"I knew from day one..."
You were right. You are also right about people jumping at the chance to show their virtue. It's pretty awful. I wish I hadn't seen so much of it, and still see it, more than ever. I suspect this is how Mao and Pol Pot gained their followers, just this way, and fear similar horrors are yet to come upon the West.
I am afraid that in order to realize for people that what they did was coping, they need more of that kind in order to see that the coping mechanism will not spare them pain. It will cause further pain. When one is of the notion that there are only benevolent forces and that government authority will save them in a benevolent manner, they are, of course, mistaken. In this way, it is actually not the government alone who has all the power but uses the trick to hand power to the individual, who is then in the position to take on the power of denunciation.
Even if a company owner or senior manager in any working environment had seen through the whole thing, they had no choice but to go along with it, because all it takes is one rotten egg to undermine players who are basically acting rationally. Since you can easily bet on it, the staging went off without a hitch. You could live with that, because nobody can really see behind the other person's face in a situation like this. What was revealing, however, was the high willingness to be inoculated, at least if you want to trust any figures. So everyone can only fall back on their own environment to recognise the statistics of those who have been injected.
For me, it was like a huge testing ground that confirmed that it works on a large scale as well as on a small scale. If the group suggests that there are two short and two long lines on the wall, when in reality there is only one short and two long lines, the individual is very likely to comply because he has to assume that either he is right and the others are crazy or that he himself is crazy. If he thinks that the others are as crazy as they seem, it will seem safer for him not to rebel against the crazy. He will only insist on reality if he is absolutely confident about himself.
I know that you know everything I just said. I just wanted to let you know that I do, too.
I think this reveals why the size of human brains shrank ~20% in the last ~40k years, as centralization rose and deprecated hunter/gatherer societies with professional armies agriculture made possible.
I think it also reveals that the reverse will happen as decentralization develops and disperses across populations, deprecating the value of herd-following and putting a premium on merit, particularly as access to the illimitable resources across the solar system become available for development by whoever gets to them first. The more advanced technology becomes the faster it becomes more advanced, and the faster it disperses. In no industry is this more apparent than in space transport, since the first 3D printed spacecraft only launched in March 2023, but almost every manufacturer is moving to 3D printing of parts that leverage the strengths of additive manufacturing to produce the bespoke one-offs that are ill-suited to mass production.
The evolution of production of the blessings of civilization is going through a clinal boundary that will separate the sheep from the goats, as it were, as people that are able to will adopt means that enable them to themselves create their necessities, and people that can't will remain dependent on overlords and suffer the mercies of the merciless. No stronger incentive can be imagined than inconceivable prosperity and felicity being attainable to them that merit it, and abject penury the lot of them that cannot. I just read a paper that discussed a new way to manufacture integrated circuits - computer chips - from graphene, that create ~5x increases in performance with orders of magnitude decrease in heat production. This is hugely significant because graphene can be printed with ordinary inkjet printers, while silicon has to be manufactured in massive factories. It is possible to envision starting with a couple printers and creating an empire Xanadu could not rival.
This is why I am so optimistic regarding our posterity and the paradise they will enjoy in perpetuity.
I am afraid, you are losing me on this. In that regard, I am a typical women (that is something what is sometimes easily forgotten in online encounters, to be aware if you talk to a male or female).
I never was particularly interested in technology and I never will. It may sound unusual - especially nowadays - but I leave that to men. I would like to think that these men are wise, but I am not going deep into this. My concerns right now are more family oriented and also to find ground in other matters. So, I freely admit that I have a hard time to understand what you talked about above, also because it is not of my interest. So you'd waste your time on me to explain further into it.
I am relieved that you have also an optimistic outlook on what may come and that I find the most important thing right now.
I hope, you take it in the way I came to know you. I appreciate our deep conversation a lot. That is nothing you find often. Thank you for that.
We all have interests, and the opposite. There are certainly things you'd wax prosaic on I'd have nothing to add to. It is fortunate we are able to discuss interests we share, which makes for stimulating conversations we both enjoy.
From what I think this kind of behavior is a coping mechanism.
The government made it very clear that everyone was a criminal who showed signs of disobedience. Since that had being made clear right from the start, and since it is or being thought painful to be treated and seen as a criminal the human starts to cope with the situation in a way he can handle.
In order to handle pain and being outcasted, you need to have experienced pain, despair or even marginalisation before such an event. To know that it is not the end of the world. The tougher, the better, I'd say. Even though this sounds like a contradiction.
me, neither.
Whatever that might be good for...