Illustration: Holding Opposing Ideas in One’s Mind Simultaneously

Entertaining conversation illustrating this quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." As Bill Maher argues, McDonalds tastes good even though it it not healthy food. BOTH of these things are true. Same thing for ice cream and many other foods. Most important these days, we can love other people even though we disagree strongly with some of their beliefs and opinions. Really.

But in modern times, many people are not admitting to things they know to be true because it is not approved by their respective tribes. We need to stop allowing emotions and social pressure to prevent us from saying things we know to be true. Only then will we be able to have meaningful conversations with each other.

As I've written repeatedly, embracing membership in a tribe reduces one's IQ by 50 points.

Additional note: I think Casey Means is courageous and brilliant. I highly recommend her new book, Good Energy.

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What it is Like to Start Seeing the Progressive Left for What it is.

Fascinating video. This woman recently started seeing the DNC and progressive left for what they are. She describes the experience of scales falling from her eyes.

I created a transcript of her 3-minute video:

I feel like I have a unique perspective with this whole election thing. Because I used to be very, very far left, like I was one of the people having a fucking mental breakdown in 2016 when he won, right? And I didn't even like him up until six months ago, when it became very obvious that they were staging a coup and tried to assassinate him. And then some shit started clicking. So I'm still very new to this whole side of things. But the thing is, when I was very far left, like, radically far left, I thought I knew what was going on. I genuinely believed I was informed. I thought I knew better than everybody else, and that's what these people think, too. And the thing is I would get so triggered and so angry when people would question me because I didn't actually know what the hell I was talking about. I thought I did, but really I didn't actually know any policies. I didn't actually know any politics. All I actually knew was what I had seen online, in mainstream media, and because everybody was saying, I just assumed it had to be right, right. And I think where a lot of this comes from is like, people just don't want to be wrong. Like, it's humbling and it's embarrassing to acknowledge that you were wrong or that you didn't know as much as you thought you did, but I would get so defensive and fly off the handle when and whenever somebody would question me, because I didn't actually have any talking points, and the talking points I did have were inaccurate.

But I didn't want to be wrong so I just kept fucking regurgitating. I just kept echoing the same shit that I was hearing over and over again, and that's what people are still doing. And I I don't blame them. I'm not mad at them, because really, I mean, if you're only exposed to that, then that's what you're gonna believe.

But it's crazy to be on the other side of it for this election and see just how misinformed people are, and they will argue with you, and I won't have a card, because they will argue with you till they're blue in the face because they are just so convinced that they're right, and I was one of those people, and the fear they're feeling is very real. I'm not invalidating the fear. I'm just it's just that the fear is not founded in anything factualbecause it's not the things that they're scared about. It's not going to happen. It didn't happen last time, it's not going to happen this time.

And it's just it's so crazy. It's like being the sober person at a party full of drunk people.

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About Love Blindness

Biologist Steve Stewart-Williams:

When male fruit flies are courting females and close to mating, they become so fixated on the task at hand that they often fail to spot approaching predators. The phenomenon is known as love blindness.

I can think of some intriguing hypotheticals!

I subscribe to Stewart-Williams and highly recommend it. It is titled the Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter.

Here are two more of the tidbits he offers this week:

A large, longitudinal study found no evidence that violent videogames make people more aggressive or less empathetic. Playing violent videogames is correlated with aggression. However, rather than violent videogames making people aggressive, people who are already aggressive gravitate to violent videogames. [Link.]

According to a fascinating new paper, people tend to assume they have all the information they need to reach a conclusion or make a decision. In a preregistered experiment, participants who were given only half the available information were just as confident in their decisions as those who were given all of it. The authors dubbed this the illusion of information adequacy.

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Are We Being Afflicted by the Devouring Mother?

Are we being afflicted by the "Devouring Mother"?

JULIAN ADORNEY, MARK JOHNSON, AND GEOFF LAUGHTON explain at Reality's Last Stand.  Their article is titled: "How Safetyism Is Robbing Our Children of the Hero’s Journey" Excerpt:

One key element of the devouring mother archetype is that she prevents her child from going on the hero’s journey. The great psychologist Erich Neumann tells a story to describe how this works in The Origins and History of Consciousness.

The basic theme of the work is the mother’s resistance to the growth and development of her son,” Neumann writes. “He has always lived with her, but now he threatens to go away.” The boy’s father “understands that the son is a hero, a god’s son, and, with the help of his wife’s familiar spirit, he tries to make the hero’s fate and its necessity apparent to her and the boy.” Yet he fails. His assertion that “their son is a hero” is “poisonous to her ears.” He says that the world “has need of him [the son],” but the mother rejoins, “My son is no hero, I need no hero son.

Why is the devouring mother so determined to prevent her son from becoming a hero? Because his becoming a hero means he will leave her. He will strike out on his own, beyond the orbit of her love. Neumann notes that “the mother denies him his right to a future, lest the child grow away from her.” When the son suggests that he might have a destiny and could potentially do something valuable with his life, the devouring mother “slaps his face and tells him he is to remain his mother’s son and not have an ego.”

This archetype of the devouring mother, who refuses to let her child mature and become autonomous, is starting to be reflected in the data. Perhaps due to societal overprotectiveness, members of Gen Z are slower to hit developmental milestones than previous generations. They are less likely to obtain their driver’s licenses at 16 and engage in dating during high school. They are more likely to live with their parents, even through their 20s and early 30s. While some trends might seem positive—such as the decline in alcohol consumption among youth—these are also indicative of a larger pattern: young people are not severing ties with their parental homes as early as they once did.

The devouring mother harms her own children, of course. It is difficult to avoid concluding that our societal overprotectiveness contributes significantly to Gen Z’s increasing rates of obesity, anxiety, and depression. But the damage likely extends beyond individual families, affecting society as a whole. The concern is not merely that young people are driving less and dating less; they are also becoming less entrepreneurial. Writing in the prestigious journal Work, Aging and Retirement, researchers noted a steady decline in the percentage of 12th graders aspiring to own their own businesses from the late 1980s through 2014 (the last year the study collected data for). In 1985, 46 percent of high school students said that they would like to be self-employed. By 2015 that number had fallen to just 31 percent.

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Increasing Willingness to Miss Out

Freya India has noticed that people are increasing afraid to participate in real life. Over the past decade, I have also personally noticed this change in both teenagers and adults. Here's an excerpt from India's article:

When talking about the harms of social media today, one of the first problems people mention is FOMO—fear of missing out. Scroll through Instagram and see your friends having fun at a party you weren’t invited to. Check Snapchat to find everyone’s Bitmojis together on Snap Map without you. This feeling of constantly missing out, we’re told, is a major cause of anxiety and depression for Gen Z.

But I don’t believe that’s true anymore.

More often, I see the opposite. Social media doesn’t make Gen Z afraid to miss out; it makes us want to miss out. We want to avoid the risk, the rejection, the awkwardness, the effort and energy that the real world demands. Our major problem isn’t fear of missing out. It’s fear of taking part.

Look at how many young people are scared of doing everyday things. I don’t just mean fear of learning to drive, or getting a job—I mean scared to order in restaurants. Can’t walk into a cafe. Don’t want to open their door for a delivery. Under the hashtag #socialanxiety on TikTok, which has nearly 3 billion views, young people are sharing symptoms, describing debilitating anxiety, even recording their panic attacks in public. One British TikToker hosts a series called “Doing Things You’re Afraid of To Show You It’s Okay”, where she films herself facing challenges like getting in an elevator, asking for help in a supermarket, and asking for directions.

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