage that often won’t allow you to afford a house or children.

But STEM jobs are in demand, although this may be changing. The current downturn has seen a large numbers of coders laid off and Chat-AIs threaten a lot of programming jobs, though I suspect less than it seems, so far.

I bow to none in my admiration for science, but our society suffers from a simple problem: we’re doing mostly the wrong things with our technology. For all the increases in renewable energy, the climate change and ecological collapse charts  show no change in trajectory. We’re in ecological overshoot, and we’re accelerating it.

This is not a technological problem. We’ve known what to do for a long time, and we haven’t used the technology we have to fix it.

To put it more simply, more technologists just pours fuel on the fire.

A fairly strong case can be made that our problems have been made worse by technology, but more to the point, the solution to our problems is not technological. Our problems require social and ethical change: they are problems related to the social sciences and humanities. We have to do the right things, not the wrong ones.

I’m not sure that the social sciences and humanities have a solution, but they are at least oriented in the right direction, with the exception of Economics and perhaps political science.

Now there are larger problems with academia. For the current topic, let’s just say that they’ve become disconnected from society, and mostly aren’t working on solutions, because of an overemphasis on sterile “research”, publishing findings for other specialists which don’t get to the general population or influence elites for the better.

But a start to solving those problems is to not worship funneling more programmers to figure out how to serve ads better and create superior echo chambers and walled gardens.

A lack of programmers isn’t holding us back. A lack of good ideas becoming influential is.

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The Basis Of All Law

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On March 7, 2023

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All laws are ultimately backed up by “if you don’t we will send violent men after you” and we should never, ever, pretend otherwise.

Mao’s “all power comes from the barrel of a gun”, or pre-gunpowder, guys with swords or clubs, is, however, only one-third true.

What matters isn’t the violent men, it is controlling the violent men. If all power came from violence, then it would be guilds of violent men who run society directly, but as powerful as police and armies are, in most places it isn’t military men or cops who who make the laws and are in the executive positions and when they are it is usually in a second or third tier country.

Ideology, whether religious or secular, is used to control violent men. It’s about legitimacy: about who has the right to give orders and what violence is legitimate. All power comes from controlling violent men, but that doesn’t mean that the violent men are necessarily in charge, especially after the first generation. Mao was a military guy: his successors after the Long March generation aged out of power were not.

George Washington was a general, most of his successors were not and when they were, as with Grant and Eisenhower, it was generally right after an important war.

Of course there are periods of history where almost every ruler was a military man, but even in such cases, control over the violent men was what mattered. The Roman Praetorian Guard choosing emperors makes this clear.

But moving back to the first sentence: law is enforced by violent men. The idea that there is some “social contract” is nonsense. You do what you’re told because their are consequences if you don’t. Those sanctions may start with fines or losing your job, but if you decide to do things the law says you can’t, well, the violent men show up. The whole history of cops going into homeless encampments, taking all the homeless people’s possessions and destroying them makes this rather clear.

At its heart law is violent. That’s why when you make a law, you should always be thinking “is this important enough that someone should be beaten up, killed or imprisoned for it? Is it important enough to use violence to enforce?”

There is a trade-off here. There’s a fair bit of evidence that many (not all) pre-historical societies were very violent. The early kings reduce internal violence by centralizing violence. “Everyone and everything belongs to me and only I and people I give permission to get to be violent.”

Whether it reduced violence overall, however, is less clear, because societies on the edge of these “civilized” states suffered a lot of violence from the civilized folk. There’s a perception that barbarians were the violent ones, threatening civilization, but when you look into the behavior of Rome or China towards the tribes on their borders, it’s abominable. As with many such things the question of “who started it” is impossible to answer, but that “civilized” nations were very often hyper-violent to their neighbours isn’t in doubt, and when they weren’t, they were constantly meddling.

The Mongols, when they invaded China, had a lot of reasons to hate the Chinese based on how China had constantly meddled in their affairs, including militarily. The Romans slaughtered “barbarians” in vast numbers. And so on.

Violence is, sadly, part of the human condition, and so far our solution sets for managing it at scale have been bad: either externalizing it, effectively enslaving most of the population as a byproduct, or both.

Finding a better way: a way that doesn’t produce war or tyranny, is one of our tasks.

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“Fuck Suffering”, The Buddhist Solution (Part One)

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On February 27, 2023

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In “Fire From The Gods” I argued that humanity has proven consistently unable to handle new technologies: that we have usually wound up making them do more harm than good. This is a first in a series on looks at past attempted solutions.

