Traps are counterparts to ladders →. They are places where a person is liable to 'get stuck', a rung on a ladder that may be difficult to move beyond. Like ladders, traps are useful lies.
I usually divide traps into two categories: repulsive traps and attractive traps. Repulsive traps are situations where some outside force may be discouraging or impeding further development (like physiological addiction, where one becomes preoccupied with getting their next fix and never moves beyond it). Attractive traps are situations where some inner force is discouraging or impeding further development (like psychological addiction, where one prefers seeking out their next fix and never moves beyond it).
The Activist Trap
is when a person (typically an activist, hence the name) hobbles their intellectual and conceptual development with the condition that it must support their activism. A person in this trap will typically only 'learn' theory that further supports / defends / justifies their praxis, and will avoid or be close-minded towards ideas that they feel (on a subconscious level) to potentially undermine their good work. One potential cause is the sunken cost fallacy, in which they want to avoid feeling like their past actions were wasted / counter-productive. Another potential cause is the belief that making a difference is more important than learning [1].
[1]
Consider the politician's syllogism:
Something must be done
This is something
Therefore, it must be done
The exit to this trap is to prioritize learning over action, especially when that which is learnt contradicts action. The adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions reflects the fact that limited awareness (or, to be more specific, awareness that doesn't illuminate the full effects of an action) erodes the moral foundation of the action itself by casting uncertainty over whether it will lead to good or evil.
The progression of ego development is exceptionally clear in children, in part because their egos are so immature, and in part because their egos develop quickly enough that dramatic changes can be observed over short periods of time.
The Adult Trap
is the belief that there reaches a point after which a person effectively stops developing. People who hold this belief, and moreover consider themselves to be so-called 'adults' may see this belief become self-fulfilling as they convince themselves that they are on the same level as all other so-called 'adults' with nowhere to go upwards.
Some people may buttress this belief with statistics about brain development (erroneously believing that the brain constitutes the limits of the mind), or with legal facts about ages required to partake in adult activities (erroneously believing that ego-development is a function of age).
One reason why people often don't think of adults as continuing to develop is because they consider themselves to have a superior/inferior relationship with children, and an equality relationship with adults. Allowing for the possibility of adults being children-like in their development might undermine their beliefs in equality.
The exit to this trap is to recognize that your journey of personal development never ends, to find and re-kindle the childlike joy of learning, adventure, and exploration that was forgotten or put aside so long ago.
It's pretty ordinary for people who grow up in religious contexts to rebel against the faith of their parents and go towards some variant of atheism or agnosticism. I generally think that taking this step is useful and formative; where it becomes
The Atheism Trap
is if the person develops a sort of 'allergic' reaction to religion in general. This trap often accompanies materialism →.
The exit is to realize that religion is a natural phenomenon, that it arises spontaneously in all populations, and moreover that religions everywhere tend to have resemblances with each other. Dismissing religious people and their experiences is an exercise in willful ignorance, not wisdom.
The exit isn't to start believing in God. If you are meant to find them, they will come to you. Developing beliefs and opinions about the nature of higher beings before actually meeting any is putting the cart before the horse; your understanding of a cosmology of higher spirits is supposed to derive from your experiences; the reverse direction does not work.
The Community Trap
is when a person denigrates themselves to community interests. Since one is but a small part of a larger community, it's easy to fall into thinking that the community is more important than oneself.
Note that this does not mean that the opposite is necessarily true, but rather that determining what's in the best interest of the community is a harder question to answer than what's best for oneself. Additionally, because one is a part of their community, raising oneself is simultaneously an act of raising the community as a whole.
You cannot help others if you cannot help yourself.
If a person isn't being challenged, or if their situation is 'good enough', then they may fall into
The Complacency Trap
. Complacency acts like a trap in the same way that the discouragement trap does, but for different reasons. Necessity is the father of invention [2], and so if there are no conceptual necessities, there may very well be no conceptual children either.
[2]I like to say that necessity is the father of invention, because its mother is clearly leisure. One gives a hot inspiration, and the other puts nine months of labor into producing the result.
The exit to this trap is adventurousness and getting outside of one's comfort zone. The explore / exploit dichotomy may be instructive here. Complacency matches a pattern of constant exploitation which, through its unwillingness to try new things, misses vast opportunities. A simple change that can help spur you in this direction is to say 'yes' more to the opportunities that present themselves.
In somewhat the opposite vein to the complacency trap, people who have given up, or think that something is beyond them, or think that it's "too hard", or that they're not the right kind of person for it are liable to fall into
The Discouragement Trap
. If one gives up, and stops trying, one will naturally never get to reach the goal.
