lp0 on fire

My personal blog

Rant: Common sense(lessness)

From the comfort of technology, a new class of laziness was born. Mindless following of "influencers", "celebreties" and such. The ever-growing groupthink, the increasing sexualization of content and advertisements, the deminishing of quality in almost every front. The increasing rudeness and lack of understanding and compassion.

People assume that there always will be food on the table, that their hairdresser will always be there, that the internet will never go offline, that all this data and "tools" such as the media machine will never be used for harmful intentions.

Once I was watching the NOS Nieuws (Dutch state-funded news channel) where they were talking about an ongoing conflict. But to my surprise they showed footage from the game Arma 3, not the real war. People believed the footage to be real.

Opinions become far more devided and polarized. The opposing side is almost always seen as the antagernist that you spare no humility for, everything you can inflict on them is fair game. This bred cancel-culture. The feedback loop of acting like a victim while ruining one's life with false allegations and evidence, so you gain sympathy and destroy your opposition.

Recently more footage surfaces what the Dutch parlement looked like during debates in the 70's and today. They used to agree and disagree peacefully, made sure anyone could make their point and discuss like reasonal grown-up men. Today's parlement debates look like monkeys flinging shit at each other. Foul language, rivalries and just making their point in the hope of being elected the next election without any attempt at unity, only self-serving interests.

When we as a society cannot have meaningful discussions through debate like reasonable grown adults, we lose our unity. When we cannot see the concequences of blind reliance without upholding quality, we lose our infastructure.

Without unity and infrastructure, our civilization will fall.

Fixing the problem

The best way to solve this problem is by fixing the state of mind of the population first. Stop with constantly telling everyone to hate themselves for [climate change, war, being a cis white person, attocities commited before the oldest person alive, etc] and for conforming to inefficient social norms [you must have a big house, big car, wife, kids, good job, etc], the state of mind changes from self-loathing and constant stress changes to love and compassion.

This could be further optimized by introducing a concept called "basis inkomen" (basic income). This means one receives the income required to live from the goverment, but one can work to earn more money to afford skeeing in the Alps for example. This allows for people to work part-time, which in return gives more free time for self-endulgance, a better state of mind. Studies indicates that part-time workers might be even productive than full-time workers (see sources).

From love and compassion grows the desire of self improvement. From this mindset, we can solve far more difficult problems like the impact of climate change on our infrastructure.

At last, society needs common sense. This in the days before enlightment came from religion and philosophers. We have no modern alternative. A society without religion falls into nihilism. People need an external body for governance of a common moral code, but this can't be entrusted to the goverment as it is important that the governance of unity and infrastructure is managed by two separate bodies. This way one doesn't have full rulership over everyone. The one body can correct the other body in case of corruption. Co-operation is in the best interest of both bodies as one cannot go without the other.

We need a religion that promotes self-improvement, honesty, persuit of knowledge and truth. We can look at examples from Chistianity, Buddism and Shintoism, compile this and form a new religioun decoupled from the state but made mandatory material in education. I wish I had a better solution for the problem, but I can't think of one that introduces more problems than that it solves.

Sources