Consider the possibility that meaning in our lives is more important than all else. And that our entire evolution has consisted of living alongside existential threat. So much so that these threats are at the centre of meaning in our lives.
This is why people believe in the visionary rumours of climate change or UFO's. And the pandemic. These rumours deliver the existential threats we need, to find meaning in life, and meaning is the most important thing to us.
Does that sound crazy? OK, its a crazy idea. So have a think about it carefully for a week or so and if it still sounds crazy, forget about it no harm done and proceed normally. This week of activity is what is known as a psychological audit. An acid test of your own self and authenticity. Truth is not relevant to it. That you can actually make an attempt to do it at all, is. The attempt itself is the first and most important step.
The source of this meaningful existence could be in our DNA from a million years of evolution where for most of that time existential threat was part of daily life from the surrounding local environment. People didn't die of old age back then, they were eaten. That today all these threats have been fully mitigated by civilisation and technology, an incredible feat and a great testimony to mankind, has not removed the meaning of them from the life of the collective... yet. That is in the nature of evolutionary adaptation. It is still there acting powerfully during millennia of evolutionary transition. We cannot see it perhaps because we are right in it. Unfortunately change rarely happens in "My" lifetime and I am part of the change.
This is not to say these rumours are not important or unreal. It is to say they have enormous power to move the entire collective of people, wholesale, without needing to force or teach us. Or even realise we have been moved. Because they give the people's lives so much meaning, which is enough. This in a secular world where there's been a God shaped hole for centuries since the enlightenment. When we killed God, something had to fill that hole, for what we wanted to be, our survival. Whatever it is it has to be an image of survival or salvation. We need that thing badly.
I'm not saying these rumours are good or bad replacements for God. I am just pointing at them, for further scrutiny, by authentic, unmanufactured science. Maybe nature does not want that to happen, who knows.
The meaning we get from these phenomena may well not be material world events and activities. That is all fine. What really matters to people is that they give the collective of people meaning, psychologically. Possibly also unconsciously. That is more important than physical pain, though of course we want that minimised too, but it comes a remote second.
So these visionary rumours are not lies, fakes or conspiracy theories per se. They are objective, scientific, analysable, facts, of the collective psyche. They happen and are more important to us than the material table I'm writing at. They are difficult for authentic science to attend to because our medieval science prohibits their serious study and measurement on pain of censorship and manufactured consensus. Speak to the litany of persecuted and executed scientists of old for more detail - they were unlucky to have come before their time. But they did at least sow a grain of mustard seed before going to the cross.
Now, this scientific censorship and fake democracy can be shown as a very dangerous thing indeed. Maybe it too being a mass threat needs a visionary rumour of its own. Maybe science as it stands today IS a rumour in itself. Cosmology is completely batty if you look at it carefully - the big bang is where science asks for one free miracle, and leave science to do the rest.
Even this clown political economy of ours, which we deliberately created, persists over the centuries in spite of it being factually and scientifically impenetrable. By privatising what is meant to be shared among all(theft) and socialising private property(more theft). Do we insist on doing this because the existential meaning it gives us is more important than the guaranteed negative side effects. That is, creating a few masters and millions of slaves today, far more intensely than the popular historic form of slavery, in a democracy where freedom reigns? We need the slavery brought by taxation and economic rent because a master/slave social relationship gives us the existential meaning which makes us feel more alive. Is the politicised, historic and highly popular form of slavery, which did happen, today yet another visionary rumour giving us meaning, by signalling a far more important and very real existential activity we're forbidden from talking about - that today, all of us in work house offices for monopoly corporate masters, are slaves already, by the tens of million?
I'm not anti corporation by the way. Again, I'm just pointing at it for scrutiny. Great recessions happen every two decades or so where everything gets rebooted. Everything. But no one ever looks closely into why it happened. And certainly no one remembers the last one happened unless you devote a lot of effort pointing it out to them. Is that because we don't care about cause and effect in the material world as much as that we went through an existential moment?
Another reason why this is so hard to see is due to factional competition between the rumours. For example, if you get great meaning from the rumour of climate change you want that to dominate the competing rumours, of course. "My meaning is more important than yours". So, little focus is placed on the general condition because it is being hidden by competing vested interest which can command all the capital if 'successful'. This is not to say this is a bad thing. It is just to point at it. For all we know, in the end, this is the better alternative.
Who knows, because no one has bothered looking yet thanks to our medieval scientific ways. And that presently, we do not yet want to raise God from the dead and fill that great hole with a modern form of meaning that works for us today.
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