Almost exactly two years ago I had my dreams crushed about people in their twenties. I thought most young people between 19 and 30 lacked character and values of their own, but the reality was: this applied to people in all age groups, not just young people. People lacked basic ethics and values, and what surprised me is that these people were middle class.
We all know that people who already have a higher impact on society often lack empathy and some basic values, but I wondered: what is the element that separates these people from the middle class losers?
High-impact people think in systems: networks, institutions, power flows. The average person thinks in individual survival: job, bills, daily routine and satisfying their ego and insecurities with the basics. The ability to “zoom out” is a massive separator.
What separates the masses from leaders is will to power, the drive not just to live, but to impose form, create, dominate, reshape. Teachers may be intelligent, but they often lack this expansive will. Elites, whether moral or not, act upon the world.
System-shapers rise because of ambition, networks, leverage, a willingness to compromise ethics, and the vision or charisma to mobilize others. A small number rise because they have the fox-like cunning or lion-like force to seize opportunities. The rest remain in the middle because they lack the ruthlessness or the chance to move upward.
They lead lives full of unawareness and stupidity, illiteracy and ignorance. It took me a lot to grasp the fact that people were content and happy in their bubble of misery. And even the ones who consider themselves rather smarter and more aware are more fun to watch and observe for me.
I really feel like I am watching a theatre show, but the funny part is: that is that person’s life, and not a play. And they think they have it figured out, like they found the secret, the last piece of the puzzle.
What they don’t see is that their state is equivalent to an animal at the zoo who has just been upgraded to a slightly bigger environment and thinks that the walls that keep them limited are the ends of the world. But they are actually being filmed with cameras high above from helicopters. They are not able to comprehend, they are not able to extend their vision. They don’t realize that if you are too content somewhere, you have to move on to somewhere where you are not.
(I swear to God I had never read Plato once in my life and the writing above was written before I’d read about Plato’s take on this. ChatGPT advised me to connect it to Plato’s thoughts on this. After I’d sent it the paragraph, I have evidence.)
This part is especially funny to me because I am really focused on coping mechanisms these days.
Plato’s prisoners are chained in a cave, seeing only shadows on the wall, mistaking these projections for reality. When freed, the light hurts their eyes. They resist, preferring familiar shadows to painful truth. If dragged into sunlight by force, they adjust slowly: first seeing shadows, then reflections, finally the sun itself. Only then can they reason about reality.
The enlightened prisoner returns to free others, but his sun-adjusted eyes make him blind in the cave. The remaining prisoners see his blindness as proof that the journey destroyed him. They would kill anyone trying to drag them out.
Only the shadows and sounds are the prisoners’ reality, which are not accurate representations of the real world. The shadows represent distorted and blurred copies of reality we can perceive through our senses, while the objects under the sun represent the true forms of objects that we can only perceive through reason.
Three higher levels exist: natural science; deductive mathematics, geometry and logic; and the theory of forms.
I think you can apply this to many things in life, and what this also tells us is: the more you rise, the more lonely you will become. Because there are simply not a lot of people on your level of thinking. You basically become übermenschen.
You have to dare more, try more, fear more, but act upon your fears even more. You need to realize and come into acceptance with life: yes, it is unfair, yes, it is full of loss, it is full of loneliness and dislike. It is not normal for everyone to like you, it is even more abnormal for you to try to make people like you.
You want to be unique and special, but you don’t want anyone to disagree with you. You despise fights and debates. You rant about how everyone uses you, but you are reactive, you are predictable, and you are not the master of your mind. You are a servant to your mind.
To understand yourself, to understand people around you, to understand what drives a human, you must study psychology, understand the fundamentals of neuroscience. You are not in enough pain or you simply do not have the awareness to acknowledge your pain if you are not changing what you are complaining about.
You will never know enough and you will never be enough. If you think you are, you’ve already lost.
One of the things I love the most about this is that I can predict and see more than the regular. It feels like watching the opera from the balcony. You can see every little movement of every person sitting in the regular seats. You have the binocular and it enables you to pay attention to what most don’t even know is there.
My advice to the minority is this: learn to cultivate acceptance. Sometimes, the person whose mind you wish to change—whether a best friend, a life partner, or a family member—will never be open or receptive. Those people can do anything to block someone from bringing them out of the comfort of their cave.
If you want to keep moving forward, you must carry as little as possible. You cannot carry a dead weight with you; at some point, you need to let go. Accept that this is a natural cycle, a necessary process of adaptation.