Everyone Has Schizophrenia

A question to everyone... Where do you get the balls to ask me how its going, how I'm feeling, is everything ok? You waste important time asking those questions to a person who is obviously not starving or dieing of easily cured diseases, knowing that billions of people have those problems. Where are your priorities?

Don't worry. I'm not asking you for money or to save anyone's life or to feed the hungry. I just want to explain some contradictions in the ways most people think, contradictions which I categorize as schizophrenia.

Most people don't care if other people die. They care when you ask them about it, but its soon forgotten because its too painful to think about. Human minds mostly think in terms of intuition instead of words. The words are there saying that billions of people dieing is bad, but in terms of intuition, nobody is dieing unless you have seen them recently or have some relationship with them. Most people have reasonable emotions when seeing someone suffering or knowing that someone they have some relationship with is suffering, but usually there are no such emotions when they only know others are suffering. Its the same information, so it should be the same emotion, but its not. The knowledge that others are suffering is disconnected from the emotion of seeing people suffering. Those are 2 different categories of thinking. One where you feel some kind of obligation and the other where "Its someone else's problem." I'm not going to debate if that is how it should be or not. I simply want everyone to understand that is how people think, and the social and government and other organizations have evolved over a very long time to reinforce that way of thinking: The knowledge that others are suffering is disconnected from the emotion of seeing people suffering.

Schizophrenia is a description of a way of thinking where some parts of the mind are disconnected from other parts. In extreme cases, the separated parts of a mind are like 2 different people, called "multiple personality disorder". Most people have some schizophrenia. Its the way Humans evolved to think. Its why we can know billions of people are suffering without having any emotions about it while having emotions about 1 person suffering we can see right now. Those thoughts are disconnected from eachother. Its schizophrenia.

What caused the schizophrenia of the Human species? Eliezer Yudkowsky writes about the evolutionary process of how we get many different and often contradicting desires and ways of thinking, and that its more efficient to evolve that way than to evolve a consistent unified mind. He calls that process and the resulting mental condition "godshatter" here:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/l3/thou_art_godshatter

I am not judging anyone. Having a mental illness is not a sin, not evil, and should not be punished, but this schizophrenia of the Human species is the cause of most wars and global problems. Governments, money, the "ten commandments", and other practical and ethical rules are all designed to deal with the problems of how people think, but that is telling a schizophrenic person to stop being schizophrenic and they don't know how. Instead of solving problems, lets solve the causes of problems, and the causes of the causes all the way down to whatever started it all.

To become less schizophrenic, simply find contradictions in your mind and work on solving them. Example: Are you intolerant of intolerance? Then you must not tolerate yourself. Or are you only intolerant of people who are intolerant unless those people are only intolerant of intolerance, and so on? As a recursive statement, it can be consistent. I'm not telling you what to be tolerant and intolerant of. I'm explaining a way to solve contradictions in your mind so you can become less schizophrenic. Also, for every contradiction you remove from your mind, you become smarter. Most people think genius is something you're born with or not, but its really the result of having less contradictions in the mind, and some people are born with a tendancy to think that way but anyone can learn it.

The core of our society is a contradiction, something which by design can never be connected to itself in enough ways to undo the schizophrenia. That contradiction is, that murder is illegal, but many times its legal to allow people to die (like by not feeding the starving people or paying for their very cheap medical bills), so is it legal or illegal to pay somebody to allow somebody else to die when they had no obligation to save the life? There is no answer, because all possible answers to it expose the contradiction when the answer is explained.


As an example, my "Pay To Not Save A Life" thought-experiment:

Einstein becomes terminally sick in a country where hospitals only save you if you can pay. He has no insurance. He will die within a week if he doesn't get a million dollar operation. The sickness he has is very predictable. Everyone of the many thousands who had it died within a week without the operation, and everyone who got the operation lived until old age or something else killed them. We know "beyond a reasonable doubt" (which is the legal way to say it in USA) that Einstein will die within a week if he doesn't get the million dollar operation, and he will live a normal life if he gets the operation.

Gandhi is planning to pay up to the million dollars to save Einstein's life. Combining all the money everyone else is willing to pay, it totals much less than a million dollars unless Gandhi pays. Einstein will die within a week if Gandhi does not choose to save Einstein's life.

Gandhi has no legal obligation to save Einstein's life, but he plans to as soon as he can get to a bank and the hospital.

"Beyond a reasonable doubt", Einstein will live a normal life if nothing interferes with his operation.

Kaczynski pays Gandhi 10 million dollars in exchange for Gandhi not paying for Einstein's operation and not paying anyone else to or any other indirect way of getting Einstein's operation to happen, unless someone else changes their mind and decides to pay their own money for it with no influence from Gandhi (direct or indirect influence) to do that.

Within a week, Einstein dies.

Kaczynski paid for Einstein to die without breaking any laws. Its legal because Gandhi had no obligation to save Einstein's life. Kaczynski had Einstein assassinated, is an accurate statement, because Kaczynski paid for a future to occur where Einstein dies. Kaczynski does not go to jail because, similar to billions of people dieing from how the money flows in society, it is not illegal to pay somebody not to save somebody else's life if they had no obligation to save the life.

End of "Pay To Not Save A Life" thought-experiment.


If murder is bad, and not saving a life is neutral, then what is paying someone to not save a life when they had no obligation to save the life?


That question is about a contradiction in the core of our society, a contradiction that reinforces the schizophrenia of the Human species, influencing people to feel negative emotions only when they see someone suffering but not when they only know someone is suffering who they do not see or have any relationship with, which is why most people allow wars to continue about things they know little about and usually do not take the time to learn what the wars are about or to look for ways to make more than trivial progress on global problems. People just don't care if others die, unless they can see those people or have some relationship with them.

