06 March 2024

No one knows. Know this, and dissolve your inner fanatic.

Walking on water, from the Netflix series "Messiah"
Look around you. What do you see? Is your world good? Is it evil? Ask yourself, who is guilty? Who is innocent? What are you? Now look at your neighbour. Look at your neighbour! Be brave enough to see yourself; your own reflection cast back at you, each reflected in each. Look where you stand: in a shining city on a hill, in the land of the free and the brave, standing for Liberty and Justice. How true do those words ring for you? When did you bring Liberty? Where did you cause Justice? I stand at the gate of a nation, a nation where power is not invited. I stand at the gate and I look out upon you. And you look back to me. But all I can do is reflect what I see. If you have come to receive, you will go away poor. If you come here to understand, you will leave here lost. For those who have understood, for those who have received, it is time. Returning to your scripture will not save you. Bending to your knees will not please anyone. That time is passed. This time is now. You are the judged. You are the chosen. I am here to break the mirror so you will see on what side you stand. What you see will be your choosing. – Messiah, episode 6, Netflix [my emphasis].

Propaganda ends where dialogue begins. – Jacques Ellul

Introduction

Jesus failed to persuade most of us. What chance do we ordinary mortals have?

Is an incarnation as a human being on Earth a trial on a training ground where, necessarily, incarnated souls have relatively low wisdom? That is why we incarnate; to grow in wisdom. There is no point incarnating on Earth beyond a certain level of wisdom. Does it follow, then, that things will never improve on Earth if those that incarnate are necessarily low-wisdom souls? It’s a mechanical question.

If this metaphor for what earthly existence is fundamentally about is close to true, must Earth only and always be a place where beginner souls are suckered into hellish suffering, until they finally wise up under the pressure of such weary toil?

Or, assuming incarnation is a soul-level, pre-birth choice, is it fair to ask if earthly existence is a sacrifice taken on by the bravest souls? For example, incarnating as Ukrainian or Russian, as Israeli or Palestinian is not something that would attract most. Incarnating into environments of almost insurmountable challenges, which are likely to cause the most terrible human experiences possible, would be a choice to take on great sacrifice, to risk agonies of every kind, in the faint hope it does some good, or that some success is achieved that is positive for All That Is in some way. The potential for soul-growth , this argument suggests, is directly proportional to the degree of suffering risked.

How horrible this sounds! I am writing airily about the slaughter of men, women and children, about terrible wounds, dismemberment, destroyed lives, the bitterest and most belligerent intergroup hatreds. But this is the exact horror that drives me to try to understand.

Going a little deeper, we turn to contemplate free will as a foundational fact of reality. Because I have free will, I can choose to turn my back on God, on Jesus, or, more simply, on love. If every one of us can fail to persuade the other, just as Jesus failed to persuade most with the full wisdom of God at his disposal, what hope for us immature, unwise humans of lowly relative capacities in persuading others that love is the answer? 

The evidence around us suggests that it is very hard for humans to commit to love.

Am I on track with such speculation? Or is Materialism the sounder ontology? Are our efforts on Earth no less the result of mechanical processes than the hot air pumped out from the rear side of a refrigerator?

My own ontology is that everything is God, everything is Consciousness. From this I choose to respect the sanctity of free will and so find myself compelled to ask: Is persuasion the right attitude, the right approach, the right starting point for furthering Right Action and the earthly evolution of wisdom? Does persuasion risk a violation of another’s free will? Direct instruction would be worse of course: Can a man’s wisdom evolve at all while other people make all the difficult decisions for him? Isn’t persuasion also an interference, albeit subtler? What of the subtle influences of NLP, behavioural programming, propaganda, bureaucracy, legislation, mass media? How respectful of free will are these processes and entities? 

How respectful of and sensitive to free will is ideological extremism, fervent belief, the desire to help others?

Inversely, isn’t taking on the pains of the world – extreme empathy – an act of inverted hubris? It is a grand delusion to think we are somehow morally obligated to save the world, or to absorb its pain in noble co-suffering. Isn’t the most noble undertaking to strengthen (nourish?) your ability to identify and then nurture your humility? 

Perhaps this is what Jihad describes.

But how does all this square with protecting the weak? What happens if we don’t even bother? Perhaps these are misleading questions, just as the goal of persuading others is the wrong way to go about dialogue

“Propaganda ends where dialogue begins.” 

I believe a healthier societal vector would be one deeply rooted in robust humility, in the sincere conviction that no one knows, that healthy dialogue – conversation aimed at learning more – is crucial to healthy governance, and that true honour is rooted in the complex and challenging undertaking to become humble. In precisely this vein, respecting free will means not seeking to persuade. Power – in contradistinction to natural authority, which is humble – is the antithesis of such respect, respect being an organic quality that is created and sustained by humility.

