Why The Thirty Years War Never Ended
“The real enemies of our life are the ‘oughts’ and the ‘ifs.’ They pull us backward into the unalterable past and forward into the unpredictable future. But real life takes place in the here and now.” — Henri Nouwen”
Most preachers are probably sincere, true believers who have faith in the stories they have been given. Sociopathic preachers are not deluded; in most cases, they are very clever con artists. They claim to know what God thinks because it's lucrative to make such claims, and their flock believes what they preach because it feels good.
The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy by Peter H. Wilson
People who don't think God wants you to take hormones are Satanic.
The Baffler, Maud Newton August 21, 2024
True Believer Syndrome is not limited to Religious people—secular people suffer/benefit from the same disorder.
Learning is hard work requiring deep commitment over time, but we all want to know, so people spin stories to believe in. Having heard a narrative that feels right, they think they know everything they need to know without learning anything.
Culture is a complex emergent system, and how our brains and minds work is part and parcel of that complex emergent system. It's surprising and amazing that we can learn as much as we can about the Nature of complex emergent systems and how they work.
Our species has special powers: creative/imaginative consciousness, reason, logic, language, and the ability to make all kinds of tools. We can use these extraordinary talents and tools to understand how we became so powerfully unique, an animal that seems to transcend all other animals.
I don't know what I don't know, but learning is a good thing, and I know we have some reliable tools that can help us learn about reality as far as our species is capable.
We have ways of discovering how things work that are more reliable than blind faith.
Still, believing a story feels much better than doubting it. Doubting leaves us in a precarious situation, requiring us to work hard to learn about difficult subjects.
We are still punishing each other for not believing what we believe. The primary motivation for making people punish "other" people is profit. Today, we really have nothing to fear and no true enemies but manufactured ones. Those who covet power create enemies for profit-making purposes.
It's easier than it seems to understand each other.
Who gets rich telling people what to believe? Who benefits from telling people who to punish for "aberrant" beliefs? Who punishes people for telling the truth about how things work or the true Nature of things as far as we can know at any given time?
I call the people who manufacture contempt The Players. These are people programmed by stories to play The Great Game. Many of them are sociopaths and psychopaths.
We keep killing the "good news."
People in the context of their immediate family are mostly lovely folks, but once organized into a mob, whether in church, on the streets, or online, they lose their minds.
"Listen to me, Brotherin, Families are lovely. Does that make sense? But remember, only this kind of family is good." Those other types are sick, satanic, evil, against freedom and democracy, or whatever.
Stories are passed along and can be good for keeping us out of danger. They can also be entertaining, edifying, and enlightening. Stories are an essential aspect of our being. However, stories can also be dangerous and lead to destruction. Read the story of The Sword of Damocles. We should respect the power of stories and not abuse them.
We benefit by going along to get along (motivated reasoning/group think) because we are social animals, and belief feels good because we are "Homo storyteller" "Homo hubris," "Homo follower," and "Homo true believer." Our species has many mysterious and evolved facets.
If you studied the great apes for a while, you'd know more about what kind of creature we are.
Clever sociopaths and psychopaths know how to take advantage of "human nature," allowing them to hoard power and gain more control over mechanisms that determine what and how we do things.
Today, we have the energy resources, technology, and industry to torture and kill with Cheetos, carbonated sugar drinks, petrochemical products, machines, recreational drugs that numb the pain of alienation, carbon emissions, pharmaceuticals that medicate manufactured diseases, and all manner of weapons and omnicidal poisons, runoff from modern fossil-fueled financialized industrial civilization. All these we do for profit, power, and control.
We envy the powers and attributes we imagine God has.
In the end, Nature dictates our circumstances. God created the thing; it is what it is and will act according to its Nature. God (or evolution) made birds fly, but people can only fly in their machines. We're special.
We are an invasive, hyper, super predator and not inclined to listen to Jesus, Buddha, Mohamed, Gaia, and the Sages. We are much more inclined to listen to hucksters, con artists, and psychopaths who can invent all kinds of reasons to believe their stories.
Throw a dart at a historical timeline at any global location and interrogate its circumstances and way of doing things: its ontology, empiricism, metaphysics, technology, stories, etc. At a large scale, when we become conquerors, expansive, and organized into civilizations, we become brutal and creative/destructive.
You may have read the Old Testament, if not the Bhagavad Gita, Norse or Greek mythology. You may have paid some attention to Anarchism, Communism, Conservatism, Neoliberalism, Environmentalism, Fascism, Feminism, Identity Politics, etc., but have you honestly interrogated what you believe?
We rationalize what we believe because we want to feel good.
It's nice that we have come to depend on petrochemical slaves rather than human slaves to do our work. It's freed us up to serve our beliefs better. We are slaves to fashion, habit, and belief. We pray to God or revere technology and progress while working in the fields, factories, cubicles, or on Zoom calls on computers. We take our worldview for granted.
Meanwhile, we are living through a crisis in our living systems. We have become death, the destroyer of habitats and ecosystems.
If we listened to Nature, we'd be better off, but we won't; we will listen to the sociopaths and believe what they have to say because it feels good. And we'll continue to shoot the messenger who wants us to understand the limits Nature imposes on life forms on Earth.
