Thread by @BonzerMate

Nonlinear frameworks & concepts seem to come up more & more as I consider & understand things in deeper ways.

There's something fascinating about a circle that gets you to the same place once you tap into it, whatever your entry point is.

We often see this as the trap of the "vicious cycle" that's obviously negative, but it's worth looking out for the positive variations too since they're just as powerful in their structure.

e.g. I think contentment can work a lot like depression.

Nonlinearity is pretty counterintuitive & tricky to think about because we experience the world in an entirely linear fashion (even if the world's not linear).

I think this is crucial to our free will & moral agency, as it creates the illusion that makes it work, makes it real.

I fixated on the free will problem when I studied metaphysics, but I've come to accept the frustrating answer "it feels real so it may as well be" because moral behaviour occurs in people who think we can be moral, which satisfies the concern that moral behaviour should exist.

(This is a simplification but it seems we inevitably need simplifications to get by unless you want to fractal down eternally.)

Interestingly, appreciating this paradox was a much more holistic process than just reading strict chains of logic, which never quite got me anywhere.

That's why you can't just explain things to others & have them know what you know.

Everyone goes through a complex process that's not linear. Learning anything important comes from different strands of your life weaving into each other, not separate lines for separate topics.

It's a key reason that people who take the "red pill" & allow themselves to see problems in society hiding in plain sight, struggle to convince others of what they see once it's obvious to them.

It wasn't a linear process for you, though our brains sorts things that way after.

But circles interest me the most.

Unreal things that belief literally makes real is a great way to make use of nonlinearity. I think this is what the people who swear by visualisation, manifesting wishful thinking, even meme magic, are on about.

There can be something to it.

Maybe it's how prayer brings about what god was always going to do.

Even though I myself am not ready to embrace specific religious doctrine, the people who act like theological concepts aren't deep & fascinating & can lead to novel insight, are kidding themselves & missing out.

(I absolutely love the concept of the soul for this reason, which encapsulates some truth that I still don't know how to express in secular terms.

Also logos, which I think is easy enough to articulate somewhat meaningfully even within a purely secular mindset.

But I digress.)

Seems you can only coherently picture god, or ultimate truth, in a nonlinear way. Any way to conceive the universe's existence requires embracing apparent paradoxes.

Luckily paradoxes don't seem to actually get in the way, but are maybe just a limitation of our cognitive tools.

So e.g., purely linear logic needs axioms & assumptions outside its own scope.

Logic itself was theorised in an effort scattered throughout time & space.

You can explain that process chronologically through the history of ideas, but that doesn't give you the full picture.

Moral logic is the same & the scary thing is that people don't even realise that making sure you have the right axioms & assumptions is a part of your moral duty, even though they know that regular logic relies on right assumptions.

I can't say how much it infuriated me to realise this, & that no one had ever told me something so important.

If moral behaviour is important, & moral behaviour requires knowing enough to do the right thing, then moral inquiry & reasoning are essential to being a decent person.

Most people aren't told this.

So naturally, people have long been manipulated because they assume their very assumptions came from someone who did this work for them, & that bad ideas couldn't possibly be passed on, on a massive scale.

Moral inquiry is your moral duty, friend.

Funny that, e.g., demonstrably unexamined moral assumptions are so integral to the worldview of people who think most everyone was just "super racist", with dreadful consequences, until at least literally this century, because of what they consider to be unexamined assumptions.

You can demonstrate that every dupe of Marxist social studies is operating on the same bad assumptions. & that people who haven't encountered this "education" never accidentally fall into this set of assumptions which is so contradictory that it doesn't occur to anyone naturally.

Anyway, onto one of my favourite ideas that tops up my own little bucket of hope: the power of myth. A version of faith.

It's important to believe in something even if you know rationally that it's at least very unlikely. Belief enables the preconditions for it to become real.

On the subject, lots of very important things are true paradoxes. Altruism. Humility. Rejecting hedonism. Good outcomes of prisoner's dilemmas.

Faith, which yes atheists & the scientific types have & they'd be lost (or even more lost, depending on your perspective) without it.

The takeaway here is that if you let others convince you to think of things in purely linear terms, your conceptual insight will be diminished, you'll fall prey to unseen nonlinear traps (vicious cycles, etc.) while missing out on the positive cycles you can try to tap into.

e.g., the linear way to realise personally that being a parent was the best life decision you ever made, supposes it was a gamble.

But it's not, it was always true that it would be. You just had to look for the clues that that was your hidden truth waiting to be discovered.

That's where you really ought to get in tune with intuition that you can't fully explain, because you truly can know things that you don't know how you know yet

— it took me a long time to accept & appreciate this —

you just have to tread carefully here & not get carried away.

One final thought: nonlinearity has been a part of my larger realisation that metapolitics is more powerful & important than politics.

(By which I mean the daily sideshow we're served up by those who basically, according to their own sickeningly materialistic paradigm, own us.)

I see quite a few people watching the sideshow in a linear fashion.

Waiting for something to happen that will change everything.

Trying 1 by 1 to connect the dots of the events the media wants in their consciousness.

Waiting for a critical mass to come around to their ideas (everyone from Marxists to boomercons to lolbertarians does this). Or a politician to fulfil campaign promises. Or an economy to collapse. Or open war to break out. etc. Waiting for something that "changes" everything.

But real change isn't a linear next step. If you look at the grand scale, things that are escalating on the surface are ancient.

There's a transformation that you can tap into right now. Eternal truth that you can join in any time you want. At least, that's how it seems to me.

You can't *much* change where your taxes go or whether the world starts to care about the slaughter of the Boers or whether everyone realises that a misunderstood historical figure was right all along.

(Although you should do your bit to spread & influence what is right & true.)

But you can start living by the truth & making your part of the world sane, even a model to others. If others self-destruct with media propaganda, chemicals, porn, mass produced junk, whatever normalised lies & filth you now reject, you can't stop them all but you can opt out.

Find your way out. Getting out of cosmopolitan metro nightmares can be cheaper if you're willing to simplify. Try pushing through social isolation & finding a partner/family, even if you yourself come from a broken family. People have had good families in worse times/places.

Work on your fitness & health. Get out in nature. Work with your hands. Read books that have been memory-holed. Swap out vidya time for learning useful skills. Go on a wholesome adventure. Discover what you can do when you push yourself to do something no one has told you how.

You can't change the fact that the world is hostile & unfair, but don't underestimate the importance of living your life well so that others want to be a part of it.

Work towards building up the better community & culture that "politics is downstream from" (because that's true).

Don't clean your room & stay isolated in a nasty neighbourhood. Work towards building something with friends who've also noticed how bad things are beyond their room.

Tap into the momentum of the healthy counterpart of the "vicious cycle". Positive feedback loops are real.

If it's your thing, keep spreading ideas you think are important, but don't fall for the trap of watching & waiting instead of actively creating change on the scale of a human life, which is so much bigger than you might think.

Lots of people don't need telling, but I sure did.

Don't think of it as steps on a trajectory.

Think of it as joining in something that's always been going on & which always leads to the same result: living with real truth is rewarding on any scale.

Get in the circle.

Just in case this thinking helps someone like it helped me.