Now the people who made these solutions usually didn’t say that they were trying to solve the problems of technology, though it’s implicit in some myths, like that of the eating from the tree of knowledge and being kicked out of paradise. But there is a wave of major solution sets being proposed all at about the same time. This is known as the Axial revolution, and includes Socrates/Plato, Confucius and Buddha. Zoraoaster comes in a bit earlier, Jesus rather later and the Jewish prophets (who spend a lot of time on social issues) scattered around thru the period.

The Buddha was born a nobleman, and during his life his father was conquered. While called a “king”, his father really lead a coalition of nobles and warriors: clans. He wasn’t a powerful king in the sense of having the ability to enforce his will. The Kings who were rising during this period in India were, and it was one of them who conquered his father. Indeed the Buddha’s time was one of huge prosperity in the part of India he lived in: probably this was the most prosperous area in in the world. They were urbanizing and for those who got in on the prosperity, standard advice was to keep one-third of one’s profits for oneself, give one-third to one’s friends and give the final third away.

They were filthy rich.

At the same time they were deeply dissatisfied and a large group of people renounced and tried to find a better way of living. These people were admired: they weren’t considered to be bums, but because they lived with few possessions and were trying to find a way out for everyone, were generally looked up to. It is that group Siddhartha joined.

Now the story of Siddhartha is that he was brought up by his father with all suffering concealed from him: aging, death and disease in particular, because a prophecy said that if he saw such, he would leave. Eventually he did and he left.

But, and this is important, the essence of the Buddha’s question is heroic to the point of being quixotic. Siddhartha saw suffering and instead of saying “well, it’s inevitable, I just have to accept it” instead determined:

Fuck suffering. I refuse to accept it is inevitable and I will dedicate my life to finding a way to end suffering.

Now that’s heroic to the extent of imbecility, except that he seems to have succeeded.

This is the core of all great ideologies, of which religion’s are a subset. The are based on a heroic ideal: a heroic conception of what it is possible for humans to achieve. Something extremely idealistic, often to the point of near insanity.

Buddhism is a heroic ideology, just like Christianity and Marxism and the Declaration of Independence and Confucianism and even Capitalism (to name only a few, but a few we will be covering.)

On a personal note, having done a lot of work and meditation and met a fair number of masters who seem to “have it” I’d say the Buddha succeeded: his way works. But, unfortunately, it doesn’t work for everyone, at least not in one life. (If reincarnation is a thing.)

Buddhist societies have sometimes extended the mandate. Asoka, the first Buddhist King of India had, so far as I know, the world’s first animal welfare laws. Construction in Buddhist Tibet was slow and difficult, because they would dig out the foundations very carefully, sift thru the dirt and remove the insects and worms and so on so they didn’t kill them.

Even when suffering cannot be ended, we can reduce it. The reduction of suffering and, when possible, its end, is the goal of Buddhism.

Mahayana Buddhism, with its Boddhisattva ideal, is an extension of this. Final enlightenment is said to remove one from the cycle of reincarnation (this doesn’t necessarily mean the individual stops existing, but they stop coming back here.) So a Boddhisattva swears to not accept final enlightenment until all sentient beings are enlightened. They’re going to stick around and keep helping, thru multiple lives if necessary.

We’re all ending suffering together

That’s the Mahayana extension.

Now of the great solutions, Buddhism is in the group I consider to have done less harm than good, but it’s definitely been perverted at various times. Like all ideologies, like all great ideals, there are ways it goes wrong. We’ll deal with that in the next article, but I wanted the articles separated, and this will be a pattern, because I want people to focus on the dream, on the ideal, on the greatness of the initial conception and its beauty. That beauty is there in all great ideologies; all of them, or they would not have succeeded.

Sometimes you have to dig a bit to find it, though not in Buddhism, but it’s always there. Just as in dealing with enemies, even when it’s an ideology you have (or perhaps you hate all ideologies) acknowledging whatever virtues there are is important. Great ideologies succeed, in part, because of some seed of great beauty: something wonderful.

If you want to understand the ideology, you cannot just look at all the evil it has done, or what you hate about it. You must find the beauty. If you haven’t, you aren’t close to the truth. If I skip some ideologies, it will be because I can’t see the core beauty that obvious exists in them. (Islam perhaps, if I can’t figure it out while I’m doing this series.

We’ll continue with the failures of Buddhism: the ways it either went wrong, or failed to achieve its dream. But understand that failing to go all the way doesn’t mean good wasn’t done, for any ideology, or even that more good wasn’t done than ill, especially for a period of time.

See you soon.

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