Utopianism and intractible problems

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I really doubt this is a new observation for anyone but I thought it might be an interesting examination to widen.

The trouble with human nature is that we don't deal with intractible/unsolvable problems well. That's especially true when the screws are turned to us daily, where the given problem feels like a perpetual knife to the throat, and we're told in so many ways - by other people - that it's unsolvable and needs to stay exactly the way it is.

I think when people start showing an anti-science bent in a way and especially when they do so without the aid of religion it's a sign that the system has become intolerable and rather than seeing intractible problems as intractible they've reached the point of cutting the knot so to speak, declaring the problem tractible rather than intractible, and usually this comes in the form of collapsing the problem down to one vector, ie. one cause, and it's often a social group.

While I can imagine some people being entitled or undisciplined enough to go right to this without even stopping themselves for examination I can see exquisite pain in most other cases fueling such a decision, ie. when someone's sanity is backed against the wall or they're backed against the wall of suicidal ideation and have the choice to either check out early or bend some rule in reality to make things continue to work.

I think of my own real life situation and I've noticed it both in real life and then on places like facebook - ie. the guy who perpetually got zero likes, zero replies, just hard ignored, and it seems like our culture pairs seeming intelligence and difference with potential predator - and it takes tons of outside social proof to overcome that. From that experience I think I can get how barely being able to make ends meet or running from creditors, or seen as 'bad' or unlawful based on your race, not just until a misunderstanding gets cleared up but in perpetuity for the rest of your life - can be quite corrosive to sanity, mental health, and eventually it can come to pass that morality and even truth become less important than survival itself.


I'm curious on what you all think on how our culture should look at things like this, how we should address it, etc.. If certain kinds of activism, especially against problems that are natural or hopelessly emergent from human interaction itself, are akin to a psychotic break (there are some groups still genuinely trying to fight for equal rights but most are getting toward the limits of what can return on investment) the question is what can actually be done in small ways to make all of this less relentlessly punishing. I think more support networks, ie. re-planting of social capital for the most vulnerable, is a critical thing and if direct solutions to their problems are impossible there should be at least ways that they can meet with people face to face who are like themselves for community, for people who can validate their experience, and for people who can at least give them some of the basic staples - like love and friendship - that they need to survive a road as hard as they're having to walk.

Who knows, this could be too weird and esoteric and might fall right off the front page but I figured it's worth a try.

I think that in my case, I learned how to do things and the more things I learned how to do, the more confident I was that I could do other things. When I reached Junior High School and the bullying began and I was told how stupid I was, I learned to ignore them and rather trust in myself and my abilities. So to me almost no problem is unsolvable.

I tried to instill that approach into my children. To protect my children from bullying I fashioned for each of them a coat of invisible armor. From the time my daughters began to walk and talk, my wife and I relentlessly began to teach them Life Skills.

Consider this, most children start with the same box [Asperger and neurotypical]. But every time an Aspie child is ridiculed, they are told they have no common sense, every time they are told they are stupid or worthless, an idiot, their box gets a little bit smaller. If the box gets compressed too small, the box breaks and explodes. The goal is to help the child expand their box, to be everything possible that they can be. One approach to expand their box is to give them skills, hands on skills, real life skills.

Every time an individual learns a new life task successfully, the individual becomes more confident, feels greater self worth and value, is better able to withstand non-constructive criticism and psychological abuse. Essentially, the individual is expanding their box.

Life tasks are normal tasks that individuals (such as parents) use in their normal life. Life skills can be almost anything. They can be making a scrambled egg, or making a sunny-side-up egg, or driving a nail into a board, changing a flat tire, washing the dishes, balancing a checkbook, using a cookbook, making cherry jubilee, ironing their clothes, fixing a broken dishwasher, answering the phone, unclogging a toilet, changing a light bulb, making a cup of coffee or grinding coffee beans by hand, coloring Easter eggs the old fashion way or finding Easter eggs buried inside or at the end of a movie, grinding grains of wheat to make flour and then using the flour to make a loaf of bread, creating a spreadsheet or sweeping a floor. These life skills can be very mundane or very intricate task. There are millions of life skills that can be learned. They can be outdoor survival skills taught in boy scouts or girl scouts. Every skill makes their armor a little bit stronger against psychological abuse. When my daughters stepped into the classroom for the first time; they had a thousand real life skills under their belt.

