Statistics vs. individualism

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There’s one interesting apparent contradiction in my political views.

On one hand, I am almost an absolutist meritocrat, which implies extreme individualism to the point of negating any kind of collective identity. You are what you are, and no kind of identification with some group changes your essential nature.

On the other hand, I acknowledge the fact that when people identify with a certain group, or a belief system, they don’t really act as individuals, but as instruments of that group or a belief system. Essentially, mobs break shop windows, loot and set cars on fire. It’s not done by individuals. People essentially give up their personal identity in order to become a part of a bigger entity, a mob, or a cult, or a nation, and this bigger entity is, for all intents and purposes, the active party. ISIS is not merely a group of individuals, it’s an evil collective entity. I understand that the legal system recognizes only individual guilt. The karmic law is even more strict – like gravity, which functions on the level of massive particles, although it appears to function on the level of stellar bodies, the karmic law functions on the level of individual kalapas of spiritual substance, although it appears to function on the level of souls.

We have two major issues. First, how to handle the need to use statistics in order to evaluate broader sociological phenomena, with the need to evaluate individuals on the basis of their personal merit. For instance, if we encounter an individual who belongs to a statistical group that has certain unfavorable general characteristics, are we justified in applying negative general prejudice against that individual? For instance, if we are in the middle of the second world war, and we encounter a German, do we assume he is a Nazi? If we encounter an Asian, do we assume he’s an overachieving nerd with high proficiency in maths and science? If we encounter an African, do we assume he’s a low IQ person with inferior level of education but above average physical skills and strength? All those assessments are justified based on statistics. However, the problem with statistics is that it doesn’t give us a number, but a histogram. It gives us a statistical distribution of certain properties in a population. Speaking as a photographer, you can look at a certain population’s IQ histogram and see whether it’s “overexposed” or “underexposed”, basically by looking at the position and shape of the “bell”. However, there’s another important information you can get from the histogram, and those are the extreme extents of the information contained within the histogram, basically the datapoints containing the lowest and highest measurements. Herein lies our dilemma. If you have a population whose median IQ is 80, the lowest measuring individual has IQ of 50, and the highest measuring individual has an IQ of 150, what do you assume about the group in general? The leftist ideologues would have you believe that pointing out that IQ 150 individual is enough to negate everything else and is to force you to treat every individual in the group as someone who is potentially an IQ 150 person. The extreme racists would point out the lowest-measuring individual and try to make you believe that all members of the group should be treated as the potentially IQ 50 individuals. A realist would say that the realistic expected IQ for a random member of the group is most likely to be within one standard deviation of the median IQ, so it is best to expect normal values but be open to the exceptions; essentially, you have certain expectations but you give individuals a benefit of the doubt when you evaluate them on an individual basis.

The second major issue is that of prejudice. If prejudice about groups of people is based on some kind of evaluation of past experience, should we treat it as informative and trust it, or should we treat it as inherently limiting to our potential to fully experience an individual?

Those issues are something I was thinking about for quite some time, and I’m not sure I have a universal answer. I can only tell you how I deal with the issue.

