by achrilock
writing
The major problem with the majority of human beings, and this is true regardless of class background or education level or ideological affinity, is that in order to reach anything close to the end of a chain of facts or circumstances or reasoning, they must, to an increasing extent, disregard any awareness of adjacent facts or circumstances.
If you can picture yourself standing at the center of a web, where the center is your subjective perception and the web is a series of strands branching out in all directions, and occasionally conceptually interconnected across the distance between them, and where you’re trying to move out into these to shift and expand your understanding, most people are only capable of following one thread. Most are incapable of moving laterally while holding the original thread in their minds, and fewer still can achieve any distance from the center. The vast majority never move at all, and simply accept the local view with which they are presented, occasionally feeling a tug on the line by those who are capable of movement. And subjective limitations, like fear or selfishness, can more often than not stop movement altogether, or contaminate any objective awareness that they manage to achieve.
In other words, people are broadly and habitually self-centered and dim. I think this is the real, substantive threat to our species, and by extension to ourselves and to the other living things in the universe. We don’t talk about or attempt to address such fundamental flaws, or how to systemically address them. That’s our weakness and the cause of most of our problems. It can be corrected with broad, non-specialized education, and we have to start doing that for everyone if we want a decent future.
