Structural decline of society

[plato85]

I'm building up a philosophy from the questions I've been asking in this forum. Are there any errors in my reasoning?

 

Structural Decline of society

If you’ve tried and failed to convince someone to think rationally, and you find your logical arguments are refuted by emotional arguments, it may be that they have not self actualised. In Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs theory, people do not self actualise and start to think rationally until certain physiological and emotional needs are met: Food/shelter, safety, love/belonging, esteem, self actualisation.

Our society was founded by the English. Our manners and customs came from Protestant England, but our culture was turned upside down. Good Christians are meek, they do not talk about religion, politics, or money in polite society. People’s feelings are important and it’s not OK to upset or offend people. In a Christian, class based society, where each class is responsible to bring up the lower class and look up to the higher class, moral authority in society tends to shift up the social hierarchy to the upper classes and the clergy.

Australia was founded as a series of penal colonies. Convicts were treated quite poorly, and when they got out of gaol they were also treated poorly by the Christian immigrants who saw them as wicked sinners. Because of this we have an aversion to higher classes, and we became irreligious. In this irreligious society with meek Christian customs and manners, moral authority tends to shift down the hierarchy rather than up. Since it’s not OK to upset or offend people, those people who are more easily offended, who tend to be lower on Maslow’s Hierarchy are hard to challenge, and you are likely to be shamed if you try. Because it’s hard to challenge irrational ideas in polite society, our society has been structurally locked into a gradual shift towards irrationality, and the moral authority of the offended victim classes. Since roughly the 1970s we’ve been stuck in this direction when the moral authority in the church started to be challenged, and the media started to shift us into being more of a consumerist society, by trying their best to making us feel unfulfilled, artificially keeping us from reaching self actualisation, and therefore rational thought.

The three sides of the equation that locks us into this gradual shift are:

1. Meek society leaving us unable to challenge the lower classes.

2. Godless society taking away moral authority from the top.

3. Consumer society leaving us unfulfilled and irrational.

What can we do to change this equation?

1. Challenge meek society – We create a confrontational society where we stand up for reason. When you change yourself to meet the challenge of an adversary, you get into game theory, and you become a mirror of that adversary and become everything you hate, and no one ends up happy. Think of the cold war and mutually assured destruction. Think of what the singles dating scene has become, with both sexes now reading books about how to win in the dating scene, but everyone ends up miserable. Think of Trumps polarised US. This is the road to schizophrenia. The only way to deal with game theory is not to engage in it and stay human.

2. Challenge Godless society to move moral authority back to the top – The classes at the top are more likely to be self actualised than the classes at the bottom, but that’s not a good reason to trust them. The ruling classes have certainly abused the lower classes many times before.

3. Challenge consumer society – We have about the best standard of living in history, so it seems surprising that more people are not self actualised, but that is the paradox. Our standard of living is built on a consumer society that holds people back from being satisfied.

I will put it to you that because moral authority is with the irrational victim classes, our society structurally set become increasingly irrational. We’ll probably go down the schizophrenic game theory path to counter the irrationality of our political opponents, and ultimately our society will become polarised by two different kinds of irrational, and then collapse. The only way to save our society and liberal democracy is to make enough people self actualised so that they can think for themselves, become self determined, and independent, rather than looking up or down the hierarchy for guidance. This means that to save liberal democracy we must challenge the idea that it’s OK to be envious rather than being happy with what we’ve got.

We can wait for our society to collapse and bring down the economy with it, or we can try to fix our society so that we can withstand an economic collapse.

 

 

[Eudaimonic]

Jim Penman's Biohistory: Decline and Fall of the West may be interesting to you.

[_LiveFree_]

8 hours ago, plato85 said:

The only way to save our society and liberal democracy is to make enough people self actualised so that they can think for themselves, become self determined, and independent, rather than looking up or down the hierarchy for guidance. This means that to save liberal democracy we must challenge the idea that it’s OK to be envious rather than being happy with what we’ve got.

 

In other words, if we want to change the world, we must change ourselves and convince others to do the same. Totally agree! In fact, I think I remember saying that succinctly a while back...

 

 

 

9 hours ago, plato85 said:

I'm building up a philosophy...

What does this mean?

[ofd]

Quote

In Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs theory, people do not self actualise and start to think rationally until certain physiological and emotional needs are met: Food/shelter, safety, love/belonging, esteem, self actualisation.

This assumes that there is a blank slate where people can actually progress, independent of their innate abilities. If you combine the Maslow Hierarchy with Kohlberg and Piaget you will notice that self actualisation is quite rare and largely dependent on IQ.