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"content": "Done. <br />Chrome gone. Brave all the way. <br />Perma-adblock. <br />Play Newsstand gone.<br />Play music and Google Drive transfers in process. <br />YouTube Red to be cancelled when new music service. <br />Keep gone by end of the week. <br />Blogger blog archives planned for transfer to Wordpress. <br />New main personal email account is no longer Gmail. <br />Uninstalling apps from device is cathartic. ",
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"published": "2017-08-20T00:23:38+00:00",
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"content": "Done. \nChrome gone. Brave all the way. \nPerma-adblock. \nPlay Newsstand gone.\nPlay music and Google Drive transfers in process. \nYouTube Red to be cancelled when new music service. \nKeep gone by end of the week. \nBlogger blog archives planned for transfer to Wordpress. \nNew main personal email account is no longer Gmail. \nUninstalling apps from device is cathartic. ",
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"content": "Via InspiroBot at <a href=\"http://inspirobot.me\" target=\"_blank\">http://inspirobot.me</a> ",
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"published": "2017-06-29T14:17:42+00:00",
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"content": "Via InspiroBot at http://inspirobot.me ",
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"content": "Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow<br />by Yuval Noah Harari<br /><br />This is the type of book that leaves you a much better person for having read it. <br /><br />There are few books that come close to covering as much breadth or depth as Homo Deus while elegantly tying together a grand narrative that weaves together threads of history, ideology, religion, economics, politics, culture, biology, psychology, philosophy, mind, cognition, information & communications, technology, futurism, artificial intelligence, identity, free will, and meaning. It is the sort of book that should be re-read, and which will necessarily have a greater impact and impression on those who are already familiar with many of the topics that are discussed. I can guarantee that you’ve never seen all of these crucially important topics brought together in one cohesive framework like this before. <br /><br />One of the biggest benefits is that it will force you to question. Everything. With renewed insight. <br /><br />Harari’s intellectual honesty is admirable. While there is an easy to detect and clearly expressed bias on certain topics, he presents alternatives honestly and with the open mindedness to seriously consider their legitimacy in various domains. That’s another benefit; forcing the reader to leave their echo chamber and be open to considering ideas they might have never entertained. <br /><br />My attempt to summarise the thesis is: <br />From an understanding of religion as anything that confers superhuman legitimacy on human social structures, tracing the evolution of religion and related intersubjective realities from monotheism to liberal humanism and the provision of meaning built into each, considering the competition between the sects of liberal humanism, and digging into the historical framework and societal development around each leading to the present time . . . we see that advanced developments in biotechnology, neuropsychology, computing, and communications technology threaten to undermine the fundamental structures built into liberal humanist societies that dominate today, destroy the meaning they provide, consign into irrelevance human will, identity, and purpose, and birth entirely new religions, value structures, and meaning in their place. Above all, question the desirability of this post-human outcome and the assumptions that support it. <br /><br />Selected Highlights & Excerpts:<br />This is a culled list from an original collection over twice as long.<br /><br />The physicist Max Planck famously said that science advances one funeral at a time. He meant that only when one generation passes away do new theories have a chance to root out old ones. This is true not only of science.<br /><br />In 1776 the Founding Fathers of the United States established the right to the pursuit of happiness as one of three unalienable human rights, alongside the right to life and the right to liberty. It’s important to note, however, that the American Declaration of Independence guaranteed the right to the pursuit of happiness, not the right to happiness itself. Crucially, Thomas Jefferson did not make the state responsible for its citizens’ happiness. Rather, he sought only to limit the power of the state. The idea was to reserve for individuals a private sphere of choice, free from state supervision. Yet over the last few decades the tables have turned. People increasingly believe that the immense systems established more than a century ago to strengthen the nation should actually serve the happiness and well-being of individual citizens. We are not here to serve the state – it is here to serve us. The right to the pursuit of happiness, originally envisaged as a restraint on state power, has imperceptibly morphed into the right to happiness – as if human beings have a natural right to be happy, and anything which makes us dissatisfied is a violation of our basic human rights, so the state should do something about it.