Blindness

[The Renaissance Man]

This is an article I wrote, called Blindness. It tries to explain why people don't change and can't change.

 

Blindness is the absence of independent thinking.

 

Almost every human is blind. They are just animals acting out their social conditioning. They lack independent thinking.

The average person lives his life, has values, makes decisions, almost entirely based on how they were conditioned growing up. By conditioning I mean what they learned from the environment, their parents, teachers, authorities, and in general what was "normal" in their eyes.

That becomes their only reality. That is unconsciousness. That is absence of independent thinking. That limited reality is all they see. Outside that there's blindness.

For a fuller picture, add to conditioning a flavor of genetic personality, and life experiences, that in most cases are just little dots of light in a sea of blindness. Far from enough to have enough context to spark independent thinking.

 

Social conditioning is not the same in everybody. Here, again, we have a mix between genetics and upbringing. We may see more and less mature perspectives, or more and less naive people, or more and less people able to interpret certain situations.
What remains common though, is that all those people remain limited  by their conditioning.

• Children of entrepreneurs much more often become entrepreneurs. And it's not about the money, it's about blindness. Children of employees were conditioned to believe that entrepreneurship is impossible, in most cases. Why would you pursue something impossible?
• A person who was conditioned to believe that a needy "nice guy" behavior is attractive, will only have that tool at his disposal, and even though it will keep not working, he'll still persist and suffer, over and over again.

 

In the face of suffering, the blind person reflexively, like an animal, tries to find a way out. But he's blind, he can't see. Just like if you put a cat in a box next to a lever, he doesn't know what a lever is, and so he'll start experimenting randomly, jumping around, scratching everything, until, by chance, he moves the lever and makes progress. But he never understands why he made progress. One step forward is just one data point. One dot of light. How many do you need for the full picture? For actual sight?

The average person only sees within his conditioning boundaries. If life's problems are solvable within the boundaries, then everything's great. But when it's not enough, when the tools given by your conditioning don't solve the problem, then it's chaos. Then it's the "cat in the box" situation: Blindness.

 

But the blind mind does not think or see that it's blind. Otherwise he'd quickly find a way to stop being blind (by learning, contemplating, introspecting). The thought of blindness implies a meta-perspective that would make that kind of blindness almost impossible. That's the problem of self-deception!

 

Let's see what it's like to be blind. Blindness is synonym with unconsciousness. To understand the blind person, which is almost everybody in the world, you need to see them like an animal. Not in the sense that they have the intellect or the worth of an animal. But in the sense that their behaviors, values, life decisions, are all unconscious reactions that are the result of the interaction between conditioning, genetic personality and circumstances.
The poor blind is a complete victim to his conditioning. His life is just the sum of those reactions, of which he almost never made a conscious one.

 

It's most fascinating to see the blind person when faced with a challenge where the solution is outside the person's conditioning. For example, when a "nice guy" can't attract women, no matter how hard he tries.

How is it possible that "nice guys" can often remain such for all their lives? The answer is simple. They're blind! They're the cat in the box! The difference is that attraction is much more complicated than a lever. That's why the cat gets out the box, but the nice guy doesn't get laid.

See, even the recognition that the nice guy approach is problematic requires sight in the first place. It requires the ability to see the flawed conditioning from outside. But by definition, the blind when outside his conditioning... is blind.

 

This is how the blind thinks:

• What is happiness? It depends on what I was conditioned to believe it is.
• What is a healthy relationship? It depends on what I was conditioned to believe it is.
• How do you know if you're happy? I just compare my current situation to my conditioning.

Does this reflect the reality of most people? I think so.

 

A final point: What about the people who make progress? After all, people seem to mature as they age. They learn lessons, they change. Doesn't this go against the idea of conditioning and blindness?

First, progress in those situations is extremely slow. Any experience contradicting your conditioning is just a little dot of light into the 360 view of blindness. A lot of experience is required to become seriously effective, unless someone straight up teaches you how to do things right. But that's not really in your power.
Even when those people learn lessons (and this tends to end in their 20s or 30s, when they set up a normal life, just as they were conditioned to), the lessons are extremely specific and isolated. Not enough to gain enough clarity over the whole situation, which is what's required to solve the problem for good.

It's true that self-help has made millions change. But remember that not everybody is aware of self-help. If your conditioning didn't teach you about self-help, or the idea of improvement, you either stumble upon it by chance, or you remain the same all your life. Once again, victims of conditioning!

 

What's the solution to blindness then? It's what we have here. It's becoming aware of it. Leo's epistemology playlist is a superpower for this reason. It is the antidote to blindness.
The real solution to blindness is when you start what I call a flywheel effect: when you see blindness in action, you now seek to understand and learn, until you're not blind anymore. Your area of sight has expanded. New area of blindness? Repeat, and again, expansion.
It's a flywheel effect because unlike blind people, which are stuck for life, you are constantly expanding your area of sight, more and more, understanding more and more, thinking independently more and more. Remember I defined blindenss as the absence of independent thinking.

It's a meta-mechanism that instead of reacting to blindness, it sees it from the outside, and then dissolves it.

 

PS - I was "blind" all my life. Actually, I was more blind than normal. I was extremely blind. Extremely naive. I lived this transformation first-hand only recently (3 years). I am in the rare position of remembering how it was to be extremely blind. I have countless stories of my blind life. 95% of them are too painful to share. Self-help, and especially Leo's work, changed my life. It's insane how the same person can change so much over 3 years. If I weren't blind this much and for this long, I wouldn't believe it could be possible.

Edited Thursday at 04:25 PM by The Renaissance Man