Flat Earth Praxis

You don't have to be crazy to work here - but it helps! :^)

1. Dunbar’s number

How many different faces can you imagine at one time? Imagine one face. You can visualize it in great detail. Now imagine two faces, side by side. The level of detail suffers, the individual picture is less precise. Imagine 10 faces, imagine 100, imagine 40.000. At what point – at what number, does the faces cease to be faces and revert into symbols? At what point do the individual faces cease to be “individuals” and become an abstraction, a number to be counted?

:) :( :P :-D :^) (o_o) :D :-/

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There’s this thing someone made up called the Dunbar’s number. It’s a postulation about human psychology, that there are only so many particular individuals you can mentally distinguish between. The number varies from person to person, but it tops off in the hundreds. The idea is, after a certain point, it stops being a personal relationship and starts being statistics, abstraction. Math. There’s a lot of interesting things going on with Dunbar’s number, such as it being the ideal size of any kind of human community (~100 people), because staying within that makes it so you can still have a personal relationship with everyone involved. Going above it, and we start to get into all kinds of shenanigans. It’s basically why you think people you meet remind you of “types”, of some archetype character you knew in high school or whatever, “wow she’s a real Bridget”, etc. That’s not necessarily because there is such a type, but might just be you rubbing up against the limits of your own RAM-capacity.

I bring this up as an example of the limitations of human understanding. There are limits to human potential awareness of it’s surroundings. There are descartesian ghosts playing tricks on us – we do not have a perfect access to “The World”: we live in an imperfect world, with imperfect access to it, through an imperfect sense-apparatus – presumably. Can’t be sure about whether the world is actually imperfect, since our access is imperfect. So we make best guesses and estimations, and once upon a time in 18th hundreds, a bunch of fucking nerds thought they were the first people to ever think about that, because they were arrogant ahistorical bitches, and created “scientism” which is gay.

What I propose here is essentially a “Dunbar's number” for geography. There is a limit to how “big” you can imagine “the world”, how large a structure you can represent in your head, before it is replaced with an abstraction – and the map is not the territory, as the saying goes.

2. Saving The World

I apologize for my evolutionary psychology in advance. Please excuse my evolutionary psychology.

Evolutionary psychology? More like, meta-epistemology. My brothers I tell you this, evolutionary psychology is a brand of metaphysics.

You know how it seems like everyone’s going fucking insane all the time, and people are fucking miserable and acting like rats in a cage and monkeys in captivity? Hyperactive, anxious, feeling trapped, trapped like a rat, irritated, inflamed, in perpetual fight/flight, FLIPPING OUT and causing a ruckus? You know how everyone feels like they have to “save the world”, by recycling and sorting their garbage, or saving water or joinging slutwalks and black protest’s lives or by making little girls believe in themselves, or by being a mythological hero on an archetypical hero’s journey of self realization and actualization?

What do all these have in common? People are trying to save the world. Everyone is trying to save the world. The world is going NUTS. it’s the end of days. Cyper-dystopian marxism is turning the environment into warm ozone, melting New Zealand. we’re living in like a bad trashy post-pulp meta-story that’s ironic and snarky, where every disaster/conspiracy theory is true, and the world is ending not from one big catastrophe, but from all of them at once. The world is a mess right now, and people are very angry.

I propose that the explanation for this is from having to “imagine too many faces”. From being forced to imagine bigger numbers than the average human mind is comfortable with. The average human cant contend with a very large dunmars number – and the average human being can deal with abstractions and mathematics very well. Literally 100% of all people don't understand statistics. Most people don’t understand percentages – because 100 is too high a number for them.

People live in very very very small worlds, compared to the size of the “world” ™. It is a cruelty to demand of them to contend with all of it all at once, all of the time. This is what being-within-media, today, is doing to you.

The human mind is not designed for a “closed” image of the world – neither in the sense of closed materialism, determinism, nor in the sense of a Fully Explored World. A “globe” is a “world map” that loops. We take it for granted that this is the case, because, we know that this happens to “be the case”.

