Progress! We can kill millions in a moment

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. 

One of my early experiments with AI art

Today is ash

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 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.

The pragmatics of love III: Technology and unintended consequences

 The Djinn is out

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.

The pragmatics of love II: Value

 

A tale of two values

Sometimes we just don’t want to hear nothing lasts forever. And yet it’s true (mostly*).

Broadly speaking, Everything – God, All That Is – consists of patternings whose common quality is perpetual change (evolution). Yes, its inmost heart can helpfully be envisaged as the immutable fact and pure experience of existence, but that heart is embedded within the context of perpetual change. By way of a more accessible example, although spring returns every year, each iteration is unique. And ice ages alter spring’s behaviours far more profoundly than the variations human lifespans are currently exposed to. Change, in other words, is (just about) the only constant.

As of this writing, active within All That Is is a concept humanity has dubbed Capitalism. Also active are Socialism, Communism, Imperialism, Fascism, Modernism, Post-Modernism, Post-Humanism and any number of other isms, none of which will last forever. To the extent any of them are guises or outgrowths of Capitalism, the timing of their dissolution will be closely governed by their progenitor’s.

Sometimes we don’t want to face these plain truths. This is because decisions are cumulative investments in the future. Without exception, decisions initiate vectors that then, outside our full control and awareness, intertwine into ever evolving weaves – patternings – that reveal themselves in time as Chinese finger traps binding us in some manner to their inescapable dissolution.

Too often, the modern mind finds this sort of misty-woo rhetoric infuriating. Be that as it may, things nonetheless bubble up, seemingly from nowhere, co-evolve, then dissolve into the nowhere whence they came. How turbulent dissolution turns out to be for us depends on how deeply invested we become – a process beyond our full control – in the myriad evolution-to-dissolution vectors that constitute a particular cycle, be it buying a new pair of socks to throwing them away, or birthing a new civilisation to living through its dissolution. 

Unlike a pair of patterned socks, Capitalism happens to be a vast, planet- and culture-spanning patterning in which billions of souls are deeply invested. The notion that it might dissolve at all, that it is not in fact the most faithful socioeconomic expression of unchanging human nature, is thus itchy intellectualising to most. In response to such resistance, I designed this article’s headline image to illustrate, as simply as I was able, how inevitable and historically imminent Capitalism’s dissolution might be. Its particular lensed window onto my view of things pits one aspect of value against another and tracks both logically forward to the very lip of Capitalism’s end. 

Exchange value (price) is Capitalism’s bedrock, but look where it leads. 

Ineffable value (quality) is anathema to Capitalism; see where it leads.

The former is inextricably related to the latter.

It doesn’t seem to matter which tale we track, Capitalism appears to have an inbuilt shelf life.

Taking the Devil from the detail

Where frightened minds reflexively seek the comfort of certainty, 10-point plans, hot tips for quick wealth, sound predictions for the coming year, etc., I offer what must seem like irrelevant vagaries. My own certainty is that the best way through our current historical turbulence – which is as violent as it is bureaucratically monotonic - is the trinity of wisdom, health and love. I suspect such advice is currently so thoroughly out of vogue because the only way to honour and nurture this vital, fundamental trinity to a living vibrancy is to Know For Yourself. This is no quick fix promised by a charismatic authority figure; it takes patience and perseverance, seems of uncertain outcome, and requires us to take full responsibility for our lives. 

Nothing reports back to us more honestly on the quality of what we have become than our lives. It can take real courage to request an unvarnished report on our progress so far. Embracing wisdom, love and health as a way of being begins with this.

Know for yourself: Evolve in wisdom through mindfulness and patience. Observe attentively as wisdom slowly evolves to house the truth – the True – ever more cosily, exactly as you mature in your ability to humbly, openly allow others their knowings, their pace, their perspectives. This manner of being is the one true and lasting antidote to the divide-and-conquer tactics, to narcissism and its siblings, that infantilise us, censor us, depress us. 

Without wisdom, love and health as our loadstone, when irksome details must be faced, the devil surges up to scatter our potential and hope to the winds.

