Tag: peer group

Mainstream Thinking – They

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Many find some comfort if their thinking and opinion is shared with others. What the peer group believes and what “they” say can have a very strong influence on individuals. If someone is in a position of authority or power others take on board whatever it is they say no matter how well considered that might be. These days being adamant can be mistaken for being accurate. There are many who are dogmatically insistent. People can gob-off without thinking about consequences.

If you are a big cheese or have power by association you are given air time and taken more seriously. Your words may become gospel.

–

–

It can be important to some to be seen as “right” and to “win” an apparent argument. They can get quite heated.

I have less of a need to agree and comply with mainstream thinking. Technically as a quasi-hermit I do not have a peer group. I do not have to worry about getting cancelled nor about career progression. I have often considered the so called wisdom of the omniscient “they” as flawed.

There is an experiment currently underway in the USA on the propagation of adamant opinion. It will confer quantifiable outcomes.

In principle free speech is a freedom of the democratic “west”. In practice social factors mean that this is not the case. You can lose your job for saying nigger or commenting on the right for Palestinians not to be starved and slaughtered. You can be arrested for calling out murderous bullies. People in frocks and with penises are no longer allowed into ladies toilets. There are many taboos which may not be strictly against the letter of the law, others have been legislated against. Freedom is curtailed. We cannot have anarchy…old chap…

–

–

Peer pressure, the whims of the herd and hive, forbid certain ways of being, of thinking and certain elements of speech. I am not surprised if I am avantgarde and not immersed fully in the norms. I have always had an entrepreneurial orientation. I do things people have not done before. I get balls rolling and break new ground. Whoopee…That is past history and probably over for this lifetime.

You never know who is reading what you publish on this internet thingy. There is always a mild risk of things getting propagated, of people cutting and pasting, using things well out of context. The amount of cut and paste text on things alleging to be spiritual is large. This is a non sequitur. If someone is trying to promote a “spiritual” way of living they probably did not ought to nick stuff, rob it. But hey it is on the internet so it is free, fair game.

I personally am now finding the suggestions of algorithms on some internet platforms very boring and difficult to get past. The use of search engines gets a bigger and bigger waste of time day by day.

I do not type “please show me some paid for advertising or promotion”.

We are, because of these omniscient algorithms, presented with an ever shrinking pool of information and knowledge, suitable for the statistically significant click-sumption as measured by the lowest common denominator of the average “they”. It is yawn-some and sucks the will to live out of life. Before long we will be cloned by Facebook and X into a mind-numbing blob. A blob which does not think nor offend, which lacks any originality. A blob which is adamant of opinion and that arrived at by algorithmic consensus.

The wisdom of they will be monosyllabic and conveyed solely by emoji…

Mainstream thinking will be blob. The future is blob. Long live blob.

Significant and Normal

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Many people might wish to fit in and be “normal”. That is comply and not be the sore thumb of life. These may seek to blend with a peer group if they are not normal in the populace at large. Geeky McGeekface is more at home with others of similar persuasion and not comfortable being with the popular plastic fantastic.

–

–

I will speculate that I am not within two standard deviations of the peak of the normal distribution of intellect. By this I am already slightly abnormal. It is not really significant because there are many way further out. They will have a higher IQ according to how these things are measured and be much better at conventional examinations than me. I am not normal but not significantly abnormal either.

On other metrics I may be more of an outlier or anomaly. It is not my ego or desire to be weird which is suggesting that, rather a detached observation. I don’t particularly want to be special or different, but I am or appear to be, a bit odd. Socially I am not a mixer and socio-politically I do not play the itchy back game so enamoured of by many. Because I am less easy to leverage by “what is in it for me” people may deem me less tractable to control and/or ready manipulation. I do not play “the” game. I am not one of “US”. I am not “good people”.

My bones have osteoporosis so they are among the 0.5% too thin for my age and sex. This is significant enough for the medics to want to medicate me in case I end up in A&E with another fracture.

What each of us finds significant depends upon our terms of reference and the world which we perceive and assimilate. Thousands watched “the Lionesses” on The Mall this afternoon. They are mostly normal in this respect. I watched a bit on TV. Does that make me normal?

Life circumstance has me/us where we are, living the way we do. Our impact on the outer world is minuscule because we do not interact overmuch. In the grand scheme of things human we are not significant. Though in the past we have both changed and facilitated many lives. Our life circumstance and health in particular, limits us. Because there is no fairy godmother our life circumstance is very unlikely to change and even it did, there is no dynamic reserve of time and energy to offer. To an extent we are spent.