I am aware of statistics, I am aware of the prejudice, and I use them as sources of information. If some social group is known for increased delinquency, and I see a member of this group sneaking around my property in the dark, and running away as he sees me approaching, I am going to assume he’s some kind of a thief, or worse. However, if a member of that same social group asks me to help him with his car because it broke down, and I have no reason to suspect deception in that particular case, I will help him in any way I can. If a member of that same social group, statistically notorious for low IQ and high criminality, asks me sophisticated questions about science, philosophy or religion, I will immediately assume that this person belongs to the extreme right part of his group’s histogram, and apply my other set of prejudice about extremely advanced non-typical individuals who are usually an exception to all statistical expectations and can be treated only on an individual basis. So, essentially, I always have informative prejudice, but I’m very flexible about choosing which set of prejudice to trust and in what circumstances, and the end-result looks very much like treating individuals in a completely fair and unbiased manner, based completely on their personal qualities. However, I get to this result based on my personal application of Bayesian weighing; it’s never that formal, of course, and it’s not like I explicitly award positive or negative points for each perceived quality and evaluate the person based on their sum, but the implicit process that I go through is essentially that: you get -50 points for your race, +200 points for your verbal expression, +500 points for the intellectual level of your question and +700 points for the spiritual context of the intellectual dilemma, bringing your final tally to 1350 points. Alternatively, you can get +50 points for your race, +25 points for your nationality, -500 points for your verbal expression and intellectual coherence, -700 points for the intellectual merits of your question and -1000 points for the spiritual context, bringing your final tally to -2125 points. Yes, I do evaluate race and ethnicity either positively or negatively, but as you can see, the value I award to those isn’t anywhere close to that which I award for anything within the individual’s personality traits, education and spiritual magnitude. There are certain properties that I would award the symbolic value of 10000 points (either positive or negative), which is sufficient to outweigh absolutely any number of other considerations combined, for instance if I sense evil darkness and a satanic presence from a person. I don’t care what the fuck that person thinks or believes, and other considerations are even less significant. Also, if I feel great spiritual magnitude and clarity from a person, a strong positive vector, this is going to outweigh all other considerations. Essentially, I’m going to rely on my prejudice for the first 100 Bayesian weighing points, but anything that a person can influence by providing direct feedback is going to award him at least thousand points, either positive or negative, and my inner spiritual compass is going to outweigh almost any kind of feedback from the person. For instance, Romana’s initial tally was like half a million positive points from my inner spiritual compass, and a few hundred negative points based on the content of her e-mail which was basically all the wrong shit. Biljana’s initial tally was also half a million positive points from the inner sense and almost nothing from anything else, because she didn’t really communicate anything informative. In Romana’s case, I actually thought she was intentionally testing me, because of the huge difference between the sensed spiritual magnitude and the negative intellectual and spiritual value of everything she said out loud. So, it’s not that I evaluate people only based on what they personally do – sometimes, it’s difficult for them to fuck up so much for it to even matter, if what I feel about them is strong enough. But if I get no spiritual inner feedback about a person, if I have no personal communication with the person that would help me get a good estimate of their personal merits, yes, I am going to rely on the stereotypes and prejudice that will guide that minimum of attention given to that person, which appears to be completely irrelevant to me in all meaningful ways. If you’re a Jew or an Asian, I will assume that you are educated, smart, hard working and competent in what you do. If you’re an African or a Gipsy (including Hindu lower castes), I will assume the worst about you until proven otherwise – I will assume that you’re uneducated, unintelligent, prone to criminality and deception, bound by malignant traditions and culture of your ethnic group, and incompetent in everything you do. If you’re of European origin, that will get you zero points, because I usually function among the white Europeans and this is a normal value that awards no additional points. I will also have expectations based on nationality – I would expect an Ukrainian to be a liar and a thief, a Serb to be a loud arrogant fuck, a Croat to be a backstabbing cunt, an American to be self-confident and ignorant, a Hindu to be traditional and to think in formulae, a German to be polite and civilized, an Italian to be loud and emotional, and so on. However, all those expectations, either positive or negative, will amount to one tenth of the impression created by the first sentence that you write.

What is truth?

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Pontius Pilatus once asked a rhetorical question, “What is truth?”

I noticed a pattern: people who are the most skeptical about the possibility of existence of an absolute truth are those who are morally and intellectually corrupt, who have made so many compromises and wrong choices that they no longer have any soul left. When someone questions the existence of truth, it’s his own existence that is in question, because he no longer knows who or what he is.

The matter of truth, however, is a tricky one, because it is usually defined as statement of fact, and what is considered to be a fact can indeed depend on one’s point of view, or depth of knowledge. It was long considered a fact that the Sun moves around the Earth, because that’s what was perceived. Only with deeper intellectual and perceptual insight was it revealed that the movement of the Sun is an artifact of Earth’s rotation. However, the statement that the Sun moves on the sky is true, and this truth was a necessary step towards the discovery of deeper truths about orbital mechanics. If you deny that the Sun moves, you can’t measure anything properly, and without measurement the door to further discovery is closed.

