I am slowly discarding my differentiations between stupid and evil, there’s a different, mysterious third thing that combines both but exists on its own.
Willful Ignorance. Choosing to remain stupid despite access to information.
Yah it’s something like that, the WWE/kayfabe thing but spreading through reality broadly, where one chooses to believe something they know isn’t true, and thus it becomes true to them. Abandoning of accountability for one’s own beliefs and embracing whatever corresponds to whatever feels most validating or satisfying. I lost a family member to this in the form of conspiracism and delusion, instead of getting help for voices and visions, they found a community to support them and started making money from people seeking meaning and truth (the truth they want to hear that is) and as a result just tripled down on every crazy idea and was eventually arrested for taking a weapon to a school and was eventually released and went right back to their supportive community online.
I think the AI/atomized internet is going to either destroy us all, or it will force some people to actually reconcile their weaknesses as a cognitive being and how limited and vulnerable our minds really are in order to create safeguards against the most devious mental traps imaginable.
HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex “real world” and instead established a simpler “fake world” for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments.
Some links you may find interesting. It took me a few sittings to finish it because there’s so much information to process but I highly recommend watching that documentary.
Willful Ignorance. Choosing to remain stupid despite access to information.
Got me remembering Badiou’s Ethics and how part of evil involves “fidelity to the lie” and actively denying the shared truth of reality.
Yah it’s something like that, the WWE/kayfabe thing but spreading through reality broadly, where one chooses to believe something they know isn’t true, and thus it becomes true to them. Abandoning of accountability for one’s own beliefs and embracing whatever corresponds to whatever feels most validating or satisfying. I lost a family member to this in the form of conspiracism and delusion, instead of getting help for voices and visions, they found a community to support them and started making money from people seeking meaning and truth (the truth they want to hear that is) and as a result just tripled down on every crazy idea and was eventually arrested for taking a weapon to a school and was eventually released and went right back to their supportive community online.
I think the AI/atomized internet is going to either destroy us all, or it will force some people to actually reconcile their weaknesses as a cognitive being and how limited and vulnerable our minds really are in order to create safeguards against the most devious mental traps imaginable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
https://youtube.com/shorts/gs1-ebayUIs
Some links you may find interesting. It took me a few sittings to finish it because there’s so much information to process but I highly recommend watching that documentary.
I’ve heard some of this before but I’ll dive in deeper and make myself even more depressed for the sake of understanding.