The solution to this trap is hope. Remember that by its very nature, it survives all odds.
Being roughly what happens when relativism gets crossed with language, people in
The Discourse Trap
may conclude that language is the seat of all meaning, and that any sufficiently well-developed discourse is equivalent it its truth-power to any other. This may lead them to the erroneous conclusion that changing the world can be done through merely changing the world's use of language.
Side-effects include:
Extensively verbose and convoluted sentences.
Spending lots of time talking about talking, rather than getting to any meaningful point.
Problematizing language. May lead to language-Naziism.
This may stall a person's ego development by turning their efforts towards mastering or controlling the language as an end (or a means to an end), rather than simply using it as a medium for communication. A person in this trap may also have difficulty moving towards post-language thinking.
I think (my answer here is not on as solid ground as with the others) that the exit to this trap principally relies in using fewer words. Note that this includes internal dialogues, not just spoken/written ones.
If you think you know it all, it will discourage you from knowing more. People who feel like they're experts, or that they know everything (or know all the 'important' things), or that they're enlightened, or that their consciousness is high enough, or that they're 'woke' are liable to fall into
The Enlightenment Trap
. Who hasn't witnessed the self-righteous beliefs of a teenager who thinks they know it all? Who hasn't looked back at their past selves and laughed at how naive and self-assured they used to be?
Since the enlightenment trap is a symptom of vanity and hubris, the exit lies in humility and self-denegration.
Fear is a helluva drug. When you are afraid of a thing, your perceptions of it tend to be blown way out of proportion to whatever real danger the thing itself poses. People who are caught in
The Fear Trap
tend to see their thoughts dominated by their fears, and their actions dominated by rituals designed to appease the fears [3]. This is not to say that all fear is a trap; there are many things quite worthy of being feared. That said, almost everyone who lives with fear believes that their fear is justified, and so one's own perception of the matter is not as helpful a guide as one may expect.
[3]
Examples include:
Checking the stock market every day.
Hoarding or stockpiling supplies, particularly ones that do not need to be stockpiled.
Bravery is its exit. It may not defeat the source of your fears, but it makes you capable and strong in the face of them.
It sucks to be lost and alone. We naturally look for guidance in the form of other people, ones who are further along than we are, and who can help us out and point us in the right direction. Such guidance is often available when needed; one should not deny assistance when fate provides it.
There are two sides to
The Guru Trap
, depending on what one's role in it is:
For the mentee, when they come to treat their guru as an authority which cannot be question, or when they substitute the wisdom of the guru in place of what their own intellect tells them, or relinquish control over their own destiny.
For the guru, when they think their advice is better than it actually is. This is the harder of the two sides to be trapped in, both because it plays into one's egotistical desire for power that comes with having subordinates looking up to you, and because gurus don't have any means of sanity checking their own bad advice.
Here's the exit:
For mentee, understand that the guru's job is to give you lots of fertilizer and helpful feedback. Their job isn't to drag you the way, but rather to put you in an environment where you can more easily find your own way.
For the guru, humility in ignorance. You don't give orders, and all the answers you have to give come with the possibility of being wrong. In general you should never try to cultivate a following of any kind.
The Hate Trap
is a helluva drug. If there is a faster road to hell than hatred, I am not aware of it. A person in the hate trap find their lives and thoughts dominated by hatred towards (typically) certain persons or nebulous groups of people (i.e. enemies and out-groups). Almost nobody thinks of themselves as being hateful, meaning that people in this trap typically disguise their feelings from themselves through sets of self-delusions.
Common delusions include:
The belief that you are fighting evil.
The belief that your cause is righteous.
The belief that you are defending the weak and oppressed.
The belief that you are upholding goodness and decency.
The solution to hate is love. I know it sounds corny, but you are supposed to learn to love the objects of your hatred. Loving doesn't necessarily result in acquiesing to their every assault; it is only through your love that you will determine what the correct path forward is.
In general, hate and the perception of evil are caused by deep separation from the hated thing, as if caused by looking in a mirror in which everything's moral value has been magically inverted.
The Ignorance Trap
is where a person's awareness is not broad enough to recognize something that would be pertinant for them to know. In its most extreme case, ignorance casts a veil over a thing to render it an unknown unknown, something that completely defies conception and anticipation. The vast majority of reality exists beyond this veil. Ignorance is the default state of understanding, and it is pushed back little-by-little, bit-by-bit.
There's nothing inherently wrong about being ignorant of a thing. It can even be a good thing, serving the purpose of protecting you from the realities that you aren't prepared to face or accept. There are things hidden from you because you are not ready yet.