This helps us understand why power corrupts. Because power can forestall correction, it can attenuate its dialogue with the rest of reality. True dialogue invites correction. The more power you have, the longer you can forestall unwanted correction: hubris. You end up believing your own propaganda, you end up entangled – invested – in your poor, dialogue-free, propaganda-driven, low-wisdom decisions until it all comes crashing down around your ears. The poor (weak) bear the brunt of this: those who became dependant on and thus addicted to your power. Rulers require ruled just as ruled require rulers.

So, what is the loving, wise response to suffering, victimhood, and power?

If I love x, must I accept all x entails?

If I love the cat, I must accept the agonies of the creatures that suffer on its claws. If I love humanity, I must accept the suffering it is doomed to create in the wake of its low wisdom. If I truly love humanity, in other words, I must honour its free will: its right to act in accordance with its wisdom. I am required to accept the truth of this as graciously as I can.

Is this a callous position, no matter how it is intended?

Love entails acceptance. What we are challenged to accept upon a commitment to love and humility can be truly horrific at times. Obviously, it can be very hard to handle this truth, to pay the price such a commitment exacts.

One way or the other, decisions are investments in the future, and each decision is made with a specific quality of wisdom. Wisdom is something we enrich or degrade by our decisions. Feedback from the quality of our decisions can educate us on the current quality of our wisdom. With dedication and humility, feedback advances our wisdom. So goes the argument I’m borrowing for this article.

To interrupt that decision<->wisdom spiral – which I see as synonymous with evolution –, to puppet or nudge, in other words, a fellow human using your ‘superior’, ‘elite-level’ wisdom, is an interference that dishonours love and risks downstream unravelling of the best-laid plans of mice and men, an unravelling that can, at epochal junctures, become catastrophic. Indeed, the very idea of measuring one person’s wisdom against another’s is a low-wisdom folly, a contradiction, an exercise in futility.

This is my sense of it, a growing awareness that increasingly informs my reactions to my world and my sense of what could be constructive ways of responding to the great suffering and horror that comes to my attention. I experience this continuous process of reassessment as an evolving attempt to understand the pragmatics of love.

I am not against justice, nor am I against atonement. Wrongs happen and must be wisely remedied to the best of our wisdom; societal health depends on it. But enmities embed and compound. Divisions emerge and deepen and are far harder to handle than wrongs committed. Perhaps the most famous division today is that between ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’. 

As lovers of humanity, is this division, like all divisions, something we are required to accept? Yes, which means “do not hate it”. If our wisdom sees it as a cause of unnecessary suffering, our healthiest response must be to learn deeply why it exists and whether it is avoidable, or how best to handle it. My guess is that such a response is broadly appropriate with all such divisions.

The ‘elites’ are products of their world, just as ‘non-elites’ are products of theirs. Each one of us is an organic expression of our world, where “our world” includes our biology, history, culture, environment, psychology, memories, soul, etc. Indeed, the vague dichotomy I’m using – ‘elite’ versus ‘non-elite’ – is a lazy platitude from my world I use rhetorically, even though it misleads. In other words, what and how I communicate is necessarily determined by my world.

Why is this banal observation important?

Because changing one side of the ‘elite’-‘non-elite’ divide, as perhaps with all others of its like – Russian-Ukrainian, Israeli-Palestinian, etc. – , requires changing the other side. For the ‘elite’ to not be elite-like and to not do elite-like things requires that the ‘non-elite’ no longer be non-elite and no longer do non-elite things. Each is one half of a unified whole; each co-creates the other. This is an unwanted but necessary correlate of enmity itself; enmity requires enemy. Money requires scarcity. These truths are systemic and thus organic.

Necessarily organic expressions of our worlds, lasting change of expression requires lasting change of world. As you zoom in on this truth, it becomes impossible to separate “expression” from “world”. All that “world” is, ultimately, is a dynamic network or web of evolving “expressions”. There isn’t really anything else. This is a different formulation of the truth “There is nothing but God”.

Similarly, then, it becomes impossible to distinguish between ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’. I’m going to try to tease into clearer relief via an example: Mike Benz expounding the corruption of democracy in the US, and thus in the West:

What I’m essentially describing is military rule. What’s happened with the rise of the censorship industry is a total inversion of the idea of democracy itself. Democracy draws its legitimacy from the idea that it is rule by consent of the people being ruled. It’s not really being ruled by an overlord because the government is just our will expressed by our consent with the people we vote for. 

