blah phase

I go through phases.

I had been in a fairly productive phase where I was trying to make good use of my time, figure out my future, and pursue ideas that interested me. But the last few days I've been in an extremely unmotivated phase where everything is just "blah."

1.) I just came across this article. Basically some guy in Afghanistan converted to Christianity, so his community is demanding that he be executed. "Rejecting Islam is insulting God. We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die," said cleric Abdul Raoulf.

The article also notes that Mr. Raoulf is considered a moderate.

2.) I also came across this blurb, which notes that according to a recent study, 30% of African women think a woman deserves to be beaten for burning dinner.

When I'm not in a "blah" phase, I often think that I'd like to pursue some career where I help improve the human condition. Lately I've concluded that my greatest strength is rational thinking, and I've thought that the best way for me to feel good about my career is to somehow professionally encourage rational thought and behavior.

But when I'm in a "blah" phase, and I encounter stories like 1 and 2, I have a pretty hard time concluding that people aren't far beyond any help I could offer.

People aren't interested in rational thinking. Even if there was a nice way to tell someone that their irrational behavior is doing them more harm than good, and there generally isn't, they wouldn't care anyway. They'd spit in your face. Or if you were in Kabul, they'd hang you. And then they'd carry on with their idiocy.

Humans aren't built to live in a global society where we're often exposed to people who look, speak, and act a lot differently than themselves. We aren't built to have access to advanced scientific understanding of the world around us. And again and again and again our behavior reflects those basic facts.

I'm reminded of a Steven Pinker quote:

Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup... Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education...

It is my belief that the only way to avoid irrational insanity is through Pinker's "arduous education." But it is hard enough for a responsible person to educate one's self - how do we make sure everyone is so educated?

You can't just storm into Kabul and teach Abdul Raoulf that killing someone for what they say isn't something we should be doing. After all, his position is very reasonable and moderate in his world.

Or you could establish widespread public education throughout your country, and then still have a nation full of anti-science fundamentalists who believe that the world is 6,000 years old and that evolution is a conspiracy.

Blah.

In this phase, it seems like holing up in my house and hustling chumps for their kid's college fund seems like an appropriate way to make a living. Why bother trying to improve the world? I just should look out for myself. Self-interest.

Self-interest is the one reason people have to overcome their irrationality. They might be built to hate their neighbors with the different skin color and the funny accents, but it is in everyone's best interests to just trade with them instead of squandering their resources trying to kill each other. If everyone could just somehow realize this, so many problems would be solved.

But naturally, most religions teach people that self-interest is bad. Religion gives wonderful advice like "die for this cause, and you will be rewarded in the afterlife (trust me, there's an afterlife)" and "if someone hits you, offer to let them hit you again... that is what Jesus did!"

Fortunately the "turn the other cheek" people don't seem jumping to offer more suicide bombing targets to the "virgins in paradise" people.

So even if you could somehow educate all these people that certain aspects of their beliefs are actually self-destructive bullshit, and even if you could show that rational thinking has improved their lives with centuries of technological advances (except for the ones who believe that medicine is evil, of course), they'd still fuck it all up, and they'd be ready with plenty of pseudo-logical excuses.

I think it's missing part of the Pinker quote that really screws us over:

We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it... and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can entertain.

We're built to be so cause-and-effect oriented, and we know that death is at the end of every chain of choices we make. So all that fancy book-learnin' and logic don't make no difference cause we all end up in a grave. So why bother with it in the meantime? It is way too arduous. Fuck that, I'll just make up happy stories to believe in.

Blah.

Maybe the anti-science fundamentalists are right. Maybe technology is terrible, because without it we wouldn't have the global industrial society that we aren't built for. Maybe humankind would be better off if 99% of the world's population killed each other, and we'd go back to living in primitive hunter-gatherer tribes. On the brink of starvation, dirty, freezing, and ignorant. But hey, ignorance is bliss.

Of course I recognize that this whole depressing rant is part of the problem that it identifies. It is just a "pseudo-logical excuse" to justify my own irrational behavarior: the blah phase, the worthlessness of my daily pursuits, and frustration with being too lazy to change what I don't like about my life and the world.

How do I fight this? Or do I just keep playing poker and complaining about it.