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Good thread. This belief in collective consciousness raising being somehow automatically materially transformative for the world is Ayn Rand style silliness for the woo crowd. I encountered and developed a permanent-eye-roll 🙄 response to both around 1989 in high school.
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I want to talk about why I'm so bone-deep hostile to the "consciousness movement" while being a life-long meditator. First, an appropriate soundtrack for this little bit of thinking youtube.com/watch?v=CNnKau Thread on.
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Morality is orthogonal to what Vinay is talking about. “Everybody meditate and all problems will vanish” is not a moral project. Moral effects are part of the wishful magical thinking about the expected impacts. Spiritual striving doesn’t necessarily induce any useful morality.
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I'd also say that individual morality can't solve for systemic incentives. It's sort of a statistical question, some may survive "moral hazards" but on average we can't expect that.
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It can spontaneously pop out of “amoral” practice, like it happy-path “should,” but it takes thousands of hours of individual effort, with a lot of failure modes and no guarantee of success. (So not a pop. level sol’n.) I mean something vaguely like this (but w more nuance etc.):
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Strive to be truly good all the way down for selfish reasons. It’s the optimal solution to many self-interested life problems.
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True. It also requires the _actionable_ realm of the personal. “True unity...between man and nature, and man and man, can arise only in a form of action that does not fragment the whole of reality.” - David Bohm
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Likewise #JohannBaptistMetz, "Will we actually allow [Auschwitz] to be the end point, the disruption which it really was, the catastrophe of our history, out of which we can find a way only through a radical change of direction achieved via new standards of action?"
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