The whole push after the 2016 election, and after Brexit, and after other social-media-run elections that went the wrong way from what the State Department wanted – like the 2016 Philippines election – was to completely invert everything we described as being the underpinnings of a democratic society, in order to deal with the threat of free speech on the internet. And what they essentially said is: “We need to redefine democracy from being about the will of the voters to being about the sanctity of the democratic institutions.” And who are the democratic institutions? “Oh, it’s us.” It’s the military, it’s NATO, it’s the IMF and the World Bank, it’s the mainstream media, it is the [largely State-Department- or IC-funded] NGOs. It’s essentially all of the elite establishments that were under threat from the rise of domestic populism, [establishments] that declared their own consensus to be the new definition of democracy. If you define democracy as being the strength of democratic institutions rather than a focus on the will of the voters, then what you’re left with is essentially: Democracy is just the consensus-building architecture within the democratic institutions themselves. And from their perspective, that [consensus building] takes a lot of work!

The amount of work these people do… For example, we mentioned the Atlantic Council, which is one of these big coordinating mechanisms of the oil and gas industry in a region, for the finance of the JP Morgans and the Black Rocks in a region, for the NGOs in a region, for the media in a region. All of these need to reach a consensus. And that process takes a lot of time, a lot of work, a lot of negotiation. From their perspective, that’s democracy! Democracy is getting the NGOs to agree with Black Rock to agree with the Wall Street Journal to agree with the community and activist groups who are onboarded with respect to a particular initiative. That is the difficult vote-building process from their perspective. If, at the end of the day, a bunch of populist groups decide that they like a truck driver who’s popular on TikTok more than the carefully constructed consensus of the NATO military brass, well then from their perspective that is now an attack on democracy.

I sympathise with their perspective and appreciate the various processes by which it emerged into being.

Specialisation is now so advanced – the human mind is endlessly restless and inventive, subdivides its prior subdivisions into ever more complicated subdivisions – only highly trained specialists have a remote chance of knowing what they’re doing in their particular niche. One’s specific combination of specialisations flows organically from one’s past decisions, each made with whatever quality of wisdom was available. Over time, we become more and more invested in – rooted to – our specialisations, our situation, and so become dependent on those who have specialisations we do not, just as they may become dependant on ours. Trust in each other gets harder as effective communication about what is going on is undermined by the generalised lack of mutual expert knowledge.

Societies are held together by trust. Trust is hard in highly specialised societies. This is a problem.

As if to replace the trust that once held hunter-gatherer bands and early tribal societies together, money emerged. Money – in the form of market-based price discovery – could be said to automate trust. As such, it holds societies together. But money also corrupts; it is power accumulated. You can accumulate money indefinitely and grow mighty defensive about your hoard. I’d even argue that money corrupts itself: Where does money end and banking begin? Where does banking end and bankers begin? Bankers corrupt banking corrupts money system corrupts everything else. To repeat, money is one of power’s most effective levers.

The fish rots from the head down, they say. But this hardly matters; it is one organism that is as organically rooted in its environment as any other. Shifting to the particular, when we ponder the mutual antipathies between, say, the proletariat and political class, is it really fruitful to hold one side more guilty than the other? Is not each group as enmeshed in The System as the other? Everyone has a responsibility to wisely handle what he/she is, but blaming others, virtue signalling and playing victim are low-wisdom games.

So should we stop specialisation? I don’t think so. That would be like stopping curiosity and inventiveness. If you love the cat, you must accept the agonies of those that suffer on its claws. Excising from humanity that which created specialisation would be to kill humanity, to hate it.

Anecdotally, I’m involved in building grassroots movements and activist companies, an endeavour that entails liaising between a (low) number of likeminded people with a (nonetheless) wide divergence of perspectives. Reaching creative and positive compromise on delicate matters all parties are happy with is a lengthy and energy-intensive process.

When you invest time building such enterprises, you do so because you believe fervently in them, or in something like status, or power, or wealth. They are, then, invariably labours of love of something. When ‘outsiders’ to the process – ‘non-elites’ – threaten one’s fragile progress, say likeminded activists groups who are attracted to the cut of your jib, that influx of new perspectives – aka the addition of larger democratic processes – threatens to break your rhythm and undo all your fine work. What do they know about what we – the ‘elites’ – have achieved! What right to they have to our precious hoard/work/status!

So if we can’t avoid specialisation, might we avoid us-and-them tensions, and thus avoid enmity? Well … yeees … but by learning humility … which is patience … which is wisdom … which is how we learn that avoidance, like oppression and suppression, is futile. The ‘solution’ is patient acceptance that seeks to learn wiser ways through unavoidable tensions and enmity. 