I therefore define truth as a process of discovering reality. Truth is a process. This process goes from establishing and stating the basic facts, as they are perceived, and going from there into the abstract layer of interpretation, of figuring out what it means. You state the fact that the Sun and the stars move across the sky, you measure what precisely is going on, and if your measurements are accurate enough, a Newton can use them to apply calculus and create a model of the solar system. However, there will be discrepancies between the model and the reality, and those discrepancies need to be carefully measured and noted, because an Einstein can then use them to model his general relativity. So, accurate perception and clear statement of facts are the necessary prerequisites in the process of following lesser truths towards the greater ones, on the path of revelation of reality.

So, as much as truth is a process, so is lie. Lie is a process of obscuring the facts, of incorrectly reporting them and interpreting them in a way whose purpose is to hide reality and replace it with an illusion.

The absolute, final reality, the goal at the end of the path of truth, is God. To lie, is to stray from this path, and to lead others astray. To choose lies, to relativize truth, makes one an enemy of God.

About truth

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What I am currently feeling is helpless rage.

I’ve been reading the news about what’s going on in America in the recent days, how CIA and now Obama are spreading the narrative about Russians influencing the elections and, de facto, bringing “their man” to power in the USA.

Here’s how I see it. Truth exists. The main stream media in America and their vassal states, completely controlled by the structures close to the government, lied and lied and lied and tried to repress the truth and misinformed the public, deliberately, intentionally, systematically. However, the alternative media, either controlled by the Russian government or by private independent parties, broke the wall of lies by publishing the facts about what is going on – in Syria, in the Democratic party, in Hillary’s campaign, in America, in Wikileaks archives, in the world in general. Also, Trump was perceived as someone who is willing to break through the wall of lies at least partially, and tell what’s going on. A significant portion of the electorate saw what’s going on, they didn’t like being treated like idiots and manipulated by the people who hold them in contempt, and they voted for Trump, in numbers sufficient to grant him victory. That’s what happened.

The reason why am angry is that I know how CIA, Obama and the political establishment think. To them, there is no truth. There are only propagandistic narratives, and the one that prevails is the official truth. The concept that the Russians and Alex Jones told people the actual truth, the concept that their controlled media LIED, were revealed as liars, and rejected by the electorate, that makes no sense to them. To them, there is only “our” narrative and “our” candidate, and “their” narrative and “their” candidate, and if our narrative was defeated, that’s a bad thing that needs to be somehow corrected. Facts that contradict “our” narrative are “lies” that need to be suppressed. They are so much beyond remorse, beyond guilt, beyond the ability to understand that they are on the wrong side, or even that they did something wrong or that “wrong” even exist as a real thing, that those concepts don’t even have meaning for them. There is no truth, there is no justice outside of “my side winning”, and now they see the truth as some evil that managed to spoil their narrative, a hostile force that is to be labeled as falsehood, a lie, and repressed, so that nothing ever again is allowed to gain power against their will.

And I can’t do anything about it. I can only watch evil people do evil, without any power to interfere. It’s like watching some horrible injustice in a movie, that hurts to watch, and you know you cannot change the outcome whatever you do. That’s how I feel: helpless rage.

Freedom and its limits

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I’ve been thinking about the concept of freedom.

Let’s first see what we have here, because freedom seems to be one of those nice-sounding words, like love, that are used for manipulating emotions, and can mean anything to anyone.

To get the obvious out of the way, if we define “freedom” as “the ability to do anything”, nothing short of total omnipotence will match the definition, so, basically, only God can be free in that sense. Also, if we define “freedom” as invulnerability, so that you don’t suffer adverse consequences to your actions, it’s even more tricky, because here we face ethical issues. For instance, you would probably want someone who wants to kill you to face consequences for his actions. Also, any kind of choice shapes your personality, and you’re not the same person afterwards, because you made a choice, by doing A or not A you chose to become the person who does A, or not A.

So, we have potential limitations to freedom which belong to three categories: of power, choice and other beings. If you are not able to do something, you are not free to do it, and that’s the limitation on freedom that stems from the lack of power. If you can technically do something but you don’t want to because it would spiritually shape you in adverse ways, it’s a limitation on freedom that stems from ethical choices. If freedoms and will of other beings prevent you from exercising your own freedom and will to the full extent, it’s the limitation on freedom that stems from other beings.

