Call the sheep dumb but maybe they just don't take the reports of the wolf seriously. I mean, this little box tells me all kinds of stories. Aliens. Spaceships. Monsters. One gets jaded.
Find a way to make money where you sell your services directly to the customer. No boss or job. Flexible schedule. Good money.
Yes, drug dealer is one such, but there are others.
Check out http://fleen.org
Down towards the bottom there is (among other things) a link to a paper explaining the stuff.
Some people need a master. Children tempted to drink gasoline, for example.
Assuming that the control could be resisted, call that a test. A test of self-awareness. If you can resist then you get free will, if you don't then you don't. It could be appropriate either way.
Assume there's a legitimately strong argument for their goodness and smartness.
You can't make better people and better cattle at the same time.
Imagine you were a billionaire. Which do you want?
In other words.
You can stuff their heads with memes and talking-points all day, get them shouting the party slogans in chorus.
But you can't give them the initiative to actually do something.
(Or to think for themselves for that matter. It rather contradicts the whole stuffed-head thing)
Lemme see if I can put that in a succinct meme.
We have created a parallel reality. A consensual dream. And, when you live in a society, skill at navigating the consensual dream is more useful than skill at navigating reality.
That probably covers it sufficiently. Translations for non-sexual contexts is easy.
So we enter post-scarcity but everybody is still playing the same games.
It could be the effects of ancestral trauma. We see people expressing extreme poverty behavior even tho it happened a couple generations back.
It could be genetic. Climbing the social ladder is arguably what we're born to do.
This would suggest some kind of therapy is called for.
I think there was a Greg Bear where humanity encountered an alien race with a nice therapy that became popular among humans. Probably an allegory for meditation.
Talsit?
Yeah, we should create a c/PedanticNonanswers too
Ok, the obvious : our society-programming is just that powerful. So we are all eyebrows-deep embedded in a useful insanity.
But you'd think we'd struggle against our restraints a bit more. That it might even be common. If nothing else, for the sake of art, science, economics.
"How impressed everybody is" is the basis of money, law, self-worth and our models of reality. But that's a pretty shabby basis if you ask me.
I'd call it a cultural artifact. We used to get married very young. In some cultures the kids are introduced to sex by the grandparents. And of course in our own culture the ideal of sexy beauty is a supermodel who looks like a 13 year old boy. It's a whirlwind wrapped in a psychosis for sure.
The subjects that you can't even bring up without getting downvoted, banned, fired, expelled, cancelled etc.
Data. Lor.
Lore.
Data and Lore are 2 different kinds of information.
That just occurred to me.
I mean, we could speculate and explore the strange future and stuff. Just without that tired trope of "well, science and technology progressed a bunch and then we got this really great machine".
I mean there's gotta be another way. Examples?
If it doesn't feel right then it's hard (impossible) to give a shit. I hear that a lot here.
Money, grades, the advice of revered authority. None of it works. I just blow it off. And suffer of course. But I'm still poking along.
But a couple of things have felt right. And those things go very well. I can draw, I can write software. I can successfully give my attention to a project like that.
One such thing is meditation. Whatever's going on with ADHD, meditation messes with it. I found the button in the center of my head that makes ADHD happen. It feel 100% right. It's like I found a magic thing.
So if you are an ADHD guy then maybe it would feel right for you too.