After working for many years, I became a first line supervisor and then a manager. As a first line supervisor I had the opportunity to shape many young engineers, some of which exhibited Aspie traits. One employee was transferred into my group because he wasn't working out in a different team. At the time I had a piece of new test equipment that was damaged and everyone I assigned to fix it came back and said it couldn’t be done. So I assigned this newbie to take a crack at fixing the equipment and I told him “everyone else said it was impossible”. In no time at all, the equipment was back in operation. So from then on anytime I assigned a task to this individual, I always prefaced that task as “an impossible assignment” and he always came through. He became my right hand man.

The problem with my nature anyway, seems to be that I exclusively deal with intractable problems, both for a living & personally. It's possible to be the externality to all this.

I told an uncommon amount about my formative story in the Thomas Szasz thread, ie. the people who were in 'charge' of me just about made the perfect floor mat and I had to unlearn it all. I think a lot of times if I come off as over-assertive, over-pessimistic, etc. in here it comes from that memory that I almost got eaten by the system.



I think to some degree every child - AS or NT - is going to run into that albeit it will be much more intense for neuro-divergents and the most important thing the can understand, even under 10, is that adults have their own problems and their proclamations don't come with God-like authority, rather their fiat and absolute claims need to be taken with a huge grain of salt - especially when they're a complete mismatch to experience.


This is where I think our letting the predation and zero-sum game arena run our society to the degree it does is a huge mistake, and if not it's a sign that adults in the world have lapsed into nihilism, comfort, and abdicated responsibility which is really sad. My only thoughts here - we maybe need to do more to make sure that people can't have their basic principle so heavily extorted by wages.

I've actually taken an interest in learning more about psychopathy lately because on one hand I've had my own negative misconceptions to get over - ie. that they're not pure evil, they're an adaptive strategy that nature is employing like any other, they're perfectly suited for high-tension tasks like neurosurgeon, air traffic controller, bomb squad, etc. (they actually go into theta brain-wave states in violent and high-risk situation, their heartbeat slows, etc.) but they're also an extreme double-edged sword and we have to think of the collateral damage that they can do when they're running corporations or large government agencies. This means we'll have to take a much much more circumspect view of them - ie. know that they're a double-edged sword that will need constant loving attention, making sure that we never oppress them for their differences, reward them well for what they do well, but also equally let them know that the rest of society can see them clearly and that they may in some cases need outside help to be kept on the straight and narrow but that bending and distorting reality around themselves is completely off limits and that the rest of society will accept their contributions but will react swiftly if they start going dark or crossing the line into predation.


I've noticed, even among social friendlies, that the guy who can't weld, doesn't work on cars, doesn't go to the gun range on a regular basis, doesn't golf, doesn't grill, etc. is seen as a bit 'less than' and it almost seems like there's a perception that if he doesn't do these things he can't do them. On one side my parents discouraged me from doing certain things, cars was an example where in my early 20's my friends were car nuts, anytime I wanted to put the car up on jacks to work on something my parents emphatically said no - that it was too dangerous, the car could fall on me, I could end up paralyzed, and they'd have to take care of me for the rest of their lives. They're kind of funny about the kitchen as well and anytime I've really cooked much I lived somewhere else other than at home. As for four-wheelers, dirt bikes, ATV's, etc. - the other branch of the things I mentioned earlier, that's another area where opportunities simply didn't open up and who knows - I may have liked those things, I may not have, just that I can count on less than one hand the instances that I actually road a quad around someone's property and got to experiment with the automatic gear-shifting and I've never driven a sportbike or motorcycle.


Lol, that can happen. My current job actually forced me to grow up in certain ways. For the longest time I considered things completely insane if I couldn't have all of the pieces needed to do my job, find the knowledge online, etc.. I learned the hard way what it's like when no one has a clue how to do it, no one will tell you how to do it online, and there's the equivalent of a guillotine in the corner for you if you can't just make it work.

