Pseudologia phantastica

[matrixmann]

Strange how things make their turn - even before anyone knows the real motive of a shooter who kills people, the agenda machinery of crying for harder (gun) laws starts rolling again.
You know what, people? It gets boring and it gets too obvious. No matter if it's 10 or 20 or even 30 years ago, it's always the same. Anyone wants take advantage politically of a scenario, regardless of what the facts of it are. Just wants to push his desired political agenda and make people believe, when they let this or that come true, all problems are going to be solved. The safe cheese cover continues to exist...
Tell you what. No matter how much you try to keep up your dreamworld where you can go on with the show until the very day, something will always keep invading your artificial peace and put you before the task to take things on - for so long until you finally get yourself some courage to do it!
Running away and denying the facts just only prolongs it for another short while. With each time doing so, your mountain of problems only grows like a pile of garbage - just until you're unable as a society to get rid of it!
Fuck you, society! Fuck you for mistaking your dreamworld with reality!
And fuck you very much for your cowardice to deal with problems!
For the dogmatism you always answer them with!

Comments

[warriorinside]

Amen to that. Sometimes, you have to stop hiding in what you want your reality to be and start dealing with reality as it is.

[matrixmann]

To me it's a rule I feel like I've always been using it. (Might be mistaken as memories can blur.)
'Cause what dreams alone and dogmatism don't achieve is that anything changes to the better. Ideas don't infect other people so quickly that they become ready to sacrifice themselves for it - that's a foolish assumption to think so. Childish, I'd even say. And if they do, I'd still ask myself about the personality of the characters that do so. Mental stability is something different than giving up your head for an issue very soon...

So, one shouldn't make his concept only relying on people converting so some kind of belief and "becoming one of the big family living in the union of thinking completely alike". That's how monotony starts, that's how extremism starts. And it's fucking the same if it's American liberal ideology, old-fashioned fascism or believing in aliens controlling mankind.

[warriorinside]

It’s an aphorism in English that “if everyone thinks alike, then someone isn’t thinking.” Nowhere is that more clearly visible than in what you said, and you’re right. When people stop thinking, they default to emoting. When people stop thinking and emote, that’s where extremism happens.

One of my favorite quotes is by Bertrand Russell: “Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth — more than ruin — more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.”

IMHO, anyone who seeks to get people to stop thinking simply wants power. You can’t destroy or subvert someone who thinks for themselves. The most you can do is kill them. If you want power over them, you have to get them to not think.

[matrixmann]

Just because that is known and common, it surprises me that American political camps, even those who boast they're the good ones in the game, don't recognize it on themselves that they're moving into such kind of direction of producing monoculture and dogmatism.
Saying, to me it sometimes appears like there is something in the water that makes certain areas whole strongholds of one direction of thought.
(Technically I know that much about extremism and monoculture that they can pretty much create this die-hard and snobby atmosphere themselves by just radicalizing their members themselves. "We against them"-thinking coupled with "we've found the only one and true path".)

The power question - when taking a look at concrete political organizations that habor certain mindsets, then it seems obviously, when anything comes from these organizations, that they just want control. Regardless of if their positions are factually right or wrong. It's just a battle for the sunny places at the beach, you can say.
But when single people speak similar opinions, just because they allocate themselves to a certain political direction, then, at first, I'm missing this center of power in the game. (And where I can locate this entity who seeks power that has infected the thought of these single people, all of that is much unproven conspiracy theory, which you don't know about if it's true or not.)
Literally: What do these people gain personally when they make me believe in the same stuff that they do?
Only I can think of "the feeling of being on the right track". Erasing doubt, erasing everything that can destroy your little dreamworld and, by that, take away the ground beneath your feet. Take away the insecurity, when everything they believe in should turn out to be wrong.

But when it's about that, there must be a pretty high degree of personal insecurity in the game...

[warriorinside]

You're completely right. Both sides do it and claim that they don't do that, only the other side does it. They both do it just about equally. Most do it for validation of their beliefs on a personal level -- it's a personal satisfaction thing, and a seeking of connection with others, which is a huge driver of human behavior and is well documented in psychology circles. Some seek power from it, and these become the charlatans and cult leaders of the world.

Thinking means invoking higher functions, and it means having the courage to break from the group and rise above your animal instincts. People don't like that, because it casts doubt into their own minds and makes them uncomfortable. I find doing so incredibly liberating and scary as hell, but I can't not do it. Following the crowd is something I can't do worth a damn no matter how hard I try. It always goes wrong when I try, so I've given up.

