Mar 23, 2020, 11:31 AM
Rik,
This piece helped me understand you a little better.
Your book helped me understand you a little better.
I finally understand what you are doing and why.
And I understand your investment in the literary frame.
My question is whether literary frames are causes, justifications, or excuses. Whether we obtain information from speech, text, and empathy, or from observation, evidence, and incentives. Or stated differently, from ideas or evidence. It seems you work from the literary(spoken, empathic, monopoly, ideal) model, and not from the evidentiary(observation, incentive, markets, adaptive) model. And whether intuition, sympathy, and empathy are to be fed, or whether they are to be TRAINED.
My position would be that as we evolve into increasing complexity we must maintain adaptability, and we must invest in additional training, not in greater accommodation of our animal instincts. and that we are failing to produce that training. And that the training can be achieved by non-false narrative (fairy tales, myths, legends, history, of princes and princesses which we want all to aspire to be as the ideal) and that stoic self authoring, epicurean philosophy of joy with others, and living within your means, tripartism/trifuctionalism, and basic economics and basic natural law can be taught to literally everyone at some level of sophistication. Military service makes men unselfish. Motherhood makes women unselfish. Adversarial education and military realism, naturalism, and empiricism produces men fit for governance. Adversarial courts and the law teach people real manners, ethics, and morals where indoctrination fails.
It is pretty obvious from history we can do what I recommend without negative externality, while we can pretty much burn the entire abrahamic project and all within it as drugging the population with false promise that led the jews to mysticism achieving nothing but parasitism, the muslims to mysticism destroying every advanced civlization of the ancient world, and christianity producing a dark age of ignorance we escaped by rule of law, commerce, literacy to take advantage of it, the conquest of the world for having done so, but where we are still trying to escape. Buddhism producing a pseudoscientific or pre-scientific stoicism of withdrawal rather than action, and all other than epicureanism and shintoism producing a mythology of suffering or evil rather than joy.
Whether you study the supernatural literature(lying), the philosophical literature(deceiving), or the demographic, economic and military literature (evidentiary truth), you will come train yourself to rely on the constant relations within that paradigm of lying, deception, or truth. That does not mean you cannot convey group strategies or some variation on group strategies through indoctrination(social construction), justification, or evidence. You can. it’s just more costly to train the animal to have a human mind instead of satisfying the animal intuition of a child. And to produce very different externalities for having done so.
So, given we know that we must satisfy the demand for religiosity given the lack of agency as empathy and neuroticism increase in dominance of an individual’s personality, it’s a matter of paying the cost of training them, or paying the cost of retraining everyone else to be an adult.
Now, that said, it is very easy to pick a hero and imitate that hero. For people with empathy jesus is an almost optimum hero. For people who are neurotic and empathic jesus is still an optimum hero, but they also need stoic discipline whether on the buddhist woo woo or the stoic ritual methods, and prayer by discourse, or prayer by repetitious stanzas all work just fine, depending upon the degree of neuroticism we need to suppress.
You’re saying you want what you understand. I’m saying the market needs whether it understands or not. This is not under my control either. I am from a long line of lower aristocracy, soldiers, and puritans (church of england > Puritan > Congregational). When I read books, poetry, the lives of, and letters by my puritan american and anglo ancestors, and the records of my norman ancestors, and I realize that just as they wanted the falsehoods of rome, priests, dogma, and institutions out of their lives, that I am merely continuing the tradition, of wanting theology, priests, their lies, their myths, their superstition, their corruption, and their parasitism, out of our lives – because the physical laws of nature, the natural law of man, and the necessary law of evolution and transcendence are the only laws in the universe not corrupted by the deceits of man.
Gods exist in the minds of man as intergenerational, fictional, archetypal kings, headmen and fathers of our peoples. But if there is a universal deity – a ‘God’ then we have the evidence of his hand in the writing of his hand, in the physical laws of nature, the natural law of man, and the necessary law of evolution and transcendence. And that is all there is to be said. those laws are either obeyed and they are not. We do his work or we do the demon’s work.
It does turn out however, that jesus’s teachings are the optimum prisoner’s dilemma strategy and that they are therefore the optimum cooperative strategy INTERPERSONALLY, when the christian himself performs the analysis and the charity – but not politically, when he proxies others do do it for him (her). So by that reasoning I include the teachings of jesus in the natural law – they are just, like many of the laws of the universe, counter-intuitive.
THE HIERARCHY OF INSTITUTIONAL DEPENDENCIES
Genetic Intuitions
… Demographic distributions
… … Homogeneity-heterogeneity
… … … Means and organization of production
… … … … Demands for, means of, method of military order – or it’s failure
… … … … … Group Strategy under all of the above: producing metaphysical (presumptive) value judgements
… … … … … … Mythology to persist that strategy
… … … … … … … Mothers, teachers, Priests, to indoctrinate into that mythology and strategy.
… … … … … … … … Education to indoctrinate you OUT of that mythology and back to the strategy (Academy).
… … … … … … … … … Institutions that enforce and persist that military, economic, social, and familial strategy.
… … … … … … … … … … Institutions that evolve and adapt that strategy to change.
As far as I know this cannot be false.