When all else fails there's what I call the 'Ship of Theseus' approach to problem-solving where you have to reverse-engineer every piece of the area that's exhibiting the problem and selectively turn things off, break them (non-irreversibly) until you actually arrive at the origin of the problem, then you may find that it ricoched in from somewhere else and in worst case scenarios that Ship of Theseus approach may need to be employed two, three, four, or more times in different places. The understanding I didn't have before - I was relying on 'fairness', and I've learned lately that fairness is for the dead - ie. that not only is fairness not available but that the world will easily destroy anyone who can't make miracles happen through their own ingenuity. To a degree I think that's a warped/sick gradient, especially when it comes from a place of destructive competition and zero-sum games but I now understand it as a feature of the world that I'll likely have to deal with for the remainder of my life.

I'm going to go out on a spooky/metaphysical limb with something.

Not in the God direction but in the direction of the functionalist view of consciousness. I do believe, at least from persoal experience, that there's relatively strong evidence for the combination of awareness at different levels, I mean actual awareness, where there's both bottom-up and top-down communication, a great example being a nerve receives pain, heat, or pressure signals, alerts your brain, and your brain signals you to withdraw a whole limb. Whether it's intense synchronicities that defy any sort of statistical reason or watching group behavior it seems like the China Brain rebuttal to functionalism better acts as a clarifier and more evidence because it does seem like groups form unique egregores as do cities, nations, etc. and I do think a lot of odd or 'supernatural' experiences people have - while some of them are just subconscious epiphanies that rise up in abstract or apocalyptic symbols to the conscious mind (through something like Aldus Huxley's bottle-neck), when these happen in outward life there's a good chance that it's a downward feedback loop where a group, city, state, nation, or even the planet, is sending a signal back down the stack.

Why I bring that up - I ended up in such exquisitely miserable and stressful situations in the last few years that I genuinely started to wonder if the universe only budgets exquisite self-awareness for people or individuals are going to be put in torturous circumstances who actually need the adaptation to function. I also can't help but wonder if people who are very good problem solvers won't find themselves not just occasionally stepping in dogisht but practically finding it under every step. For example every new job felt like Russian roulette, they were always unstable environments, felt like I was a polar bear trying to hop from melting iceberg to melting iceberg to stay alive (even if I could perform at a job it always felt like the company I worked at was evaporating out from under me), and then I'd find clients who needed something super-complex, just about scribbled directions on a piece of paper on their stomachs, crumpled it up in a ball and dropped it on my desk and everyone expected me to fulfill that obligation perfectly.

That's one of the things I feel like our understanding of politics might be missing and it's the kind of thing I wish Bret and Eric Weinstein were chewing on in terms of their Game B ideas, ie. that we're not just dealing with individual game-theory and group in the informational sense but literally layers of the canopy where, like I don't know what it's like to be a cell in my body, there are most likely layers of organization that experience selfhood but can't literally feel the people they're made of, these are what were called 'egregores' in 19th century France and Mark Stavish recently wrote a book about them from the western esoteric perspective which is one of if not the first book of its kind.

I think you may have missed some of the point. You learn skills for yourself, not for society.

Part of the way NTs act is because of our animal heritage. Humans have built into them the shadows of social structures of species that came before us.

To understand bullying one must look at it through the lens of a primate. The reason why teasing and bullying is exhibited in humans is because it is an evolutionary trait that evolved in primates. Primates exhibit a social tribe structure based on Alpha, Beta, and Omega members.

This structure is also exhibited in tribes of humans. Humans form into societal groups called gangs. A gang is led by an Alpha Male (otherwise known as the bully) and his lieutenants, Beta Males. Generally this tribe encompasses the entire school class because the other members of the tribe participate as soldiers in the gang or as silent eyewitnesses. The leadership of the gang is determined by brute force. A male Aspie fills the role of an Omega Male, a communal scapegoat or outlet of frustration.

One of the interesting observations about school bullying is that generally for males it peaks in the Junior High School years. This is no accident. What makes the timing of that phase interesting and special? It is because males are transitioning into puberty at that age.

In primates, Alpha Males often gain preferential access to sex or mates and as a result to reproduction and offspring. In humans, this bullying is part of thinning out the herd just prior to the mating age. It either mentally cripples Aspie males for the rest of their life or causes them to become loners and leave the tribe.

Once abuse and torture enters the picture, do not expect the child to advance any further along the stages of natural childhood development. For some (Aspie girls) who are further along socially, they may even digress backwards. I feel that girls tend to mimic the action of others and this is actually part of the natural process of becoming an extrovert. They are further along in social development and forced backwards into becoming an introvert by their girl tribe. As a result they are separated from their tribe, shunned and abandoned. Once you drive a turtle back into its shell in fear, don’t expect it to come out anytime soon. Aspies exhibit paralyzing fear, afraid of sticking their head out of their shell, because they don’t know what they did wrong to have their peer group turn on them, even their best friends, with great meanness pushing them out of their tribe.