So, let’s see the examples. A limitation on power is that you can’t visit Mars. Nobody is preventing you from going, and going there has no adverse ethical consequences, but you just don’t have the ability to do so. A similar limitation stems from the lack of available choices. For instance, if you were born 100 years ago, you didn’t have a choice to buy a PC or a Mac, simply because they didn’t exist yet. You also didn’t have an option to board a plane and fly around the world, because the planes didn’t do that yet. Also, if you are very poor and live in some uncivilized and backward part of the world, you don’t have an option to buy a new car, or to board a plane or to buy a computer, not because they don’t exist as options for others, but because they don’t exist as options for you specifically, because you can’t afford them. So, sometimes options exist for the powerful few, and sometimes they don’t exist at all, and in all cases, this limits freedom.

I am deliberately omitting the limitations that stem from logical consistency, because those are merely trickery; for instance, the ability to do A while doing not-A, or specifically, the ability to make wooden iron, the ability to make a rock so heavy even you cannot lift it, or the ability to factor prime numbers.

So, what does that mean? It means that total freedom doesn’t exist, not even for God. Even God has to choose whether to do something or not. You can’t really both kill and spare someone. You can’t both tell a lie and be truthful. Even if you’re a God, if you grant someone some privilege, you can’t both revoke it and be consistent. So, one of the most important things to understand is that there are limitations even for the Gods. For instance, if you create souls, and grant them the freedom of choice, you have to allow them to face the consequences of their choices, or otherwise you are canceling your grant of free will. What kind of a freedom of choice is it, when you don’t have the option to fuck up? It’s like going to school and getting an A regardless of what answer you give. Freedom of choice necessarily comes with the possibility of choosing the wrong thing, and “wrong” isn’t really wrong if there are no adverse consequences.

This is the true answer to the question of “why did God create or allow evil”? Well, once you truly understand the problem, it’s no longer a meaningful question. The true question is that of freedom – is God free to do whatever he wants, or is he limited by ethics, logic, consistency and reason? We then come to the paradox that a good God is a limited God – he is limited by the boundary between good and evil, truth and falsehood, reality and illusion. An unlimited God is an omnipotent indifference, a force of general chaos that is closer to evil than good, because for each thing such a hypothetical being could technically do, there is no reason not to actually do it.

A good God, however, can indirectly cause evil to exist. He can, for instance, create independent beings and grant them freedoms to exercise their will. They can then use this freedom to explore options that are beyond God’s limitations – they can decide to create illusions, where falsehood can prevail over truth. They can create veils of ignorance that can obscure the light of God. They can choose to inflict malicious harm upon other souls and instrumentalize them for their own purpose. Essentially, once you create an independent being with creative powers, you can no longer be fully in control of the course of action, because such a being can choose its own spiritual path which might be completely different from your own, with consequences that might differ greatly from what you personally would find acceptable. And you can’t just nullify those consequences, not because you technically couldn’t, but because it would nullify your previous choice to allow those beings freedom.

Because freedom to choose and to do implies the potential to fuck things up. Freedom to choose means necessity to suffer the consequences of your actions and, in theory, you can be more “free” than God. You can be “free” to lie or to deceive, however this cancels your “freedom” to be truthful, honest and based in reality. You can be free to betray, but then you lose the freedom to be loyal. So, in case of ethical choices, “freedom” is really a matter of rhetorical trickery, because what can be seen as bondage to some, is a freedom to others. Some see the truth as a restraint on their freedom to lie, while others see lies as a restraint on their ability to be truthful.

Obviously, there are some freedoms that aren’t really worth having – such as a freedom to lie and betray your friends and be a complete bastard. Even if you can technically do it, you wouldn’t want to, because it would adversely influence your spiritual vector and turn you into the kind of person that you don’t want to be. This is how satanic temptations are to be interpreted, because demons will tempt you, they will say they are more free than you because they can do all kinds of things that are forbidden to you. The answer is, “It is true that you can do those things, but not because I couldn’t do them, but because I choose not to. I am limited by my choices, and, if you ever try to reverse your course, you will find out that you are limited by yours.”

