Running through a minefield blindfolded.

Good Citizen

The following is a continuation of my exchange with Winston Smith of Escaping Mass Psychosis Substack. He responded last week with two excellent pieces.

1. Limited Perceptions and Dangerous Crossroads

2. Science, Truth, and Dangerous Crossroads

My original letter to him “New Religions at a Dangerous Crossroads” was posted here on April 7.

Hello Winston,

You really laid down a good carpet bombing run with your response on the neurological limitations of our perceptions. The villages of nurture and nature are never coming back. They’ve called off the search for survivors, as far as I can perceive with my compromised horizon of simultaneity.

Neuropscyhobiological was the term I believe you used before unleashing those science-guided bombs. It unveiled a new realm of exploration that was really an unexpected and pleasant surprise.

Blind Spots
We are never really dealing with a full picture of any one topic. Consciously we may suspect this from simply not having a very satisfying array of tangible information from which to begin the process of decision making. We each possess differing capabilities in terms of logical deduction and analytical reasoning. And as you point out with numerous examples, neurologically our senses will inevitably betray us in ways we cannot even fathom. Even if one is aware of those sensory deficits there’s still no way to fill in that missing information, those “gaps”. One simply cannot produce or reproduce what was never captured, though it sounds like we attempt to do our best to ‘fill in those gaps’ anyway with incomplete information.

This leaves each of us with a skewed sense of reality, based on the limitations of our perception, the treachery of our own biases, plus all those social and experiential factors previously mentioned that might fall under that ‘nurture’ category that need not get thrown out with the bathwater. As you put it aptly, “We all fall for the illusion that what we see and know is the nature of things.”

Our faculties are hijacked, misguided, or we’re simply dealing with insufficient information that we are incapable of staying on that path to perceive some approximation of “reality”. Forgive me for making any unscientific assertions so far, but that’s more or less where I ended up, perhaps led astray by my own limited perceptions or outright ignorance.

As you summed up in that final section:

So that was a long way of saying our sensory input is limited, our perception is therefore limited and some of it fabricated, and our sense of reality is unique (it may be very close to many other’s but biased and unique nevertheless).

We are all left with our own unique sense of reality based on incomplete evidence, and no matter what we are all constantly encumbered by blind spots.

Bugmen
Forgive me for veering off the scientific path momentarily and to the world of memes. I relearned a semi-old term the other day courtesy of John Carter’s Postcards From Barsoom substack that will have some relevance to our discussion: Bugman.

The term refers to the average ‘normie’ corporate slave consumer, infatuated with all the latest trinkets and gadgets, incapable of skepticism or critical thinking, passively accepting what they’re told and then passing it off as truth. Possessing great tendency to conform, submit, obey. You inadvertently referenced Bugmen in your first letter though asserted that we all have a little Bugman in us.

We are also naturally lazy and readily absorb information, like passive couch potatoes, especially if it’s personally significant and even more especially if it involves some sort of danger.

Based on your psychological expertise, is it safe to say the average person is a Bugman, even those who think they’re not?