As time goes by, I’m growing increasingly convinced that the constant waves of SARS-COV-2 infections are damaging people’s brains. This is not the conclusion I would like to reach, but it’s somewhat hard to avoid, considering the available evidence. People’s brains seem to be aging prematurely. How you notice this, is in the same way as how you tend to notice it once elderly people start to develop dementia. They’re quite capable of doing the sort of things they’re used to doing, but when they’re faced with a new situation they struggle to adjust to it.
What I notice is that people in recent years don’t really seem to be adjusting their worldview to new information anymore, they increasingly react on new information based on existing information they already had. You notice it for example in political tribalism. Europe today faces the worst drought we’ve faced in 500 years, but you won’t really see anyone change his mind in regards to climate change. They’re stuck in whatever they already believed and they’re not capable of overcoming the cognitive hurdles they entrenched themselves in.
You see it in other problems too. There’s a company named Tesla, the sixth most valuable company on the planet. It has stagnating revenue, car sales are plunging in Europe, the cars burn down, the autopilot crashes them into trees, pedestrians and oncoming traffic, it’s facing a declining market share as competitors start selling electric cars, but the stock market doesn’t really seem to care, nor does the SEC care that its CEO is once again manipulating the stock market by claiming he will buy a publicly traded soccer club. People made their minds up about this company and its CEO long ago, new information doesn’t lead them to update their beliefs.
And then there’s the monkeypox situation. When monkeypox broke out in 2003, it was treated as an emergency and human to human spread was prevented. We’re now faced however, with a CDC that has simply resigned itself to the ongoing uncontrolled spread of this virus.
The general public too doesn’t really seem to care. I remember how during the swine flu outbreak, Alex Jones was on the radio, saying he was going to buy a Hazmat suit. Even with Ebola, Trump was panicking and saying the whole country needed to implement travel restrictions:
But now that we have a new plague spreading across the United States, smallpox version 0.1 alpha, the far right consensus consists of making petty jokes about “moneypox” and how gay men must be raping children and dogs who got infected. People are responding, based on how they responded to COVID. The nervous system is no longer evaluating new situations independently, it tries to fit them into its pre-existing cognitive architecture.
For wokies that means pretending monkeypox is a nothingburger, as the main priority is not being accused of homophobia and monkeypox not being a nothingburger would cause homophobia. You see no serious attempt at preventing this from spreading, the system has effectively resigned itself to its uncontrolled spread. For angry white males it also means pretending that monkeypox is a nothingburger, as they settled on COVID being a nothingburger and they’re taking that same cognitive architecture and now cramming monkeypox into it.
People seem no longer able to change their minds, to deal with subtle nuances, or to think ahead in regards to how situations can be expected to change. They’re just stuck, doing what they were already doing. That’s the sort of thing you tend to see before someone is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
This is some of the evidence we have:
-Brains of COVID patients look like they have Alzheimer’s.
-Cognitive decline is increased 12 months after infection, even in non-severe cases.
–Alzheimer’s disease is increased 250% after infection.
-Blood markers of brain damage are higher after COVID than in those who have Alzheimer’s.
-Infection is associated with reduced IQ.
-Blood vessels in the brains of long COVID patients are filled with microclots.
If you have all sorts of different lines of evidence pointing in the direction of this virus causing brain damage, then who am I to suggest it must all be wrong? And when you consider that basically everyone is constantly getting reinfected in the Omicron era, it’s not looking good.
I should note the long COVID syndrome doesn’t seem fundamentally very different from what people experience after influenza infection, as shown in the study saying there’s a 250% increased Alzheimer’s incidence. What’s mainly different, is how people throughout our population are now constantly getting reinfected with SARS-COV-2, whereas influenza infections are much less common. During the swine flu pandemic, only an estimated 11% of people above 65 actually got the virus.
