Conversation

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.
Quote Tweet
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.
Show this thread
8
44
Replying to
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.
4
13
Replying to and
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.):
Quote Tweet
Strive to be truly good all the way down for selfish reasons. It’s the optimal solution to many self-interested life problems.
1
2
Color me highly skeptical. I can’t think of a single historical example where this has unambiguously happened. Pockets of spiritual practice have at best played a minor supporting role. Kinda like how having a couple of tall guys around helps while say remodeling a house.
1
6
It’s the inner work version of the efficient markets argument at best, with indirect benefits being similar to “trickledown” and “there are positive externalities, and negative externalities will eventually be priced in” type wishful thinking, and far less compelling.
2
2
Replying to and
Right but while *markets* have externalities, *everything* doesn’t have externalities. So it comes down to are individual people long-run effectively 50.000001% neutral/powerless, bad, or good, contingently-in-interaction with other people and everything else.
2
1
If you try to write, you might write at a few mediocre essays. If you try to solve climate you might have a mediocre impact on a project. If you try to meditate, you might enjoy a few episodes of illumination. Beyond that first order, it’s a slightly evil crapshoot.
1
Show replies