Cyrus Draegur

Atomic energy enthusiast. Architecture enjoyer. Mecha appreciator. Sci-Fi reader. Friendly neighborhood shameless degenerate. Winged caniform synthetic biped techno-lich. Mostly Harmless™. Poly-Panro-Demi It/They/He

  • 0 Posts
  • 144 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle






  • not everyone actually KNOWS what they’re imbibing though. There are discrete pipelines of rhetoric that drip-feed poison that oftentimes isn’t even noticeable until it’s too late. Little baby-steps of escalation. Getting roofied is not full consent!

    each human being comprises a wide foundation of autonomous sensory and telemetry systems feeding data up into a stack of reactive animal impulses of competing interests which present options to a capstone observer process that has executive influence in deciding which options to embrace and cultivate vs which ones to ignore and atrophy and that capstone, your actual SELF, is a much smaller piece of you than you think it is, and it CAN be overwhelmed by junk info flooding the lower sections.

    People. Get. Brainwashed. People absolutely CAN and DO become prisoners within their own bodies as their willpower is overwhelmed and swallowed by propaganda and rhetoric, becoming possessed by an ideology that replaces them and transforms their body into a shambling zombie whose only goal is to SPREAD THE INFECTION. You can see it take hold whenever you’re trying to tell someone something that opposes their worldview, watching their eyes glaze over mid-sentence before they are swept under the thrall of canned responses that they neither actually believe nor even fundamentally understand.

    Mostly it happened to our parents and grandparents who drank the tea party’s kool aid and then promptly got swept up into the MAGA cult, or worse, Q-Anon. There might be a shred of the person they used to be in there somewhere, but make no mistake, that person is not in control anymore. That person who loved you as family once has been replaced by a ghoul that will sacrifice you to the false god of its ideology now.

    No matter how much high-minded philosophizing we pile on top of ourselves, deep down these bodies are still animals beholden to flawed instincts and senses that can be manipulated, misled by illusions, or even driven to outright hallucination.

    TL;DR: YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO PROPAGANDA.

    (but i’ve upvoted you because ‘brainfucked’ is DEFINITELY a valid alternative way to describe this shit XD)








  • Cyrus Draegur@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlcontrarians
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    13
    ·
    2 months ago

    you can sense the change in air pressure as several walls of NUH-UH are rapidly approaching your position to explain in excruciating detail why and how the point you made wasn’t nearly as reasonable as you believed it had been. or just yell at you a lot >_>;



  • Cyrus Draegur@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlStay alert.
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    2 months ago

    I think he should be saying “Hmm, no…?” Because “oh” is an interjection of surprise but “Hmm” is a murmur of premeditation. Also, the vibe of a hesitant question contrasts the excitement and assertive certainly of an exclamation point.



  • It’s interesting that every group of people, basically ever, has started a religion.

    One such example of a group of people who had NOT developed religiosity I’m aware of, interestingly, also did not develop mathematics or written language, because the capacity for abstraction which form the substrate that religions grow upon is ALSO a prerequisite for speculative concepts like symbolic meaning and set theory.

    I’m speaking of certain mostly out of contact tribes of humans.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirahã_people
    And even they, despite living with an exclusively direct observation empiricism-based worldview, are still susceptible to collective hallucination (though they don’t cultivate it into an organized system that will ever persist beyond those who directly experienced any given hallucinatory event).


  • This right here. If we didn’t have religion, practically the first thing we’d do is begin hallucinating about one. There’s a “religion”-shaped hole in every human brain, basically, even though things that we wouldn’t necessarily readily recognize as religious patterns could come to fill it, wholly or partially. Our pattern recognition/reconstruction and predictive modeling systems will always generate hallucinations that, like most heuristics, are fundamentally not reality but MAY nevertheless offer sufficient utility (or the feeling of utility) that the synaptic connections they comprise will end up self-reinforcing.

    The amount of vigilance it would take to continually purge these cognitive patterns would be more expensive and exhausting than most of the potential dangers of letting them exist.

    But it’s possible to mindfully decide to cultivate the features and aspects of what emergently congeals there such that it’s more likely to be harmless, such as certain hobbies, fandoms, habits, or ritual-esque behavioral patterns.

    Reflecting on our experiences against an anthropomorphized hypothetical observer to gain insights we would otherwise miss shows up even in places like computer programming - see “rubber duck debugging” - sufficiently strict religious sects would most certainly decry this activity as idolatry to a false god, even if YOU clearly do not classify a rubber ducky as a god. Because, again, the root of religiosity is group consensus of a socially shared memetic hallucination. what they perceive becomes a component of their beliefs even if it doesn’t become a component of yours.

    This leads me to often consider spirituality, magical thinking, ritualistic behaviors, and religiosity in general as a bridge between our animalistic impulses and instincts vs. our sapience, or whatever you might label “higher” cognitive functions that enable abstract decision differentiation.