Thanks for this. Re: "don't you have the sensation that the world is ruled by people affected by some form of dementia?" Oh yes. It's really quite awful and sad. I am coming to the conclusion that the three best things I can do for myself, at least intially, are: (1) recognize it; (2) accept it; and (3) find the humor in it. Not recognizing it is dangerous, and so is refusing to accept it (and relatedly, getting stuck in just nattering on about it). The humor isn't always easy to find, but when all else fails, there is Monty Python.
I said "at least intially" because, obviously, sometimes some tough decisions need to made— for example, with family elders with dementia, taking away the car keys. In the case of societal dementia, I don't want to get into details here, but I can say that in recent years I have resigned from a number of professional associations— in those specific cases, I decided that what was best was for me to just leave them to stew with each other in their own race-gender-jabs-obsessed hell.
About the argument is scaring how far we can go with this, studying Dunning-Kruger effect is interesting to understand that people in the "overconfidence phase" are terribly effective in convincing other people of their beliefs, usually we TALK about arguments so we didn't get factual feedbacks, so all is about persuasiveness of orator (or writer). People perceive the doubt as treating, so usually agree to the most straightforward and seemingly clear explanations and solutions because offer a fast way out of uncertainty, usually this approach is not linked to reality and real experts in any field know that a margin of uncertainty is unavoidable and is more pronounced more complex is a system: Newtonian dynamic is quite straightforward but still have ample margin of uncertainty, is almost impossible to get a perfect solution for real movement of an object or structural limit of anything, but we can get very close to, and we accept that we can have no solution to thing as simple as the 3 Body Problem.
Usually, societies are adapted to survive a ruling class that is ineffective, egotic and narcissist and fall apart only when the burden or the habit of these elites exceed a threshold, we can mirror it in the image of crime in society: all societies have a percentage of criminals and are adapted to them enduring negative effects and culling down them functioning quite well but if the percentage go up we can get to the point that the society go non-functional and individuals in it find impossible to survive. Today we see demented leaders, last century had seen mad leaders (Hitler, Stalin and a lot of ones not always recognized as such) but I feel that we are going to the right path......
Yes, we have a huge problem of mental illness in the U.S., Europe, and the rest of the world. You could call it dementia, I guess. I call it selfish and idiotic and craven. It is related to the impending collapse of the economy, environment, and society and why - as the article states, no one is doing anything of significance about the major problems facing all of us: overshoot, tipping points, etc. Which is disastrous for the millennials and Gen Z and their descendants. But I guess these quote unquote leaders?? don't care?? are idiots??
Anyway, Biden and Trump are just examples of what is happening. But many of their younger 'peers' are also acting irrationally. This is nothing new, as Meditations/Marcus Aurelius shows us. But today a leader's mistake kills tens of thousands (Biden in Gaza) millions (Bush in Iraq) or billions (tbd), and in ancient Rome the population wasn't as large so we can read Meditations and just smile and nod and learn from his wisdom. And watch the time go by.
Thanks for this. Re: "don't you have the sensation that the world is ruled by people affected by some form of dementia?" Oh yes. It's really quite awful and sad. I am coming to the conclusion that the three best things I can do for myself, at least intially, are: (1) recognize it; (2) accept it; and (3) find the humor in it. Not recognizing it is dangerous, and so is refusing to accept it (and relatedly, getting stuck in just nattering on about it). The humor isn't always easy to find, but when all else fails, there is Monty Python.
I said "at least intially" because, obviously, sometimes some tough decisions need to made— for example, with family elders with dementia, taking away the car keys. In the case of societal dementia, I don't want to get into details here, but I can say that in recent years I have resigned from a number of professional associations— in those specific cases, I decided that what was best was for me to just leave them to stew with each other in their own race-gender-jabs-obsessed hell.
Is it possible to not agree?
About the argument is scaring how far we can go with this, studying Dunning-Kruger effect is interesting to understand that people in the "overconfidence phase" are terribly effective in convincing other people of their beliefs, usually we TALK about arguments so we didn't get factual feedbacks, so all is about persuasiveness of orator (or writer). People perceive the doubt as treating, so usually agree to the most straightforward and seemingly clear explanations and solutions because offer a fast way out of uncertainty, usually this approach is not linked to reality and real experts in any field know that a margin of uncertainty is unavoidable and is more pronounced more complex is a system: Newtonian dynamic is quite straightforward but still have ample margin of uncertainty, is almost impossible to get a perfect solution for real movement of an object or structural limit of anything, but we can get very close to, and we accept that we can have no solution to thing as simple as the 3 Body Problem.
Scaring as is usually a demented leader is not so much of a problem, usually we have quite a big score of sociopaths as ruling class (https://www.huffpost.com/archive/in/entry/why-sociopaths-succeed_b_7965882) and usually we can get to full-fledged psychopath in the topper most positions (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/articles-of-heterodoxy/202212/do-you-know-a-successful-psychopath) doing their fair share of damage!
Usually, societies are adapted to survive a ruling class that is ineffective, egotic and narcissist and fall apart only when the burden or the habit of these elites exceed a threshold, we can mirror it in the image of crime in society: all societies have a percentage of criminals and are adapted to them enduring negative effects and culling down them functioning quite well but if the percentage go up we can get to the point that the society go non-functional and individuals in it find impossible to survive. Today we see demented leaders, last century had seen mad leaders (Hitler, Stalin and a lot of ones not always recognized as such) but I feel that we are going to the right path......
Yes, we have a huge problem of mental illness in the U.S., Europe, and the rest of the world. You could call it dementia, I guess. I call it selfish and idiotic and craven. It is related to the impending collapse of the economy, environment, and society and why - as the article states, no one is doing anything of significance about the major problems facing all of us: overshoot, tipping points, etc. Which is disastrous for the millennials and Gen Z and their descendants. But I guess these quote unquote leaders?? don't care?? are idiots??
Anyway, Biden and Trump are just examples of what is happening. But many of their younger 'peers' are also acting irrationally. This is nothing new, as Meditations/Marcus Aurelius shows us. But today a leader's mistake kills tens of thousands (Biden in Gaza) millions (Bush in Iraq) or billions (tbd), and in ancient Rome the population wasn't as large so we can read Meditations and just smile and nod and learn from his wisdom. And watch the time go by.