In the primate world, an Omega is the lowest caste of the hierarchical society. An Omega is given two choices. Either an Omega can remain submissive to everyone and will commonly be used as a communal scapegoat; an outlet for the tribe’s frustration or the animal can leave the tribe.

In humans, an Omega can select the same two choices. They can remain an Omega Aspie or they can leave and become a Non-Conformist Aspie. Those are the two types of adult Aspies.

In my opinion an Omega can try to fit in, to conform to societies norms. You can constantly look over your shoulder, be hypersensitive, watching for any signs of danger, always keep your senses in overdrive, keep your guard up and live in a constant state of fear. But the prolonged stress will evolve into distress. Over time you will most likely wear yourself out and decay into mental problems.

As a non-conformist Aspie, I expect society to conform to me. And in general, they do not disappoint me.

Oh no, I get it and I'd agree that these things are absolutely worth knowing for their own sake, I was just discussing another side of the issue. Having people in your life, like a parent or even relative, who will encourage you in learning these life skills is a huge blessing and to some degree I wish I'd had more of that.


100% agreed. There's a way that this can go into hyper-drive as well if they also find you threatening on deeper levels that don't involve prowess with your fists, which I believe was another aspect of this that I got to enjoy.

I'd like to refer to Bruno Latour's "we have never been modern" here (which I highly recommend reading, although the language is a bit confusing, maybe due to translation).

in it, Latour describes the "traditional" worldview as one of a network made up of real things (objective reality), religious stories, and social constructs (subjective realities). By taking the religious stories away, modernity laid bare what is objective and what is subjective, and made everything subject to change - objective reality can be changed by natural science, social constructs can be changed by cultural change. However, Latour writes, the argument could also go the other way: we cannot change a thing, because the laws of nature won't allow it, or we can't change the social constructs or there will be chaos.
So, religious stories were the way to bring a meaningful order to things - but it made change difficult. Without religious stories, we can change everything, or defend everything, but we are always acting with the risk of destroying something important.
As the title suggests, Latour doesn't think we have ever been in this state of modernity, but rather that we have always been working within quasi-religious stories, but we have been changing these stories to fit our social and scientific change, and that we're chnaging things faster than our stories can keep up.
or destroying elements that were necessary for stories to function.
....
I think we need a meta-story, and actually, I think, some of us have this meta-story. Like the big history of the likes of yuval harari.
If you can view religion as historically contingent, partially genetically supported development, you can step outisde of your religious story and look at things differently.

but since these religious story are the "ordering" element in human societies, that might result in a breakdown of these societies. pull hinduism out of india, and you have a country with an obscene level of inequality. pull the story of capitalist meritocracy out of most parts of the world, and you end up with a world of obscene inequality... and that epiphany might lead to a workers' uprising and so on. ... we've been there..

I'm curious on what you all think on how our culture should look at things like this, how we should address it, etc

Much of this depends on how humanity is viewed.

1. Are we perfectible and on our way to enlightenment?
2. Are we hopeless and on our way to destruction?
3. Are we better off as individuals rather than cogs in a collective?
4. Are we flawed and in need of redemption?
5. Do we do better in adversity or prosperity?

Before consideration is given as to how to order society, one might have to face a true understanding of the nature of man.

Sounds like Latour is rhyming with Gray a bit there, human nature a fixed problem and for a very long time humanity's relationship to nature also being largely fixed (technology offers some novation of contract there.


Patrick J. Deneen I think made a similar point about liberalism (in the economic and secular sense) and the governance Christianity added to it which made the two workable side by side in his opinion but adding that the defeat of Christianity by liberalism caused the centrifugal properties of liberalism to start ripping apart or atomizing society:

https://www.firstthings.com/article/201 ... gnoble-lie

The thing that worries me, which state do the 'victors', ie. the unthinking and pampered, like better - this state or the state of dealing with a religious story? On one hand I might be tempted to think that only a serious cultural trauma, like a world war of a very specific kind and near extinction, could reverse this I'd have to admit - WWII made more atheists, so I'm really not clear on what would change this.

