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Been mulling this ever since banana tweeted it. There's something here that goes beyond mere strategic incompetence (executives choosing not to know how to use the coffee machine) and strategic ignorance (Sherlock Holmes choosing not to know the earth goes around sun)
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Refusing to know about things is a valid form of civil disobedience
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The thing is, ignorance about things to which the notion of civil disobedience even applies is far harder to achieve. You must remain ignorant not just of facts ("who is Trump") but general environmental sentiment ("why are people angry all the time lately?")
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The ONLY way to achieve that is to leave the environment that has a charged sentimental context around the facts you refuse to know. It's easy to not-know astronomy (just don't go to the planetarium or watch discovery channel) and avoid looking up on clear nights.
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It is much harder to not-know things that are clearly affecting minds around you and reshaping social realities. You'd have to either become hypernormallly oblivious, or make up alternative explanations ("oh, daemonic forces are abroad because saturn is in the house of pisces")
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To the extent strategic incompetence also plays a role in your posture, you're also going to have trouble with unskilled and/or necessary activities, like more stringent airport security, documentation requirements, etc. This is Geselleschaft equivalent of Gemeinschaft sentiment
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But it is possible. It is possible to retreat in ways that achieve this kind of "civil disobedience". You just have to do an extreme escaping-reality type retreat, moving in physical and lifestyle space to where the sentiment cannot creep.
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The degenerate form of this is what I'e been derisively calling waldenponding. A very personal and rather selfish pattern of retreat (if you're otherwise mentally healthy) that has none of the redeeming features of effective civil disobedience.
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What banana is talking about is a broader kind of disengagement that is focused and tactical. You don't retreat from all societal engagement. You retreat along specific information dimensions to deny specific zeitgeist demons the attention energy they feed on.
If all the political establishment does for their end of the bargain of *keeping* citizens informed is create FUD and push viral-bullshit buttons of all sorts, they broke the contract first :D
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In fact, "informed citizenry" is better understood as "staying informed where they want to keep you in the dark" (in the spirit of "journalism is printing what somebody doesn't want printed, everything else is PR")
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Of course, this also inevitably creates justification for conspiracy thinking. "What they don't want you to know" is an invitation to wild speculation. Duty to stay informed != aptitude for processing it in reasonably intelligent ways.
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