Find someone who looks at you the way Donald Trump looks at Zohran Mamdani.

[jfz9580m]

74. Sorry to butt in

But I did want to say that I don’t think that is about smarts.
About 14 years ago I had a really nasty shock. Changed my perspective of reality overall and it took me a long time to recover.

The second Trump admin has actually helped restore my old perspective a lot. Our brains are strange beasts. These extremely complex problem solving tools we barely understand and yet carry around on us with a false sense of ownership over something we barely understand. But they are powerful and lately I have had a dawning recognition, an AHA
moment if you will:

It has made me realize why I have always found something incongruous about our horrible, destructive species-humans.

We are clever after a fashion, but we are so absolutely awful. How are we the dominant species taking down all of the biosphere since we don’t seem that bright in any real sense?

It’s that we are good at bullying. Most of our tools go towards war, hedonism and displays. That confuses the brain. Further, the program of brainwashing starts at birth when you are not explicitly told from the time you are born “Oh btw you are a member of this really stupid species. No one will explicitly tell you this though all your life you will have a vague suspicion this is true and the dumbest members of your species will be the most supremacist and chauvinistic. The second dumbest people just react to the dumbest and never actually think about anything nor examine anything seriously and get angry and attack you if you point out that this is stupid”.

But actually we are a very stupid species. This constant myth about human progress where thanks to a few scientists (and those not very responsible people since they teach the species how to build stuff we don’t want or need, but absolutely nothing about how to be a less destructive species) we have all these tools and goodies, but no bloody common sense wrt how to not wipe ourselves out.

I have an answer to Fermi’s question lately. Where is everybody?

Where is everyone? If I were a super intelligent alien, I would absolutely avoid us.
We have to be the sort of pariah species everyone else hopes never gets more technology and I agree with that.

I’d be like the pacifist in the 3-body problem if aliens contacted me and say “Hey don’t come here. These fuckers are crazy. It’s the Idiocracy. We are all Maga and Maha etc over here. Just stay away from us. We are really stupid and would destroy anything cool.”

It why except logically, it’s so difficult to have a sense of “we” with so much of the species.

Coldly logically it is behaving stupidly to copy our stupidest instinct which is brutalizing anything we consider “stupid” such are other animals which would exist in some sort of equilibrium with reality over building a bunch of fugly malls, factory farms (which highlight our banally brainless brutishness further) and parking lots and thinking this is some sort of cosmic gift, when you are actually wiping out billions of years of non-human evolution with a bullshit narrative based in dominion theology dismissing animal cognition so we can gloss over how outrageously stupid all this is.

Every human impacted place first loses its richness and diversity in any real sense. True in every part of the globe.