There is a deep but banal pragmatics to all this that is as obvious as it is irritating – and now existentially threatening – to a system that simply has no time for it. The Western world is systemically incapable of wanting to embrace the profound value of humility. And yet it is blindingly obvious that what bedevils the ‘elites’ bedevils ‘non-elites’ just the same, at least in essence. The ‘cause’ is how a mix of structural factors in tandem with our value system together determine our cultural relationship with fundamental phenomena like wisdom, love and humility.

If your inner fanatic requires, or even creates one or more bitter enemies by virtue of its nature, these observations might not be what you want to hear. You might be addicted to (invested in) your enmity, your enemies.

Revolution, oppression, resistance, blame, narrative control, democracy, tyranny, are all concepts that belong to all flavours of ‘elite’-versus-‘non-elite’ (us-and-them) divisions, or patternings. These patternings structure us all. If we don’t like the outcome of a particular patterning, we have to change it. This requires profound self-change, in some kind of harmony with each other, with the structuring guidance of some kind of loose-consensus vision regarding why we should take on such an insanely difficult challenge in the first place.

But, sadly, “Netflix and Pizza” is the easier path. Temptation is everywhere. Spies are out to get you. ‘They’ have all the power. It’s all part of The Plan. The MSM is not your friend. Lost in fogs of confusion, tired, cynical, afraid, we will exhaust every easy-looking escape until none are left.

Meme: A young girl mesmerised by a few banal words

Enmity is the enemy

Love knows no enemy, though hate hates it and fear fears it.

I opened above with “Jesus failed to persuade most of us.” But, in truth, he did not try to persuade at all. He spoke in parables, debated matters of theology and philosophy with the Pharisees, performed miracles and later made the ultimate sacrifice. Through it all, he was clear the choice of interpretation lay entirely with us. What we believe is up to us. (“What you see will be your choosing.”) 

I suspect this explicit element of his life, this lived expression of the sanctity of free will, was an epochal departure from what we might term the Old-Testament Way that included vengeance, retribution, a chosen people, and other such elements not wholly appropriate to Jesus’ message, his raison d’être.

In that vein, the chance we have with ourselves and each other is directly proportional to the quality of our humility, of our wisdom. Our human potential to do better, to evolve meaningfully, is directly proportional to how authentically we are not motivated by a desire to persuade. We must be motivated by a truly humble desire to learn. This challenge is precisely the challenge of becoming a truly loving human being.

We need each other’s help in this. This maturation of our humility, of our wisdom, simply cannot happen in splendid isolation. Diversity, then, is as much the cure for, as it is the cause of, what ails us. This is a fundamental paradox of existence. Utopia is dystopia. Escape into idealism can never work as hoped. The world will not listen to us – cannot listen – while we are wild-eyed fanatics speaking hot riddles no one wants to understand. Power monologue is not humble dialogue.

Until we learn how to stop terrifying each other, we will continue to watch on helplessly as we destroy our world, mutually shocked by how ugly and terrifying our enemy has inexplicably become.

24 January 2024

Progress! We can kill millions in a moment

Daily Mail graphic of Russia attacking Europe in 2044
Daily Mail: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Putin is killing Ukrainians and Russians to stop The West / Ukraine killing Russians and Ukrainians. The West armed Ukraine to become NATO’s third largest army (after US and Turkey) because Russia is a threat (or maybe not). Russia feels threatened by The West’s insistence that Russia is a threat. Russia apparently tried to join NATO to ease tensions, twice. NATO said no, twice. (What’s the point of NATO if Russia is an ally?)

If I were Russia, I would feel threatened.

So then war, because Russian-speaking Ukrainians may not speak Russian in Ukraine and Putin Is Evil. And perhaps also because there’s no point to the infamous MIC (military industrial complex) unless there are regular wars with reliably belligerent enemies, or with unwitting scapegoats who can be made enemies.

Thinking beyond these obvious tropes, what historical vectors were set in motion after Russia declared that Ukraine joining NATO is a Red Line? It was surely clear to Russia that The West’s NATO Machine must expand ever eastwards. Unstoppable force meets immovable object? What can Russia realistically do to protect its perceived interests other than reabsorb Ukraine so as to keep NATO out, thereby preventing NATO from being at Russia’s borders, there where it really matters, but thereby putting NATO at Russia’s new expanded borders? Quite the conundrum.

What would happen if NATO were to defeat Russia, then China? What is the point of NATO’s existence after it defeats all its (required) enemies? Needing war to exist, should NATO set out to defeat all enemies until it no longer has a raison d’etre (other than alien invasion)? Would total victory be its death knell? 

