Are we increasingly avoiding conscious thought?
My position is not that the only reason for poor access to pattern-forming processes and poor inductive reasoning ability is emotional barriers. I suspect something else is going on as well. Lack of processing capacity is likely an issue, as well as something fundamental that I don’t yet quite understand. Self-awareness is far more than just the absence of barriers.
The lack of access to the pattern-forming process means that conscious thought is not applied to many problems or solutions. Instead, theories, systems, opinions, and logic, are accepted without challenge. The closer the opinions are to already formed (emotional) beliefs, the less the challenge. Still, this problem does not only apply to the ‘radicalized,’ but it seems to apply to the entire ‘middle’ of society as well. The middle is probably also too busy with their jobs and vacations to think, but it’s still a problem. People, particularly in western societies, generally unquestioningly accept anything they’re told, even if just a cursory examination would reveal it as ridiculous and outright false.
The big question is whether this avoidance of conscious thought is increasing, and/or whether we have a pattern of people lacking it becoming more prominent in society – making all the decisions. I suspect that both are true. While we don’t have direct confirmation of these trends, an objective observation of western societies makes it difficult to come to any other conclusion. What is happening now is not normal and goes beyond the usual brainwashing of ignorant people that governments have used for millennia to further their goals. Let’s look at a few examples:
Lack of self-examination – A defining characteristic of western societies is the utter lack of self-examination. We are always in the right, and never do anything wrong. We destroy our economies and our societies, and bring the world to the brink of nuclear war – but it’s never our fault. Someone else is always to blame for why our policies aren’t working, and all we need is to stay our course. Mistakes are never admitted, responsibility is never recognized, and no one looks inward.
Stagnation – Another defining characteristic of western societies, particularly basic science, is stagnation. Science, geopolitics (attitudes toward the outside world), and economics look like they were put in suspended animation in the seventies. A lot of what isn’t stuck has regressed, like education. The only fields that have progressed are engineering (based on ‘derived science’) and social engineering – which we’ve become awfully good at. The stagnation is extremely visible in science and academia, which is locked inside a ‘mainstream’ paradigm. People who question the orthodoxy and try something new are driven out of academia, ridiculed and persecuted. Incidentally, recent estimates indicate that something like 90% of university professors in the US identify as ‘democrats’ – which nowadays is a code word for persons with low self-awareness.
Stagnation happens when positions and theories are systematically not re-examined. Something has locked the minds of our scientists and academicians in place, preventing them from discarding theories that obviously don’t work. The system is, admittedly, set up that way – but the people in it are set up that way as well.
Violent responses to challenges – Yet another defining characteristic of the modern western world is the response to a challenge – intellectual, political, or otherwise. Challenges are not accepted rationally or stoically anymore. Instead they are met with emotion, including anger and hate, which then transforms into action to get rid of the challengers.
Challenges are now seen as emotional violence – causing pain like real violence. Challenges force re-examination, and re-examination is painful.
Unquestioning acceptance of narratives – Naïve people in the past assumed that unlimited access to information would result in a more enlightened populace. This has not happened. Instead, people have become more and more willing to accept any theories and logic without question. Any agenda, no matter how crazy, can now be presented in a pseudo-rational package that will be accepted by the majority.
Moral bankruptcy is presented as moral superiority and scientific falsehoods are presented as a scientific consensus.
The willingness to accept these fake narratives is so great that they barely need to be disguised – and challenges to it are dismissed without thought by the public. An hour on the Internet is usually enough to debunk almost everything western authorities say – but no one seeks real information in the information age. People might find something they won’t like.
If I were to describe the current essence of western civilization, it would be ‘civilization without conscious thought.’ It moves unthinkingly forward in time through a narrow tunnel – perhaps toward its own destruction.
What are the causes?
To summarize the text above, I have speculated that conscious thought, or self-aware thought, has been diminishing in the western world. The proposed mechanism is the increase in mental barriers actively preventing people from looking inward in general, and interacting with their inductive pattern-forming processes in particular. People are less able to accept intuition than before, less able to think inductively than before, and to challenge their own views and the views of the majority. Trust has replaced curiosity, and laziness has replaced inquiry.
I further suggest that this may have an emotional component, with emotions increasingly affecting higher functions of the brain – creating these mental barriers. I also suspect that there may be a processing capacity dimension to it, with processing capacity (short-term memory) dropping in the western world.
Processing capacity almost equals consciousness. It perhaps isn’t consciousness as such, but it is the tool by which it operates. If it drops, conscious thought will suffer. I recently published an
essay discussing ADHD and mental processing problems where I suggested that processing capacity of human brains has been dropping in recent decades. There is some evidence for this. IQ is dropping in the West, and conditions seemingly caused by processing problems have skyrocketed. If generation after generation is growing up with impaired processing capacity, it will directly affect the ability of society to evaluate problems and solutions. A person who is barely able to pay attention in class will not turn inside and start breaking mental barriers. Instead he will accept the version of reality which requires the least mental effort.
Regarding the emotional dimension, I have suggested that people have been becoming more and more driven by emotions in the last half century. There is a huge amount of evidence for this, including the massive increase in diagnosed emotional problems, and the emotionally unhinged nature of our societies. The reason is likely the partial abandonment of child-rearing methods that enable children to control their emotions. Emotional control enables people to isolate emotions from their higher cognitive functions. If control is lost, we can expect emotions to increasingly seep into higher functions of the brain – including formal logic and inductive reasoning. I will be publishing an essay on this issue soon.
If the conclusions of this essay are correct, western populations are not only getting more emotionally driven, but also more docile and manageable because their brains are changing in that direction. The consequences for our societies will be serious – in fact they already are. The docility has reached such levels that it seems unlikely that the majority of westerners will wake up until they are being personally threatened. By then, it will perhaps be too late.