<br /><br />For 4 billion years natural selection has been tweaking and tinkering with these bodies, so that we have gone from amoeba to reptiles to mammals to Sapiens. Yet there is no reason to think that Sapiens is the last station. Relatively small changes in genes, hormones and neurons were enough to transform Homo erectus – who could produce nothing more impressive than flint knives – into Homo sapiens, who produces spaceships and computers. Who knows what might be the outcome of a few more changes to our DNA, hormonal system or brain structure.<br /><br />This is what we fear collectively, as a species, when we hear of superhumans. We sense that in such a world, our identity, our dreams and even our fears will be irrelevant, and we will have nothing more to contribute. Whatever you are today – be it a devout Hindu cricket player or an aspiring lesbian journalist – in an upgraded world you will feel like a Neanderthal hunter in Wall Street. You won’t belong.<br /><br />This is the paradox of historical knowledge. Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.<br /><br />Each and every one of us has been born into a given historical reality, ruled by particular norms and values, and managed by a unique economic and political system. We take this reality for granted, thinking it is natural, inevitable and immutable. We forget that our world was created by an accidental chain of events, and that history shaped not only our technology, politics and society, but also our thoughts, fears and dreams. The cold hand of the past emerges from the grave of our ancestors, grips us by the neck and directs our gaze towards a single future. We have felt that grip from the moment we were born, so we assume that it is a natural and inescapable part of who we are.<br /><br />Movements seeking to change the world often begin by rewriting history, thereby enabling people to reimagine the future. Whether you want workers to go on a general strike, women to take possession of their bodies, or oppressed minorities to demand political rights – the first step is to retell their history. The new history will explain that ‘our present situation is neither natural nor eternal. Things were different once. Only a string of chance events created the unjust world we know today. If we act wisely, we can change that world, and create a much better one.’ <br /><br />This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies.<br /><br />In order to transmit genes to the next generation, it is not enough to solve survival problems. Animals also need to solve reproduction problems too, and this depends on calculating probabilities. Natural selection evolved passion and disgust as quick algorithms for evaluating reproduction odds. Beauty means ‘good chances for having successful offspring’. When a woman sees a man and thinks, ‘Wow! He is gorgeous!’ and when a peahen sees a peacock and thinks, ‘Jesus! What a tail!’ they are doing something similar to the automatic vending machine. As light reflected from the male’s body hits their retinas, extremely powerful algorithms honed by millions of years of evolution kick in. Within a few milliseconds the algorithms convert tiny cues in the male’s external appearance into reproduction probabilities, and reach the conclusion: ‘In all likelihood, this is a very healthy and fertile male, with excellent genes. If I mate with him, my offspring are also likely to enjoy good health and excellent genes.’ Of course, this conclusion is not spelled out in words or numbers, but in the fiery itch of sexual attraction. Peahens, and most women, don’t make such calculations with pen and paper. They just feel them.<br /><br />History provides ample evidence for the crucial importance of large-scale cooperation. Victory almost invariably went to those who cooperated better – not only in struggles between Homo sapiens and other animals, but also in conflicts between different human groups.<br /><br />If you want to launch a revolution, don’t ask yourself, ‘How many people support my ideas?’ Instead, ask yourself, ‘How many of my supporters are capable of effective collaboration?’<br /><br />In 1917, at a time when the Russian upper and middle classes numbered at least 3 million people, the Communist Party had just 23,000 members. The communists nevertheless gained control of the vast Russian Empire because they organised themselves well. <br /><br />Egypt had only two institutions sufficiently organised to rule the country: the army and the Muslim Brotherhood. Hence the revolution was hijacked first by the Brotherhood, and eventually by the army.<br /><br />We refuse unfair offers because people who meekly accepted unfair offers didn’t survive in the Stone Age. The monkey experiment, along with the Ultimatum Game, has led many to believe that primates have a natural morality, and that equality is a universal and timeless value. People are egalitarian by nature, and unequal societies can never function well due to resentment and dissatisfaction. But is that really so? These theories may work well on chimpanzees, capuchin monkeys and small hunter-gatherer bands. They also work well in the lab, where you test them on small groups of people. Yet once you observe the behaviour of human masses you discover a completely different reality. Most human kingdoms and empires were extremely unequal, yet many of them were surprisingly stable and efficient. Large numbers of people behave in a fundamentally different way than do small numbers.