About preparedness

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I was thinking about disaster preparedness – prepping, in short – considering I’ve noticed a strong increase in the instinctual-level warning signal, probably broadcast through the global astral field. It communicates immediate and urgent need to stock up on supplies and prepare for a disaster, because when it begins it will be too late, the supplies will become inaccessible. I’ve heard of many instances where people, always the older ones, prepared for the war by stocking up on food and other supplies in their basements, before the 1990s war in Yugoslavia. Obviously, people can sense that shit is about to hit the fan, but only the older ones, who already have had personal experience with war, actually act upon it.

The instinct itself is very similar to that of a squirrel who feels a strong urge to collect acorns and nuts and store them in a hole in a tree where it will hibernate. It’s a very basic, animal urge directly connected to survival. For something like a limited war, this instinct is extremely useful. Stocking up on non-perishable supplies will not get you through the crisis entirely, but will give you a very comfortable margin of time which allows you to avoid desperate options later, and the ability to plot a course of action which doesn’t include extreme risk is what will actually help you survive. For instance, you don’t have to try and rob someone’s food cache, or to go out and risk sniper and mortar fire in order to attempt something. The priorities are clean water, medications (for people with chronic conditions), food, fuel and weapons. Essentially, water is the biggest issue. If you don’t have access to pure drinking water, death from water-borne pathogens is the bigger threat than sniper fire. However, the problem can be solved if you stock up on bleach; two drops per liter of water, stir and leave for 30 minutes to kill the pathogens and you have drinkable water. As for food, stock up on carbs and fats; protein is easy. You can hunt for protein (which includes collecting the earthworms and eating the pets), but carbs and fats are freakishly hard to get from nature, outside of modern agriculture. Stock up on whatever you would otherwise eat, just have a bigger quantity in store and rotate the supplies so that they are always fresh enough. If you think it’s silly, think about Aleppo, Syria. Imagine being trapped there after the war had started. Your options are basically eat whatever you have in your apartment, or go out under sniper fire and try to get something to eat, in a situation where nobody really has much, whatever they have is guarded with guns, and distribution of humanitarian aid is an excellent opportunity for mortar fire by the enemy. Fuel is a big problem, especially in cold weather. Without fuel, you can’t prepare food, or get warm. It increases the chance of people getting sick and dying because of nonexistent health care in those conditions. Also, the cheapest non-perishable foods, like flour, beans and barley, will require cooking. Also, if the electricity runs out, the perishable foods in the refrigerator will need to be eaten quickly. Having your own solar power generator, strong enough to power the fridge and the oven is a great asset, but almost nobody has access to that, so it’s not really worth mentioning. The problem with having supplies is that people who don’t have supplies will be tempted to take yours, especially if they have a gun and you don’t. So, having a gun with plentiful munitions is an absolute life-saver in those situations. In a civil-war situation, people can be divided into active and passive elements of a situation depending on whether they are armed or not. Translate “passive” as “victim”. Also, people who can rely on other people and have plentiful social contacts with the neighbors are more likely to be able to trade for whatever they need. Expect “grid” to fail – gas, water, electricity, phone, Internet. Those who use gas in bottles for cooking will fare much better than those who use gas supplies from the grid, for instance. The more “off grid” your installation is, the less modern and convenient it is in the normal circumstances, the more resilient it is in the case of outages and infrastructural collapse. You can get gas in bottles from somewhere, but if you’re connected to the city’s supply, you will probably need to rework/replace your kitchen stove in order to be able to cook food. Also, if your central heating system uses gas or electricity from the grid, expect it to stop working. For this kind of outages, think Vukovar, Sarajevo, Mostar, Aleppo or Donetsk. We’re not talking nuclear war or a Chicxulub-level asteroid strike, we’re talking things like a civil war, where a city is expected to be split into segments based on the communities, with riots, armed gangs and all sorts of shit taking place, which makes it very dangerous to go out. Even in case of a natural disaster, such as a flood or an earthquake, there might be infrastructural collapse, widespread looting and violence, and you want to have some level of isolation from that until it blows itself out and order is restored. The worst possible scenario of this kind is the siege of Leningrad in WW2. I know more about it than I would like. Millions died. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a picnic compared to what happened there. In early 1942 some 100000 people died every month, mostly from starvation. Not fun. I interpret all the atrocities committed by the Soviets in Germany, later, as a reaction to that. You see, shit like that actually happens, it’s not some far-fetched conspiracy theory. At almost every single moment there’s a place in the world where you have a natural disaster or a civil war or a siege. Being able to endure for two weeks without exposing yourself to danger or starving is very useful.