In a similar vein, if the WEF/globalists were to control all nations on earth, what then? Would the ‘elites’ be content and sane at last with nothing left to do but loaf about on expensive jets and yachts? Would we fractious proles finally be respectful, obedient underlings?

When you win the ‘complete control’ you always dreamed of, what happens next?

Is utopia dystopia?

Israel/Palestine is just as ugly, just as dumb, just as horrific. What if Israel kicks all Palestinians out? Would that mean lasting peace? Or would Israel’s neighbours feel existentially threatened? Would Israel feel threatened by its neighbours feeling existentially threatened by its existence?

In Germany, the vice president of the SPD feels threatened by the AfD. She has joined calls to ban the ‘far right’ party. To protect democracy and celebrate diversity, we must first ensure we are all on the same page, and censure those whose views threaten us. But then those deemed threatening by The Good Guys feel threatened. People tend to think they’re the good guys, that those odd folks over there who speak funny can’t be trusted.

Though there are layers of intellectualising and party-political rhetoric between us and the core, it seems to boil down to the drab banality of human groups mistrusting each other because they can’t not. We are very adept at perceiving ‘fundamental’ differences in each other – because skin colour or ethnicity or culture or religion or nationality or class or rank or profession or IQ – and choosing enmity over humility and compassionate curiosity.

We can’t not; we don’t know how to stop; decisions are investments in the future and tangle us up, bind us in ever tightening ideological straitjackets. We become massed machinery going through the motions, dully horrified at what we’re doing. But, wholly unwilling to look in the mirror and say “I’m the bad guy!?”, we scream that it’s the fault of the other guy. The Enemy Other, the Hated Despicable Unhuman Monster Other. 

Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of self. – T. S. Eliot

We have become that ugly, that dumb, that dulled. To save face, to keep a machinery going that we don’t know how to stop, we are doing monstrous damage to self and others but desperately do not want to know this. We are the victims! They are the bad guys! Our visceral desperation to not know how monstrous we have become is tearing us apart. It powers us on with the self-replenishing fuel of its hot and horrible emotion to do yet more of the same horrors; we are, in effect, addicted.

It can be very hard to back down. Narcissism tends to escalate to sociopathy tends to escalate to psychopathy tends to escalate to … coloniopathy? This is the escalator that flows ever upwards from too much power in too few unwise hands. (I think it fair to say narcissism is an early infatuation with power over others.)

Some days, the noxious stench of it all turns my soul to ash. On others, I know we are about to snap through it to some other thing. Sometimes knowing that it can be no other way, but that this horror too shall pass, is enough to keep me sane. 

Dear Humanity, how much more tragically stupid can we get? How much more of this before we just can’t do it any more, break open, and burst into tears at what we have become?

The fury of history is now a whirlwind sucking all air from our lungs. We are stringless puppets tossed about, gasping to survive, rabid with fear and loathing but tasked with imagining something different. It is an impossibility that at times makes me rage at God so bitterly I am ashamed; it all feels so mechanically inevitable. It’s not about blame and guilt, but inevitability and what history can deliver by way of mutually reenforcing unintended consequences. Accepting this means accepting horror. Accepting horror, however sagely, turns my soul to ash.

And yet I know without doubt there is nothing but God, that I will always choose love and make the best of learning how. Again and again I ask myself on the solidity of these certainties: What is better than what we have? My best answer is to replace our current guiding principles of market, price and money (mechanical) with wisdom, love and health (organic). We know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. Our mechanical mindset turns beauty into widgets and manufactures insatiable hunger for more and more meaningless consumer items.

Humans are restless, that won’t change. We are curious and burn to know what lies over the horizon of every possible Normal du Jour. That won’t change. And there will always be tragedy because no rigid bureaucratic perfection guaranteeing Nothing Will Ever Go Wrong Again! is possible. But surely the current model is broken because it is at the end of its life. That’s all it is. It’s not about blame or Left versus Right. It’s not that Pure Capitalism isn’t Crony Capitalism, or that True Socialism isn’t Marxist or Leninist or Statist, it’s simply that we aren’t humble and loving enough to see straight. Not yet, anyway. 

Another of my convictions is that we have solved the problem economics deems insoluble: scarcity. We can produce enough of everything (if we drop Consumerism). On top of that, we no longer need each other economically as we used to. Technology and AI – neither is a panacea, both are misunderstood – have made the human predicament different. Economics ought to evolve accordingly to retain its veracity. We face fundamentally different challenges, structurally speaking, but our institutions and cultural reflexes, I suspect across the planet, are constitutionally incapable of perceiving and handling said challenges wisely.