<br /><br />All large-scale human cooperation is ultimately based on our belief in imagined orders. These are sets of rules that, despite existing only in our imagination, we believe to be as real and inviolable as gravity.<br /><br />As long as all Sapiens living in a particular locality believe in the same stories, they all follow the same rules, making it easy to predict the behaviour of strangers and to organise mass-cooperation networks. Sapiens often use visual marks such as a turban, a beard or a business suit to signal ‘you can trust me, I believe in the same story as you’.<br /><br />However, there is a third level of reality: the intersubjective level. Intersubjective entities depend on communication among many humans rather than on the beliefs and feelings of individual humans. Many of the most important agents in history are intersubjective. Money, for example, has no objective value. You cannot eat, drink or wear a dollar bill. Yet as long as billions of people believe in its value, you can use it to buy food, beverages and clothing.<br /><br />The value of money is not the only thing that might evaporate once people stop believing in it. The same can happen to laws, gods and even entire empires. One moment they are busy shaping the world, and the next moment they no longer exist.<br /><br />It is relatively easy to accept that money is an intersubjective reality. Most people are also happy to acknowledge that ancient Greek gods, evil empires and the values of alien cultures exist only in the imagination. Yet we don’t want to accept that our God, our nation or our values are mere fictions, because these are the things that give meaning to our lives. We want to believe that our lives have some objective meaning, and that our sacrifices matter to something beyond the stories in our head. Yet in truth the lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another.<br /><br />Meaning is created when many people weave together a common network of stories. People constantly reinforce each other’s beliefs in a self-perpetuating loop. Each round of mutual confirmation tightens the web of meaning further, until you have little choice but to believe what everyone else believes. Yet over decades and centuries the web of meaning unravels and a new web is spun in its place. To study history means to watch the spinning and unravelling of these webs, and to realise that what seems to people in one age the most important thing in life becomes utterly meaningless to their descendants. A hundred years hence, our belief in democracy and human rights might look equally incomprehensible to our descendants.<br /><br />Sapiens rule the world because only they can weave an intersubjective web of meaning: a web of laws, forces, entities and places that exist purely in their common imagination. This web allows humans alone to organise crusades, socialist revolutions and human rights movements.<br /><br />The Sumerian gods fulfilled a function analogous to modern brands and corporations. Today, corporations are fictional legal entities that own property, lend money, hire employees and initiate economic enterprises. In ancient Uruk, Lagash and Shurupak the gods functioned as legal entities that could own fields and slaves, give and receive loans, pay salaries and build dams and canals. For the Sumerians, Enki and Inanna were as real as Google and Microsoft are real for us.<br /><br />This obstacle was finally removed about 5,000 years ago, when the Sumerians invented both writing and money. These Siamese twins – born to the same parents at the same time and in the same place – broke the data-processing limitations of the human brain. Writing and money made it possible to start collecting taxes from hundreds of thousands of people, to organise complex bureaucracies and to establish vast kingdoms.<br /><br />Writing has thus enabled humans to organise entire societies in an algorithmic fashion.<br /><br />In illiterate societies people make all calculations and decisions in their heads. In literate societies people are organised into networks, so that each person is only a small step in a huge algorithm, and it is the algorithm as a whole that makes the important decisions. This is the essence of bureaucracy.<br /><br />Abraham Lincoln said you cannot deceive everybody all the time. Well, that’s wishful thinking. In practice, the power of human cooperation networks rests on a delicate balance between truth and fiction. If you distort reality too much, it will weaken you, and you will not be able to compete against more clear-sighted rivals. On the other hand, you cannot organise masses of people effectively without relying on some fictional myths. So if you stick to pure reality, without mixing any fiction with it, few people would follow you.