An Interesting Meme

6/6/2021

The gentleman who runs Dark Brightness has posted an interesting meme at his site.

The meme works for me personally because it contains what many refer to as a "truth bomb."

The fact that the truth bomber is Bruce Charlton only makes the meme work that much more.

To top it all off, the meme features a portrait of St. Eustace carrying a flag emblazoned with the symbol of the crucifix perched between the antlers of a stag, (see header at top of blog or link above).

An interesting and meaningful amalgam of words, images, and symbols.

6 Comments

Wm Jas link

6/7/2021 07:32:36

No need to credit Bruce by name. We know it’s him from the hyphenation!

Honestly, though, I’m not sure this particular message is what is needed rights now. It frames religion as a means to the end of large-scale social stability.

Francis Berger

6/7/2021 08:35:06

@ Wm - I see your point. To me it was more of an observation of fact - stable societies, especially large-scale ones, can only exist because of religion. That is, religion comes first and should come last as well - the stable society is just a beneficial side effect.

Bruce re-posted the 2015 piece from which the quote is extracted. I feel its relevant because we are currently experiencing an attempt to maintain a large-scale society that not only lacks religion, but is vehemently anti-religion.

If religion is a means to an end, a stable society is not the ultimate end of religion. I agree.

Anyway, it was the stag/crucifix symbol in the meme that really got me or, more specifically, the combination of the symbol with the message.

bruce charlton

6/7/2021 09:29:06

" It frames religion as a means to the end of large-scale social stability."

If taken as a sentence it could be misunderstood that way; but the point is that positives and negatives are seldom symmetrical.

No society can survive without a religion (partly) because of the demotivation, which passivity turns to a kind of insane short-termist expediency driven by feelings and fears.

the point of the post was to emphasise that plans and schemes about what we might do to improve things (which were the staple of most of my early writings) are futile when there is no strong motivation to improve things.

Mencius Moldbug once had the insight that motivation was crucial, but wildly misunderstood the nature of real motivation (not having experienced, nor recognised it historically) and put forward the Burning Man festival participants as exemplars of highly motivated people!

But we also should not be misled by people who are highly motivated to short-termist selfish ends, since these are merely reckless.

What is necessary is positive motivation of a long termist kind which is prepared to suffer at least suboptimal outcomes in the immediate term.

I found - when I worked in medicine, academic and science - that from the 1990s almost no individual person was prepared even to risk slightly adverse short termist outcomes - because none had strong motivations in terms of medicine/ academia/ science... their real motivations (by revealed preferences) were careerist, aimed at stats/ power/ wealth; and so they followed slavishly the incentive structures of The System - in so far as their ability and conscientiousness allowed.

Thus, the modern leadership in these fields is externally-directed and hard-working at doing... whatever the System tells them.

jorgen b

6/8/2021 23:12:23

"their real motivations (by revealed preferences) were careerist, aimed at stats/ power/ wealth; and so they followed slavishly the incentive structures of The System"

In the past due to inheritance and the simple agrarian nature of society, people pursuing such things already owned land. Now they are landless peasants; so the motivation is all how to earn rent now.

Ingemar

6/7/2021 18:44:10

The counterargument of course will be "But what about China?"

Francis Berger

6/7/2021 21:22:08

@ Ingemar - I assume you mean contemporary China. Secular dictatorships don't have good historical track records, so we'll see how that plays out.

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An Interesting Meme

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