In Oneself Or Others… Neurological Demolition Is How Understanding Progresses…
It’s right to be wrong, as long as one is willing to correct and go deeper. What does going deeper mean? It means under-standing at least one axiom used previously, and previously unchallenged, or an emotion used previously, and previously unsuspected.
This is construction, but on the locale of previous constructions which have therefore to be demolished.
Neurological change requires energy. Literally.
And energy is the ultimate worth.
One trains for physical activity by practicing the activity. Practice enables one to get more active by reinforcing what ones uses. It is the same with mental activity, on an even greater scale (actually physical activity is part of mental, because it requires motor neurons, and also proprioception and equilibrioception, both senses among the eight senses which the ancient had not discovered…) Flexing neural networks instead of muscles. However, muscles already exist, whereas neural networks are not in general genetically given… Those corresponding to language, science, culture are humanly given. Thus genuine progress in understanding requires new neural networks… created ex-nihilo, or through massive reorganization.
“Debate” means, originally, beating completely. Debate is thrilling, but brutal, and thrilling precisely because it’s so brutal. Kindness or a smile can kill, but only rarely. It’s killing with ideas which is common.
Intellectuals, in an old tradition inherited from the most prestigious among them, deny that any of the preceding is true… Out of self-preservation, no doubt. To admit engaging in creative mental activity as a weapon of mass neurological destruction does not feel like having much of a future!… But that creative destruction is how civilization regenerates.
So, if we want higher knowledge, we require not just humility, but beating up completely… Others too, not just ourselves… And finding pleasure in it.
This goes of course completely against an agenda of behaving like snowflakes, and expecting, even ordering others, to respect every single snowflake.
In particular no ideology should be beyond any suspicion, or beyond debate. Blasphemy, in matters intellectual, and to achieve mental progress, is a moral imperative.
There is no higher mental activity than the advancement of understanding. But it rests on the destruction of yesterday’s minds. Far from being cuddly and cute, the advancement of understanding requires brutality and arrogance. (The root of arrogantia, ad-roguare, means to ask forcefully… the PIE root being “reg”, straight line…)
Of course one should be as gentle as possible.
However, the core of mental progress is to demolish old neurology and build new ones. Short of outright physically torturing people, that’s as aggressive as it gets.
This implies that, should it impose gentleness as a sine qua non condition, a civilization will not progress in understanding… and thus will collapse because, as the ecology it stands on evolves, any civilization has to progress in its understanding (remember the Mayan civilization which imploded from mismanaging an ecological crisis it had created).
Now of course, change is growing superexponentially. So, then, must understanding, and, thus the demolition of old neurologies. This is why it is unwise, and not even caring, to take care of the sensitivity of others as if that should be mission number one.
Quite the opposite: sensitivity being one of the reasons to shun the progress of understanding, sensitivity should be bulldozed over, not just by necessity, but also as training, and a matter of principle.
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Make no mistake. The preceding is even more important emotionally than logically. I was just dreaming, I don’t remember the overall motive. It was outside in a vehicle, vivid blue sky. Not a cloud in the sky (It’s snowing outside where I am presently, we have not seen the sun for days…). In the distance in that dream a mountain, shaped like a truncated pyramid, with a glacier perched on top. We were going somewhere. Considering the environment resembled the American north-west. While the dream went on it was clearly defined by a powerful emotional aura: the motive, what moved the dream (which I have now forgotten, but which left a trace, no doubt, to be recovered in the appropriate circumstantial configuration… in another dream…). The point is that the now forgotten emotion drove the logic of the dream. So emotions are fully part of our understanding. Emotions are what stands the most under.
Full under-standing then requires emotional change.
So when Galileo pointed at the shadows of mountains on the Moon, experienced church authorities could feel that if the Moon was just another planet, if the planets then were just like Earth, if indeed moons orbit around Jupiter, four of them, no less, then what was viewed as sure and self-obvious for millennia, the Ptolemaic theory, could be completely wrong. The emotion of what was once certainty, now proven thoroughly wrong, would no doubt extend to give a lethal aura to all the impossible statements of the Catholic church, foundation to all what made the lives of these authorities pleasant or even possible.
That’s why the Catholic authorities kidnapped and then tortured Giordano Bruno for seven years before piercing him here and there and burning him alive.
The Catholic plutocrats knew all too well that the shattering of a pseudo-scientific theory would feed from and provide the same emotional aura to demolish their own pseudo-divine status.
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Ah, to finish with a joke. Jokes are mental bulldozers… They torpedo old certainties with new perspectives.
Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and all the other genders that were made up, are from… the Moon.
In other words, they are lunatics (let’s be all too clear!)
Please don’t restrain the applause while I prepare a few jokes on those who believe in Muhammad flying on some sort of horse from Mecca to Jerusalem. To be shot down by the Israeli Iron Dome, or something…
Patrice Ayme
Muhammad, Buraq, the winged horse-like creature with “the beautiful face” and Judeo-Christian archangel Gabriel observe “shameless women” being punished in Hell for showing their hair (that’s why they hang from it). Persian 15th c. The emotion conveyed: women without shame should be half undressed, hanged by their hair, and roasted from below. So better be shameful, girls! You may not like it otherwise. And then Muslim “judges” prepared the appropriate logic, namely Sharia laws.
Similar paintings from the same period represent nude roasting women hung by their tongues for having answered their husbands inappropriately. So girls, learn to stay silent…
P/S:
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 
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Happy where they were, and perhaps too happy… If you feel right always, you are not trying hard enough: this is our distant ancestors thought, as they headed away from the trees. Occupying a new ecological niche always favorizes new speciation. So a species niche making at will, will self-evolve, and exponentiate, this is indeed what happened: Will to power through the power of new niches. Amor Nidificans, not Amor Fati.
