Here I am staring at this blank page trying to figure out what I might say about anything.
Obvious flatland fuck-ups were on display everywhere you looked this year. I am still sometimes surprised that I need to point them out to get a few humans to notice them. That's important to me, for others to see the same train wrecks I'm seeing. Only human after all.
I suppose that's why I kind of lost it when I read that, for humans—
Developing situational awareness ... will not require altruism or idealism or self-sacrifice, only accurate self-perception and enlightened self-interest.
Sounds easy! No need for altruism! No need for self-sacrifice! Really, we humans just need a nudge in the direction of "accurate self-perception" and "enlightened self-interest".
And then I remembered how hard I've worked on this blog with very little tangible reward to develop "situational awareness" in a few thousands of humans. And most of the time it didn't take.
I'm not talking about awareness that humans are fucking up the biosphere—that's easy, Robert Scribbler can do that, even David Grinspoon can do that—but awareness that humans are the problem. That's the only "situation" that matters if you're looking for solutions.
The "catch-22" here is that if humans are the problem—if humans do not have the required capacity for "accurate self-perception"—there are no solutions. And they do not have the required capacity, or so it seems to me. That's what I mean when I say humans are "whistling in the dark."
If you truly understand what I'm talking about, then you will also see that the human world necessarily consists of an endless stream of socially motivated filtered bullshit, something like this—
And that's what I see everywhere I look. Good lord, if you didn't see the primates in 2016, you never will.
Because it wasn't us, right? Russia did it
This is not "nihilism" as some humans would have it. That's reality. If some humans want to interpret that as nihilism, well, be my guest. Humans can misinterpret anything and almost always do. (Sometimes they get it right like a broken clock that's right twice a day.)
Have a nice holiday weekend. Try to enjoy yourself. It needn't be a nihilistic weekend.
The nihilism label bothers me, too, and I'm glad you added it.
It's a blanket dismissal for someone who doesn't want to hear a threatening critique to their sacred beliefs, secular or non-, and that the person doing to the critiquing believes in nothing and has embraced some sort of self-pampering life based on selfishness. A lot of times, probably most, granted, the reasons for critiques can spring from a vacuum of idiocy, a need for negative attention and/or social acclaim, or an undigested bit of beef, bah humbug, but sometimes it is built on long and thorough processes of consideration, and in these cases the people behind the critique actually do believe in something, and have a decent reason for doing so. They often need to say it out of impulse, and usually that is because they actually DO care.
Try to enjoy the holidays, too, Dave. Thanks again.
Posted by: Jim | 12/23/2016 at 10:43 AM