I have discussed before that I believe values are the core of an animal's control system. I'll give some examples to illustrate.


Role of Values in Directing Thought:
I've commonly used the example that if you thought somebody stole your money, you'd be mad, because anger is the emotion that you feel when someone is attacking something that you care about. However, if you decided that you really didn't care about the money anymore (perhaps you won the lottery, or got a large inheritance?), then the anger would disappear. Or if you realized that you had just lost the money, and that nobody had deliberately stolen it, the anger would probably be replaced by some combination of sadness and embarrassment. But whatever you are feeling about the situation, the feelings drive the thoughts. Anger tends to incline one towards seeking revenge against the enemy, and sadness tends to make one dwell on the sad event.

A new example that has just come to mind is that whereas I have always been intellectually inclined, I did not much care for money or practical matters in my youth (beyond avoiding bullying). However, after I went through puberty, I wanted to have sex, marriage, and a family. I had difficulty with this however, due to my lack of social skills and lack of money, which I realized through experience and testimony are attractive to women. I had never been interested in other people or in money before, but my interest in women caused me to try to learn about these things. So, my interest in sex caused me to think about women, and that caused me to realize that I ought to care about money and social skills, and that caused me to learn about those things.

Humans are Social
Anyway, now I can start the main point. It seems to me that most people are very highly socially oriented. That is to say, they care a great deal about what other people want. Because the typical person values other people's wants so highly, his brain cannot truly turn on until it has been set on a socially accepted task. This is why the Overton window exists; most people have no motivation to even seriously consider a thought if they have not heard it previously espoused in a socially sanctioned way.

Most People Don't Think
I have heard that Schoppenhauer said that a person cannot actually think unless he likes thinking for its own sake. If a person has some ulterior motive for thinking, then he finds a quick and dirty answer, and then stops thinking.

I have also heard, I believe from some other famous person, something of the nature that 90% of people do not think, 7% of people think that they think, and 3% of people actually think. This seemed very pessimistic and mysterious to me at the time, but I think I understand it now. Most people do not actually turn on their brains and independently process the information they receive. They are so focused instead on trying to please other people, that they try to repeat those words, phrases, and actions which they have seen socially sanctioned by others. Within a social setting, they can give a very convincing illusion that they are thinking, since they are replying in a manner that other people expect. However, when it comes to anything new, for which no known social consensus exists, they show themselves to be very stupid.


My Experience With Previous Posts
I have experienced this (people making irrelevant replies) myself with several posts I have made on forums in the last several months. I had several thoughts that I had never heard anyone else say before, and I thought I should share them. I was disappointed to find that most of the replies did not even attempt to address the content of what I said, but replied superficially to some tertiary thing.

For instance, I made a couple posts on God, in a variety of contexts. One context might have been God merely as the ordering principles of nature (the laws of nature), and I think I even might have explicitly said this. But I still got replies stating that God does not exist. This is very stupid, since science depends on there being reliable ordering principles in nature, and I was using God in that context as being pretty much interchangeable with the laws of nature, and I don't think anyone was suggesting that nature has no logic or consistency to it. I suspect that in popular culture, "God" has become associated with "irrational" (which is bad), and "skepticism" of God has been associated with goodness, so that they see the word "God" and immediately react with derision in order to be on the good side of the social consensus rather than the bad side. But it really made no sense in that context, because I could have replaced "God" with the "the laws of nature" and it would have made little difference to that particular argument. The main essay that got the most pushback was "God as Experienced, and as Metaphysical Speculation". Since it was dealing with "God as Experienced", I treated God as the laws of nature, social consensus, and as a projection of one's inner values (so lots of separate topics in parallel which are often associated with God). So, I was dealing with tangible things that can be experienced, and trying to make sense of them, but most of the replies would have been appropriate only in response to a cartoonish Christian representation of God (not merely Christian, but cartoonishly Christian). After a couple pages I did get a reply which convinced me that that person had understood what I said. He said something like, if God is a projection of one's inner values, then it's possible that someone could make up some BS that makes him happy and call that God. My response was, yes, that's entirely consistent with what I was talking about! But the essay went on for several pages, and the last I checked, the consensus in the replies seemed to conclude only that perhaps there was something of merit in the opening sentence of my essay.

I have written several posts on several forums in the last several months, and typically I got very few replies (I suppose I didn't use any buzzwords that lit up people's social brains), or else I reliably got +3/4 of the replies only in response to a particular buzzword, like "God", and the topic I wanted to discuss was left mostly unaddressed.


Guesses on Why People are so Socially Oriented

Typically we think of a person living by his labor (unless you are a socialist), but I think in truth, a person earns money according to the perception of his value, rather than according to his actual value. Convincing your boss that you've done a good job is more important for your success than in actually delivering good work. This is extremely important for our development, because economic development among humans typically necessitates specialization and trade. It's the trade part that determines the reward for your work, and trade is a negotiation rather than materially fruitful labor. Delivering what is expected is the most crucial element to material success in productive labor, and what is expected can sometimes deviate from what is materially optimal.