Compare this to how often people get COVID. Here’s the most recent update of anti-Nucleocapsid antibodies I could find for UK blood donors:
With the rise of Omicron, we jumped from about 25% of the population, to 70% with anti-N antibodies. There’s now ongoing constant mass infection, with people getting hit by variant after variant. If you get hit by influenza, your brain has time to recover, but how much time do our brains have to recover from these constant Omicron infections?
Even compared to just a year ago, people are looking very stupid to me, incapable of developing responses to novel situations, trying to cram everything they observe into one of their pre-existing neural pathways. It’s like the crystallized intelligence is still there, but the fluid intelligence has dropped dramatically. They can still sound smart, because their brains remember the words they learned, but they can’t deal with new situations.
Returning to monkeypox for a moment: We just had a pandemic where everything that could go wrong went wrong. We then had all these exercises to deal with monkeypox, not because Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab are trying to make your life miserable, but because we’ve seen cases of human to human transmission increase in Africa for years and knew that this was a prime contender to become the next pandemic.
Then the disaster we had anticipated struck, this virus started showing up in gay men across Europe, yet we still failed to contain it. This was not a black swan, this was a white swan. How do you wish to explain that? How could they fail this badly? It really suggests to me we’re becoming very stupid.
If we are suffering a global cognitive decline, the question becomes how long this will last and what the long term repercussions will be. It’s obviously not looking very good, but there’s one aspect that works in our favor: Alzheimer’s disease isn’t just a product of accumulating damage. It’s also a product of a decline in the body’s ability to repair itself. If we accept that we’ve accumulated damage from constant SARS-COV-2 infections, that doesn’t necessarily imply that we’ve also suffered a decline in our body’s ability to repair our brains. In other words, it’s possible we’ll make a recovery if we eventually stop seeing constant waves of mass infection.
In the next few days, I plan on making a post where I outline some of the things I think people should be doing to overcome this constantly recurring assault on our bodies.
It’s abundantly clear to me that Covid reinfections are causing a host of health problems; and that the vaccines make reinfections much more common. Put together, this means that over the course of the next few years, a large number of the vaccinated are going to die from the cascade of health problems, and once enough of them do, the reservoir currently holding the virus will go away, and it will revert to a normal respiratory virus.
As morbid as it sounds, this means the problem is self-limiting, and things will improve as more and more of the vaccinated die from the consequences of constant reinfection.
There are billions of people who were vaccinated by now. Any solution that involves the vaccinated dying off inevitably involves the collapse of industrial civilization.
I think it depends on the details at this point, but yes, we’re in for a massive disruption; however, the Black Death did not permanently destroy European civilization, even though it saw death rates on the scale we’re in for (on a global scale) if nothing else changes. I think that a lot of places would end up de-industrialized, and a lot of people will die as this happens, but that there could be enough survivors who know how to operate industrial society to be able to rebuild at least some of what we have now.
Of course, it depends on details we can’t predict in advance, and the areas with low vaccination rates tend to be poorer countries without access to as much education; so all we can do is wait and see what happens.
The black death did not destroy the assets.
People could go to church afterwards and donate the rest of their money to the clergy for having spared them.
What? This die off won’t destroy any of the physical assets either.
in highly unvaxxed countries (or mormon communities) & even predominantly unvaxxed regions/continents there is no non-regular mental decline, so maybe it is the jab or 5G or hyper-texturated vegan proteins or too much lgbt-hormons or, to be annoying (to the deniers): the climate change** (my unbiologic pc-processor also does not like too much heat)
** any idiot should notice how deforesting on a global level changes global climate when it DOES CHANGE the micro-climate even in your backyard, but a rigid tax on non-recycable resources would do the job more efficient (covers CO2 as well) than just very questionable/totalitarian surveillance-regiments. Plus a global 1-child-policy would be appropriate (sorry, but i have nothing but disgust for those who destroyed the mindful Georgia Guidestones which should be re-erected on every single continent as reminder of living in balance)
>i have nothing but disgust for those who destroyed the mindful Georgia Guidestones which should be re-erected on every single continent as reminder of living in balance
Same. It’s insane to have this many people.
