Today I ran errands and had afternoon coffee 
Lately I've been thinking about the things people can't hear. Specifically, I've been thinking about ideas that never make it past our psychological filters. These filters, whether emotional or intellectual, limit the conversations that we're able to have. Sometimes they even limit what we're able to consciously think about.
Vast numbers of people in our society can't hear anything technical. Or economic. Or environmental. They also filter out any information that challenges their status quo in general. All of this is done on an unconscious level, so educating them or trying to reason with them is inherently unproductive.
These things sum to giant cultural blind spots. We realized we were ruining the environment many decades ago and know that regenerative land use would solve this problem but instead of solving this problem we continue to poison everything. The internet gave us the opportunity to create resilient decentralized networks to challenge the control regime's stranglehold on culture and we largely ignored this opportunity in favor of complaining about the control regime while remaining under its thumb.
Consciously engaging most people around these issues is a nonstarter. Their psychological machinery makes them impervious to reason. And yet, if we ever want to begin really addressing societal issues as a society, we can't just write off all of the normal people. There must be some way to reach them.
Personally, I try to do this with fiction. Anyone can pick up one of my books and get something out of it, and many readers are also introduced to advanced concepts they may have otherwise unconsciously avoided. Even so, my writing engages the conscious mind, not the unconscious mind where the programming is.
A good myth engages unconscious machinery, resonating with archetypes and other processes. In rare cases, actual events may have a significant mythic dimension which inspires people to betterment. There are unlikely hero stories like Assange and Snowden and Erin Brockovich. But life is mostly not structured like unconscious archetypal forces.
All of this makes me curious about advertising. Ads intentionally hook into unconscious machinery to initiate behavioral change in ad recipients. They're basically installing bloatware in our minds. And they're far from the only source of mental bloatware in our culture.
Read my novels:
See my NFTs:
