RE: The illusion of political division: Take a step back and understand why we constantly disagree
Brilliant writeup.
You have laid out how pretty much all human endeavour that veers even slightly from the brute material realm is a house of cards built on foundations of clouds and sand.
The more of life I see, the more I engage in arguments with people who, while clearly competent and intelligent, have beliefs that are utterly incomprehensible to me, the more I realize that:
i) reality doesn't care what we think
AND
ii) our thinking doesn't care about reality
What I mean is, our brains only barely interface with reality, they interface with a Cliff's Notes loose approximation shadow of a shadow of an image of reality. As a result, we can believe almost anything (aside from stuff like: "humans can fly" and "gasoline is a nutritious drink") and still be functional members of society.
When you look at the human world through that lens, it's a a wonder we have even built a society at all and held it together for this long. We are all of us mad and full of worlds.
Thanks for dropping by - our existence does surprise me too, though when we think of larger timescales we havent actually lasted as long as we like to think. Our boom-bust cycle into extinction could occur in an overall blink of an eye of say, 12,000 years or so which is nothing compared to literally every other species to exist. We'd just leave a lot more trash behind.
But we can also approach this all evolutionarily, in how our brains always find the path of least resistance because that was the best way to survive on assumptions yadda yadda, so it kind of makes sense how we're so useless at the things we supposedly value. I guess we're just transitioning to become entirely separate from the relentless force of evolutionary tendencies, and we're living through all the side effects.