[matrixmann]

Hm, that's about as how I've found it to be too.
No matter if you convert to anyone else's belief or not, if you do the same things they do or not or if you eat, consume or read the same things as them - at the end of it all, it didn't make any happier or feel well for long.
Also, you're just only as interesting as long as you share the same mindset and can follow the same rules. If you suddenly can't or don't want to anymore, then you're suddenly like forgotten and uninteresting. Maybe even treated like a traitor to a matter.
And, if it's just about that, about following some stupid group rules, what the hell was it then with "it's about you" and all that shit? How much was it then about me and my personality?
Not a single bit.
By the way, I find it boring fulfilling some rules dogmatically over a longer time period that are none of my mind and which I have inner reason for following.

[warriorinside]

Exactly so. How dare you be different? People don't like people who are different from them. There's actually a word in English for this concept: "tribalism".

I've read before that how people react to you is seldom about you; it's much more often a reflection of who they are than a reflection of who you are. I think that that's true, sometimes, especially in cases where you have no idea why they got upset. It's not always so; sometimes the person who is different is really just being a jerk. That's the exception, though, not the rule.

By the way, I find it boring fulfilling some rules dogmatically over a longer time period that are none of my mind and which I have inner reason for following.

So do I. It's boring and it's simply mind-numbing, because the only way to do it is to stop thinking.

[matrixmann]

Yes, I know that from psychology. Gosh, which terms you'll find the circumstance with... Even forgot what it's called in German.
Think it was somehow part of the concept of narcissism (the pathologic version) and narcissistic deprivation.
Not very bad to know - one saves nerves with it.
As many, many people practice it, but without really knowing consciously that they do it.
And if you tell them that they do, and what they do, then it's all like a bunch of nonsense to them and you bringing bullshit to the discussion.
I don't know why people are like that, if it's that you caught them red-handed, or if they simply fail to understand and to reflect themselves properly.

These days, even politics down at the very bottom are flooded with people who act like this, but reject to be pointed at the scheme.
Why this is so, can be strongly assumed perhaps because people aren't raised differently anymore. So everything they engage in, they follow these patterns.
Then it's no miracle that so many hammerheads are out there which dogmatically fight for acquiring the domonation over what one is supposed to think and not while they actually also only habor a political mindset straight out of a one-sided whitewashed mainstream position.

[warriorinside]

I can tell you that American schools no longer teach logic, critical thinking, propaganda, or logical fallacies, and that's a good part of the problem with American schools these days. They teach to the test, and they teach what to think, not how to think. I maintain that that is aimed at creating a generation of sheep that is easily ruled.

I think that people like to think that they are free to do as they will, and that they think for themselves -- they simply agree with the majority. I've met so many people that are afraid of staring reality in the face and would much rather live in a fantasy of their own. Truth is hard, and we've been conditioned to go for what is easiest.

[matrixmann]

Well, in one way this is practical: No matter which dogmatic camp wins, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, everyone who has created his attachment with either one, he will follow them blindly. So whenever the elite likes to get any kind of politics or mindset or opinion established, then they make up an idea how to integrate this into the previous concept of either group (depending on which one is currently the fashion).
That's how it becomes that, no matter which camp you support personally, in the end you gonna be fucking fooled by both of them and used at their discretion. The ones who pull the strings behind the curtain can laugh themselves to death over those fools which brawl about bullshit which is incorrect either way they believe it to be...

Yeah, that seems like the way it is. It is about feeling free, not being free. People like it to think they're in control and in the reality it's somebody else.
I think I already had this topic a long time ago in terms of "individuality"...
People want to think how highly individual they are, how UNIQUE they are, just to forget how actually exchangeable they are. How much everyone like them functions in a certain way out of a certain wide scheme of variations, but all of them follow some basic patterns that are all common to them.
To a certain degree, I wouldn't even mind it, as humans are created as animals who live in groups, not as lone wolfs. A certain bit of things they can all agree on must exist, otherwise they'd be like panthers - only meeting for producing offspring once a year, and the rest of the time they'd be at each others' throats.

But how much it has become with mankind in the West, under their obsession with brands, advertising, lifestyle products, and bumptious behavior - it's way too much. Those products and illusions replace what those people are / could be as characters. Take all that away from them and they're a bloody nothing.
That's nothing that suits a species which wants to think of itself as "the crown of creation"... Absolutely not.

[onb2017.livejournal.com]

I would say it is just a reflection of reality.

[matrixmann]

How do you mean that?

[onb2017.livejournal.com]

You know what, I had a pretty bad day yesterday and left whole bunch of comments that are sort of irrelevant.

I meant to say that their dreamworld actually a little bit like reality not exactly in the case of shooting but generally reality is kind of surreal in many cases. Well, never mind.