Ponder
28d ago
I think the problems you are mentioning are downstream of spirituality/religion. A well-functioning society has widely believed shared stories, practices, values, rituals, and agreement on what is sacred.
There is something like an “American Civil Religion” that includes things like:
- myths about how democracy results in good outcomes and leaders through public deliberation
- the myth that anyone can start with nothing and end up successful (because of public education and scholarships)
- the myth that you can achieve economic success through hard work (like starting as a entry-level employee and working up to manager)
- the myth that the free market enhances life for all Americans
- myths about the role of the military
I’m using the word myth as John Vervaeke uses it. It not something untrue, but rather a symbolic story that helps people make sense of reality.
Those myths have been losing their credibility/plausibility/power in recent times. This is because of information spreading and events like:
- The handling of the pandemic by government officials caused some people to lose faith in the democratic process
- Things like the 2008 financial crisis, growing wealth inequality, outsourcing, and AI have called myths about economic success through hard work into question.
- The Iraq War and other military operations have caused people to question the myths around the military.
- The rise of social media caused people to question the myth about the free market leading to better outcomes for everyone (social media caused a bunch of negative externalities that benefited tech companies by exploiting human psychology).
It used to be much easier to believe in the myths and to see bad individual outcomes as outliers that often resulted from individual lack of character.
I think instead of focusing just on material solutions we need new myths that people find widely plausible. There needs to be enough evidence that they are generally true. Without shared myths people become distrustful, conspiratorial, and tribal.
Ponder
28d ago
Yes, this happened to me in my early 30’s too. I made a longer post about it when I joined this site.
It was a series of small things that added up over a long time, then one day I looked back and made the connection that it was likely autism.
- I was heavily into Magic the Gathering for a ten-year period starting in high school.
- I struggled with social milestones, especially romantic ones.
- I am awkward in social situations. When I was younger it was giving short answers, fearing that I would run out of things to say, and trying to come up with social scripts to follow. Now it is noticing that I cycle through a lot of perspectives and think about wierd patterns/connections.
- Frustrations with small talk, tribal political discussion, and people trying to peer pressure me into being on the right side and getting offended when I ask them to provide logical evidence for the belief they want me to go along with.
- Ruminating over past social interactions and getting frustrated that I have a hard time saying the right thing at the right time.
- Frustration when people use social manipulation to bypass the agreed upon rules, then I become obsessed with figuring out the actual unwritten social rules.
- Openness to odd ideas and questioning the status quo.
- Watching content about autistic people (like Asperger’s Are Us) and recognizing that it sometimes overlaps with my own behaviors.
- Watching a streamer with a formal autism diagnosis and realizing he was high-masking and many people didn’t notice his autism unless he told them about it. His story matched a lot of my own experience.
It has made it easier to navigate life and look for situations where I fit in rather than trying to mask to prevalent social norms.
The advent of the sacred is something that arrives and it is not something that can be top-down engineered.
Western society focuses on propositional knowing (knowledge expressed as facts - like cats are mammals). There are however other forms of knowing that don’t reduce to universal certainty and are hard to communicate:
A shift I see occurring is that people are becoming more open to non-propositional knowing. This makes myths about a pluralistic society more plausible and credible. If you accept non-propositional knowing as an important part of your worldview it makes it easier to understand other people’s perspectives without needing to collapse things into certainty.
The democratic myth can shift back to something more like how the parasympathetic vs sympathetic nervous system operates. There isn’t a one right way for every context. You need both parts to work together to reach the right balance. In democracy people are supposed to work together instead of trying to defeat the opposing part – this allows both sides to self-transcend their own self-deception.
Another myth that I see gaining traction is the idea of unhealed collective/generational trauma. When this is accepted it makes it easier to empathize with others because you can see how their actions are influenced by bad things that happened to them in their past.
Finally, we are in a psychedelic renaissance. Psychedelics and empathogens (and higher states of consciousness) show us the importance of non-propositional knowing and can lead to individual and collective healing. I think society is shifting to the myth of these being important and powerful medicines. These can help reveal shared myths like how ancient Greece had the Eleusinian Mysteries. Empathogens can help reveal myths about collective healing through cooperation and trust.
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