Saturday, 6 April 2024 ------------------------ Hello. All is well. Today I want to talk about stories, religion, and money. I'll speak from a western perspective (North America and Western Europe) I guess. I wish to learn more history on this. What I'm discussing here is simply a starting point for me to build my understanding upon. My current understanding may be way off. At an early age (~6 years), I remember regular attendance in some sort of group meeting with my peers that oriented around christianity. I remember it as a good time, but I could never see the stories as more than other tales we hear. I remember talking to my friend at the time how I didn't believe in god. It didn't make sense. It was inherently based on faith (something like constructing abstract concepts with perceptual affect), which I today believe my brain is incapable of doing to some extent as I talked about my intuition is partially disconnected from my intellect. I also don't attach affect to objects. I do a little and also with people, but like an untrusting animal, haha. I have no sentimental items of the past except my memories. Those are powerful for me affect / emotion wise, and I can sit hours cherishing them. Anyway, back to not believing in god, It was the same for me with the idea of Santa Claus and things like that. I appreciated the good social spirit it created, but I never saw it more than that. We create stories for social cohesion. We derive social values and norms from those stories. Authority (people with social power) must not misuse story telling to maximize self-serving goals. Before, society had Christianity as the main story, but it seems the story broke for some reason. My assumption is it's a mix of authority abuse, stories falling apart from new understanding of reality (science), and the values (or values corrupted by what I call cancers) perhaps maximizing the goal of a subsystem in the system (society), causing inevitable revolt against the story and the authority upholding it. So today we no longer have the same social cohesion. What to value, how to behave, how to be orderly. There's many new stories trying to take its place. It worries me what story will win. I fear a cancer we won't spot before it's too late. Moving to Denmark around age 10-11, to a bigger town, it seems they had moved further away from Christianity. In Sweden, we lived in the countryside. My first impression was that students were less mannered. They came across as wild and unpredictable to me at the time. Note that this is a simplified view, it is much more nuanced and many were well-behaved. Here, we were told ideas about self-realization, self-improvement, self-worth, self-made. Lately, I have come to believe these ideas are harmful and misguided. My worst case scenario concern is that these ideas are being deliberately spread to maximize a subsystem's goal, fooling people to blame themselves for dysfunction, slaving away by their own will. The idea of self-worth is nonsensical to me, and I see it used everywhere. We've completely simplified the complexity of evolution and applied survival of the fittest to our social function. Why do you think ants are so successful? Most people spreading these ideas are those who have been told the story. It's incredibly powerful. These ideas are also inherently conflicting to moving away from ideas of humans being more than animals (Christianity ideas) and moving to ideas of scientific reasoning based on worldly facts we can observe. Perhaps we have to acknowledge that we make stories for a reason and have a more balanced view? I think people like me, who don't attach to stories and simply use them to guide socially, may not understand how important good stories are if we want humanity to flourish. Perhaps I'm just insane maybe? Please let me know. People like me can cause havoc in society I believe. If they adopt short-term, self-serving strategies, because they are given wrong motivations to feel safe and respected in society. Do you remember from a previous writing how I found it uncomfortable that people defended me on my behalf for things I felt guilty about? I saw myself predatory on some level, exploiting people's social function for my own benefit. They were attached to the story I had created, where social standing was obtained by spending more time and money. What if I didn't feel guilt? The guilt that inevitably made me say bye to a lot of money? I had people begging me to continue, that they would "die" without my Minecraft server. No one knew how much I was profiting. I meticulously crafted my image to keep people from questioning how much I made. I had hundreds of people voluntarily give their time to serve the cohesion of the story I was creating: "A welcoming community where you can meet new friends to play with." A lot of people that tried to copy my server didn't understand that was the main selling point. Many don't understand the power of story telling, neither did I to the extent I do today. I paint a dark picture of myself here, which I believe has truth in it, but I want to be clear that I never compromised my fundamental morals I had. Morals that I really think are just sensical long-term survival strategies, understanding humanity as a whole must flourish. Nothing was allowed to compromise the story I was telling. Any high spender was never above the rules as it'd risk breaking the story. What if the story was based on valuing the collective human spirit and not my own individual, predatory survival? What if society did that as a whole? I don't know, but it's worth thinking about. I think we have a misunderstanding of what we are. We believe we're above story telling, but I think we're simply switching to new stories without thinking too much about what function they serve for molding our individual character and social structure. It could also be a scaling issue, as I said, I'm just trying to make sense right now, I have no absolute beliefs about this. Absoluteness is a very foreign concept to me on a perceptional level. As I said in previous writing, I believe my perception is more animalistic, but intellectually I can still conceptualize reality. Perhaps there's some truth to the notion of people appearing as more reptilian they just don't fully understand why that is. This is just my curiosity thinking, I do realize this can easily be misinterpreted as promoting hate speech or something like that, so I try to only talk about myself. We must not let fear turn our speech hateful or spiritless. One also has to see what money really is. It's a construction in social reality to commodify social power. You can make people do anything with money. It's efficient. Whether that efficiency is used to serve society long-term or a small part of society short-term is not accounted for. We've commodified social reality to become a resource that simply allows one to use social power for short-term self-serving goals, whether it be how much money or followers you have. This will work as long as we can afford to chip away at the social foundation we take for granted. This is not to a call to return to Christianity. If you knew my dismay for religion in the past, you'd think I'd completely lost it, saying anything close to that notion. I respect and understand people of religion much more today, but I don't have any stance at the moment. I still don't know if religions are resilient enough long-term. It's not simple. There's a lot of dangerous stories from religions, but I think there are good values and social functions of religions too. But they're also corruptible and the stories may not work well today as our technology and understanding of reality advances. Regardless, I think we should move away from making people gods instead, either by fame or wealth (social power). Before everyone was at least accountable to god. Our past is filled with people that maximize short-term, selfish goals, they've just never had the power to do it on the scale we see today. Perhaps we should think about whether we're being lead into a darkness we can't ever return from, killing off the diversity of ideas that keep the spirit of humanity alive when society face struggles? We're losing resilience in the name of productivity. Productivity for what? Growth of a cancer? I have a dream that we will one day live in a society where we won't be judged by the depth of our pockets but by the content of our character. A little remix, hehe. I love MLK.