![]() ![]() We don't know anymore what the next ones will think. We see a glimpse of a future we don't understand we used to be with "it" but "it" changed. But as a societal consensus starts to shift, and we start seeing new priors appearing, things start to get uncomfortable. We know what they think, or at least we think we know what they think, filtered through the lens of what we think. At least we can grapple and argue with our contemporaries, and scorn our predecessors. They seem dumb because they don't come to the same obvious conclusions we do.Īnd it seems to motivate conservative behavior, by way of fear. They have the same human equipment for reasoning and synthesis, but a different set of priors from which this calculus manipulates and concludes. They may say the same words, but mean different things. It's why societies seem to tend to see their peers and predecessors as lesser as well they are all their own "us"es, in some ways inaccessible to our "us". ![]() It seems to boil down to the sort of societal consensus definition of "us" that serves as a foundation for the individual definitions of "me" that comprise a society. Fukuyama's (in)famous The End of History). Each seeing themselves as a logical peak of the progressive arrow history, especially post-enlightenment (cf. Riffing on this, I think an interesting and fundamental phenomenon of societies is exactly their frequent inability to imagine their successors, or even the possibility of a successor. ![]()
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May 2023
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