We do not have to many people. Globalist bullshit.
We consume way to much and we use our land incredibly inefficient. Having 20 sets of clothes, 50 different ‘choices’ of the same exact product, while them all being the same 8 companies in the end. Only using like 2 percent of the entire airable surface of the earth. Add to that our global elite has been suppressing things like free(ish) energy for aaaages. All these problems are way more pressing than the amount of people we have.
Overpopulation purely focused on the amount of people being the culprit is a globalist lie. Especially when one dives into the history of these theories, who coined them active for which institutions. Almost all eugenicists.
Exactly the people who erected and demolished the Guidestones haha. All symbolism. But I know you aren’t really into that stuff. But, seriously. The damage we do to our surroundings is not mostly because of the AMOUNT of people at all.
Also. Genuine question, I wouldn’t dare talk climate warming… global warming… climate change with you. But! It has been kolere droog. Do you have any links to it being dryer than it has been for 500 years?
Thanks, love your work.
Kill yourself.
Unfortunate that programmers can’t make replies show up under the comment being replied to.
To the population control advocates. If you believe there are too many people…please lead by example.
being a lifelong supersmeller (suffering extreme hyperosmia due to an enzyme defect) i can confidently assure you, that the jabbed (so far) will all die in the long run (therefore no sudden “collapse” of civilization but time to adjust, hopefully through “safe objective instead of dangerous subjective” AI & ORGANIC agriculture instead of GMO), because opposite to naturally infected their exhalation SO FAR does not stop smelling fermented (one of my top 5 most hated odors) and this is always fatal (especially compact cancer build up in the individually most unaerobic areas, almost always irreversible when someone smells more than about 9 months like this, the stronger the “stink”, the faster the growth/death)
this was meant to be a reply to… (maybe you can adjust)
“There are billions of people who were vaccinated by now. Any solution that involves the vaccinated dying off inevitably involves the collapse of industrial civilization.”
I remember a piece from the Economist magazine a few years back in the Science section, before the quality became severely degraded and politicized – a few studies had noted confirmed that some nurses had such a keen sense of smell that they could identify cancer patients – way early before an official diagnosis confirmed by some expensive test. It’s like how they knew they could have trained dogs to sniff out covid + folks in a crowd, but that idea was quickly discarded as they pushed for more PCR/ART testing instead as a money making for certain companies.
Thu’s coffeeandcovid noted that EthicalSkeptic had dug out some official CDC figures which are showing huge (like seriously straight up) figures about cancer deaths since the launch of the jabs. Note that it didn’t correlate with the 2020 lockdowns and potentially delayed care… month by month it’s shooting higher. Then we have the much higher exccess deaths in many highly vexed countries – and you have the MSM in places like MSM agonizing about why it’s happening – and of course, not making the obvious correlation / connection. The elephant is in the room.
1. Doesn’t the fact that vaccinated people develop nucleoclapsid antibodies after infection destroy the claim that the vaccines cause Original Antigenic Sin?
2. Does ANYONE in the Official Science bureaucracy ask why we didnt just design the mRNA vaccines against the fucking nucleocapsid to begin with?
The argument that we should target the spike protein because it’s the most dangerous bit may sound superficially plausible but really is like saying the best way to take out a tank is to try to snipe off the gun barrel.
> 2. Does ANYONE in the Official Science bureaucracy ask why we didnt just design the mRNA vaccines against the fucking nucleocapsid to begin with?
I recall reading that the decision to focus on S protein was made because concerns about ADE were greater with the N protein.
I’m not qualified to judge the truth of that, but it’s what I read.
>Doesn’t the fact that vaccinated people develop nucleoclapsid antibodies after infection destroy the claim that the vaccines cause Original Antigenic Sin?
They develop fewer of them and it seems to take a higher viral load. That’s what the evidence shows us.
“They develop fewer of them and it seems to take a higher viral load. That’s what the evidence shows us.”
