Zealots of Certainty
Our all-too-human craving for certainty is a weakness exploited by cynical intelligent criminals since the dawn of human history.
One of the deepest and most persistent flaws of human nature is our insatiable need for certainty in an uncertain and ambiguous world.
Thus most gravitate towards someone who confidently tell you that you’ll go to Heaven if you mumble the right words, be protected from a mysterious and deadly disease (which you’ve only seen on TV) only if you line up to participate in an experimental drug test, or be saved from tyranny if you vote for the correct regime-approved political candidate.
Sociopaths have long understood this grim truth about human nature and fully capitalized on this human weakness to build multibillion dollar empires off lies, poison millions of children for profit (or just out of sadistic fun), and launder billions in stolen money through NGOs/offshore cutouts.
The only way to fight back is to get average-IQ people to reject our all-too-human craving for certainty.
Internalize the notion that ANYONE strutting around telling you they’ve got a lock on The Truth is an emissary (probably an unwitting one) of an arch-criminal who has a vested interest in getting you (and millions like you with your biases and predilections) to behave in a particular way to the benefit of specific powerful forces.
Hell, you should mistrust ME. Maybe someone is paying ME to say this so your belief systems will be nudged a certain way after reading this (nobody is paying me to say this. But there’s no way for you to definitively prove it either way).
There are no messiahs.
Everyone, even the smartest and wisest of us, gets it wrong sometimes. Sometimes they are wrong by good-faith accident.
More-likely, their trusted status was a valuable lever for a cynical and powerful arch-criminal to leverage. Consider what it’s worth to ruthless arch-criminal to have blackmail information on, or be able to credibly threaten the children of someone who is trusted by millions (be they political figures, directors of medical research facilities, or top leadership of a prominent religious order).
Any “mistakes” by such highly-trusted figures (whose utterances are taken at face value by millions of their respective worlds) shifts billions of dollars in predictable directions, can end/shorten the lives of millions of innocent people, and all of this can be accomplished through classic espionage levers of bribery or coercion of those key “trusted” people.
Waking up people doesn’t mean getting them to trust a new, improved, more-infallible/incorruptible messiah.
No.
It’s helping people face the disappointment that there are no messiahs. It’s comforting them when their worldview crashes in.
It’s just imperfect humans all the down … and all way to the top.
We can admire those who’ve done more, thought more about humanity’s deepest mysteries, accomplished more - but don’t idolize them, for even the best, wisest, smartest of us, will bend at the right kinds of pressure, so the wisest thing any human can do is accept the uncertainty of it all and embrace it.
Shed your longing for certainty and accept that we’re in an adventure with unpredictable, implausible and often unfair outcomes and take it with a smile.
Hi KC.
While reading this, I immediately thought of the sociopathically toxic relationship between most undergrad 'professors' and large classes of students that they sort on standardized tests for brute memory and compliance to authority. The same seems true for most of the compulsory education here in Japan. While my classes were popular with the students, many 'teachers' accused me of being unprofessional in expressing self-doubt or confessing that I am learning anything of value from my students.
It appears this need for certainty is so deeply embedded in our collective psyche enough to be directly correlated with rule-driven institutions rather than empathy-driven communities.
One reason the same playbook has been used since the beginning of mankind is because the average person can not help but judge other people, including intelligence and morality, according to their own personal standard of self-awareness. It is a sad fact that the predators among us are also as 'intelligent' as they are corrupt. That is one reason I admire the humility of the likes of Spinoza and Einstein ... rare cases of high intelligence coupled with a high sense of morality.
Merry Christmas to ya!
Yes, one of the hardest for people to let go is their religious beliefs, but sometimes it seems that religion is their escape from the harsh reality of life, faith probably has evolutionary roots in human psyche, because if it's not beneficial, it would have been eliminated by nature. We can imagine a band of hunter gatherers in a dark jungle of Asia, surrounded by deadly snakes, tigers, and other fearsome animals, after hunting a mammoth, sitting in front of a bon fire or inside a cave, they'll probably make up some fun stories and habit (rituals) to soothe and entertain themselves, as time goes the story become legends, and rituals become dogmas, and they become religions. And any descendants who criticize them will be labeled as heretic.