Why do people ride roller coasters? I very much enjoyed watching "A Clockwork Orange" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange  movie, but at the same time it was one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen and makes me wish I wasn't Human. It wasn't the most disgusting like the Saw movies are. It was disgusting how happy those people were while they were doing it. The schizophrenic people in the movie, and that's not the only mental illness they have, disconnect in their minds their violence from someone else feeling pain. They rape women and stab eachother and do whatever they want with no thought about how it affects anyone except themself. They sing to a tied up husband as they cut off the clothes of his wife preparing to rape her. They take the time to be artistic about it, cutting 2 holes in the cloth so her breasts stick out before cutting the entire clothes off. Its like riding a roller coaster to think that way, to do whatever you want and avoid all other thoughts, and in that way I very much enjoyed the movie, but thinking about the receiving end of their actions, and how similar it is to real society in an abstract way, it was disgusting and made me not want to be Human. I think if one watches Clockwork Orange and feels both sides of it, thats a good sign. To deny either part of ourselves is to invite schizophrenia into our minds to block out what we're afraid to experience and form different parts of our mind for different subjects instead of a unified consistent mind. To see both those sides of yourself is not enough to know how schizophrenic you are, because in our society global problems are caused by very subtle things people do as a result of their schizophrenia disconnection in their mind of their actions and such global problems, associations they know are there but have formed social and legal and ethical systems to help them forget. Its painful to think about, so society formed ways to not think about it.

When people smile at me, ask me how its going, how I'm feeling, is everything ok... I see in their smile the smile of those schizophrenic people in "A Clockwork Orange". The main difference between those psychotic killers and normal people is the normal people feel negative emotions when seeing a suffering person or having some relationship with a suffering person, but for the other 7 billion people, normal people and the psychotic Clockwork Orange people are the same in the way they have no negative emotions about the suffering of those billions of people. We're all psychotic (specificly schizophrenia), and billions of people are dieing from it. Most people are a danger to others, and that is one of the qualifications of being forcefully committed to an insane asylum, but they don't have enough asylums for 7 billion people.

This movie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untraceable  explains part of the subtle way peoples' schizophrenia could cause global problems. Its about "a serial killer who rigs contraptions that kill his victims based on the number of hits received by a website ("www.killwithme.com") that features a live streaming video of the victim. Millions of people log on, hastening the victims' deaths." This kind of thing doesn't really happen, but its still a good way to explain it. I think if this was really done, many people would view the website, watch the person suffering as a result of getting more website visitors, consider how little part their one visit had in the person's death in progress, and blame it on the other people viewing the same website, even though they're all doing the same thing, watching the same live video of the death they're all causing together. Its easy to say you would resist viewing it, but words and actions based on intuition are disconnected in most peoples' minds. If you would choose not to view the website, even if you really wanted to, then why do you spend money buying fast food or other unnecessary costs while billions die from much cheaper things to solve? Its a contradiction, and you have schizophrenia if you answer differently for those questions.

People prefer hierarchies instead of peer-to-peer organization of things because hierarchies can handle inconsistencies by keeping them in separate branches. A schizophrenic mind has more hierarchies than normal. They keep their thoughts separate from their other thoughts because they contradict. An extreme of that is multiple-personality-disorder.

Schizophrenia is relative in some ways. A person with schizophrenia will think a unified consistent mind has schizophrenia because the unified mind flows between many subjects that are disconnected in the schizophrenic mind, so the schizophrenic mind thinks the unified mind is jumping around in a disorganized way. Disorganization is another symptom of schizophrenia. The unified mind correctly thinks the schizophrenic mind jumps around in a disorganized way when the schizophrenic mind sees a contradiction which causes the schizophrenic mind to jump somewhere else in its hierarchy of incompatible ideas.

Most of our society, not the people but the society and governments and corporations and ethics and other organizations, are built on a lie, and that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, and will be when enough people see the contradiction, the lie built so deep in society that nobody questions it or even is aware of its existence anymore, the contradiction explained in my "Pay To Not Save A Life" thought-experiment, and more generally, the schizophrenia of the Human species. Earth is like an insane asylum, and the few sane people left are learning to use the delusions of those in control to make big changes, while most are still under the delusion that not much is changing. How can you trust your own measure of change when you know you have schizophrenia?

To have a consistent way of thinking without contradictions in my mind, I want to feel the same way when I look at a suffering person as I feel when I simply know it is happening somewhere. I want to feel like I'm seeing billions of people suffering, and seeing the positive parts of the world at the same time on that scale, because its real, and I'm tired of living in a fake world. I want to become less schizophrenic.

My mind is far more consistent and unified than almost everyone elses. It became that way gradually. Now my root goal is to make the universe more interesting. Almost everything I do, I can trace the path between that root goal, a chain of subgoals, and the specific action I'm doing at the moment. I have no system of ethics or rules of what I should never do, since such things always lead to contradictions. Instead of negative statements against what not to do, I have only a positive statement of what I should do, and that is to improve the universe, and practically it has many of the same effects since one of my subgoals of that is to advance the Human species and help them work together. Its why I'm writing this, to explain how to get over some of your schizophrenia, so we as a species can move on to more interesting things like intergalactic travel. But, like everyone else, I also have some schizophrenia left.

There's nothing wrong with animals. I can be friends with an animal, love an animal for what it is, and play simple games together. We are animals, but we can also be more. The ability to change is what separates us from animals. If you don't want to know whatever is important and true more than you want to avoid the pain of thinking about such truths, to want to know about your schizophrenia (and we all have it some) to get over your delusions, then you're just another animal.

Tue, Oct 18, 2011  Permanent link
Categories: society, schizophrenia

RSS for this post