Can you link those studies? I believe you but it’s a sufficiently important point I’d like to read all the details.
In either case, seems like OAS is a matter of degree, and maybe won’t matter in the end (i.e. it probably isn’t possible that everyone will get reinfected 1,000x until they die).
>In either case, seems like OAS is a matter of degree, and maybe won’t matter in the end (i.e. it probably isn’t possible that everyone will get reinfected 1,000x until they die).
Eh, this is the wrong conclusion to draw, for a number of reasons:
-If OAS means you need to get infected five rather than three times before your immune system figures out how to keep this bug outside once and for all, that matters for your own health. Every infection means some damage.
-If OAS means that people need to get infected more often, then they’re going to infect others more often. That matters for total infections.
-If total infections increase dramatically due to OAS, that means the ability for this virus to invent new versions of itself through mutation that we can not yet deal with increases. As a consequence for the overall pandemic, that would mean the whole human population has to sit through more variations of the “coronavirus” theme before this pandemic finally comes to an end.
To see this point illustrated, I would recommend looking at the least vaccinated nations and comparing them to the world’s most vaccinated nations. The pattern will be pretty obvious:
-For the vaccinated nations, we’re dealing with constant waves of every Omicron variant infecting the whole population. The unvaccinated nations generally had one relatively small BA.1 wave, followed by a series of nothingburgers. Vaccinated people’s immune systems are struggling to learn new proper responses to new Omicron variants. You can just compare the size of the waves: Unvaccinated nations get progressively smaller waves, vaccinated nations get progressively larger waves.
The vaccine peddlers made a choice, either knowingly or unknowingly, to buy peace and quiet for most of 2021, only for the silence to be followed by the misery we’re now witnessing in the Omicron era, with massive excess mortality and constant unprecedented waves of mass infection. But hey, if grandma dies from a stroke 3 months after her Omicron infection it doesn’t count as a COVID death, whereas a Wuhan infection that leads to an immune system overreaction culminating in her death on the ICU shows up in the statistics as COVID related.
It was a decision that directly led to the misery we are in today, so I would not agree that it doesn’t matter in the end, just because the immune system still has some degree of capacity left to develop a novel response to novel variants after three shots of Wuhan spike.
” it probably isn’t possible that everyone will get reinfected 1,000x until they die”
Geert Bossche did an interview a couple of months ago with a guy named Clas Sivertson, who lives in Taipei and manufactures medical tests. Clas hangs out with people who work in the test-making factories; they live in dorms there in huge numbers in very tight quarters. They are all hyper-vaccinated. At first the companies kept testing the workers and isolating them when they tested positive. But then they changed their approach. They instead stopped testing, and are taking at as given the the workers, who are constantly sick, do not have covid. That they must have something else. Obviously it can’t be covid, since they are vaccinated and have also had covid before.
As an experiment Clas has been testing them. They are in fact constantly positive for covid. They are simply positive all the time. They are catching it over and over and over and over again (you can find the interview on You Tube; it was posted on June 19th).
So yes, vaccinated people will get it a zillion times and then die. I’m not too optimistic about us unvaccinated, but I am very pessimistic about the vaccinated. Alas, pretty much everyone I care about is vaccinated.
Had those workers been boosted as well? I’m curious of the difference between two doses of the vaccine and someone who has been boosted once or twice. I know Biden keeps testing positive, and I’m sure he’s probably had 2-3 boosters by now.
I’ve long thought our increasing reliance on smart phones may be making us dumber too. More people are on social media since COVID began. The dopamine hits these sites give you is very powerful. Previous activities like chilling out with a book or just simple contemplation are less enjoyable for me now. After staring at my phone for an hour or so, my brain literally feels fried
Did you really miss the news on how most research on Alzheimers was a complete fraud?
