Autonomous Individuals Search in Vain for Coherence

Watching the kitten get the measure of himself, I see how he prepares for the world. Arching his back and walking tall, then pausing before a bizarre sideways jump -- it looks ridiculous to us. He is catching invisible prey, trying to climb cinder blocks, tumbling and finding his feet. Without it he could never one day climb a tree, survive a fight or feed himself. Before he can encounter the real world, he builds a life within.

I think it goes something like this. Having put his faith in God (or sky fairies, if you are an atheist) the religious man addresses the Big Question to the best of his ability and sets off to understand and grapple with the world as he finds it.

If he is great, he may like Dostoevsky, understand the nihilists better than they understand themselves. He may like Graham Greene, gain access to the inner mind of the whisky priest who breaks every commandment of his religion only to know it better.

The post-modern mind is free - it thinks - of superstition and cultural modes of thinking, of the traps of ethnicity. Yet it soon is locked in a virtuous circle of in-coherence that renders it unable to form a steady image of the world. With no fixed beliefs, the PM mind has nothing against which to measure and compare this jagged image. At best it can perceive vague threats, emotions, attraction or repulsion.

In the article below, Ravi Zacharias talks of a PM mind that demands coherence from others but perceives none within. The PM mind is demanding coherence salve the dissonance created by inner turmoil.

"From fuzzy logic to relativism the homeless mind has moved to the home-less idea.

This is dangerous because such a person may seek anything that presents coherence: castes and untouchables; technocratic seers ruling the Eloi; or the perfect "society of peace" in which dissent is not tolerated but ruthlessly liquidated, in an endless pursuit of harmony, honour and homogeneity.

We have a hint as to which of those outcomes is more likely. The Event Covid world in which society must be locked down to preserve each and every individual is not communal. This is the deification of the self which lays obligations upon society that owes 'me' a living. It is the transmutation of individualism as a balance of freedom and responsibility into a hierarchy of needs. Social engineers have realized that such people can be manipulated by influencing their perception of needs, especially in people who, increasingly, think with emotion.

No wonder people see everywhere the infantilization of society. The desire for untrammeled freedom of action, of autonomous individuals, has inevitably created yin's search for yang. The danger is that this primitive search for coherence is attracted to an equally infantile opposite: that which meets the most short-term needs most proximately and immediately, which is the zero-sum thinking that believes one more for you is one less for me.

Only a complex inner cultural world can conceive, create and operate within a society that is a rich tapestry where many fibres interconnect far below those that we see. In fact, were one to remove that unseen weft and warp, all that is so colourful and apparently real would fall to pieces. Only a complex inner cultural life can grapple with a world in which every action has consequences that are often unseen or unintended.

Without knowledge or trust that a complex society may meet our needs indirectly by raising up others and perhaps gratify us with delay, we shall not bother to invent, nor start a business, nor share our knowledge and time.

This is the realization that learning that creates intelligence, not the other way around. And if we know that for machines, why have we abandoned it for ourselves?

Here's the link to the article mentioned above: https://www.rzim.org/read/just-thinking-magazine/an-ancient-message-through-modern-means-to-a-postmodern-mind

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