Identity.

 

Identity in a group is negotiated between the individual and the group. It is a bilateral relationship. The group agrees to accept the individual as one of its own, with all the attendant rights and responsibilities. In return, the individual agrees to abide by the rules and norms of the group, and to uphold the group’s values and honor. In many cases, membership may entail an element of exclusivity: If you want to call yourself a member of A, you cannot also belong to B. And this process is the model of how the individual, as a unique being, comes to terms with his or her place in society. It is the process of growth, maturity, and further growth.

The social market.

 

The social market is the complex web of courtesies and communications, small talk and discourse, through which we negotiate our interactions with others. Through it, we assess the trustworthiness and relevance of the information others provide, and attempt to establish the value of the ideas we share with others.

Notes

 Almost everything we know about the world, we learn from other people.  It follows that our ability to understand the world depends on our ability to understand people.

What we can observe directly is the behavior of the people who control the information.

The technocrats are acting like they've got something to hide.  They are showing with their own actions that there's something there.

I don't have a lot of specialized expertise.  I look at what I can observe directly.  What I can observe directly is the people in power and their actions; what I can observe directly is the media and their actions.

We make practical and moral decisions primarily, and most reliably, on the basis of first-hand knowledge.  The function of propaganda is to supplant what we know from direct observation.

Human beings are competitive, like all living things.  Unlike other creatures, we have the ability to follow a moral code, and we are competitive even in that.  Virtue envy - the resentment of another person's moral standing - is as old as Cain and Abel.  Even when we stand to gain nothing by it, it is easier to take the other guy down than to build ourselves up.

There's a deliberate strategy to decouple moral reasoning from the objective, observable consequences of your actions. Global warming, pandemic masks. It's so that your sense of guilt can be properly manipulated.

Performative virtue:  disconnection of perceived "virtue" from any tangible results in the real world.

If I convince myself that most people are ignorant bigots, then I get to feel "special" just by not being a bigot.  If I believe the other guy is a nazi, then I only have to be 1 percent better than a nazi to be the good guy.

The Covid scare campaign appeals to a certain strain of vanity: the conviction that "I am among the selfless few, bearing the burden for an ungrateful and ignorant humanity".  

What "climate change" and the covid scare campaign have in common is that they are designed to focus your moral decision-making on things that you cannot directly observe - global temperatures or infection rates - so that you must outsource your moral decision-making to the Authorities.  This is the same top-down model of the communist command economy, applied to our social, moral, and cognitive universe.

The goal of the technocrats is to get you to subordinate your local, mundane knowledge - things you can observe directly - to the "information" you are fed by authorities.

Rebel News: Parliament Police confiscate a table at Canada Day.

 https://www.rebelnews.com/parliament_police_confiscate_illegal_table_during_canada_day_events

Ottawa Police issued warnings Thursday about a crackdown on " unusual noises" and "shouting" but made no mention of banning tables.