Part of it is learned helplessness. A lot of people thought they were effectively controlling what would happen to them by getting vaccinated and following the rules set down by authorities. Then they caught covid anyway. Now that they are faced with a similar sort of problem, they have lost faith in their ability to act, because of their prior failure. I think that the unvaccinated are going to have a similarly unpleasant surprise (and I’m one). They have staked their sense of self on the notion that not getting vaccinated will mean that they will be well. I don’t think that will pan out, and their world will turn upside down, too. If you are in a state of learned helplessness your brain doesn’t work too well.
Part of it is grief and despair. A lot of people have died over the past couple of years. Some due to covid, some due to the vaccines, some due to deferred medical care, some due to suicide since their jobs went away, some due to drug ODs that would have not happened if they weren’t stuck being solitary. They left relatives who are trying to cope psychologically, and their brains are not working well. Part of it is that people are feeling grief because they can see that things are going to be very bad, and that their plans for life will not work out. Also, people are broke due to cost inflation. People in these sorts of situations can’t think too well; they are distracted.
Part of it is stress. Stressed people don’t think well, and often just give up.
But it is also medical. I am seeing people have trouble with spacial reasoning; that is a documented consequence of covid. I brought a relative’s hearing aid in to be repaired. I brought it home and discovered that she’d turned the hearing aid from left hand to right hand, so my relative had two right-ear hearing aids. I brought it back in. She fixed that, but then when I got it home we found that she’d put the ear insert on backwards. This is a middle aged lady at the VA hospital who has done these repairs and nothing else for many years.
So I brought the hearing aid to the HMO audiology clinic, and had it fixed by another middle aged lady who has done nothing else for many years (and who was also a smart person). She couldn’t figure out which hole to put the tube in. She just held it helplessly. She let me take it from her to figure it out myself (people like her ordinarily never let you do that). I held it and rotated it around and pondered at length and finally got it (I naturally have horrible spacial reasoning). So she then knew which hole to insert in. It was very troubling.
I have noticed that many people’s eyes are uneven; that is, one is facing straight but the other is just slightly off. This is something new. My relative’s house call doctor visited today; a guy in his 30s; his eyes were very subtly uneven. And it is not just vaccinated people; I was horrified last week to see our dog’s alternative vet’s eyes were uneven; she is only in her 40s; she is not vaccinated.
I bet we will never be able to pin it down to one single thing. Alas we can not even point down your statement. I have asked some friends about “sense making”, I sense they try to avoid that topic but it is “there”…
We have corrupted our environment in so many ways, there is just no more chain of evidence.
One piece to the puzzle by Prof. Martin Hall could be here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsaB7ewFsN0
I was long in the 5g is a CT thing but it seems to be a fact that the “roulette” forms in blood are also formed from EMF radiation poisoning. (Dr. Young)
I did not dig into this but I think you could find these results in studies before 2020. If google was still working. They also seem to have some Amnesia.
Prof. Martin Pall, sorry.
Ok, I see, the topic has lost interest. Already. Was it 15 or 150 seconds ?
Whatever.
The great reset will not achieve any of it’s goal because the IT industry is by definition defunct now.
Of course the managerial class still thinks it is in control because there are just so many meetings.
I called a colleague “there is a bug in your system”
He said: “No, it works for me”
I: “ok, can you please tell me what I need to do to make it work for me too?”
He: “You need do do this”.
I: “Ok, is there any documentation that tells me how to do “this” ?”
He: “It is not required, you just do this”
–
I:”Hello, I did this but it did not work”
He: “Yes, of course because you did not do it right!”
I: “Is there any documentation on how to do it right?”
He: “This is just self explanatory and there does not need to be any documentation”
I: “Ok, for some reason I am a bit stupid, and the documentation does no explain to me how to get it to work”
He: “Yes, If you can not read the documentation, I can not help you”
I: “What documentation should I read?”
He: “Just debug the code”
I: “Well this will take me hours, can you not just tell me how it works?”
He: “Well, I am sorry, but for me it works.”
There is always a way out:
I called another department and said “Can you please try this?”