This is whut mean “life is lived forwards, but can only be understood backwards”, by Kierkegaard. This is whut mean “rationalism can only be a handmaiden to the senses” by hume. This is whut mean “absurdity”, “leap of faith”, “existentialism”: It does not matter whether the world is round – we must act (as if it wasn't).

The roundness of the world is purely academic, it has no impact on life-as-lived. Unless forced somehow to contend with it, we simply do not think about it. The shape of the earth, in this sense, just doesnt matter. To be forced to think about it causes only problems, mental discomfort.

The human mind, as I see it, is made something like this: there are various categories, which are more or less a priori, “in the blood”. One of these is “home”=”safe, nest, rest, family”. Another is “town” or “kingdom”, which is, the “civilized world”, the part of world that is ruled by mankind and not the other way around. And then outside that, there may be other kingdoms, other civilisations and so forth, but these are of little psychological interest. What’s interesting is the “and everything else”-category, which I think about as “borderlands”, no man’s land, wild nature. The stuff that falls outside of categorization, the unsettled spaces between kingdoms, where no one rules, where nature and God and demons live. Geographically Other.

I see this as a kind of “map”, that is biological, in the blood. This is the shape of the tabula rasa: it is 2d, it is square, the edge of the map says “and so on, forever”. I claim: it is easier to imagine something is eternal than it is to imagine a loop.

My basic claim is that by living in a “globalized” world - in every sense of this word, in both the sense of being connected to international finance and the internet/social media, as well as, knowing that the World is Round - our baseline psychological “map” of the world is left without one of the crucial categories that make up our psyche. We lack, psychologically, this notion of the wild in-between no-man’s land, lawless space. Because there are no more “edge” of the map that just “goes on forever”.

Why are we all trying to save the world? Which world - the Big World, or the small world? We are driven to save the world because we intuit that there is something terribly wrong. I believe it is this.

Zizek referencing lacan tells story of a cuckolded man: the man’s wife is unfaithful to him, these are the facts of the matter. however, regardless of this, the man’s fantasies of her being unfaithful, that is to say, him worrying about it, is still pathological. The actual truth-value of whether she is cheating on him or not do not matter, engaging in the mental visualisation of her betrayal, is pathological.

In the same way, I propose, that regardless of whether the world “actually is” round or not, it is pathological to believe it is.

3. Virtual critique as virtual therapy

It is not a coincidence that “flat earthers” have become a meme in the digital age. It speaks to a commonly shared anxiety, and the internet phenomena of humiliating and abusing low IQ or autistic men with facts and logic but showing a camera in their face, is a ritual in which we as the viewer, externalise our own private psychological discomfort at living in materialism, modernism, late industrial society - A looping world - and punish it. It’s strictly speaking fetishistic: The weirdos we enjoy-through-critique in Rational Ritual humiliation are low-IQ, high-emotion, and we cruelly use them as a little doll we can punish, in place of ourselves. We enjoy them being owned and humiliated, by, through them atoning with our own emotional discomfort from living in a “round” world.

The flat earth theorists are “wrong, but for the right reasons”.

Flat earth theory is a terrible theory, with very poor predictive power. It does not explain shadows or calendars or the movement of the stars as well as other theories. But it is an excellent praxis. When we actually, physically, pracitcally navigate the world, no one uses a globus.

They use flat, 2d, square, maps.

This does not imply that the flat map is more accurate to The World “an-sich”. It implies that the flat map is more accurate to our imperfect senses.

There is today a greatly felt need in all of us to flatten the world, to make it navigable.

The world is a mess, and you don’t know what to do about it, or even where to begin. The World an-sich or the world an-mich? It’s too much, too complicated, and with too many variables, making it impossible to take rational action. So you are forced to live irrationally, all the while stress and tension builds up internally. Until finally you lash out - to level the world, and make it flat once more. The popularity of various mindsets, perhaps all of them, is this: a gorilla believes the earth is flat. A bronze age man believes the world is flat - or at least, he just doesn’t think about it.