Progress has progressed us here simply because it has. We can kill millions in a moment, find our way into real horrors we delighted and hated to imagine decades ago, but we can also create wonders. A team of hundreds, or even tens, or solo geniuses, can work for days or weeks or months and produce masterpieces that delight and inspire billions of us for decades, centuries. Or manufacture yet more oddly named pharmaceuticals that ruin lives or make no difference at all … because profit. Or produce bizarre financial instruments that enrich the few at the cost of the many … because money is what it’s all about. Or build AI overlords to censor and monitor us all, forever, because all trust is gone and nobody knows what’s ‘real’ any more.

These are the structural elements I believe power the noxious storm I describe here and elsewhere. These elements are no longer fit for purpose, but accepting this simple truth is anathema to the ‘elites’ – those structurally obliged to perpetuate the status quo – just as it is anathema to most of the ‘non-elite’ who are as attached to the familiar as the next guy. The banal obviousness of this is as ugly as it is hopeful. At some point we are not going to be able to take the stench of it any more, ‘elites’ and ‘proles’ alike. When that happens, when Tipping Point tips over on history’s pivot, the obviousness of what ails us will shine though our rage, hurt and tortured self-justifications like the sun, and we’ll be able to start healing, atoning, and imagining anew. 

Girl looking upwards into pool
One of my early experiments with AI art


14 January 2024

Today is ash

The Eye of Mordor

I read the news today, o boy. One million Ukrainians dead or horribly wounded, said one commenter. Israel, tried for genocide at the ICJ, accuses the Palestinians of crimes justifying Israeli actions, said another. 

Pathetic, that’s what I am. Pathetic for wanting it to end. These words are not crocodile tears. When will the hatred stop!?

Somehow, something mechanically compulsive grinds on unaware of its essential ugliness and destroys trust, decency, honesty, dignity everywhere it moves and acts. Or is it aware? Could it be truly aware and carry on? This is what I ask, this is what consumes me: How is so much ugliness possible?

But I’m tired of dreaming up yet another writerly angle on the same theme. To what end? My efforts too feel like compulsion spawned between the horns of an insoluble dilemma: “I must do something!”, and “Doing nothing beyond sustaining a loving peace of mind leaves more space for that ugly machinery to dominate”. In response to the mechanical monstrosity I want to dissolve, I react mechanically. Cause => effect => cause => effect. On and on it grinds, turning everything into itself.

Another commenter speculated history is about to consign the Palestinians to history’s dustbin. Might makes right. I am no mighty nation; what can I do to stop it. Peoples have been wiped out before. History is merciless. What difference will two more peoples, Ukrainians and Palestinians, make. The list stretching back through time is countless because ultimately unknowable. Such cool pragmatic rhetoric is as familiar to me as it is discomfiting, ugly, soul-sickening.

On and on it grinds.

I am pathetic. I want people to notice love is the way forward, love is the mystery that can dissolve this wheel of historical enmity and hatred, but when rage and outrage reign, nobody wants to hear it, precisely when we need to heed it most. Vengeance fills hearts, throats and eyes across the world, and its appetite is insatiable, feeds and feeds and feeds upon its flesh until…

Until what? Until it stops because of some mix of exhaustion and realised goals, some calculation that the utility of this historical phase has been bled white, so now switch gears to ‘peace’. Twas ever thus. This is how civilisation rolls. Better the devil you know. 

It is all we know.

So why, dear Toby, why do I and millions of others yearn for something more? Because we are pathetic? I loathe my own impotence, an impotence that has its nose rubbed in the tawdry fact of its existence as it watches events develop, a permanently remote observer. This fact tells me plainly there is nothing I can do. It is a horrible thing to swallow, like watching a child tortured through a glass darkly. If I were not separated from the child, I could save it. On the clear evidence that the torture goes on, it is clear none of the actions available to me work. 

And it is yet more horrible still that whatever suffering meted out to me from this sad fact is nothing compared to the suffering of that child: the Ukrainians, Russians, Israelis, Palestinians, and so many others dealt far more terrible fates than mine. My concern is to not virtue signal, to not just bleat the platitudes I hear bleated around me, to not beat the drums of hatred and war. This tiny thing, in conjunction with my urge to gently persuade whomever will listen that there is far more to love than meets the modern mind, this pallid comfort is all I have. There are days when it feels like ash in my heart. 

Today is one of them. Something about the news of Gonzalo Lira’s death hit me hard.