The only thing I can say - there is some shift happening in the scientific community as more of the straight-laced components try to shift away from naive materialism (I mean naive as - 'it is as it appears') in favor of panpsychism, it's still laughed at by a lot of people but it could be that we'll have more breakthroughs that might tip the scale in that direction, more weirdness equivalents to delayed-choice quantum eraser, and as I mentioned webbing and egregores - we may finally find ways to make better use of the stacks rather than just trying to fight for cultural stability on individual or raw organizational levels.

I'm deeply concerned about this one because it seems like few people get 'enlightened' - if we're to define that as the gap between action and reaction - without some traumatic experience that forces them to grow more than the rest of the society around them, meaning if they didn't have some severe problem, ie. meaning they're socially irrelevant and before enlightenment be an outsider, after enlightenment be an outsider, this seems to have no significant effect on how things are done at that X where the conformity bell-curve and success bell-curve meet in power.

As for things on a long time scale - I'm sympathetic on one level to the alchemical Great Work, the idea that as far as consciousness is concerned this world is a bit like a caustic industrial process that's hammering, splitting to dust, coagulating, burning to ashes, etc. consciousness and that each individual whose been here comes along a little farther the next time they get born. My problem with that idea is that I can't say I'm morally 'better' than I was as a kid, I may have picked up more tricks to deal with adversity and futility or adapt to them but - is that an improvement and would any process of reincarnation where we're just constantly beating ourselves into the buzzsaw of a zero-sum genetic war for surivival, mating, and status really progressively make us better? Unless this is a billion-year process, and a horrifically painful one considering that, I'm not sure what could change or improve. It could also be that consciousness continually reincarnates and doesn't improve.


At a minimum - give us enough technological leverage for violence such as synthetic biology - things could go that way.


We derive meaning and status from work, and we have no idea how we'd make society function without people's status and daytime being tethered to work. We might be able to experiment with less bone-breaking for workplace conformity but even there - the person has to be functional in their spot.


I'm not comfortable answering that one - maybe something that lives in a space of a more Gods-eye view could answer that question, I couldn't.


At a minimum we don't have good mechanisms for keeping discipline in prosperity and we additionally handle turns back away from prosperity rather badly.

As far as genetic tampering goes - the only thing I could think of is if they could find some very small innocuous modification that would essentially both make us all super-soldiers and super-athletes who also abhorred violence but if they had to do it they'd kill the competition within seconds (all of that sounds super-convenient and I'd have to guess it doesn't exist - it would probably be many sets of genes with many side-effects).

I say that because on one hand we'd have much better mutual deterrence, and on the other hand we really don't want an alien race crushing and enslaving us at some point in the remote future just because we sorted out our self-predation problems.

Another really fun one, and one that I don't think can leave either gender not doubled over in existential anguish (and I think this a good part of the theory's unpopularity rather than it's accuracy) - sexual economic theory:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 701630277X

Pretty much if this doesn't warm you up to antinatalism or human exterminism very little is likely to. Also, rather frighteningly, misogyny and misandry are easier to survive for the person taking up that view than the person committing themselves to take in the whole picture and hold it accurately in their minds because the despair for the human condition this creates is immense.

This is part of why the IDW and Rebel Wisdom are unshakably interesting to me, there are people who are doing everything in their power to look at these problems in their fullest color fidelity that human beings can manage. If they don't have a shot at it - it's likely toast.

Isn't this what the red pillers believe in? And doesn't that just turn people into pick up artists? And aren't pick up artists the real reason for warming up to the idea of human extinction? At least, that's what they do for me ...

It's been broken over my head for the relevant range of my nearly 40 years and it's about the only map of what's happening that explains human nastiness and shallowness to the degree that it does.

Where it actually leads me - I think Bret Weinstein in looking at, and largely sharing, this outlook has said once you know what the gene game is you simply won't want to play it. That's about where I'm at too, ie. it's a choice to either disfigure my character to try 'winning' at an animalistic game, or just figure that if my hypothetical kids would stand a chance of going through even half of what I did simply for being different and if its true that the narcissistic and shallow shall inherit the earth - great, in some ways if only the shallow and narcissistic are breeding that might actually decrease the level of pain because most likely that would decrease the level of conscious awareness.