Nobody Knows What They're Doing

There's a very fancy courthouse in rural Illinois that cost over a million dollars in 1870s money. It took citizens there 40 years to pay for it. The courthouse in Macoupin county looks pretty nice, but it was built on scams and corruption. Every monumental building is like that. They're really monuments to vanity and gullibility.

 

Government and religious buildings are essential to the scammers that make a living on institutionalized corruption. That pattern has existed for thousands of years going back to ancient greece or rome, or even all the way back to egypt and its pyramids.

These scams are all based on a void at the heart of civilization. Not a single person knows what he's doing let alone why. For some reason, almost every single person living in this or previous civilizations imagines there's somebody who does.

I think the schools of philosophy in ancient greece are really quite interesting to consider from the perspective of that void and the relationship to the public. Ancient greek religion was just some prior version of the current jew based religions. The greeks had Zeus. Modern people who are religious worship Jew Zeus and/or his son that rolls up a bunch of middle eastern god tropes, like the dying harvest/sun god like Tammuz or Dionysus.

A bunch of people in ancient greece didn't buy into the public spectacle, nor the claims of religious or political leader's pretense of knowledge. In a couple of cases, their investigations led to ideas that are similar to Taoist concepts that human reason is severely limited and that "knowing" via speech is impossible.

However, that concept never really got much traction in the west. Western people traded one dumb religion for another one and even to this day, they keep thinking the political system can be "fixed" with the right clever solution. Society can be "engineered" with the right people in charge, and other crazy things. Each western person imagines there's someone who actually knows what he's doing, but at the center of all the people who believe that, there's just a black hole--nothing

I think right now, we're in a fever dream time in the US. The society is dominated by people who make plans based on ideology or religious ideas and have zero feedback on their failure or any pragmatism. The liberal or progressive people seem almost impossibly stupid and fanatical. That became very clear during all the covid craziness. The coastal strongholds of those religious zealots are still reeling from choices they made and cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are in turbo death spirals of ideological stupidity. It's pretty mind blowing to watch or see up close.

Life or societal decisions based on pragmatism are pretty plain and obvious and also pretty hodge-podge and perhaps even appear contradictory and can also fail. When presented with a problem, a person can just do the best he can and make the best decisions possible based on limited information and ability to predict outcomes.

The public is too stupid to realize that though. It imagines there's some infallible person who knows better than them and can make better choices than they can. It's a childish perspective really.