Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 73
Here's a selfish argument against racism and nationalism: if all the world's races interbreed, humans will literally become more beautiful and sexually attractive. Have you noticed that mix-raced people tend to be more hot?
Here's the proof. These images represent the averaged faces of every major ethnicity. Averaging faces (blending/unifying them) makes them more attractive to the human eye. Now imagine if we did a meta-average of all the ethnicities into one face. So, to put it starkly, it's in your best interest for all races to fuck each other ;)
Hint: If you want to have the most beautiful babies possible, have sex with someone who's a different race than you.
Great essay by Zizek. He has an excellent nose for sniffing out hidden mechanisms of devilry and bullshit:
Just be careful, his position of materialism, atheism, and anti-mysticism is delusional. He does not know what he's talking about when he speaks of God, consciousness, or love. The rest is good.
Unlike most billionaires, this billionaire is doing a great job at overcoming his self-bias:
We need more millionaires and billionaires to speak out against the devilry of neoliberal economics. Unfortunately most of them are so comfy it makes them blind to the systemic rigging. A lot of millionaires and billionaires hold libertarian and capitalist ideologies because that's what serves their survival, and allowed them to rise to the top.
It would be almost impossible for someone who's conscious of the devilry of neoliberalism to run a giant Fortune 500 company like Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Disney, Exxon, Boeing, Walmart, Coca Cola, AT&T, etc. To run such companies requires that management and investors bullshit themselves about how good and fair it all is. All of these companies need to believe that giant monopolies, low taxes, and deregulation are good for society. Without such a positive mythology, management and investors would have an existential and moral crisis.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
-- Upton Sinclair
Here's a nice intro to how Multi-Level Marketing cults work. Be sure to avoid these like the plague:
You'll never get rich this way because fundamentally this job generates no creative value. It's a parasitic system that feeds the leeches at the top.
This short clip epitomizes how Stage Blue misunderstands Stage Green:
I love this clip because it so clearly demonstrates how the ego-mind can literally see love and peace as "evil". That's the essence of devilry: to call love evil and truth falsehood. When a devil sees or hears love, he calls it evil. When a devil sees or hears truth, he calls it falsehood. He does all this unconsciously with an air of smug self-righteousness. And then he actively rallies those in his circle to his distorted perspective, as this allows the distortion to take on the appearance of truth. This is the universal mechanism of devilry. Learn it well because you will see this over and over again throughout your life.
Genuine morality is not a set of man-made rules to follow. Genuine morality is the recognition of Self-Love. It cannot be written down in a book or even taught. The trick with teaching Love is that although it sounds simple, childish, utopian, and airy-fairy, it's actually the most advanced of teachings because it requires of the student a certain level of consciousness and being. To someone at a low level of consciousness, a teaching about Love will seem utopian, unscientific, immoral, and even evil. Which is why someone like Jesus, if he were alive today, would actually be demonized by the right-wing as a communist SJW.
Of course the Beatles did a lot of LSD, so they had direct mystical experiences of Love — which they then sang about. But none of this fits a right-wing rule-based view of morality. Which is of course why LSD and other psychedelics were quickly outlawed in a predominantly stage Blue society (1960s). Psychedelics are the single greatest threat to people like Ben Shapiro (Stage Blue) and what's more, they don't even know it. They just instinctively stay far away from it. See, the ego-mind is so good a self-deception that it can stay far away from things that threaten its worldview without the person even having to consciously understand why. The ego-mind will rationalize it in a way that only entrenches one deeper in one's paradigm, making the self-deception indistinguishable from reality and almost inescapable.
How do you validate Spiral Dynamics? With examples like this. It's remarkable how well Spiral Dynamics explains and predicts such examples. It's like people operate on just a handful of scripts: Blue, Orange, Green << that explains 80% of current human behavior! Amazing, huh?
Tis a thing of beauty to watch Anand Giridharadas demolish the neo-liberal fantasy.
This is what exposing devilry looks like:
This is a top-notch example of Stage Green at its healthiest and most cogent. This is what Jordan Peterson and his fanboys are missing. This is what JP smears as "Cultural Marxism". This is what the right-wing is in denial about. This is what the culture wars are distracting from. This is the real political discussion that is never shown on TV.
Neither nationalism, nor libertarianism, nor technology, nor higher economic growth can solve this problem. We face a new set of collective challenges which require a Stage Green worldview to start to address.
BTW, if you're not in America, you might wonder, "But Leo, how do your American examples help me?" Not so fast! The principles we're studying here in these mostly American examples apply to all countries. If you're in a less developed country then these are the problems you'll face once your country reaches peak Stage Orange like America. And it will happen sooner than you think. Maybe it will take 50 years, but your country will face these same problems, and probably already is. That's what Spiral Dynamics shows us. That's the value of studying structure. Don't get hung up on local details. China, India, Russia, Brazil... they're all gonna have to find solutions to corporatism run amok, gross income inequality, and what is fundamentally plutocracy.
To be clear, I don't recommend you ever experiment with heroin or opioids because they are super addictive and run counter to our work.
But it's psychologically and metaphysically illuminating to read about why people do heroin:
Vice.com - Former Users Describe the First Time They Tried Heroin
The bottom line is: people do heroin because it brings them closer to God, and they don't know of any other healthy way of getting there. Most of them don't even know that what they're connecting with is God. That's how ignorant the situation is.
God is the greatest high in the world. What do you think monks, mystics, and yogis are chasing? They are heroin addicts minus the heroin.
Once you experience God, no other feeling will satisfy you. And in true going-full-circle fashion, that's how the best thing in the world becomes the worst thing in the world. Heaven becomes hell. So the wise find ways of reaching heaven without the life-shattering side-effects. It takes more work, but it's worth it.
P.S. Psychedelics can take you even closer to God than heroin and are anti-addictive. But they will still leave you with the suffering and heartbreak of losing your connection to God after the trip ends. Of course your connection to God cannot ever truly be lost because you are God. But you will lose awareness of this basic fact, sucked back into the Matrix of ego and social obligation.