Love and Sense Making
Our malfunctioning sense making organ is the fundamental sickness we can all be trying to heal.
We can measure our love based on our attention. Our attention is fundamental to our sense making. And so our love and our sense making are related individually and collectively.
Love everyone.
One of my claims is that a properly functioning sense making organ should be loving and able to prioritize information based on its relevance.
It is good to love everyone, but it is not good to love everyone and everything the same amount.
Love by proximity.
We can get into an unhealthy situation where we are loving strangers on the other side of the planet (or in the distant future) more than our neighbor, children, spouse, or self.
A problem with our sense making organ in the modern era of information technology is that we get information coming in from thousands of miles away and treat it with more importance than the information that is right outside our house, in our house, or in our own body.
Some people will disagree with my claim to love by proximity and call it something like “tribalism” or “jingoism”. I think those people have a point to consider because we should love everyone at least a little bit. Our natural (and healthy) tendency toward loving our self, spouse, and children more than everyone else should be balanced with a love of all people at least a little. We should not be sacrificing the strangers on the other side of the planet and the distant future if we can avoid doing so. But we shouldn’t be quick to sacrifice ourselves for strangers on the other side of the planet and in the distant future either.
Love by relevance.
Our society seems to love problems more than we love solutions. Solutions to problems need to be more relevant in a properly functioning sense making system.
I am classified as an INTP personality. I make up three percent of the population and I think innovation is very important. But my perspective is absent in our collective sense making organ. I suspect other important personality types are absent as well. And so our collective sense making organ does not love everyone at least a little bit.
When the stories about possible futures and solutions are absent from our sense making organ we are unable to move forward and create progress. We are prone to becoming stuck in our problems and the suffering those problems produce.
One of the reasons for this unhealthy state of our collective sense making organ where solutions are ignored is that people like me don’t want popularity. And even if we are willing to take on the challenge of becoming popular we aren’t good at doing it. Our collective sense making organ would ideally empower people like me without popularizing us. I even suspect that this phrase about the corrupting influence of power is due to the fact that the INTP personality is not being targeted as candidates for positions of power.
Be honest.
Find people who claim to be trying to make a difference in the world and then try to connect with them and offer your skills and services. You will learn that people are presenting themselves as one thing outwardly to the world but when you test their behavior you discover that they really aren’t the thing they claim to be outwardly.
While I was working at Redstone Arsenal I reached out to the 4 star general there and received no response. When I reached out to the CIA to offer my skills as a professional software engineer I was ignored. When I reached out to the IAS and offered my skills as a professional software engineer I was ignored. When New Jersey’s unemployment system, written in COBOL, was recently unable to handle the surge in unemployment I tried to reach out and offer my professional software engineering services but found no mechanism to connect with the people who needed help. When I was interested in helping to build open source election software and reached out to the OSET foundation they unexpectedly stopped responding to me. I have reached out to many other people and organizations who claim to be doing one thing but ultimately ignored me or failed to provide potential volunteers with a mechanism to connect. All of those people who publicly claim to be interested in doing something but have no path forward for volunteers to help are making big mistakes. People should be seeking out help from those who are willing and able to volunteer their skills and services.