Thread by @Sanilac_J

Your desire to soothe your ego with dishonest self-affirmations is holding you, and all of us, back. Women are worst about this as they seem to only have two settings, self-love and self-hate; but men do it too. To fix our problems we have to acknowledge their existence.

To get at the truth and make ourselves and the world better with knowledge takes a kind of "intellectual buddhism." First you have to clear your mind completely and NOT WANT the truth to be other than it is. Only then can you see it. Because wanting obscures the truth.

This is why very few women are able to take in the truth about feminine beauty and use it to self-improve. Because their egos get in the way and it sends them into spirals of self-love or self-hate. That, however, is a really minor problem compared to rejuvenation.

To figure out that rejuvenation is the holy grail and we ought to be devoting huge resources to curing aging, you first need to accept that getting older and dying are bad things. But that's a thought no one wants to entertain because it's too unpleasant.

Circumcision persists almost solely because men insist on behaving in this same way. They don't want to acknowledge that they were mutilated because it hurts their egos; worse still they don't want to acknowledge that they mutilated their children. How would you ever get over it?

So they come up with an easy solution, which is to not accept an extremely obvious reality. All to soothe their egos and make self-love easier.

This pattern of choosing pleasant and ego-soothing lies over the truth is holding us, collectively, back from huge wins, some of which are very low-hanging fruit. For instance, ending circumcision just involves DOING NOTHING. What could be easier than doing nothing?

You don't need a long pole to pick that mango.

While not QUITE as easy, it would still be VERY easy for all women to become 10% hotter just by exploiting the truth about feminine beauty. But, first they'd have to acknowledge that they're imperfect and have been doing it wrong.

Another example is the fact that intelligence has a biological limit mostly set by genetics. We don't like to think about this because it means that however hard we strive there's going to be someone out there smarter than us for reasons we can't control.

Actually we underestimate the extent to which this is true, because future generations are going to be SO MUCH smarter than us that we're all going to look like monkeys. But facts are facts. We can make the world better by accepting reality.

Should we make the world better so that everyone's happier in the long run, or should we soothe our egos by believing what we want to believe, which makes us FEEL better in the short run? Almost everyone chooses #2.

Watching people choose short-term ego boosts over and over, instead of picking ripe, low hanging fruit that I was wiggling tantalizingly in front of them, has made me very pessimistic about humans in general.

One thing that's taken ME far too long to accept is that you can't get anywhere by correcting people on these issues. EVEN IF the fruit is low and EVEN IF it would hugely improve the world. There's no demand. Not just that; people hate it. It was a waste of my time for me to try.

In contrast, there's a huge market for profiting off of people's dumb need for ego boosts. For telling them what they want to hear even though this will harm them on net. Yes, market forces sometimes reward people who do net harm.