Thread by @rogerahicks

I tweeted this thread back in October & here are the analytics I just took a look at, which suggest that it didn't make much of an impact.

https://twitter.com/rogerahicks/status/1319874468580331520

These words are from a song, The Boxer, by Paul Simon:

🎶A man hears what he wants to hear & disregards the rest🎶

Humans have a fatal capacity for ignoring what they don't want to know.

How to explain this in evolutionary terms?

These words are from a song, The Boxer, by #PaulSimon:

🎶A man hears what he wants
to hear & disregards the rest🎶

Humans have a fatal capacity for ignoring what they don't want to know.

How to explain this in evolutionary terms?

Our ancestors survived by recognising threats & dealing with them. Otherwise we wouldn't be here.

The threats I'm referring to, however, are very different from the ones our ancestors faced, which were local & immediate. The threats facing us are neither of these.

Sitting here at my computer, I am under no apparent threat. The threats I'm referring to are abstract & easily ignored, or rationalised out of existence.

Much cleverer people than I think I'm delusional, but I think they use their cleverness subconsciously to delude themselves.

And because they have a much higher social status than I do, others believe them rather than me, which, before the emergence of civilisation, made evolutionary sense.

But not any more, because the artificial environment of civilisation perverts & corrupts evolved human nature.

It's important to understand HOW civilisation perverts & corrupts evolved human nature, which is by facilitating the abuse of power to the personal advantage of certain individuals at the expense of society at large & its long-term survival.

Could human civilisation have achieved what it has without perverting & corrupting evolved human nature?

Presumably not. It was a phase it had to through. But it is a phase we have to quickly put an end to, if we want our civilisation, unlike those which preceded it, to survive.

I refer above to the corruption of evolved human nature by civilisation itself, which leads to the corruption of human behaviour, which is what actually poses an existential threat to our survival.

The corruption is like a cancer with which our entire body politic is riddled.

Everyone who is anyone in society, with any wealth & social status is a manifestation of this cancer, esp. the billionaires, film stars & pop idols we so admire & envy.

This is what makes it so difficult (impossible?) to cure.

Writing the above tweet brought home to me that curing this cancer may not be possible, that our civilisation, like all civilisations before it, is bound to fail & fall, as it is on course to do very soon.

Writing the above tweet brought home to me that curing this cancer may not be possible, that our civilisation, like all civilisations before it, is bound to fail & fall, as it is on course to do very soon.

But I'm going to keep on trying anyway.

It just seems the right thing to do - & is personally satisfying.

In the same vein as "better to have loved & lost than never to have loved at all", it is "better to have tried & failed than to give up trying altogether.

Time enough for that when my life is over.

That tweet also reminded me that it is these successful, wealthy, high-status individuals I must get my message through to, because they are the one's with the means to effect real change in the short amount of time now available to us to save our civilisation.

However, for the reasons I have already made clear, these are the last people who want to hear my message.

Unlike your typical social-justice & leftwing revolutionary, I am not going to demonise them for being so rich & privileged at the expense of others, although it is true.

Most of us in the West, incl. myself, are relatively rich & privileged at the expense of coming generations, but lack the excess wealth necessary to effect radical social change.

Thus my appeal to the wealthy to reach out to your kinfolk, which it is the natural thing to do.

And to form genuine, sustainable communities with them in solidarity with coming generations, that we might preserve our civilisation for them, rather than run it into the ground as we are currently doing.