Thanks for the feedback on my last blog, an observation on Shawn Rosenberg’s Democracy Devouring Itself.
There is a need for me to further explain my thoughts on the origins of the Incompetent Citizen, the necessity for a Competent Citizen, and how we may attain Competence.
Democracy and its most closely associated economic system (Capitalism) are dependent on the actions of the ‘Rational Man’. Another way to conceive of this person, as Shawn Rosenberg has shown us, is the ‘Competent Citizen’.
The Competent Citizen will weigh all the available evidence, and rationally make decisions that will be best for them and by extension their family and nation.
Human progress will be assured, and our survival guaranteed for millennia.
The areas of Politics and Commerce have for some time realised that the Rational Man does not exist. The real individual is a hodgepodge of emotions, memories, primal fears and desires. They are driven by the three human traits responsible for the species’ flourishing over the last few thousand years: the pursuit of pleasure, the avoidance of pain, and the conservation of energy.
The irrationality of man has led to decisions which seem self destructive, yet they continue to be made time and time again. The more complex society becomes, the more irrational becomes Man. Politicians and Businessmen, recognising that Man can be influenced, have sought to do so in ever more sophisticated ways, from demagoguery to advertising, and more recently social media influencing.
The Elites who govern us maintain that superior education and intellect gives them the right to choose the direction in which we should go as a society and what the World Order should be. To this end they feel justified in controlling and directing the message to get responses satisfactory to them.
Many Citizens, finding that the world of the elites is not meeting their needs, and having swung from one way to the next, are now in open rebellion. This gives rise to, among other things, Right-Wing Populism.
This too will ultimately fail and likely result in widespread chaos and the destruction of the current World Order.
If this is to be avoided then the answer has to be in equipping Citizens to be Competent. The basis of this is an understanding of how the brain functions, how we think, how we can control and change our patterns of thought, how we can think more clearly, and how we can reprogram our brains with new and more beneficial thought patterns.
We are generally unable to do this. This is why diets fail, racism and sexism persist, and petty prejudices cannot be avoided. Brilliant men are laid low by small vices.
We know how to change our thought patterns and internalise them. Eastern civilisations have been doing this for a long time, and athletes in the western world have used these techniques to achieve and maintain Peak Performance.
These techniques involve identification of the behaviours/responses we want to change, defining what the change should look like, and using deep relaxation and visualisation to shift our brains into the new desired patterns.
By doing this we can gain an understanding of the automatic responses we have, how appropriate they are, and what new ways we may want to automate our thinking. With practice, practically any person can achieve a mental state in which they have the space to evaluate; a process comprised of properly considering emotions and experiences, weighing them against abstract concepts, and seeing what kind of concrete outcomes are probable.
This, I think should be the basis of education from the earliest age; to help people to gain control of their minds.
Of course, if people start thinking, it would be the end of Democracy and Capitalism as we know it.
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