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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Replying to @Failed_Buddhist
Good to see that you realize that attempting to fix the collective is a fool's errand. The broken collective is a reflection of the broken individual. As in the micro, so in the macro.
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