Our cognitive biases and apish psychology pose hard barriers to cultural change on a global scale. We didn't evolve to deal w /issues of large-scale cooperation and shared ethical intuitions in a world where the systems that enabled those things in the past are going obsolete. 2/
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What's more, our apish psychology prevents us from even being able to consider and grasp how this inherited cognitive structure is leading us toward self-destruction. It's a viciously cruel cycle, to the point of being almost darkly comical. 3/
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We don't tend to think of civilizational problems as being the result of our collective cognitive limitations, and we don't think of the solutions as requiring us to personally confront and attempt to overcome these limitations. 4/
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Instead, we blame other tribes or ideologies and believe that if we could just eradicate these imagined enemies then everything will naturally sort itself out. This view is inherently flawed. It rests on a subjective sensation of certainty in one's own worldview. 5/
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If the solution to all my problems is thought to be my tribe winning, my ideology coming out on top, then conflict is inevitable. But the real enemy is not the other tribe or the opposing ideology; it is the very basic psychological defects that we ALL share. 6/
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Therefore, the only way out of this mess is for each of us, as individuals, to shift our focus from eliminating the perceived social, moral, and ideological defects of others to reprogramming our own fundamental psychological structure. 7/
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Unfortunately, this leads me to an unavoidable pessimism. For such a shift to be successful, individuals on a massive scale would have to acknowledge the nature of their own humanity and work to fix themselves before attempting to fix others. 8/
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These individuals would also need to have enough social, political, or religious influence to convince a lot of others to do the same, such that we rapidly see a huge spike in the number of awakened people across every culture, political party, and religious system. 9/
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I'm not at all confident that this is viable. We can't put awakening in the water supply, and people are unlikely to do spiritual work that doesn't already fit in with their existing spiritual (or anti-spiritual) paradigm. 10/
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Our rate of technological progress is also far outpacing our spiritual & ethical progress, making the prospect that we'll drive ourselves to extinction all the more likely. I'm by no means a believer of miracles, but it's gonna take something very much like one to save us. 11/11
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I thought about this today too. Partly it’s a problem of development. We’re born knowing nothing, have to half our lives just learning what we need to know to survive.
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Yes, and our institutions fail at teaching us how to best survive together rather than on our own. The decline of religion was a good first step, but the nihilism that's replacing it can do just as much harm. As a society we must realize that there is a way beyond both extremes.
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Historically, cynicism and greed could be masked by religion, and religion used as a tool to fuel these injustices. Now, cynicism and greed are out in the open. We have to learn to tackle human nature head-on.
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