It is still a trap though, because some people find themselves in a circle of light, knowledge, and understanding that doesn't seem to be growing. In its more perverse case, a person may engage in willful ignorance towards things they'd rather not think about. Sometimes ignorance is bliss. Sometimes it's just setting yourself up for a harsh awakening.
The general exit is curiosity.
The Materialism Trap
is the belief that reality is solely composed out of physical matter like electrons, photons, gluons and other elementary particles, along with physical forces like gravity. People in this trap tend to dismiss everything from beyond the material veil, often explaining it away as "yet unknown physics" or something that's all in the observer's head. People in this trap tend to erroneously believe that not being in the trap is irrational. Materialism has extraordinary staying power; this is one of the most pervasive and difficult-to-shake traps on this list.
The exit to this trap is to practice open-minded skepticism towards the possibility and existence of immaterial things. You are not asked to believe anything, or to have blind faith, but rather to not slam the door in the face of evidence to the contrary.
When a person believes that reality is fundamentally meaningless, the may be stuck in
The Nihilism Trap
. This entraps a person by divorcing them from their own meaning-creating capabilities, as well as the teleology of the rest of conscious reality. People so stuck tend to be unmotivated or otherwise drift through their life without pursuing fulfilling endeavors and goals at a larger scale.
One exit to this trap is to recognize that meaning is given, and to go about actively giving meaning to things.
Related to the community trap,
The Normal Trap
is where an individual will look to their peers in order to determine what's right and wrong, rather than looking within themselves. This will lead them towards adopting popular, common, or 'normal' perspectives of the world, and will work to prevent them from moving beyond the limitations of their peers. For social human beings, this is a highly compelling trap, and tends to capture large groups of people all at the same time.
The exit to this trap isn't to reject normality or otherwise cast yourself into the counter-culture, but rather to expand your understanding of normality so that it comes to include its counter-culture.
Wouldn't it be great if there was One True Way to get to greater truths and answers? Wouldn't it be great if there was a Handbook, and all you had to do was follow its instructions? Wouldn't it be great if there was a whole group of people working on hammering out the finer details, making sure that the Handbook is perfectly correct and free from error?
The notion that there is a Right Way, and that everyone just needs to follow it is the basic nature of
The Orthodoxy Trap
. As it turns out, there is no single way, and the path that lies before you may be dramatically different than the path that lays before others. Orthodoxies can be useful to help you bootstrap your way, but there's a point beyond which the orthodoxy will cease to be useful, and beyond that point sticking to the straight-and-narrow of the orthodoxy will become more limiting than helping.
Orthodoxies tend to be restrictive and close-minded (e.g. by preoccupying itself with conformance to its own strictures and stamping out heresies), and they also usually end up being co-opted by hierarchical power-structures that trap the people who ambitiously climb them.
Understand that what works for you may be different than for others, and that nobody has a monopoly on the truth.
Since so much meaning is constructed in binary opposition to someother, a person may fall into
The Other Trap
of thinking about the world exclusively (or predominately) in terms of the other, rather than in terms of a balanced relationship between two counter-posed parts.
Since the other is often constructed as *evil*, this can lead to an extremely hateful, angry, or frustrated understanding of reality, and may stall a person so trapped by consuming their efforts in some futile fight or struggle against that other [4].
[4]This trap is often easiest to see in politics, competition, or combat. Lots of pots calling kettles black.
Since the other is being used as a meaning-generating thing in this trap, the causes of the hate/anger/fight/stuggle/etc is usually identified as originating in that other. The entrapped person may have difficulty identifying their own contributions to the whole, especially where their contributions resemble the other's most closely.
The exit to this trap to to recognize that these self/other conflicts exists for a reason, and that together they serve a higher purpose than either one alone. Down this road lies the understanding that the other cannot be defeated, but rather conflicts are eliminated by re-aligning the two halves so that they fit together in a more compatible, lower-friction arrangement.
If a thing feels good, why stop doing it?
The Pleasure Trap
is a lure that attracts one towards hedonism and other short-term ego-satisfying pursuits. This trap is espectially effective against utilitarians, who believe that pleasure is inherently good. This trap does not say that all pleasure is bad, just that pleasurable things can be too enticing to avoid. Common manifestations of this trap include masturbation and gluttony.
I'm not really sure about the exit to this trap. Asceticism seems to be the natural exit, but I haven't quite figured out how to cast pleasure through its eyes in a way that yields a properly transcendental escape.
