Strategy Keep Us Sane: Part 1 - Choices

Too many of us are growing unhappier for insane reasons. Too many believe that the world is a terrible place and getting worse. Such people don’t trust the wealth of objective evidence that we are becoming, on the average, wealthier, healthier, longer living, more advanced, more connected, more able to improve our individual lives, and so on. The number of us in poverty has shrunk dramatically in the last twenty years. Obesity is now a more common problem than starvation. The world is improving so dramatically because more and more people are free to advance their competitive positions.

Unfortunately, many of us are also getting worse “educated.” In the most “advanced” countries, this means that we are taught to hate our bodies, the way our minds work, our families, the idea of marriage and children, our work, our nations, and our religious traditions. We are taught to hate competition because modern education confuses competition with conflict. It also confuses the unavoidable desire to improve our lives with greed, selfishness, and seeking power over others. Education refuses to teach proven, traditional values that sustain societies and unite us. Instead, it promotes nonsense that divides us.

Two Opposing Ideas

We are taught two contradictory ideas about comparison, the real meaning of “competition.”

First, we are told that comparing people is wrong. No individual person, behavior or way of life can be judged as better or worse than another. This is contrary to how the human mind functions. Constantly making comparisons is the only basis of our decisions. Our denial of comparisons denies us good judgment. This drives us insane.

At the same time, those who command us not to compare also demand that we compare each other in perverse ways, but we can only make these comparisons based on a new, recently invented, and constantly changing, standard. Trying to do this also drives people mad. The new basis of comparison is a kind of moral superiority, we acquire by adhering to this shifting standard. No idea in this new morality is too absurd to be promoted. It depends on the use of words that were not even known ten years ago. Most of these ideas give moral superiority only to victimhood. It can be described as competition on grievance. No matter how successful we are and how beneficial our work, we can only win status by identifying with various victim groups.

The pursuit of victimhood is insane. Our minds are simply not wired that way, except for the most neurotic among us.

The Sane and the Insane