As old as humanity, this advice is out of fashion for now. But as things continue to unravel, as the choking, noxious dishonour exuded by those in power and promulgated via the useful idiocy of establishment experts infects all pores, personal and societal, so the truth of what I merely repeat here is growing in resonance and appeal. This is what I anticipate and, to some extent, see.

Let’s consider the flowchart up top.

It begins with value. It all begins with value and how a culture handles value.

If we take value in the capitalistic sense of price – in the sense that value can be measured objectively –, the flowchart presents its twin vectors as a particular logical sequence. Because price <=> money <=> market discovery <=> supply and demand <=> endemic scarcity** are necessarily interdependent, they arise/exist as one, from price, as a living ideational dynamic. And from this living dynamic, other things must also be, or come to be. Consumerism is one, so is perpetual economic growth as systemic requirement, advertising is another, wages for labour yet another. All these things belong together necessarily; each element is a necessary descriptor of a larger whole we might call Capitalism.

By contrast, technological advance is, more deeply, a product of human invention and curiosity. Whether it thrives more under this or that ism is a subjective matter not relevant to my efforts here, though it might work its unpredictable magic more rapidly in Capitalism than in other isms, I don’t know. What is clear is that technological unemployment, once again becoming loudly important as AI flexes its rapidly burgeoning muscles, is a problem for wages for labour (I do not mean it is a problem for work itself). Wages are a foundational requirement for Capitalism; they distribute purchasing power, without which markets cannot function; no buyers = no market. 

For the sake of argument, if we only ‘need’ – can we satisfactorily define need? – to employ 20% of humanity to furnish everyone on earth with the essentials plus much else by way of luxury, what hope for a system that requires wages to distribute the purchasing power markets need by way of effective demand for what manufacturers supply? How disruptive to this system would 60% unemployment be? Or 40%?

To ponder this imponderable more coolly, shouldn’t we consider what humans actually ‘need’ to be ‘happy’ – better: healthy? Shouldn’t we consider, humbly and openly, what we require to create life meanings for ourselves that we know are real and authentic? 

If we don’t ‘need’ consumerism and advertising for such things, if most human labour isn’t really ‘needed’ any more … or more persuasively: If human labour is now, or will soon be, too costly to sustain (disruptive, societally harmful) within any system that uses price / market discovery as its guiding light, what would an economy look like that has no consumerism and no advertising? How much less labour might such an economy need than Western economies? What if, furthermore, there were no incentives whatsoever to use builtin and perceived obsolescence in manufacturing? What if no one anywhere was influenced in their desires by the dark arts of advertising? What would such a system look like?

I doubt the result could meaningfully be called Capitalism.

Because we could not reasonably call our imaginary new system Capitalism, would it therefore be worse, or terrible, or wrong, or unnatural, or unfree? If the delights of consumerism are our only real freedom, how free are we?

What do you think value is? What do you want and why do you want it? Is it money, status, power? Are these things not inextricably intertwined with Capitalism and price? There’s theory positing many complicated arguments that deal with government and corporate interference. Then there’s the reality: Money is power is money, and those who feel they must rule society know this full well.

To me, it looks like these idols, for so long now our guiding lights, reveal themselves ever more plainly as unfit for rulership, unfit for the deep formation of societal goals, as wholly incompatible with wisdom, love and health. Those that fixedly worship and advance money, status and power seem wholly given over to their sclerotic venality, dangerously misguided by their narcissistic incompetence, too deranged to see their professional unravelling. As globalist ‘elites’ dare everything to keep control of what’s wrongfully in their possession, as they pore through all data they are willing to accept to predict and manipulate the future they demand, so they ensure their demise. The harder they try, the more certain their fall. They are the rotten vanguard of a rotten system rooted in money, status and power, which are egotistical/Satanic perversions of value, honour and authority. 

The value definitions we have culturally accepted uncritically for too long are tearing us apart.

Surely this train of thought is only upsetting while we can’t imagine anything else. Upsetting to we who adhere to the West’s value system, that is. Surely such adherence is so pervasive because the ‘ruling elite’ of any system is far more invested in that system than anyone else. Any system’s ‘elite’ has at its fingertips, necessarily, the levers and dials that ‘control’ the system that sustains that ‘elite’ in its status and power. Any threat to that system is thus a threat to that which its ‘elite’ values most: the tenets of its system. Ergo, it will pronounce most loudly that There Is No Alternative, and use all manner of statecraft, public relations, NLP and dirty tricks to propagate and nurture this belief in the minds of the hoi polloi, until the system seems as inevitable und irreplaceable as gravity. 