The Progress Trap
is the belief that when you are making progress towards a thing, that that thing is worth pursuing. Time may be wasted while spent on making progress, when it would be better spent in other ways. Many video games [5], or other artificial systems of rewards and advancement pose as progress traps. As an extreme but educational example of this, consider counting up from 1. Since the numbers keep getting higher, it feels as though progress is being made, however from a higher perspective, it's clear that one could keep counting forever and never reach anything.
[5]Can I have the years of my life I wasted on Runescape back? That game practically defined 'grinding'. Who wants level 99 fire-making anyway? [5-1]
[5-1]For the uninitiated: level 99 fire-making requires accumulating a total of 374,968,717 experience points. Experienced is gained by lighting fires, the amount varying by what kind of logs are being lit. The most commonly used wood for training purposes is Yew, which gets you 60 exp. So to get level 99, yew only have to light 6,249,478 of them. Whoopie! [5-1-1]
[5-1-1]Like most seriously perverted things, there is in fact a good reason things are warped the way they are: when first created, Runescape had a bit of a boy-scout approach [5-1-1-1] to skills, which is how it ended up being a category in the first place. Then, once players had invested time and energy into lighting ridiculous piles of wood, it no longer became fair to destroy their effort by correcting the situation.
[5-1-1-1]Why isn't rope-tying a skill?
A slight variant of the progress trap is that if one is making progress towards a thing slowly, one may pass by or not seek out opportunities to make progress more quickly. For example, no investment may be made on improving process so long as the process isn't entirely broken.
One exit to this trap is to care less about goal-setting and goal-reaching, to think of the world less in terms of achievement, and more in terms of idle play. Another exit is to regularly perform reality checks on the higher purpose being achieved by whatever notion of progress that is being pursued.
The Rationality Trap
is when a person believes that they are rational, and that their understanding of the world is free of contradictions. Life itself is irrational, and so are the people who live it. Holding the belief that this isn't true for oneself encourages ignoring obvious irrationalities and contradictions, preferring a limited-but-complete-seeming perspective over a larger-and-inchoate perspective.
The exit to this trap doesn't necessarily require rejecting rationality and succumbing to the absurd and inane, but rather loosening the requirement that everything must be contradiction-free. In the process of rational thinking, contradictions are momentarily held together side-by-side in the mind as the mind explores competing alternatives; typically one is then rejected by the end of the thought, but there is no reason both cannot be kept around for longer, including for indefinite periods of time.
The Relativism Trap
is when a person takes their understanding of subjective relativity and uses it to deny or debase the existence of objective reality.
Relativism demonstrates how the perception of a thing changes based off of the state of the observer. Being able to observe a thing from a variety of perspectives is useful for learning more about that thing. It's important, however, to maintain a sense of the relationship between these perspectives.
Common pitfalls that characterize this trap include:
Believing that all perspectives are equally valid/true/useful.
Believing that observations are entirely subjective, or otherwise have no external component.
Solipsism.
As a person sits in the relativism trap, they start drifting slowly away from reality. Eventually the contradictions between what is real and what is believed to be real will grow large enough that the process of denial that upholds the trap will be unable to cope with them. It can make for a rough spot when the rubber finally hits the road.
The relativism trap can be a very difficult one to escape, since being in it is something akin to being lost in an infinite maze. The exit is to realize that there is a single objective reality [6], and that all relative realities (including your own) derive from the One. After spinning in enough circles, all directions become equivalent, but there's still only a single True North, even if you don't know which way it points.
[6]If you don't want to accept a single objective reality, you can instead substitute a subject-invariant reality. This is a useful tool for telling the difference between that which is real and imagined: is it the same for others too?
The Superiority Trap
is when a person considers themselves to be superior to others (including non-human others).
The exit here is to realize that you and that which you consider yourself to be superior to are two parts of the same thing [7], each with your own incomparable roles [8] to play in it.
[7]There's a lot of nuance here that I'm not directly addressing. Chief among nuances is that difference does not imply superiority/inferiority. This trap relates more to the idea of intrinsic worth or value than e.g. suitability for some specific application/scenario.
[8]I want to stress that your roles are incomparable [8-1]. This doesn't mean that no comparison can be made, but rather that any comparison is justified by its purpose, and the purpose of making a superiority comparison is ego-satisfaction, and you do not need ego-satisfaction; it serves no higher purpose than isolating yourself from others, where such isolation is limiting, constraining, and self-defeating.
[8-1]My favorite example for programmers is to consider a function and ask: which of these lines is inferior to the others? Once you have your answer, delete it and try running the code. Most deletions result in error, as the function no longer functions.
WARNING: This is probably the most dangerous trap on this list. When beliefs in personal superiority mix with contempt for inferiors, and power is introduced to the mix, a volatile recipe for evil is created.