People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
Some people are already enduring it, whatever it is. The most recent figure I can find for suicides in the UK from the Office for National Statistics is from 2023:
There were 6,069 suicides registered in England and Wales (11.4 deaths per 100,000 people) in 2023; this is an increase compared with 2022 (10.7 deaths per 100,000, or 5,642 deaths) and the highest rate seen since 1999.
Maybe some of these por souls found their lives so unbearable because of their false beliefs. But it is flippant to assume that people can, in fact, endure the truth. Some truths are unbearable to some people.
Maybe there will be a truth I come across which will be unbearable to me. For example, the book due to be released in September, with the cheerful title “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” by Yudkowsky and Soares might do it. Can I really bear to think of my children and grandchildren, all my friends and family, those who brighten our hearts by playing Mozart or Handel (or whatever music you prefer), all the people who care about the environment, the scientists who dedicate their lives to solviing our health issues, all those people who are just people and are unique and precious with their loves and their dreams, just gone—all because the Chinese will get there first if we don’t?
I always hoped I would live long enough to see the “Technological Singularity”. Now we are in the accretion disk, I am finding it pretty scary. I never imagined AI could hallucinate, or tell lies, or try to blackmail anyone. And this is only LLMs! I tremble to think what could happen if this is combined with an intelligence like AlphZero.
Yet it is impossible to escape an accretion disk.
And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived.
So we have to live it until we can’t.
There actually are rising cases of “mental ill-health” right now. Here in the UK, services are swamped. I’m sure some of this is due to an attitude change, in that people now refer to anything from a minor upset, or a slight difference in neurological function, to normal emotions such as grief, shame and regret, as a mental illness.
Previously the attitude in the post-war generation was more like Truman’s toward Oppenheimer: “Blood on his hands; damn it, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it”. (Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center; by Ray Monk.)
Bellyaching, cutting people out of one’s life due to some human imperfection, and turning to substance abuse, all seem to be excused under this mental health label, as if the difficulties the world is facing right now are already sufficient to trigger the insanity expectation.
I’m grateful to you for this article, which I intend to take very seriously, because it provides the tools we need to arm ourselves against succumbing to stresses of every kind, as well as coping better with everyday life today and in the future, however long that might be.