I once thought that fixing politics (and other basic societal dysfunctions) takes precedence over mass awakening/spiritual maturity. But it seems like the problem with politics is fundamentally rooted in our individual psychological defects, making the latter the priority. 1/
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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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Replying to @Failed_Buddhist
it’s so impossibly difficult, because there are innumerable individuals whose basic self-respect is limited by environments in which there are no precedents for what that is on an inalienable level; rejecting an entire reality and taking a solitary path out is difficult and rare
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Well said. This is why compassion is more productive than hatred or blame. Everyone is born with evolutionary, cultural, and psychological conditioning. Some are born with a more dangerous set of conditioning than others. There is no "evil". Just varying degrees of dumb luck.
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