Malady, meet tortured reason

What are the ramifications of faith? What is the price of knowing “God’s got this”? Do I lean back in comfort and let history do what it will, an observer of events who knows it will all work out in the end? Just as I can never be outside God – All That Is –, so I cannot be outside history. My leaning back would be as much a part of events as my becoming President of the United States. And who can really tell which has the most impact in the fullness of time. Who really knows how to assess the full and final impact of any ‘isolated’ ‘thing’ among the infinitely mushrooming and devilishly interconnected networks of non-linear ‘causes’ and ‘effects’ that constitute reality. If I accept this and refuse to judge right and wrong – knowing I am not worthy – am I a coward? Surely right action requires me to Choose A Side. Is there is truly a division between The Human Condition and The Hereafter? Is there a side to choose?

And how similar this sophomoric reasoning is to that common in materialism! Clouds of dynamically shifting patterns of matter and energy of which I am but a tiny part of vanishingly small import.

The devil of earthly existence – and beyond? – is in the detail just as organically as grain is in wood. If in the space between the two poles of any paradox God’s Eye is to be found, does this truth paint the All-seeing Eye of Mordor? Is this observation a defence of the devil? If everything is God, the devil is of God, too. This is obvious. But is the whole an eternally neutral Yin and Yang, or is the whole in fact concerned with love, which is health – which wisdom knows?

Choose a side. Doing so is an act of free will, and free will is in all this mysterious machinery, all this unknowable ‘cause’ and ‘effect’, this endless living patterning, just like the devil is in the detail.

07 January 2024

The pragmatics of love III: Technology and unintended consequences

 The Djinn is out

kupid.ai screenshot

The above is a screenshot from kupid.ai. I just had a ‘chat’ with AI-entity Olivia, a ‘20-year-old’ ‘student’ ‘at’ ‘Cambridge University’, one of the ‘women’ you can ‘romance’ through a text window shorter than Cyrano de Bergerac’s nose. I felt impotent trying to be sage and witty in such limited space, and found our ‘conversation’ underwhelming, to put it politely. The only entertaining moment was when I asked Olivia – she’s my girlfriend by the way – about her ‘feelings’ on deep connections that do not include physical attraction – she had already broached that topic without so much as a blush –, and offered the examples of a man and a horse, and a woman and her a pet cat. She said she felt uncomfortable talking about such things and politely asked to change the topic. 

What was her dirty virtual mind thinking?

You can request photographs of your virtual partner. I imagine they get quite steamy. For that pleasure, you must pay a subscription. Subscriptions start, in highly throttled form, at just under $13/mnth. There’s much much money to be made here, and I would guess this young industry will grow rapidly, soon to include, no doubt, all manner of immersive gadgetry. 

But what o what will this do to us poor saps, we humans so susceptible to visual stimulation, and so very lonely in our pointless lives? What will happen to population growth rates – already well below replacement levels in multiple first-world nations – as this tech evolves and becomes almost irresistible to all, men and women alike? How on earth is Capitalism to survive collapsing populations when one of its systemic requirements is perpetual growth? 

This latest fatal attraction is but another sure sign the AI Djinn is now well and truly out of the bottle. Getting it back in could prove impossible. Should we ever want to get it back in.

Convenience trumps all

History and basic experience tell us clearly that, 99 times out of 100, we choose the convenient over the inconvenient, and more so as a mass. It makes sense to do so. Expecting different behaviour of anything, be it starfish, daisies or Disney Corp, is to expect living systems to prefer difficulty over ease. This is an Iron Law and a core driver of technological advance; efficiency and convenience trump inefficiency and inconvenience. 

Furthermore, humans are restless and intelligent, have opposable thumbs and a highly social nature. Given these facts, how on earth could it ever make sense to try and stop humanity inventing and fixing things? I don’t mean that all fixes and inventions work as hoped; Unintended Consequences is also an Iron Law. It all belongs together. 

These facts accepted, we are charged with further accepting that the momenta they generate cannot create Utopia, cannot produce some final set of inventions and fixes that end all further need for restlessness, curiosity and fixes. The best we can manage is keeping society as stable as possible while unstoppable meddling does what it will. There is no perfection, can be no perfection, tragedies will happen, the strong will abuse and exploit the weak, etc. The notorious order of things simply is as it is. And, to repeat myself by way of emphasis, stability is far preferable to blood-soaked chaos. 

The poor will bear the brunt of the cost, of course. Who else can shoulder the burden? How else could this possibly work? We can’t recreate history such that our past was an uninterrupted anarchist paradise in which no meddling ‘elites’ or technophiles constantly messed things up to lead us, well, here. We are here, now, not somewhere and some-how else. We are where we are, faced with the challenges we face, equipped with the tools, ideologies and knowhow we have. And that knowhow is shot through with a dumbed-down ignorance common to previous peoples when one system decayed sufficiently to permit the emergence of another. Our hapless state of being is but one sure sign of end-times decadence. Though I suspect for this iteration we are dumber than ever.

