Subjectively, life is a repetitive process. You feel an urge, or an appetite, and you act. Sometimes you feel multiple drives at the same time, and you have to prioritize them. Other times, you have drives that you cannot satisfy. That creates frustration and pain.

One of our drives is to make sense of the world. Including people. But, we can’t understand everyone. Not fully.

The world is too big to understand. So we have to simplify it. But we all simplify it in different ways. This is a product of culture, and our experience. We learn or invent explanations that describe our experiences. Later, we have new experiences. These aren’t always consistent with our explanations. So we have to deal with the contradiction. The dissonance.

Some people update their explanations. Some people deny the implications of their new experiences.

We also regularly meet different people who understand the world differently. That also creates dissonance. How do we cope with it?

Most people reject opposing viewpoints. Some people try to understand how they came to be, or at least try to tolerate them. Other people’s experiences are equally valid. But what about their process of arriving at explanations?

This can be very difficult. People come to different beliefs, for varying reasons. The reasoning can be problematic.

Most people aren’t rigourous. They are pragmatic, superstitious, sentimental, or all three. They follow the reasoning, or adopt the explanations, of influential people: authority figures; mentors; heroes; the rich, famous, and beautiful.

When I was young, I didn’t really think that powerful people were irrational or expedient in their beliefs. At least, not all of them. Maybe people in the past, or in foreign countries. Or maybe in the southern US, rednecks and in-bred hillbillies and racist former slave owners.

But well-educated Canadians, American, and Europeans—and even lots of normal people with good common sense—had a good grasp of how the world worked. And so did their leaders, mostly. Even moreso, the scientists and technologists, who guided and advised them. The world was becoming more rational. So even if a lot of dopes were confused, and intellectually lazy, the people in charge were better informed and more level-headed.

I don’t believe that anymore. I think most people are completely out of touch. Including most leaders and intellectuals. Even the scientists and engineers aren’t so trustworthy. I don’t even know how well I can trust myself.

This sense that most people are not only mostly oblivious, but increasingly delusional, has been growing in me for a long time. Decades, by now. There is so much to know. But most of us know almost nothing. Even those who know a lot rarely know much beyond their specialty. But somehow, we are all supposed to be able to identify and support wise people to lead us and run our nations and economies. Ha!

There are a few people who have a pretty good working overview of what’s going on. But there’s another problem. A good number of them cannot be trusted. They see the rest of us as disposable non-player characters. We exist only to fill the stage. We might as well be puppets to them.

This is not comforting. The world is drifting off course—if it ever had a course to begin with. Lots of people feel a sense of dread. But we have not been able to find a consensus explanation for how we feel. Even though various splinter groups do believe they know the answer, even if it is obvious to everyone else that they are wrong. Almost everyone is wrong. And the people who are closest to being right are mostly being ignored.

What do you do when it seems like the whole world is out of touch, with little hope of reconnecting? It seems like the disagreements, arguments, fights are only going to get worse. What do we do, while we’re waiting for everything to explode into chaos?

I can’t concentrate on anything important for longer than a few minutes at a time.

My friend said I should try to help people. I can’t turn that into action. Help them what? Learn to write software? Software won’t help us. Software is a distraction, now. We have enough software. Too much software. We don’t need more math or science. We don’t need more knowledge. We need direction. We need structure. We need purpose. We need collective understanding.

But most people think they already understand. But they’re wrong. Nearly everyone is wrong.