Values Shifting

  Psychologist Donald Winnicott posited most nonorganic mental illness as a conflict between a person's true self - self-actualization, the kind, happy, caring baby that keeps showing up in studies, even if it's short lived - and a false self they feel required present to the world.




  Meanwhile, some basic truths are, well, true. Everyone is making a journey from birth, to the grave. Any values outside the happiness of living things - deep, calm, durable, meaningful happiness - drain energy and are a net loss on quality of life. Meanwhile, bodies can experience discomfort and the ease of discomfort and are what can experience physical discomfort and the ease of discomfort, the root of empathy.

  Things like 'chastity' or 'keeping up with the neighbors' or the like need to go. They're just dragging human happiness down, and dragging the society with it, an energy sink which keeps people from being able to invest in noticing whether life is actually good or not, and dragging energy away from caring for each other, or even ourselves.



  At the root of it all, however, is fear. Embarassment, as well as more disturbing concerns, are effectively fear of being targeted. Normally, farting during a public speaking exercise is no big deal, but fear that the people around you will continue bullying you makes it a bit more notable. Fear can be seperated into fear of those around you, and fear of those above - even though there should not, honestly, be an above.

  As such, to reverse the collapse of the planet into a literal hell realm, one's duty is a campaign of a war against fear.

  Such a campaign could be imagined to have many components...

 • Discarding Other 'Values' and Decreasing Fear of Economic Stress

  These go well together. Food grows from the earth and water falls from the sky, man. That's all you need to live, the rest are just toys.

  By promoting any ethical form of the "free ride" - from waterproofing your clothes to make it easier to sleep anywhere, to picking blackberries from the weed patches - you're decreasing economic stress, and making it less likely that someone will tolerate threats to their safety for their basic needs, or even minor hassle.

 • Actual Radical Acceptance

  People shit themselves, vomit, blow snot out of their nose unpredictably, and half of them will totally mensturate all over your ultra-expensive bedsheets. They also sometimes break a dish or something.

  They then fear being hit by their parents.

  Oh, they also make minor mistakes sometimes. We can convey, although only by doing, that it's okay and that there's no reason to be afraid and actually, this happens to everyone.

  This is likely the most transformative possible act, the dissolution of fear. The trouble is that it is generally one-on-one, which means a small army of healthier, accepting people.

  Luckily, those tend to cascade.

 • Messaging of Radical Acceptance

  "Be who you are," "it's okay to be you," and other... bluntly, propaganda... suggesting that the person one actually is, rather than the person one pretends to be out of fear, can be put forth. Put the dream in people's heads that it's okay to crawl out of their shell.

  This can be supported with a secondary message of agency. "You can change the world," "anything done in society is done by humans, and you can do that too," and the like.



  Active intervention steering the world around one away from the downward spiral that is a culture of fear is the only thing likely to halt the completely senseless war of all against all. Most of this is a trench of child abuse that got deep over the aeons. We're probably going to have to haul these people out of the deep, deep pit they made.


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