Put me in a car on the M25 and I may not cope. I can no longer hack the outside world. A few glancing interactions perhaps and that is about it. Even if someone wanted it otherwise, it isn’t and cannot be. I have not been in a proper city for more than a week or so in the last six years and that for hospital / health reasons. I am a bumpkin these days…Life circumstance has me away from the crowd. It is better for me and probably for them too.

Here is an aphorism pertaining to the rule of the three pronged nagal from the Toltec Teachings by Théun Mares

–

–

This is not a normal example or tract of text. The question might be, “is it significant?”.

As is so often the case, it depends upon context. It sounds grandiose and might fleetingly captivate the attention. To the vast majority of people it has no personal significance and at best might be a curiosity. People are concerned with Facebook, Insta and TikTok. This type of thing would be abnormal to them. It is not abnormal to me.

I think it fair and accurate to speculate that what is normal and significant for/to me is abnormal and insignificant for others.

Thus we are in the subjective. Normality and significance are not objective, people make {personal} judgments which may or may not be rational concerning these notions. At the moment its seems normal to bomb the fuck out of Gaza and starve the people. This is normal for some but abnormal, brutal and evil to my eyes. The Palestinian death toll is more significant on Al Jazeera, less so on the BBC.

So-called normality is not always a strong recommendation for being better. Significance can depend upon prejudices and alliance.

If I was a mosquito, I would be grossly insignificant, unless I were in your bedroom of a hot summer night, and a bit peckish. Then for a few hours I could be significant.

Significance has a temporal component. It was once normal to have slaves. Slavery was more significant for the slaves than for the masters. That normality is now shunned and people are asked to accept the significance of their past slave ownership. Nothing can undo the abuse and torture.  A few quid here and there, a public apology, does not change one single lash of the whip.

Being normal may not be all that it is cranked up to be!

Normality has a checkered past…

Who knows what is normal for you, right now, may in time be seen as a misguided travesty. But for the time being you have the comfort of your peer group to tell you, “We concur old chap” and that everything is just dandy.

I am not sure that anything normal has brought about progress, ever. In that sense being normal is largely insignificant.

Self-Diagnosed Omniscience and the Closed Mind

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

I have been having a dabble on LinkedIn and am more than a little surprised at the plethora of coaching, self-development schema and other things which sound too good to be true. People have to make a buck and the platform is used to tout and sell services. My logic suggests that either there are a lot of insecure and incapable people who need someone to help them and therefore there is a market or there are lot of “experts” surplus to demand. It has always seemed a bit of swizz to me. Someone develops some schema, some training, then demands payment from others to be certified by them. This kind of business model is in Aikido, NLP, Reiki etc. Someone must issue the certificates.

But exactly who was the source certificate, who passed them as competent?

I’ll postulate that many imagine their knowledge and wisdom to be more extensive and comprehensive than it actually is. This group of people includes really smart people at universities.

We might call them the self-diagnosed omniscient or the know-it-all gang. There are a lot of people who think they are “experts” who are unaware of the extent and breadth of their ignorance. But because they deem themselves clever and smart they are closed minded and negating of anything outside the limited church of their knowledge. They profess from their soap boxes in real life and on-line.

There is a related phenomenon, “the not invented here syndrome”. This is when group mind develops a norm, an explanation, a brand or a product. Anything which is not sourced from within that set or peer group is suspect. The brand must be evangelised and cannot tolerate any new ideas which might threaten market share. Ideas from outside of group mind are repelled with boiling oil from the parapets or Winchester rifle rapid fire from within the circled wagons. Nothing foreign and “Apache” can be tolerated and allowed to live. “They” and “we” do not like nor trust “them”.

On an off for over a decade I have had dreams in which I am not believed or listened to. There is not much I can do about that, nor do I feel hard done by. I know enough about human nature to understand that I am a bit of a non sequitur in the minds of many. I don’t make sense in the world of should and ought. For too many the step to “as it actually is” can be tricky.

We have the robes or Levis joke. I say that because of my background and my penchant for black Levis 501 I am not believed. If, however, I wore Buddhist monk’s robes the incredulity would mostly be washed away in a flash of saffron or magenta. It is that simple, people do judge a book by its cover even when they are self-diagnosed omniscient.

Which suggests that said diagnosis is at best premature.

Hmnn…