Love Against a Void

Us vs. the banality ov evil

“People are terrible judges of randomness. That is why we invented statistics” « Quotulatiousness

Most people are terrible judges of randomness and terrible at statistics, yet if they want one word to bank all their securities on and pour all of their fears into, it’s “normal.” Whenever anyone does anything wrong, that’s “not normal.” They are “abormal.” All of this is taken to mean crazy, and by extension, evil. This is all coming from people who are awful at statistics and have no idea what “normal” is. They would probably think the picture on the right is random, when the one on the left is random. Or take another example:

These pictures depict the average women and average men in various countries around the world. As you can see, they are stunningly good-looking and not remotely what comes to mind for the word “average.” Why is that? While most people have some kind of blemish, most people don’t have any blemish in particular, so the average person looks basically perfect. This is the difference between average and mode. The mode person is what people mean when they say average, because it’s more common for people to have one or another blemish than to look like that, even if the average person doesn’t have any blemish in particular. If you take all the people with a huge wart on their chin or a droopy eyelid or whatever, there will almost certainly be more of them than people who look like the actual average people.

An important factor is I don’t think there’s any such thing as pure, indeterministic randomness, though random is a great descriptor for things that we don’t have all the details on. That’s how it can be said that fortune favors the bold: fortune isn’t really truly random, so whoever develops virtue such as boldness is better-equipped to handle situations they might not entirely understand. However, any understanding you might have of situations should improve them, which is largely why I write these things.

So what is the wider issue? All of society is completely falling apart, and I have a relatively simple diagnosis for the cause: people hate each other on a personal level, so they can’t even come close to maintaining a broader society. This has also been going on for a long time. Our symbol of national pride in the US is the Moon landing, right? Aside from all the people who are now doubting it happened, we haven’t been back in ages. We’ve had a death trap space shuttle program instead of rockets since 1981. This also seems to be about the same time the communazi wolx came into power. Claudine Gay, who has been removed by a bipartisan verdict (and defended by a bipartisan group within Harvard, showing this is not about partisan politics,) did her dissertation in 2002.

We have a loneliness epidemic in the US:

U.S. Adults Have Few Friends—and They’re Mostly Alike - Barna Group

No one wants to date or start a family (not all women or men fit into these groups, but the general trend of viewing relationships as adversarial definitely applies:)

Theft of Fire - by John Carter - Postcards From Barsoom (substack.com)

People who are already in families mostly don’t see eye to eye at all:

Why the Baby Boomers Were the Real Commies All Along! (substack.com)

Parents are even taking their kids to not merely therapists but psychiatrists to get them diagnosed instead of raising them:

Please meet ... BAD THERAPY: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up (thetruthfairy.info)

Trust in institutions has hit an all-time low:

Confidence in U.S. Institutions Down; Average at New Low (gallup.com)

Other things I have observed tend to involve the similarities between “anticonsumption” ideologies (generally derived from the Frankfurt School, aka actual, non-tinfoil cultural Marxists, not to be confused with “Cultural Bolshevism”) and religious extremism such as the Islamist ban on music. The Berlin Wall was supposedly torn down because people listened to “Heroes” by David Bowie, and everyone knows the reds weren’t exactly into David Bowie. Neither the reds nor the Islamists like music, or art, or much anything, and I think this is a consequence of so not liking other people, and related to society falling apart due to being consumed by hate.

I see the cause as being essentially the widespread embrace of evil, which I see as being driven by fear. Every person feels like they have been very hurt and wronged and this pattern has been continuing for at least 40 years at this point. Since people don’t want to feel like they’re just being taken advantage of and preyed upon by other people’s evil, I see that they are in essentially an evil arms race to try to be even more evil. They aren’t doing this because most of them were just born as demon-possessed psychopaths, even if there are those people, though. They are doing this mostly out of pure fear and attempting to stop other people from being even more evil. Of course, this just ends with everyone being as maximally evil as they can personally be and dragging the world straight to Hell.

Enter love. I think love is the answer. Love involves things like trust, not because you’re naïve and people will take advantage of you, but because you know it’s necessary to humble yourself sometimes even if you’ll get hurt. And you will get hurt. I tend to think of the story of Jesus in a generally nondemoninational kind of way. The innocent man was the one who was accused but instead of going like “I’ll get you back!” he just died on the cross and came back.

We have lots of Christ figures in our popular culture too, including Harry Potter, which makes me think it’s no wonder the wolx wanted to cancel J. K. Rowling, Superman, music stars like David Bowie and Leonard Cohen writing their last albums full of Bible references, and more. And regarding David Bowie, why is it “we can be heroes” anyway? Because it’s people together in their relationships being like the superheroes, rather than the old school image of the stereotypical Nietzschean Übermensch just lording it over people. I think unless we can just accept that sometimes we will have to willingly suffer evil, the whole world will end up in a state of barbarism, but there should at least be rewards after we suffer the evil. In some cases the rewards might be in the afterlife, sure, but even if we go with hardcore religious examples, it’s not always.

So back to the topic of randomness. I don’t even think pure randomness is at work here because for one, humans have a negativity bias. That’s why whenever someone, say, insults someone once, the end result of that can be violence and all sorts of awful things, because people have a bias to see things as worse than they are. I think that plus “randomness” (which is just the aggregate of little things we don’t know adding up together deterministically like grains in a sand dune in my opinion) is what we’ve been seeing for essentially the past several decades leading to America and many other Western countries apparently embracing this communazi ideology that should have opposition from everyone all over the political spectrum as a matter of simple patriotism and wanting to uphold our civilization. So I’m not going to advocate the pseudomorphed Islamism after Christianity as the solution to our problems as so many of the “cultural Christian” types do since that’s literally trying to fix the problem with the problem in my opinion. I’m just going to offer love, regardless of creed or culture, even though I do think Christianity in the true form of being about Jesus is a very good example of how to live with love.

Evil is often considered as a lack by people from Boethius to Hannah Arendt. It’s important to be proactive if you don’t want to be another “good German who didn’t support Hitler.” I tend to feel quite sure most people weren’t like “yeeeeeeeah love me some Hitler!” but they were still culpable because they were passive bystanders due to being afraid. Hate comes from fear after all, without fear you only have indifference and contempt. Most people are bad, which has been pointed out by everyone from Theodore Sturgeon with Sturgeon’s Law to the Bible saying “broad is the road that leads to destruction.” There are lots of good reasons “normal” and “common” and “usual” are all horrible standards that you should never ever hold yourself or anyone around you to.

The lyrics to “Love in a Void” actually seem kind of relevant so have them too:

Too many fools blocking my motion 
Clouding my eyes must be the potion 
Spots on my eyes must be the lotion 
Love in a void it's so numb 
Avoid in love it's so dumb 
Love in a void 
Too many bigots for my liking 
Too many critics too few writing 
Rabid dogs that aren't biting 
Love in a void it's so numb 
Avoid in love it's so dumb 
Love in a void 
Jaded reputation on which you're staking 
Lots of money for the making 
For all the stars they're just faking 
Love in a void it's so numb 
Avoid in love it's so dumb 
Love in a void

Wasn’t punk also made at about the same time society started falling apart? It’s like people were observing it back then too even though they didn’t solve it. “Too many critics too few writing.” It doesn’t matter how good you are on a personal level, if the world you live in is a horrifying Dark Age what do you have to lose by trying to fix it? Let’s go fix the world with love!