Everyone wants to get to the end of the story since their unchosen favorite fantasy has promised such a wonderful epilogue.

It's not those poor wretches who are to blame for having paid 10% of their lifetime incomes in exchange for a return they don't receive before death.

Lol no. But i do feel bad for you all.

I believe there was a guy in the mid to late 1800s who started some apocalyptic cult in upstate NY, that obviously didn't happen. I'm not sure the cult made it after the prediction didn't pan out.

I'd say the thought of groups living in end times is a common theme for all of human history. I mean, just in modern times alone there was the Jonestown cult, Heaven's Gate cult, the Branch Davidians.

I think this thought stems from arrogance; both exuded by the leader and embodied in the follower seeking greater meaning to their lives than just being the product of sex by their parents. Not that their is anything wrong with being merely the product of sex, but expecting or demanding more for yourself seems futile.

Thinkers? I think, therefore I am a thinker.

Chomsky gets my attention

I think it's a debatable question in a descriptive sense. It's an open question whether people vote primarily in their material self-interest vs ideology etc.

But I think in a normative sense, it would be impossible to avoid questions of ethics or other "ideological" constructs. Even the most materialist analysis contains agents that act in a self-interested manner, and behind that self-interest are ethical or normative preferences that are worthy of examination on an individual basis, as opposed to strictly a collective sociological analysis.

Of course there are personalities and personas comparisons on Reddit or Discord. Probably more so as we now have to introduce the complete anonymity of these sites into the equation. Using Facebook, Instagram or the like you are at least dealing with a person that has some degree of accountability to some people in their lives because they aren’t anonymous. That user tends to leave out all the bad or embarrassing parts of their lives mostly choosing to add or expound the good parts of their lives.

Now let’s factor in anonymity. We have people hiding behind a keyboard and monitor. I’m speaking in generalities but we get the people who are looking for attention as well. They just tend to do it the opposite way with negativity. The trolls who say and act in ways they lack the courage to do in real life. Now one could look at that two ways. I could think I’m such a great person because I don’t say or act like the internet trolls hiding in anonymity. Or I could think that the world is really worse than it is because the trolls paint it that way. Either way it is human nature to compare things but we need to have an accurate picture to compare ourselves too and an edited or unreal personality is not the way to do it in a healthy manner. Here are the choices. Compare oneself to all of the fake beautiful perfect lives on social media that aren’t anonymous or the depths of negativity with people that don’t act or say those things that are on anonymous social media. Or we can recognize that our instinct is to compare and just make better choices of what we compare ourselves too. Looking inward at our own moral compass and virtues. Looking in the mirror daily and comparing our actions of the day to the person we want to be.

They also happen to think they are more important than everyone else.

does this include reddit

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Whether or not the political is dependent on how much we understand philosophy (idealism) is itself a philosophically debatable question.

The problem is greed, not democracy. Turns out that when companies put profits before the greater good then politicians are easily swayed - by bribes or just fear of being voted out. Seems greed overrides political systems.

I would assume political questions are more practical, and therefore more accessible. How do we stop gerrymandering? How do we restore faith in election outcomes? How do we keep money out of politics? These problems are more solvable than larger scale problems that are ultimately the source of these problems, like how do we curb human greed? How do we make politics a noble pursuit rather than a pursuit for power? The real problem with politics is you can’t change human nature, and the systems in America put forth to curb human nature like checks and balances were not sufficiently prepared to handle the modern world.

Well, social media has one use!

ha! I had a convo with my SO about that essay, tried to wrap our heads around it, ended up chatting about the ego for a bit.

I enjoy Kastrup, his writing supports interesting thoughts and conversations about the philosophical implications of living in a non-local universe. Without having to delve into old religions.

Only if one presumes what social media conveys is truthful.

Not sure they incorporate GIGO.

Can we overcome the greed of capitalism?

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Source: Any book on the philosophy of science, Decartes Meditations, Spinoza's Ethics, the whole German Idealism movement from Kant's Critique of Judgement to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Heidegger's Being and Time, French Postructuralists like Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze. This isn't a topic you just ask for "source" when you are completely unaware of the whole historical development of the idea you're asking for

Base failure/s ? Just one choice out of many:

Externalities. A glacier has no vote; a frog species finances no election campaign; a stable climate could not be voted for; the global dumpsters (atmosphere, oceans, etc) are free to use; cheap oil costs nothing but drilling refinery transport (and military) but neither the nonrenewability, nor the resulting pollution has to be paid for; (and without politics taxing all those, the economy misses out on that vital information completely, so it cannot deliver proper optimization); and almost no one gives AF about anything after the current election cycle - let alone future generations. All the services that a no-longer-tame nature had delivered, were never in any government budget balance sheet.
So in short, we are losing literal INVISIBILITIES that only a tiny minority ever cared about, but which played zero role for everyone else.

"Minority" is a key observation here.

Diversity - what if the "base failure" is totally different, for different subgroups?:

I've watched plenty elections. The vast MAJORITY gets it all wrong. Each time. And still. Largely not even by their own thinking, but then they did not free themselves in time.
More (much more?) than three quarters of voters are just different shades of conservativism; perhaps that's why "democracy" has such horrible outcomes when completely new societal, technical, economic paradigms would have been needed instead? Only when the relevant timescales are longer than a human life, the situation might sometimes progress and improve, because old views can literally die out. And gerontocratic subsystems try hard to postpone that.

The ecological MINORITY has been growing, but much too slow. Perhaps only very recently out of the one-digit percentages? With its super slow growth, the biggest "base failure" of the ecological minority might have been ... in spite of better knowledge (and while time was running out) still believing in ...

the majority vote principle.

>Ignoring the issue of implementation (naturally), what is it that forms the base failure of our systems? Is it lack of awareness of material reality, i.e. ecology, physics, and so on?

The only answer I've ever come to that feels right is that people operating in groups for the purpose of completing a complex task, function more like parts of a machine than each piece functioning as a microcosm of the whole. Each piece of the machine may work towards a unified goal, as specificied by the actor choosing to be a part of the machine, but each component will have its own goals and interests that may not perfectly align with the end goal of the machine, even if the job the component does satiates the machines desires. I'm inclined to believe that being a part of the machine in the first place conditions you to behave in ways that the machine deems acceptable, else the machine will simply spit you out. And that is probably one of the core issues. Gating success or acceptance, as defined by society, by checking against the needs of the machine and largely dismissing the parts that don't immediately provide benefit, such as spending a large amount of money on greener means of production or disposal, or acting like a goofball, which you might find entertaining but the machine mught not. Our machine is geared towards production, and until we downshift a bit, the game will be production at all costs.

Not garbage collection: you misunderstood me.

That's true. And there are probably even more instances than we know because if some Rabbi declared that the world would end in seventy years and then it didn't happen they probably adjusted it while passing down the text generation to generation.

The book of Daniel is maybe the most famous of the apocalyptic one.

So we've always had a fairly popular belief that humanity is on the way out?

I grew up devoutly Christian, and there's a strong, storied strand of their beliefs that everything ends and gets wrapped up in the next generation or two. Augustine to Edwards, plenty of people thought they were living in the end times and thinking super longterm was less relevant.

That list is all quite modern. Those things have concerned us, some continue to, some don't. But they are concerns and distractions.

Did similar concerns exist hundreds of years ago? Did people take breaks from moral philosophy because they're like, "Ah, who cares, no one will be alive in 100 years anyway."?

I'm wondering if this feeling that humanity might end is new.