It’s Progress, Dummy
According to the sheep world, nothing that is happening is bad. Technology is running wild, robots and AI are taking over the world, Digital IDs, CBDCs, on and on and on. None of it is bad. It’s just progress, and to oppose any of it is opposing progress, and opposing the advancement of humankind.
Humans are advancing emotionally as well, we no longer insist there are only two sexes, everyone has the right to be anything they wish to be. In fact, it is all so beautiful it is magical. If I was born with a penis, and every cell in my body is screaming out that I am a male, isn’t it a beautiful thing that I can decide I am actually a woman? And isn’t it beautiful that I can give “birth” to a baby, and have it feed on my male breasts, sucking out nutrients in a futile effort to stay alive? (Didn’t someone try to do this once with a snake?—and it didn’t work.)
This is progress—we have become so loving, and so accommodating, and so liberal, that anyone can express any sort of identification they choose, male, female, horse, dog, bat, weasel. What a wonderful human expression that is! So free! So creative! So liberating! So much an exercise of our fundamental right as a human being! And not only can we believe that about ourselves, but we can insist on laws that force everyone around us to believe it too. In fact, doctors can even perform the necessary surgical procedures to make us look and feel like what we are identifying with. (They can’t make us be whatever we want, just look and feel it, only God can do that.)
Not only can we identify as a different sex, or even a different species, than what we were born as, we can be anything we want to be even if we don’t deserve it or have the physical and mental capacity to be it! We are all winners, “be all that you can be” no matter what! We have the physique to fight fires and carry people out of burning buildings even if we are weak and physically incapable. We have the option to be a brain surgeon without any formal training, we have the right to fly helicopters, control planes, fight wars, play competitive sports. Anything. If we want to do it, we have the right and should be allowed to do it. (We can try, but most likely we won’t be successful at it, yet everyone around us has to pretend we are stellar in our efforts!!) And most importantly, nobody can stop us.
This is progress, dummy, what else is it?
In reality this is the effects of grandiose narcissism. Humans now believe they are God, and can, as God, create reality. For example, God has limited our expression as a biological entity to either male or female. But since we are now God we can change that and just “say” we are not the sex we are born with (as God intended) and we have the technical know-how to adjust the material elements to express, materially and biologically, the sex we have decided to be.
Only we don’t. We can alter the gross elements of gender (well, only a few things like breasts and penises, and even that not very well) but medical “science” can’t change the shape of our pelvises, or the density of our bones and muscles. It can chemically alter a few hormones to act against its “born will” but that doesn’t work out all that well either. And certainly, medicine cannot change every cell in our body to express the male or female chromosome arrangement (whichever one a person was not born with).
[I am using the trans issue as only one example of what we are identifying as “progress.”]
Generally, the reason we accept everything as natural progress is because we have let go of any sort of divine plan. Whatever happens to us is just the way it is, and even if we don’t like the consequences of that deviation from the divine way, we do not fight it, we do not say, “This sucks, this isn’t what is supposed to happen.” At worst, we just throw up our hands and say, “What can we do? Progress is progress; we can’t fight progress.”
That’s the worst-case scenario. That worst-case applies to things like the ill effects of social media, pornography, the mutilation of children in the name of gender identification, the devastation of medical treatments such as chemotherapy, radiation, vaccinations, and bad pharmacology. Some things we do try to change, but the attempt at change is usually top-down, not bottom-up. Top-down is trying to change things like the frequency and duration of cell phone use, for example. Bottom-up is working on the development and healing of the psychology behind the compulsion to stare at a cell phone screen 18 hours out of 24.
The ”less than worst-case” we are just fine with out of the box. We may find some realization that it isn’t ultimately all that good, but we honour the concept of “progress” so passionately we are perfectly fine with it. We also may be totally blinded by progress, particularly if it is of the technological kind, we actually love it and even the consequences of it. Medical technology gets this treatment more often than other examples (entertainment and convenience are a close second). According to the administrators of medical technology, we live longer, we suffer less, and maybe we even function more efficiently thanks to them. We care very little for things like expense, negative consequences, drug side effects, or physical and psychological dependency.
The advancements of science are always forgiven. Even the progress that made the atomic bomb a viable form of warfare weaponry—“How can you stop progress?” We are victims and slaves to it. Unfortunately, most of the time willingly.
If we lived by a certain human and divine ethic first, we would stop advancement when we could see that it would not be beneficial in achieving our goals as human beings. We would not allow “progress” to rule us and roll over us, taking progress for granted, and as a given, wherever it ends up taking us. We should have a clear image of what human beings are supposed to be, and work toward that image. We should put the image first, as a priority, and reject anything that comes out of our creative mind that is contrary to it. This should be an individual pursuit and assessment of our personal behaviour in the world—not an action dictated by government or even by the church. The ancient Egyptians believed that we all individually knew what this image was, in our hearts, and only needed to follow its divine, and wise, guidance.
I do however, have serious reservations about relying on the dictates of "one's own heart" to delineate what constitutes moral behaviour. As a psychologist, you well know that many people whose perceptions are distorted by trauma, drug use, etc absolutely MUST NOT rely on their gut reactions, as these are severely warped, whether deliberately or not. A solipsistic reliance on admitting no input from others, from the discoveries of science (including those of technology, God forbid!) or from the adages of religious or cultural tradition lead to the same kind of tunnel vision as does over-reliance on external edicts. It is equally narcissistic, equally grandiose , although stemming from a disproportionate suspicion of externality, as opposed to a disproportionate trust in externality.
I have searched for a reliable moral yardstick for ever, have given up, and just, as do many without realizing it I think, stumble forward doing 'good' as best I can in full knowledge that mistakes due to misperception will be made. The important thing here is to be willing to admit, quickly, when I've erred, as that restores some semblance of balance to the whole enterprise of living. One thing beyond this attempt to balance out principled behaviour I have found useful is a notion from systems theory: to act morally one must be able to make accurate predictions. That capacity requires the application of evidence-based thinking, logical manipulation of hypothetical outcomes and a highly developed imagination to produce and assess the realistic probabilities of many contingencies. Sadly, these faculties are no longer appreciated nor taught and instead we are exhorted to resort to relying on "our heart wisdom" -- whatever the blazes that means!
There is a lot more group think mentality these days. It has caught on like wild fire and very obvious over the last 5+ years. Just repeat something enough times and people suck it up. There is also so much addiction whether it is all the usual vices or even the one of 'poor me'. Largely, a lot of folks have no positive guiding force. A lot of time is wasted on their phones finding out what their so-called friends are doing. I don't even think they have the awareness to know they are on the 'group think train to nowhere'.