My thoughts on the world
Hello, I found this forum today which seems in line with my own quest to make the world a better place, and I would like to share with you my thoughts on the world, to provoke some discussion and maybe open you to new lines of thought and potential solutions.
There are contradictions in the ways we act and behave with each other to get what we want, and in the ways we practice science, psychiatry, justice, and education. To me these contradictions are an immense source of suffering in the world today, and we could prevent a lot of suffering by seeing them and how they cause suffering.
I point out some of these contradictions in a long introduction to my ideas I have posted online: https://rethinkthe.world
I would love to get feedback on it.
Cheers, Leo
Sure, well, first of all to effectively determine what course of action to take to prevent the most suffering possible (or spread the most happiness) we need an accurate model of how suffering comes about. The whole text is aimed at showing how suffering comes about and how we can prevent it.
I argue that the idea (which permeates all our thoughts) that there is one absolute reality is not an accurate model of what is, and that we need instead to start thinking in terms of each being having one’s own reality. To come to this conclusion I talk about how words are a limited tool to communicate, to show others what we experience and to experience what others experience, and how the absolute distinction between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ is not valid. I use this to show how the criteria we use in psychiatry to determine why many people suffer are flawed.
I then describe a world where we consider each of us to have our own reality, and show how the apparent lack of absolute standard does not entail meaninglessness or suffering or fear, on the contrary, that despite differences there is something that links us, the desire to live and the love we received without which we couldn’t have survived, and that through love we can overcome fear and all the suffering that follows from it.
I mention how fighting fear with fear only adds more to it, and that justice is based on that idea, to prevent suffering by causing suffering, which can never prevent suffering, it can only make some people suffer more rather than some others. I disagree that some people are fundamentally ‘bad’ or ‘insane’, they appear to be because we do not understand their reality, their fears and how they came to be and how they came to cope with them. In the aim of preventing suffering caused by people onto others justice contradicts itself.
Then I talk about ‘science’, how it has become the top authority in our society replacing religion, seen as a bringer of ‘what to believe in’ and ‘what we want’. I talk about what science fundamentally is and how what many so-called scientists do is not science, but rather pushing their own beliefs without realizing it, which causes enormous suffering. I give the example of their fundamental models of the ‘one reality’, be it general relativity, the standard model of particles physics, or string theory, which can provably never account for our experience of feeling, of feeling anything at all, yet from these models of the ‘one reality’ pushed onto them people come to believe that their feelings don’t mean shit and that their life is meaningless, leading to depression and suicides.
Then I talk about how the way we educate our children through school contradicts what we want for them and the world we want, how we are sowing the seeds of war and suicide. But things don’t have to be the way they are, and by seeing as individuals and as a society how suffering comes about we can much more effectively prevent it.
Many people with good intentions end up generating suffering because of their fears they aren’t aware of and their false beliefs they haven’t assessed. Fear works insidiously, people want power because they fear others, and they want to push their beliefs because they fear others. I don’t want to be believed, I just hope you can see what I see, and if you don’t I want to find what is it that makes you not see. I’m doing this because I feel it needs to be done, if I saw others on the same track then I wouldn’t bother, but I don’t see it. But the first step is having the desire to improve things, and believing that things can be improved, and I see that here.