People are Stupid

by bryce

I hope the immature title caught your attention

I have been in the midst of a 30 month long state of transition, arguably another year longer, but I like to think of its genesis as the summer of 2010. This was a time that everything I knew, everything I had held on to, was cast into the wind and has ultimately led me to who I am today.

The world is an illusion and I do not mean that in a conspiratorial way, but as a statement of fact. Illusions are fake things appearing real, or more appropriately, something appearing different than its true form. There is an old adage which I frequently cite which states simply, “That which never changes is real, that which changes is unreal”. This is a weird, spiritual way of stating an overlooked reality of humanity, that very little of what we sense or perceive is real.

Have you noticed that you, in a state of disarray, can approach 5 people with your problem and receive 5 different answers? Or you can be certain of something one day only to have the whole body of that concept challenged the next? Information is one of the most illusory constructs in this world based on the nature of what information is: information is a description of the world, seen and unseen around us. If the predominance of things around us are in fact illusions, constantly changing shadows of potentially real concepts, then information becomes a virtually useless thing.

Information frequently follows the zeitgeist of its time, it is loosely constructed around the prevailing opinions, concepts, and social normalcies of the era during which the conscious is interpreting it. We have shifted into a dispensation, a time frame, during which too many prevailing theories are allowed to compete for the same brain space. Humans in the last 15 years have taken immense steps in connecting the world, a world that used to be defined by strict cultural paradigms. The result is a social topography that is now utterly confused as more and more people mix and mesh information as they see fit, often times taking vital principles and axioms out of context, and proclaiming them to other confused individuals.

We see this everyday. Every time one logs on the social network of their choice this reality confronts them. It manifests itself in a variety of ways, but most often as a general irritation when you see differing perspectives. You find yourself asking: “how the fuck did you come to that conclusion?” or “Dude, just shut up.” To make things that much more difficult, you then have to see yourself inside this cycle of stupidity, realize that you are probably contributing massive amounts of misinformation or just slightly incorrect interpretations to the fold. Information is passed under many different aegises, religious information always seems to command the most pretentious sort of authoritative amnesty, but we will derive our belief systems then promulgate accordingly.

So what then, Bryce? Are we a pointless species, trading useless cognitive commodities because there is nothing else to do? Yes and no. Yes in the sense that there really is nothing else we can do, humans are social creatures and we must communicate and what we communicate IS information. But because I am the type of person I am, I am trying to discern what is from what isn’t. The “what is”: is information that can profit without disillusioning the individual. The “what isn’t” is of course the opposite.

The questions I find myself asking then, whose opinions are actually valid? Whose thoughts are those of actual profitable and whose are interminable dross? Whose mind actually resembles the only Truth the only Real in the universe, The Almighty God (regardless of your religious proclivity)? Whose semi-truths bring harmony to the earth and whose strife?

Let me provide a few more examples of why I am going down this tract as I bring this post to a close. Last week I saw a young woman put on Twitter “never apologize for who you are, be true to yourself no matter what”, to which I replied “what if I’m a racist ax murderer hellbent on ethnic cleansing?” (or something to that effect). This is another one of those illusory, faux wisdoms attempting to appear real and it is a COMMON adage propagated by those in my age bracket. Another example, well a class of examples, is illustrated by the fact that most conventional wisdom is countered by other conventional wisdom that is DIAMETRICALLY opposed to it. Most accepted human wisdom is utterly hypocritical to some other parcel of insight. Example: “good things come to those who wait”, whereas in the world of business “good things come to those who aggressively work”.

There are infinite examples of these binary, ternary, and quatenary informational clusters, which seem to exist in a constant state of flux. Instead of trying to conceive a informational stream with one of these wise adages at a time, man should always be in the practice of evaluating instances with an informational cluster, comprised of multiple interpretations and perspectives. As our globe continues to shrink and we continue to trade cultural capital and more distinct familial and experiential capital, perhaps this best vehicle of informational transit is through these clusters.

I want to conclude by bringing this back to my opening paragraph in which I stated that I am still steeped in a state of transition. I used to be a person with absolutely rock-solid perspectives and beliefs. i was determined that every single modicum of information I had at my cognitive disposal was as close to the truth as a human mind could be, because I was of course familiar with my deductive and inductive faculties which derived these existential, spiritual, mental, and romantic answers. I think that also is a serious, serious disability in humans…. It isn’t so much the information we believe to be true, but the processes we employ to come to our conclusions. Mental processes are so rife with invalid biases that one can only expect to come to some outlandish conclusion, but to the chagrin to the state of progress around them.

Although I am sure of everything, I am also unsure of everything and this is the genesis of all my thought processes. I’ve learned, the hard way might I add, that my judgments mean nothing, my positive, rational qualities mean little, and my willingness to listen to others are undermined, if I don’t get a handle on how I receive and process information. I no longer wish to be a hypocrite, a flip-flopper of cerebral content merely patching serious social wounds with words and beliefs that sound good at the moment or worked one time because I heard someone else say it. I no longer wish to be blinded behind the veils of abject illusion, constantly believing things that my limited sensory organs and abundantly imaginative cognitive faculties push out.

I have long relished my self appointed position of agent provocateur in terms of human interaction. I challenge everything, tonight is no different. I challenge each and every one of you to look at your decisional matrices, the premises on which you make choices, and determine if you are contributing to the social soup of confusion or actually providing any life savers to bring us into a new age of understanding. If information is to have any real value again, we must be willing to pierce the veil, my friends, pierce the veil of illusion and discuss ways to organize the masses annals of knowledge into practical, timeless applications of success.

bryce