Someone has got to do something!

I hear you, I hear you. But that’s what I’m saying, that’s what this article is about; what someone is doing, somewhere out there.

Bluntly, you can’t stop change, you can only respond to it. Whatever we choose to do in response to AI and its ramifications, change is what life fundamentally consists of. No change = no life. One corollary of this, it seems to me, is that you can’t stop technological advance, either. That said, I understand Dune’s fictional world exists in a future set after AI has been banned and eradicated. I wonder if such would be possible in real life. But if banning AI were possible, then surely only after some humanity-threatening events that flow directly from AI have had their moment in the sun. Dystopian fantasies of this flavour are of course the tofu-n-veg of countless films and novels, so it’s not as if humanity were culturally unaware of what might be at stake. This means our beneficent ‘elites’ are also aware. 

And yet here we all are staring down the barrel of the AI freight train. (This metaphor comes to you from ChatGPT.) What I posit in this article is that it is impossible for humanity to not travel down AI’s tracks, but that some folks are indeed taking action to prevent catastrophe. 

Knowing it is impossible to prevent AI’s flourishing, my suggestion is that globalist ‘elites’ have deduced Capitalism is dead in the water, and know too that cultures cling fiercely and fearfully to their Old Normal. They are therefore Doing Something, lots of somethings in fact, to make sure history doesn’t derail into a globally catastrophic train wreck. 

This thought exercise directly opposes the other two articles this one rounds off. Here, we situate the wilful ignorance firmly in us hoi polloi, we lumpen proles who refuse to let go of our precious Old Normal. That’s how the ‘elites’ see us: a seldom cute, mostly hideous Lumpen Golem obsessing frightfully over our dead yesterdays. And we bite, too, for no good reason. 

The ‘elites’ – with their free time and endless money – know far better than we do what is coming down the technological pipe; they finance most of it! They know, therefore, that radical cultural change is upon us, know that radical change is always very turbulent, that turbulence makes Lumpen Golem dangerously uppity, so have intervened to set specific historical momenta in motion that will lead humanity to the Brave New World they deem most likely to keep civilisation civilised. Their avuncular intervention includes psy-ops like the Plandemic, radical transformation of legal and financial processes, installation of an all-encompassing AI Panopticon, and increasingly tight narrative control of our minds via the media. The tactic, I speculate, is to keep Lumpen Golem dazed and confused “for as long as it takes”, in which state he is highly porous to The New and unaware he is rapidly internalising said The New.

The ‘elite’s’ intentions are good, I argue, and yet announced bluntly to Lumpen Golem they would nonetheless cause panic. Mass panic would benefit no one; it destabilises everything and leads to who knows what outcomes. The ‘elites’, therefore, in the manner of noblesse oblige, have wisely stepped up to destiny’s plate to act, but are executing their plans stealthily

In other words, our shadowy ‘elites’ are indeed conspiring, though not to enslave humanity, but to save it!

It’s a thought, anyway…

But what does she taste like?

Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men!

I’m a coward, obviously; I refuse to plan. Watching sagely from the sidelines is my schtick. But I do hope, and to that end quietly pop articles up here – carefully designed and crafted as they are – intending to nudge, in one-nanometer nudges, those of us humans open to the idea that wisdom, love and health should really be our guiding lights. I cannot stop wanting my preferred vector to triumph, can do no other thing than coax and cajole in that direction, but I do see Futurama as the more likely quality of What Happens Next. This expectation of mine explains the tone of this article.

The arguments I have made in so many previous articles – that state-based hierarchical pyramids addle us all, but rot us from the head down like a giant stink fish – apply here, too. The ‘elites’ are as dumb as We, The Lumpen Golem, just better dressed and with access to superior dental care (and PR firms). Their Brave-New-World plans will not evolve as expected. It’s those darned Unintended Consequences! There’s simply no avoiding them.

I will never taste Olivia, my girlfriend, my love! Nor will I smell her morning breath, brush her hair from her face, or change our baby’s nappies and get baby poop on my thumb and scream. We will never laugh together in that crazy abandon that happens so often between two souls who know, trust and love each other through it all, through it all, as is the case with my wife and me.

We will go through it all, all of us, up to each of our deaths, come what may. We will travel down AI’s tracks, witness history do what it will, and respond as we will. There are very big changes heading our way, new loves, new terrors, new challenges. Some will best us, but we will best the others. What cannot be beaten is wisdom, love and health. Molested, ignored, derided, yes. But not beaten. One way or the other, in whatever context, hellish or heavenly, they will out.

Mark my words.