After a while they called me back and said: “Sorry but this does not work!”
I said: “I am sorry but in this case you would need to file a bug ?”
They said “We filed a new bug on this topic for department X”
“Thank you”
This comment is probably more suited for one of the articles here about monkeypox.
But it’s related to the fact that covid-vexed folks have an impaired immune system, which predisposes them to catch and spread MP more easily.
What Radagast has missed – is that a majority of the gay folks who caught MP are already HIV +ve, while the rest are taking something called PReP, a cocktail pushed by big pharma to ‘prevent’ HIV infection. That is on top of taking the jabs so that they can travel and then attend those ‘festivals’. PReP is another big hit on the immune system… while ostensibly helping against HIV, it’s a compounding factor against the immune system on top of the jabs.
So no, not really worried about MP – as a big node for the initial transmission was via contaminated blood transfusion. While they may not be testing for MP right now for blood donors, the obvious lesions will be a giveaway, discouraging certain folks from being donors. I’m actually more concerned with so many jabbed folks, who might be loaded with spikes from a fresh shot, donating their blood into the combined pool.
The cognitive declines have been obvious for quite a while since the shots rolled out. Enough studies have confirmed that the spikes actually end up poking holes in the blood brain barrier. An infection would do that too, though not to the same extent. But throw in 4 jabs and 2 infections, it becomes a leaky BBB. So guess how the handful of monkeypox patients have died? Via brain inflammation, aka encephalitis. That does indicate that an increasing number of ailments/viruses can probably make it through the BBB now… probably accounts for some of the extended post-covid brain fog cases..
Anyways, there’s not much point in trying to warn about a failing industrial civilization. We have senile and incompetent elites in power in too many western countries and the US vassal states (Japan, S Korea, Taiwan, Singapore) so the mRNA jabs are the nail in coffin for an accelerated decline. The global landscape will be greatly changed by this year-end, it’s pretty much baked in. Better to channel our efforts and energy towards making it through the coming bottlenecks. Get in better natural health, stock up on essential modalities, including alternative medicines that you’ll need, build up parallel societies as the mainstream one fails faster. Be mentally, physically and spiritually ready, do more grieving and acceptance now, and when the emotional rollercoaster fully hits, there should be ready-made plans waiting to execute.
Just wondering, what caused the (even worse than today’s) drought 500 years ago?
Now a person whose brain was functioning properly would look at this monkeypox wastewater chart from New Haven, CT: https://www.yalecovidwastewater.com, and conclude that something bad is coming down the pike. But American humans are not functioning all that well mentally just now.
What I have noticed is how gay men have been excused for their sodomy. Whilst the rest of us have to suffer from lockdown and other measures.
Even the treatments for gay men is to facilitate more sodomy rather than abstinence from sodomy.
Yeah, they can hold mass gatherings with tens of thousands of people simultaneously screwing each other in hotels and nobody seems to care.
On the other hand, the skateparks were filled with sand to make sure kids would not play outside.
Very interesting!
Maybe we should consider an alternative explanation: neurodegeneration.
I guess this is not the right terminus technicus – I mean the opposite of neurogenesis taking place in the hypothalamus. There’s a German scientist who has written a book about this Western syndrome:
Nehls, M. (2022). Das erschöpfte Gehirn: Der Ursprung unserer mentalen Energie
– und warum sie schwindet. München: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag
There, he analyses several causes of this syndrome. To be sure, most of these causes are not new (e.g., not enough sports, not enough movement), but there is no doubt that most of these causes have intensified in the last two years (e.g., anxiety, fear).
So, we should consider the hypothesis that this kind of neural decline contributes to the phenomenon you’re trying to explain. We should not take it for granted that there is just one cause for this “cognitive decline”, instead several factors contribute to this misery, more or less.
And yes, your own hypothesis is plausible, too – but I guess it’s only a partial explanation.
