It’s disappointing how strong the drive to have a tribe is that one would subject oneself over and over again to groups in hope of gaining acceptance. If I had a choice in the matter and I was not limited by my capacity to control this biological desire, I would probably forego trying to find group acceptance. However, I think it is clear that if you want to interact with groups you will have to sacrifice some part of yourself in order to fit in. Perhaps a good compromise is to have only a few people who you can relate with, because it is hard to find more than a few.

That is the irrationality of people, that even though every person is experiencing the same world outside of their heads, they still invariably find some way to disagree with one another.

I think many people don’t realize that most people are completely unconcerned with intellectual honesty. They don’t care whether the positions they arrived at were arrived at through good faith. Everything which matters to a human being is completely a construct of their own invention. It only matters to us - every single one of our moral constructions, because the universe does not care, and our brain is part of the universe operating on the same laws of physics, so consequently our brains do not care about whether our thoughts are rational and irrational.

In fact, most thoughts are merely memes; things which our minds, or perhaps masses of minds latch on to because it is emotionally stimulating. As a result, most of our desires may feel like they were arrived at through sheer force of rationality, as though through free will. But because our brains operate on the same deterministic laws of physics as our indifferent cosmos, even the impulse to be rational wasn’t our decision. That is, if we were ever rational to begin with.

It becomes apparent that it is very difficult to tell whether one is rational or irrational, considering those who are most sure of their rationality are often the ones with the most confused perspectives of the world. As a consequence, it becomes very difficult to find meaningful interactions with those around you besides a very small few. Even then, sometimes people congregate with only people who reinforce their own biases in an echo chamber.

When you realize how irrational human beings are in general, and how to most people communicating on a deeper level is something they simply avoid to try to distance themselves from their own and others irrationality, it becomes a society in which the more you think, the more alien you become, and the more the people on the strange world you inhabit seem like confused animals which have privileged themselves as privileged with unique intelligence.

Sometimes I blame myself for this dilemma, sometimes I blame others for being weak minded fools, still other times I look at it from a balanced perspective and say that this is just the way of the universe. But either way, I am cruelly shackled to humanity as the only, unrivaled intelligent species on planet earth. Not only is there no god, which people cling to to give their lives meaning, there is the reality which the mask people call god covers up - the reality that the universe is indifferent.

One could, of course, take a positive approach when faced with this existential nightmare about the world. After all, even since there is little standard through which people hold each other in terms of intellectual honesty in general, and many people are likely to misinterpret what you say, and not even comprehend why you are wrong if you are wrong, but simply misconstrue your words out of inability to process your thoughts, you can still re-assure yourself that your position is reasonably consistent and rational. After all, you could drive yourself to follow the meme of rationality and self honesty to its logical conclusion and simply support nihilism.

It ultimately comes down to whether you make an arbitrary distinction optimism and pessimism; one would hope. One wants desperately to break free of this hopeless paradigm of uncertainty. But humans are not inherently rational, and you can try to fool your brain for a while, but eventually one will be thrown back to the original function of one’s biological machinery. Humans were never creatures built for logic; they are creatures built for tribal acceptance. One cannot extinguish the desire to conform, but the desire to conform can be conflicted with the desire to rebel, and the two subsequently cancel each other out. One is is left with no resolution, and ultimately, despair.