The old proposition of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was that life tends to increase complexity. Lamarck observed that through his microscope, studying mollusks’ fossil evolution. Such a force is the opposite of entropy. To understand it we will have to get a better understanding of Quantum Mechanics and entanglement. As the complexifying force exerts itself upon the environment, new ecological niches are created, and then, occupied by life itself.
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Chimps love meat: it is more calorie laden than all other foods. Chimpanzees are also hyper aggressive. Chimpanzees also tend to spill out of the forest. I saw one large male chimp in savannah park, maybe 100 kilometers from the first serious forest, in an area full of lions and leopards. He demonstrated to me his unbelievable insanity, humongous strength, and delirious ferocity, half demolishing a solitary tree he had climbed on, in the process.
Our ancestors were even more chimp-like than chimp themselves, on the Dark Side, and lived in the savannah more than other chimps. They could do so only if they were smarter and more violent. But then they prevented less smart and less violent chimps from joining.
I suspect our ancestors used stones and branches as weapons early on, more than other primates: otherwise they would have been powerless and defenseless… And used them to the point that this usage drove human evolution. They had to keep at bay not only other chimps, but baboons and giant baboons (a species they dispatched early on). Baboons are hyper aggressive, to a ridiculous extent, but they fear chimps (who eat their young). Thus the human ancestors created a niche for themselves: hominoids are better at stone throwing than other primates because of the fact they can hang from their arms. Long arms swinging down give more momentum to stones (some baboons in Africa could testify to that fact when interacting with the ten year old version of yours truly).
To survive in this more difficult niche, human created, our ancestors had to be smarter. The less bright ones got eaten.
In any case, this is a story of extreme violence: failures don’t get to eat, let alone reproduce, and, instead, get eaten.
I observed in the wild that psychology is very important. All brainy animals tend to do mental analysis, and they take the circumstances into context. I do not kill venomous snakes who do not engage in aggressive behavior. In general smart animals do not engage in aggressive behavior if the profit/risk ratio is not high enough. That’s what brains are for. But that profit/risk ratio is itself the fruit of a psychological evaluation, both from predator and prey. That’s why it’s in general a bad idea to run away from a predator.
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Humans Are The Most Violent Species:
Violence is fundamentally the application of force on the environment: what could be more human? What species has modified Earth more than humans? Blue green algae creating Earth’s oxygen? Vegans planting genetically engineered soy, drenched by toxic fertilizers, to the horizon, where there used to be forests, will deny this, and flaunt their sheepiness, forgetting in their self-celebration, that the goat is a satanic symbol. If beavers kill forests to shelter their dwellings with dams, that’s indeed a form of violence.
Thus extreme violence, be it only on the environment, be it only by colonizing it, establishing new ecological niches, extreme smarts and refined psychological analysis pervading nature, human, animal or physical, were the engines driving humanity forward for millions of years. Spending a few hours in a totally wild place full of megafauna, and without weapons, reveals this in a hurry: only the threat of potential hyperviolence keeps predators at bay… As long as one knows them well.
Once, hiking up a mountain with my family, I have exchanged verbal threats with a converging brown bear (Eurasian grizzly) for more than half an hour in an Iranian forest… The most terrible scream I did ever manage finally got him to go away (nothing else worked). Once in Yosemite, a large and fast stone impacting on a charging ursine target did it. And I had to demonstrate stone power to threatening bears several times. Bears know stones perfectly well, and fear them; once they know that you are a stone master, with resounding impacts on a third object to reveal that notion to their thick skulls, they retreat. Indeed, making a demonstration of stone throwing generally gets bears to gallop away. Unassisted cross country mountain running with minimal equipment in forest full of inquiring bears was my passion for decades, and it reveals nature’s psychology: a sort of pantheism is eminently practical. Survival tricks are a must. They can be as simple as not wearing headphones, or never stepping not far from something that could hide a lethal snake waiting in ambush.
It goes without saying that being ruled by smarts and ready to engage in preventive violence are not exactly “woke” notions. Integrating that fundamental truth, that smarts and violence dominate, or denying that it exists, is exactly why China went down for centuries, when it was overrun by foreigners, or why Europe has been going down for more than a century, or why China is coming back up, and why the US exists, and why the US is on its way up, more than ever (Biden plays woke, but only on TV; otherwise Biden is Trump 2.0).
We are the knowledge species, and more knowledge is how, on the average, our ancestors learned to survive better.
Now is not any different. It is actually much more so: the survival of the species was never in doubt, until today and only new and better knowledge will save it.
Ah, and what of Descartes’ famous “I think, therefore I am!”. Well, “I am” was never in doubt. Anybody who thinks a bit knows that “being”, perception, precedes thinking. And there are plenty of situations when one feels that one is, and one does not, or can’t, think. So, whatever Descartes tried to say, it’s neither here nor there.
We are the knowledge species, we are potentially all scientists, critiques and thinkers. Except that oligarchs and plutocrats want us to believe most of us are no better, and at our best, as sheep… We will be, as a species, only if we think enough to know what is right, and important.
Patrice Ayme
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[1] Old French science “knowledge, learning, application; corpus of human knowledge” (12 C.), from Latin scientia “knowledge, a knowing; expertness,” from sciens (genitive scientis) “intelligent, skilled,” present participle of scire “to know.”