Our societies are literally tearing themselves apart, irreconcilable positions are taken by individuals, uninterested in discussion and convinced in their moral outrage. How do we fix this?
I agree with your diagnosis but am not sure of the solutions. The Government has been manipulator in chief for years ("don't kill your granny") and nobody trusts or believes anything that comes out of government anymore. Education has become a sausage machine funded and directed by various pressure groups.Social media loads fuel on the fire. As far as I can see, based on history, there are only two possible solutions- conflict until it burns itself out or religious conversion.
We have a whole society which is affected by this - young and old, all are infected. I regularly see grievances where emotions are believed to trump facts, and we have a population blinded by its preconceptions. It's quite a puzzle.
I'm going to have to think some more about this... I'm not sure your proposed 'cognitive defence' is a solution though, not least of all because talk about critical thinking has been in circulation for decades and it has never gone anywhere in practice. Also: many proponents of this turned out to be unable to think their way out of a paper bag during the recent international Nonsense.
I do think you're onto something here, but I'm not entirely sure your offramp doesn't lead back to the motorway. 🙂
I agree that we need to teach critical thinking but that will take years. We need an immediate national conversation about where all this passion and division is likely to lead, and is this what we want? Encourage everyone to think of the immediate dangers and act peaceably with everyone we meet.
It's not just a national conversation we need, alas... The problems in the UK appear to be downstream of the problems in the US, where what C.J. describes here has been even more disastrous. I agree that public discourse would help. What a shame that the national broadcasters have all allied with the transnational camp against the concept of a nation.
My philosophy this year has been circling around this very issue - that two different versions of society are colliding, one based on the nation and one based on a transnational ideal of 'the human'. I don't feel close to a solution at this point, but I'm glad C.J. feels like he has a direction to move in.
You write of signs everywhere that AI is increasingly used to manipulate instinctive (System 1) responses and then justify them with rationalisations. That's the way Facebook, for instance, works, but perhaps not intentionally at first. Needing to make its services look free, social media platforms, driven by profit as well as for cyberwar, design algorithms to shepherd users (you, me, us) into echo chambers - silos, filter-bubbles. These homogenised groups are valued on global data markets, hence surveillance capitalism. And no wonder! What trader wouldn't want to have retail access to a hitherto undiscovered demographic that comprises, say, gay Asian middle income urban cyclists keen on fitness who might like a new food product, clothing or medication? These drivers reduce human conversation to sparring with faceless text, emojis, and GIFs eroding the nuanced art of face-to-face communication.
Very interesting. I am most interested in the climate change/Net Zero agenda and how its unquestioning pursuit is wrecking our energy infrastructure, deindustrialising our economy and impoverishing our people, all to indiscernible climate benefit. I often swither about whether Net Zero proponents like Ed Miliband are “mad or bad”.
The thesis of this post suggest that they are “mad”, hopelessly consumed by irrational thinking. Then I look back at how Miliband’s peers pre-planned and executed their globally-coordinated Covid “plandemic” based on a relatively innocuous flu-like ailment (average age of “Covid” death 82.4, higher than average UK life expectancy) with the aim of digitally enslaving the entire populace and effecting a degree of Malthusian depopulation and sterilisation for good measure, which was definitely “bad”. Sadly, this never gets discussed in “normie” society.
The globalist establishment and our Uniparty politicians showed their true colours through Covid, which swings me to the conclusion that Miliband et al could not possibly be so stupid as to believe against all the empirical scientific and engineering evidence that unilateral UK Net Zero could be a benign and worthwhile endeavour. Therefore they are bad, not mad. Or have I got it wrong?
If I live in a street of 100 people and am the only one who recycles their rubbish, am I crazy? Actually, other people may see me and feel they should be doing the same. Perhaps they already are doing the same. (Many of them are.)
In fact, in the UK, 60% of the population are in favour of Net Zero, according to polls. Furthermore the green economy in the UK is growing at 3x the rate of the rest of the economy. We’re looking for growth, aren’t we?
Life is complex. I actually do think the response to Covid was OTT - but Net Zero is different. Everything has to be looked at on its own merits.
Show me a poll, with the actual questions asked, which says that 60% of people in the UK are in favour of Net Zero and I’ll show you how it has been grossly manipulated. It reminds me of the long-ago debunked chestnut that “97% of scientists say that man-made climate change is true”: https://x.com/ClimateRealists/status/1932766007979872390.
And if the green economy is growing by 3x, that’s only because vast quantities of taxpayer money subsidies are being shovelled into these malinvestments, pushing our energy bills even higher, stoking deindustrialisation of the economy and in the extreme forcing people to choose between eating or heating, all to no useful purpose.
Life is complex you say. Yes it is, which makes it all the easier for the establishment to pull the wool over the eyes of the people, most of whom are too busy getting on with their own lives to see through all the lies, obfuscations, psy-ops and propaganda.
Here’s a paper which concentrates on the engineering aspects of Net Zero and how it will wreck our economy to no useful purpose: https://sites.google.com/view/the-lpf/home.
I agree with your diagnosis but am not sure of the solutions. The Government has been manipulator in chief for years ("don't kill your granny") and nobody trusts or believes anything that comes out of government anymore. Education has become a sausage machine funded and directed by various pressure groups.Social media loads fuel on the fire. As far as I can see, based on history, there are only two possible solutions- conflict until it burns itself out or religious conversion.