Perhaps this explains why we can’t imagine anything else.

But nothing lasts forever. The clash between sclerotic defensiveness and unstoppable change yields historical turbulence, which is precisely what we see now, right across the planet. Many will argue this turbulence is explained by the dangerous transition from uni- to multipolarity. This is certainly a very large part of it, but deeper than this important geopolitical reality other forces are at work. At least, that’s how it looks to me. My prediction – for what it’s worth – is that the isms governing the likes of Russia and China, as well as other nations now scrabbling to board the BRICS++ bandwagon, will soon experience similar strains to those besetting the West, strains whose causal roots lie in the complex soils of technological advance as it collides with the price-based systems whose time is running out.

The other facet of value explored in the flowchart above is the ineffable, immeasurable, lived experience we all have of how our preference-based relationship with the world around us, and within us, morphs subtly and organically from moment to moment. Deep down, we know we can’t measure value, just as we cannot measure wisdom, love and health. There is something about the ineffable that won’t quite lie down and die, try as we might to reduce everything to number. As important as finely accurate measurement surely is, it is nothing but empty numbers when we strenuously ignore the ineffable. That wisdom is what is coming through now as things break apart, as science, governance, medicine, media, and justice systems are corrupted by money and ideology. 

Wisdom, love and health are as threatening to Capitalism as is price.

Conclusion

My argument boils down to this: Societal systems developed on assumptions of insoluble scarcity, which undergirds price, which requires market-based mechanisms for ‘fairly’ distributing the wealth generated in such systems, cannot accommodate change that breaks any one of their foundational elements. This could not be more obvious. The sort of historical turbulence that follows epochal evolutionary leaps – which are far from unprecedented – is best navigated by humbly embracing wisdom, health and love. 

None of this is to advocate abandoning or condemning measurement, nor in fact anything else, as a target of one’s derision or judgement. Rather, it is to advise letting go, indiscriminately, of attachment to all isms so as to allow what is truly viable to rise to the surface clearly, unhindered by vested interests, be they political, financial or ideological.

And I do not argue that money must be abolished, nor that it will, 100%-no-doubt, gently be rendered redundant by historical processes. What I have been engaged in here at Econosophy for well over a decade now is exploring the ramifications of technological advance. This endeavour has exposed me to pathways of thought and intellectual adventure I had not anticipated. I have also undergone a profound ‘spiritual’ transformation that has greatly altered the tenor and emphases of my approach and outlook. Money, I now believe, is as rooted in ‘spirituality’ – how I hate that word – as prayer. We are consciousness. We therefore live in ideas, are filtered by ideas, see reality itself through ideas as a constellation of ideas. And everything is experience. Physicality is an experience. Modernity misunderstands this, proceeds from the assumption of a mechanical universe. This assumption is rapidly losing coherence and support.

Money is immune to none of this. It is not an immutable, objective force of nature beyond our influence; it is simply a creation of our devising. It can therefore be changed should wiser heads than mine deem it necessary. We have what it takes to navigate our current cultural impasse into whatever brighter future awaits a wise handling of the coming few years.

* Well, almost nothing. In my view, the fact of existence will last forever; existence’s nominal ‘opposite’ or ‘death’ – absolute nothingness – is itself a flat impossibility, so can never occur. Ergo, existence per se cannot die, is eternal. Not only can nothing come from (strict) nothingness, (strict) nothingness – in contradistinction to the concept of nothingness – is in fact a wholly impossible non-thing that can by definition have no properties whatsoever … including the property of existence. Ergo, nothingness cannot ever be, not even for a nano-moment. Existence and nothingness are mutually exclusive. “Nothing lasts forever”, strictly speaking, is thus a very revealing truism, capable of inspiring all manner of paradoxical semantic casuistry. For example: Nothing is a ‘something’ that lasts forever in the very fact of its impossibility as immutable and eternal Truth; that is, in nothingness’ guise as anti-existence.

** It should be pointed out that whatever scarcity remains to be justly distributed can be managed without price discovery.