In such circumstances, probably the best thing you can do is wait out the first period of randomness and chaotic bloodshed, and when you figure out what’s going on, make an assessment on whether to get the fuck out or to wait it out. Each option has strengths and weaknesses. However, there are possible scenarios in which getting out isn’t an option, because there’s nowhere for you to go. There are people who have romantic notions of taking a backpack with supplies and going into the woods to “live off the land”. Be absolutely certain that if you do that, you will die. Every shelter you make, every fire you light, is a beacon attracting all kinds of criminals to your camping site, and be assured that there will be criminals in the woods. They will rob you of your resources, and if you resist, they will kill you with impunity, and possibly even eat you. Your home, in most circumstances, will be much more easy to defend from attack. If you don’t already live off the land now, don’t even think about attempting it later. It stopped being possible for humans to live off the land in great numbers in late Pleistocene, and it forced them to invent agriculture, not because it’s fun but because it was the alternative to starvation. I walk through the forests all the time, and it’s true there’s wildlife there – boars and deer, for the most part. I’ve seen pig tracks, and I’ve seen deer occasionally. However, to attempt to survive by hunting the woods for pigs and deer, let’s say that this couldn’t even feed a small village, even if they hunted the animals to extinction. There’s simply too many people for this to work. In order to calculate the number of people who would die in case of a great disaster that would restrict food production, just have in mind that throughout history, human population was as big as the food supply allowed. So, if food production drops to pre-industrial levels, human population will drop to a pre-industrial level. Numerically, this means a sustainable population of around one billion people, which means six billions would die. This, of course, is an optimistic assessment, because the ensuing chaos and conflict would mean that those who are sentenced to death from starvation will commonly resort to banditry of all sorts, and the expectation that one billion people will be able to grow food on pre-industrial level while surrounded by hungry mobs of crazed people is naive. Some isolated, inaccessible areas might continue to function normally, but for the most part, in the rest of the world literally everybody would die before there would be any kind of peace again, because the most realistic and effective survival tactics in those times would not be agriculture, but armed robbery. However, this will not be the universal outcome. In some parts of the world, people are very disciplined and would be much more effective in surviving great hardships. In America, however, I would expect the worst kinds of nightmare.

So, to summarize. Being prepared for a limited disaster scenario is a good idea. Those things happen with such frequency, it’s very likely for a person to experience at least one such scenario during his or her lifetime. Some experience several. However, trying to survive a civilization-ending cataclysm such as a nuclear war or an asteroid strike is naive and pointless. Even if there were survivors, the factors leading to survival would probably be too random to be able to prepare. Most likely, the low-tech, off-the-grid, already living off the land, secluded closely-knit communities separated from the rest of the world by some natural barrier that is very difficult to overcome without modern technology, would have the greatest probability of survival. In urban communities, I’m afraid that there can be no long term survival. I personally know how much food I have to buy for my family every week, and it’s very easy for me to extrapolate the probability of our survival if the urban food supply were to be disrupted. Also, we are completely dependent on the grid – gas, water, electricity, everything. In those circumstances, survival is an illusion.

So, preparedness. By all means, be prepared for low-level extraordinary events, such as an earthquake, a flood or a civil war. Pay your bills, wash your dishes, have some excess of non-perishable food stored, have a bottle of bleach for disinfecting water, have battery lamps and power packs for charging your phone when there’s no electricity for five days. But above all, be prepared to leave this world, because all humans must die. Be prepared for war, but above all, be prepared to meet God. If you are, everything is easy.