We have a whole society which is affected by this - young and old, all are infected. I regularly see grievances where emotions are believed to trump facts, and we have a population blinded by its preconceptions. It's quite a puzzle.
The Bug in our Thinking ...
Hi C.J.
I'm going to have to think some more about this... I'm not sure your proposed 'cognitive defence' is a solution though, not least of all because talk about critical thinking has been in circulation for decades and it has never gone anywhere in practice. Also: many proponents of this turned out to be unable to think their way out of a paper bag during the recent international Nonsense.
I do think you're onto something here, but I'm not entirely sure your offramp doesn't lead back to the motorway. 🙂
Stay wonderful,
Chris.
I agree that we need to teach critical thinking but that will take years. We need an immediate national conversation about where all this passion and division is likely to lead, and is this what we want? Encourage everyone to think of the immediate dangers and act peaceably with everyone we meet.
Hi Diana,
It's not just a national conversation we need, alas... The problems in the UK appear to be downstream of the problems in the US, where what C.J. describes here has been even more disastrous. I agree that public discourse would help. What a shame that the national broadcasters have all allied with the transnational camp against the concept of a nation.
My philosophy this year has been circling around this very issue - that two different versions of society are colliding, one based on the nation and one based on a transnational ideal of 'the human'. I don't feel close to a solution at this point, but I'm glad C.J. feels like he has a direction to move in.
With unlimited love,
Chris.
You write of signs everywhere that AI is increasingly used to manipulate instinctive (System 1) responses and then justify them with rationalisations. That's the way Facebook, for instance, works, but perhaps not intentionally at first. Needing to make its services look free, social media platforms, driven by profit as well as for cyberwar, design algorithms to shepherd users (you, me, us) into echo chambers - silos, filter-bubbles. These homogenised groups are valued on global data markets, hence surveillance capitalism. And no wonder! What trader wouldn't want to have retail access to a hitherto undiscovered demographic that comprises, say, gay Asian middle income urban cyclists keen on fitness who might like a new food product, clothing or medication? These drivers reduce human conversation to sparring with faceless text, emojis, and GIFs eroding the nuanced art of face-to-face communication.
Very interesting. I am most interested in the climate change/Net Zero agenda and how its unquestioning pursuit is wrecking our energy infrastructure, deindustrialising our economy and impoverishing our people, all to indiscernible climate benefit. I often swither about whether Net Zero proponents like Ed Miliband are “mad or bad”.
The thesis of this post suggest that they are “mad”, hopelessly consumed by irrational thinking. Then I look back at how Miliband’s peers pre-planned and executed their globally-coordinated Covid “plandemic” based on a relatively innocuous flu-like ailment (average age of “Covid” death 82.4, higher than average UK life expectancy) with the aim of digitally enslaving the entire populace and effecting a degree of Malthusian depopulation and sterilisation for good measure, which was definitely “bad”. Sadly, this never gets discussed in “normie” society.
The globalist establishment and our Uniparty politicians showed their true colours through Covid, which swings me to the conclusion that Miliband et al could not possibly be so stupid as to believe against all the empirical scientific and engineering evidence that unilateral UK Net Zero could be a benign and worthwhile endeavour. Therefore they are bad, not mad. Or have I got it wrong?
If I live in a street of 100 people and am the only one who recycles their rubbish, am I crazy? Actually, other people may see me and feel they should be doing the same. Perhaps they already are doing the same. (Many of them are.)
In fact, in the UK, 60% of the population are in favour of Net Zero, according to polls. Furthermore the green economy in the UK is growing at 3x the rate of the rest of the economy. We’re looking for growth, aren’t we?
Life is complex. I actually do think the response to Covid was OTT - but Net Zero is different. Everything has to be looked at on its own merits.
Show me a poll, with the actual questions asked, which says that 60% of people in the UK are in favour of Net Zero and I’ll show you how it has been grossly manipulated. It reminds me of the long-ago debunked chestnut that “97% of scientists say that man-made climate change is true”: https://x.com/ClimateRealists/status/1932766007979872390.
And if the green economy is growing by 3x, that’s only because vast quantities of taxpayer money subsidies are being shovelled into these malinvestments, pushing our energy bills even higher, stoking deindustrialisation of the economy and in the extreme forcing people to choose between eating or heating, all to no useful purpose.
Life is complex you say. Yes it is, which makes it all the easier for the establishment to pull the wool over the eyes of the people, most of whom are too busy getting on with their own lives to see through all the lies, obfuscations, psy-ops and propaganda.
If you want to learn more about the tyranny of “climate change”, here’s a paper I published a year ago concentrating on the pseudo-science it is based on: https://metatron.substack.com/p/debunking-the-climate-change-hoax.
Here’s a paper which concentrates on the engineering aspects of Net Zero and how it will wreck our economy to no useful purpose: https://sites.google.com/view/the-lpf/home.
If you want to learn about how the Covid response was hugely worse than “OTT”, here’s an open letter I sent to my MP on the subject at the time (he didn’t reply): https://metatron.substack.com/p/an-open-letter-to-my-mp-culpable?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email.