I have thought of a more brutal example of how it is that we may have come to be like this. There is DNA and archeological evidence that when agriculture was developed in the Stone Age, land was passed down from father to son within a tribe, and women were traded between tribes. Cities developed for the first time for protection, because neighboring tribes often warred with each other. Every once in a while, one tribe would be completely wiped out, with the men being killed and the women being abducted (there are even a few references to this happening in the Old Testament). Because land was passed down from father to son, male DNA was typically geographically isolated, so that wars which killed men tended to reduce male genetic diversity in the Y chromosome. This caused a drastic decrease in the diversity of the Y chromosome, so that it appeared for a while that there was only 1 man alive for every 17 women. I believe that it is a practical impossibility that there could have been so few men remaining alive generation after generation, so I believe what actually happened was that the lack of genetic diversity just made it appear as though there were very few men. It could be that maybe only 1% of male genetic diversity was wiped out after every generation, and after several generations, very little of the original genetic material remained. Anyway, the point is that for thousands of years, genocide and rape was the norm in our species. Being a social outcast would have meant certain death. Chimpanzees also have wars, which indicates that the proclivity for violence may have been in our species for a very long time, and the advent of agriculture just exacerbated the issue by forcing people to stay put instead of being able to flee when there was a conflict.

Prior to the advent of the scientific method, the only known method for ascertaining truth in the human species was by appeal to authority. The reason is that authority killed you if you didn't agree with it, so that free thinkers were weeded out of the gene pool. This is still our default method of finding truth.

Humans are Made to Live in Cults

Here is my definition of a cult: A social unit which claims for itself the right to decree truth. If the social authority (it could be democratic vote, or a charismatic leader) decrees that the sky is green and the grass is blue, then the adherents of the cult will believe it. If it decrees that a penis is interchangeable with a vagina, and that a person can change his biology by his chosen identity, then members of the cult will believe it. I could give more examples of cult-asserted truth, but I will not do that, because then everyone would hate me.

It is my belief that humans are hardwired to live in cults, and that identification with a cult is actually what passes for thinking most of the time. People do not actually care about the meaning of words like, "truth", "justice", "equality", "freedom", etc, but only say those words so that other cult members who say the same words will accept them.

Actually, I will give an example of a special cult, because it is socially accepted at the present time to poke fun at this cult. Christianity seems to me to be the ultimate anti-cult cult. In form, it is the ultimate cult, but in teaching, its teachings run counter to all of our instincts. It asserts that a man IS truth (the ultimate form of authority being able to assert truth). It asserts that affiliation with the cult will bring ultimate blessings, and dissociation with it will bring ultimate punishments. This is the most extreme example of a cult I can think of. But the teachings are very strange. It also teaches that truth is higher than any human social organization on Earth (apart from churches, which typically have some claim to infallibility), which is the ultimate nullification of any other cult. It also teaches that while on Earth, we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, which runs directly counter to our cult instinct to attack and kill the stranger and take what is his. It is my belief that the Christian cult was a prerequisite for the scientific method to occur, because it asserted objective truth beyond any Earthly authority. The teachings of loving one's neighbor as one's self were probably also the prerequisite to equality under the law and individual liberty. What has been more typical in other times and places was that a person's true value was not different than his perceived social value.

The communist cult which was the basis of the Soviet Union is an obvious example of authority being able to assert truth independently of material reality. This cult is dead, so it's also safe to poke fun at it. But most people still live in cults. If you want to find out which cult you belong to (or any irrational belief, really), it would be instructive to go look for those things that offend you.

On Love of Truth for Happiness Machines
Schopenhauer said that a person cannot think unless he likes thinking for its own sake. I prefer rather to think that a person has to value truth for its own sake, in order to be able to recognize the truth.

It seems to me to be hardwired into us to want to improve our emotional state. If it's possible to lie to trick ourselves into feeling better about ourselves, this is what we typically do. It's very hard to avoid doing this, because that means sitting on top of negative feelings rather than positive ones. The only way to avoid it is to have a love of truth for its own sake, and a sufficient disdain for our own comfort, as well as for the opinions of others. I think love of comfort and people pleasing are the greatest sources of lies in the world.

Until most people love truth above all else, lies will rule the world. It must be this way. Because lies are not restricted like the truth is, they are better able to satisfy our emotional needs, and in so doing, they have our support.


Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom

I was a strange child, so I became the school scapegoat. Whenever the children did something naughty and the teacher didn't see it, they'd blame it on me, and I'd get punished, often without even knowing what the crime was. This was extremely stressful and confusing for me as a child. I didn't realize it at the time, but I believe this set me psychologically apart, and made it possible for me to learn wisdom.

I understood viscerally from my life situation that there were forces bigger than my own wants and desires which would come and do harm to me if I did not understand them and avoid them, and I understood very well that I knew next to nothing about them. This made me very curious and eager to learn everything I could and improve myself as much as possible.

I think in general, "Fear of the Lord" is when a person realizes that there is an objective reality which is bigger than any of his own personal fancies, and bigger even than the social consensus, and that ignoring it will bring doom. This seems to me to be an objective fact. Ancient people (due to our proclivity to identify with cults) tended to see personality and agency where it really might not have been, and so they called the objective reality "God". Calling the objective reality "God" is unpopular today, but it is still out there, and it still goes about its own business without the slightest regard to our wishes. I believe it is fear of this reality which overrides our tendency to tell ourselves comforting lies and to people please.