As writing a book is demanding and writing it in a compelling way even more. But as a lesson, I learned the last years is most stuff you do that you think is for others is mostly for yourself. My books are mostly for myself. They cleared up my thinking. When my mind believes the matter is clear when writing it down, I notice my mind was wrong. I was forced to articulate my ideas and therefore provided a target for my inner critic. But I realized that only allowing him to criticize intensely constitutes true thinking. I try to persuade others to read my book and ask them for weaknesses. However, the only one that was fascinated by my book was me. Nevertheless, I learned a lot and sharpened my arguments. The key lessons from this process I want to document here.

Do it!

The first thing is not to be intimidated by starting to write a book. I knew I would not easily write anything close to one hundred pages. But I started anyway. I wrote essays about topics I was intrigued by. I could then weave them together and fuse them. Write transitions from one thought to another and learned how they relate in the process. Although I thought I knew this lesson, I am now scared to start the next project. To bridge it, I work on this website to force myself to produce something.

Wisdom

A key takeaway from my book is the realization of the limitation of rational thought. That we don’t even come close to solving the relevant problems we face with science and logic. I value practical advice now way more than before. I deeply realized its utility. Therefore, I started working more in the realm of wisdom than philosophy. These thoughts are all on this blog (category: wisdom). They might result in a booklet or not, who knows.

Appreciation of other religions

Before, I believed one could rationalize reality in different ways. Either without god or with. And I thought with god gives a more complete picture of the world. And of all theologies, Christianity was superior to the others. However, I soon realized that the old polytheisms have value we have lost in our current society and don’t seem to rediscover them very soon. I began to read Homer and loved how he pictured the divine experience of mankind. It shook my understanding of my religion, but it also widened my view. I was enabled to learn from all schools of thoughts.

Legitimate machiavellian thinking

Machiavellian thinking is to this day a synonym for exploiting people to gain power. However, my reflections showed me that discarding this strategy due to ethical reasons is not helpful for anyone. In the final analysis, it does not matter how ethical you are if your system collapses. We ought to fight for our system and defend it against attacks. We have to get involved in politics, economics, and society in general. The world will not give us a badge for our nice behavior.

Reciprocity

As an additional milestone, I realized that evil is limited. It might be horrendous and last for some generations, but one has to realize that pure evil fights and kills itself. This doesn’t mean it won’t happen, but that there is never all hope lost. A true Machiavellian knows this and will provide for the people.

Variability

I realized that a system, idea, or society is way more stable if it has diversity. And so much diversity that it hurts a little. Meaning, the ideas you find dangerous are there in the public space. You might fight them, but if you want the best for your society, you fight them with good intent. The more stupidity we can tolerate, the better. Because this stupid person might be the rescuing hero of the upcoming crisis. All global empires that lasted for more than a century had this variability. Roman citizens could pray to any god they liked, as long as the Caesar was the highest god. The same in the current capitalism. So, the truly dangerous ideas are those who want to silence the stupid.

Artificial Intelligence

From my book follows the hypothesis that all systems must be self-correcting, implement variability and have to be able to fundamentally change their structure. So, true artificial intelligence has to be able to change its architecture. Not only that, but given an environment which encourages intelligent behavior, any gradual system with the theoretical possibility to produce intelligence will eventually also do so, given enough time. The current AI research does this manually. They select what they deem intelligent and develop it further. But as long as humans are in the loop it is slow and biased.