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@augustus The ability for genuine introspection is difficult because it's akin to dying. In a sense, re-evaluating your entire worldview is like destroying the world you knew and replacing it with something new, unknown, and painful. In order to fit into that world, you have to change yourself, and if the change is drastic enough, it's essentially like destroying the old you. If you like the old you, or believe that the old you is the peak of virtuousness and morality, then to destroy the old you is akin to destroying all that's good in the world. This is key.

This is key because ultimately the fundamentally best thing anyone can do is aim towards the highest truth they can conceive and then embody and express it. Thus, they can become the highest truth they can conceive, and thereby become the best possible person. By definition, the best possible person has the most fulfilling life. It may be difficult, and sometimes difficulty might be an intrinsic requirement in being the best possible person, and to some that difficulty must be sought after (which is why you see a lot of proggos become absolute fanatics at riots and protests).

So to these proggos, just doing what they're doing is to embody the highest truth they can conceive. They're already at that point. Any tumults within their lives can be explained away as the struggle they must go through in order to achieve their utopia. They must preach and promulgate the good word, but if any serious resistance occurs, then they see that opposition as fundamentally flawed out of hand and worthy of being ignored.

To varying degrees, this holds true for just about any ideology. The difference between the proggo viewpoint and pretty much any other is that the proggo viewpoint completely ignores, denies, and seeks to discredit the very notion of an objective reality.

They use any and every excuse they can in order to avoid acknowledging the concept of objective realities. One that I found during my time in physics academia was escapism into pop-quantum mechanics. According to pop-QM interpretations, there's fundamentally nothing objective about reality because at the most fundamental level it's stochastic in nature. Meaning that it's inherently random, but that randomness has a structure. A lot of proggos stop there, and say "if everything's random, nothing has meaning, so everything is as good as the other, so there's no objective reality because there's only subjective realities" and once again they call upon their quasi-god Magical Scientician Somewhere.

But QM says that this randomness is predictable, modifiable to a surprising extent, and ultimately deterministic at scales large enough for every biological process that exists. Hence we have a hard objective floor on biology, thereby giving credence to biological determinism. From this, a whole bunch of things follow, including studies on IQ (or rather, the fundaments of intelligence), genetics, sex, race, evolutionary psychology, and species-inherent common sense.

Note how everything in that last sentence is the equivalent of persona-non-grata in proggo fields. To even acknowledge IQ as anything past the ability to do an IQ test makes you a non-person in a lot of proggo senses.

But to insinuate that the proggo worldview is wrong is so fundamentally threatening on so many levels that there's no other option than to ignore it entirely, for the sake of that person's very psychological existence and their current personality.

https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/867484

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