I don’t think this is anything new tbh, covid has perhaps just exacerbated it. We have a pretty good track record when it comes to stupidity. The 20 year Afghan war: soldiers fighting, dying and coming home permanently maimed for a goal nobody could really agree upon. The Iraq War: a large majority of people at the time genuinely believed that we could democratise and westernise Iraq despite all evidence to the contrary. Our insane war on drugs which criminalises people for committing the cardinal sin of wanting to relieve stress with a psychoactive substance other than alcohol.
I agree. Also a system, an economy that is meant to always grow on top of the previous years growth. Not shrink or die back in a certain season, just always grow and never reduce in size. I agree that the modern internet with smart phones could have made it worse. People “creating content” for tiktok and stuff. Propaganda which makes people feel they have to profess love for things they don’t like, eg homosexuality or immigrants or “progress” or whatever, may have played a role.
It’s easier to say what you feel. I bet people in the past said what they felt more. Not thought what they felt, then modified it back into line with whatever they were “supposed to think”.
According to Dale Bredesen Alzheimers partial cause of Alzheimers is overactivation of innate immunity. So if Covid causes such overactivation – it can cause Alzheimers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s86wpaF-7XI&t=1s
You write:
“What I notice is that people in recent years don’t really seem to be adjusting their worldview to new information anymore, they increasingly react on new information based on existing information they already had. You notice it for example in political tribalism. Europe today faces the worst drought we’ve faced in 500 years, but you won’t really see anyone change his mind in regards to climate change. They’re stuck in whatever they already believed and they’re not capable of overcoming the cognitive hurdles they entrenched themselves in.”
This of course has nothing to do with Covid or even actual elements of climate change (and of course, “worst in 500 years” indicates a possible cause outside of how much nitrogen cow poop adds to the environment, or how much CO2 was generated during the Dano-Swedish War)
I think this has more to do with two things, being perception of “locus of control” and how individuals form their opinions on the world.
Locus of control is one of those fancy terms trying to describe if an individual considers responsibility for an area of the individual’s life is internal, that is within the individual’s own responsibility, or external, the responsibility for situations and conditions of the individual’s life is controlled forces outside of the individual’s control.
The last 100 – 50 years has been a drum beat of individual responsibility for the collective salvation of society, which I believe to be one of the most pernicious elements of the reform movements of Protestant churches which has remained even after the erosion of faith and secularization of the West in the last 75 years. This both takes the obligation to think and act away from the individual, and forces the crushing guilt of being to blame for the fallen state of this secular world on the individual who has internalized an inability to effect any change individually. This pushes leaders to act to “save” the world, and pushes individuals to both accept and actively support such programmes in spite of the inconvenience and deep economic detriment to the INDIVIDUAL.
The individual learns helplessness in the face of this, and becomes apathetic, and dependent. Easy to lead (well, easy to drive), until the economic and social burden is so high the individual must rebel, be it actively or passively. Of course such rebellion is punished, socially through exclusion, or economically and legally through the seizure of assets, property, or freedom via the use of the state’s monopoly on violence. Those who comply or support the state do so, of course, because with their locus of control being external to themselves the state is right in taking such actions. They have outsourced their morality and personal agency to the third party in the form of the state.
This leads us to the second concern which is how the average individual understands how an opinion is formed, and how the average individual actually forms an opinion:
We as a species think we develop our opinions by carefully sifting understood facts to determine objective reality, and draw our opinions from that determination. We as a species, however, are some of the most social creatures evolved in the world, and we actually determine the opinions of the group which to which we belong, or wish to be part of, and then sift available information for facts that we can use to bolster our in-group opinion, and call that mass of weighted and stacked data “objective reality”
It is a rare individual who actually draws conclusions from facts instead of searching to support a per-determined opinion.
But we exlude freaks who do that, because one can’t trust them to reliably support the in group to which be belong, the state to whom we have outsourced our agency; this is the moral and correct action the group takes for our collective salvation.
It is a harsh way to be treated. Don’t be that guy.
Very interesting!