Blameless — Humans Just Can't Help Themselves

Dear fellow-sufferers,

It was pretty easy for me to write this blog over the last 42 months. Aside from whatever talent I might have, the reason it was easy to write DOTE was that once I began to remove myself from the largely unconscious world humans live in, and started looking at human behavior from the perspective of a true outsider, it became easier and easier to deconstruct the Human Condition.

For example, take that Elon Musk post I wrote earlier this week. I just whipped that out, it was like falling off a log, because from where I was sitting this hopeless techno-optimist's money-making schemes are ludicrous. I was simply describing what was in plain sight for your benefit. To me, Elon and others like him simply look ridiculous, especially in the context of the enormous, self-created problems humans face in the 21st century.

Now, if my perspective on the Human Condition is "correct" in some sense, and my view of Human Nature is also "correct" in some sense, and by writing DOTE itself I have (for myself) confirmed the "correctness" of those views over and over again, it follows that humans are very limited animals. Their behavior is heavily constrained in ways which they can not possibly begin to fathom. This is a necessary outcome of the deterministic outlook I sketched out in my posts about the reality of the unconscious and Flatland. And although my views are easily falsifiable, they have not been falsified by anything I've seen.

For example, and mark my words, there is geo-engineering in your future. Wait for it.

It also follows that my running commentary on human folly is necessarily invisible to humans in the general case. And it has been. DOTE has no natural constituents, unlike liberal websites, investment/economics websites, social media websites, doomer websites, and all the rest.

However, if humans can only make very limited choices and their behavior is thus so heavily constrained, as I first outlined in my Free Will post, it also follows that humans are not to blame for the absurd or wantonly cruel and destructive things they do.

In short, humans are largely blameless because they just can't help themselves. After all, from my perspective they are not making choices; they are simply acting out their nature—Homo sapiens is a species, so what you see is what you get.

So what I have described on DOTE over these last 42 months is a classic Ancient Greek tragedy, where a figuratively "blind" person pursues his inevitable Fate or destiny (harmartia). Oedipus unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother, thus bringing disaster down upon his city and family.

Briefly, there are three broad classes of unconscious people.

the completely, hopelessly unconscious (e.g. Elon Musk)
the mostly unconscious
the partially conscious

Of those in the first group, nothing more can be said, and certainly nothing can be done. Of those in the very small third group, you know who you are—Realists (but not emotionally distraught and thus terminallly confused doomers), or people coming to grips with the Human Condition, or people who have glimpsed the ongoing human tragedy, or people who are not waiting for (hoping for?) "the collapse" but who know that eventually in the 21st century it will come because it's an inevitable outcome of human overreach.

The second group, those who are mostly unconscious, is more interesting. This group includes standard pro-growth environmentalists or "liberals" in the classic sense—basically, anybody, regardless of some inevitable political persuasion, who believes deeply in the secular religion called Progress. This group is especially tragic in the sense outlined above because it seems to me that these types do know, albeit unconsciously, that human action (e.g. pursuing endless growth) is destroying the biosphere and, ultimately, will destroy Homo sapiens itself. They are killing their children, or their children's children, and can do nothing about it.

But these "good" people are unable to bring these "suicidal instincts" into consciousness, and thus they are destined to destroy themselves even as they yean for a better world which will always be unavailable to them.

Now, if humans are "blameless" because they can only think (using the term loosely) and behave in very limited ways, it also follows that it is a bit unfair for me to rub their noses in it over and over again. And I have certainly done that over these last 42 months.

Still, I think it had to be done, even though, necessarily, it does no good. But carrying on seems to me like beating a dead horse, and I have grown weary of beating that horse. And also remember that you can lead that horse to water, which I did, but you can not make it drink. And now we know why.

This doesn't mean I will be eager to hang around with humans in the future. After all, they can be cruel, they are certainly untrustworthy, and you never know when some form of human shit will hit the fan you're standing in front of. In the end, they don't know what they're doing or why they're doing it. I've seen that over and over again, both in my personal life and the larger public life I write about.

Tomorrow is the last day.

People are tricky
You can't afford to show
Anything risky, anything they don't know
The moment you try
Kiss it goodbye