Inside Prison

Allow no conflict, and people will take it to the courts, which will lead to irrational animal conflict costing millions. How could that happen?

Imagine the other variables we could add:

• People driving slowly taking up to an additional half-hour of your time every day, for no reason other than their own incompetence. Add that up over the course of a year and think what you could have done with that time.

• Incompetents and dullards on the job must be tolerated, so every concept gets divided into bite-size pieces, and soon you’re sitting through two-hour meetings where five minutes among equals would have sufficed.

• Dumb people have no idea their actions have consequences, so they litter, commit crimes, vandalise, or simply break things you might like to use.

• Look at all the areas of our cities that are no-fly zones because they’re inhabited by people without a clue who ruin their own homes, riot, commit crimes, and so on. What else could we do with that land?

• Fools are a politician’s best friend because they are easily manipulated. Since we cannot call them fools, and make them unequal because they have rights, they’re there for any corrupt manipulator to promise them the sky — in exchange for more power of course.

Do we need to go on? These people are taking you for a ride. You have one life and only a certain amount of time in it, but that time is being taken away, passively, to support incompetents!

You go along with it because you’re afraid. The idea of universal equality and rights sounds good to us because we’re afraid as a group. If you the individual speak out against it, the others may gang up and you and clobber you — for denying their denial of reality.

The guilt and passive aggression that manipulates you has a huge cost, but all the people who are afraid that they might be incompetent are going to insist on it, even if it means that society as a whole moves like a person encased in lead, always pandering to the weakest link in the chain.

The individuals around you are thinking like the crabs in the bucket: they want to claw above you by appearing more egalitarian, more progressive, more compassionate than you. They don’t care about the results of their actions. They’re just trying to get more popular.

There are two real victims here: civilisation itself, which stops rising to a challenge and starts collapsing inward; and yourself, because your time is wasted and all of those resources of time, money and energy you could have applied to something constructive are taken away.

It’s a reversal of evolution. Instead of seeking to get better, and when we find something better spreading it around, we’re trying to avoid anything better because it might make us look bad.

And they’re going to waste your life by slowing everyone down to the speed of that weakest link in the chain.

The following article suggests on means of helping us past this difficult point in — not history, but evolution itself — through psychological conditioning:

A recent study led by Phelps found that reminding people of the fearful stimuli, minus any fear-inducing event, shortly before the extinction session can effectively block the first memory. The finding could help improve therapies for overcoming fear.

The mechanism for the initial memory’s defeat could be that the initial quick reminder induces the amygdala to store new information, Phelps explains. The window during which the amygdala is “open” is fleeting, however, and could explain why the reminder shown 10 minutes, but not six hours, before the first extinction session, eradicated fear. As Phelps notes, relearning a memory, also known as reconsolidation, takes place much faster, within several minutes, than learning the memory for the first time, or consolidation.