<br /><br />Fictions enable us to cooperate better. The price we pay is that the same fictions also determine the goals of our cooperation. So we may have very elaborate systems of cooperation, which are harnessed to serve fictional aims and interests. Consequently the system may seem to be working well, but only if we adopt the system’s own criteria. The key question, though, is whether this is the right yardstick for measuring success.<br /><br />Human cooperative networks usually judge themselves by yardsticks of their own invention, and not surprisingly, they often give themselves high marks.<br /><br />Fiction isn’t bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function.<br /><br />Corporations, money and nations exist only in our imagination. We invented them to serve us; how come we find ourselves sacrificing our lives in their service?<br /><br />In the twenty-first century we will create more powerful fictions and more totalitarian religions than in any previous era. With the help of biotechnology and computer algorithms, these religions will not only control our minute-by-minute existence, but will be able to shape our bodies, brains and minds, and to create entire virtual worlds. Being able to distinguish fiction from reality will therefore become more difficult but more vital than ever before.<br /><br />Defining religion as ‘belief in gods’ is also problematic. We tend to say that a devout Christian is religious because she believes in God, whereas a fervent communist isn’t religious, because communism has no gods. However, religion is created by humans rather than by gods, and it is defined by its social function rather than by the existence of deities. Religion is anything that confers superhuman legitimacy on human social structures. It legitimises human norms and values by arguing that they reflect superhuman laws. Religion asserts that we humans are subject to a system of moral laws that we did not invent and that we cannot change.<br /><br />Liberals, communists and followers of other modern creeds dislike describing their own system as a ‘religion’, because they identify religion with superstitions and supernatural powers. If you tell communists or liberals that they are religious, they think you accuse them of blindly believing in groundless pipe dreams. In fact, it means only that they believe in some system of moral laws that wasn’t invented by humans, but which humans must nevertheless obey. As far as we know, all human societies believe in this. Every society tells its members that they must obey some superhuman moral law, and that breaking this law will result in catastrophe. Without the guiding hand of some religion, it is impossible to maintain large-scale social orders.<br /><br />As individuals, scientists and priests may give immense importance to the truth; but as collective institutions, science and religion prefer order and power over truth.<br /><br />Modernity is a surprisingly simple deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.<br /><br />We are constrained by nothing except our own ignorance.<br /><br />The modern deal thus offers humans an enormous temptation, coupled with a colossal threat. Omnipotence is in front of us, almost within our reach, but below us yawns the abyss of complete nothingness. On the practical level, modern life consists of a constant pursuit of power within a universe devoid of meaning. Modern culture is the most powerful in history, and it is ceaselessly researching, inventing, discovering and growing. At the same time, it is plagued by more existential angst than any previous culture.<br /><br />The economy froze, and science stood still. The cycle was eventually broken in the modern age thanks to people’s growing trust in the future, and the resulting miracle of credit. Credit is the economic manifestation of trust.<br /><br />From its belief in the supreme value of growth, capitalism deduces its number one commandment: thou shalt invest thy profits in increasing growth.<br /><br />The traditional view of the world as a pie of a fixed size presupposes there are only two kinds of resources in the world: raw materials and energy. But in truth, there are three kinds of resources: raw materials, energy and knowledge. Raw materials and energy are exhaustible – the more you use, the less you have. Knowledge, in contrast, is a growing resource – the more you use, the more you have. Indeed, when you increase your stock of knowledge, it can give you more raw materials and energy as well.<br /><br />The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.<br /><br />This is the primary commandment humanism has given us: create meaning for a meaningless world. Accordingly, the central religious revolution of modernity was not losing faith in God; rather, it was gaining faith in humanity.<br /><br />Meaning and authority always go hand in hand. Whoever determines the meaning of our actions – whether they are good or evil, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly – also gains the authority to tell us what to think and how to behave.<br /><br />No wonder then that when we come to evaluate art, we no longer believe in any objective yardsticks. Instead, we again turn to our subjective feelings. In ethics, the humanist motto is ‘if it feels good – do it’. In politics, humanism instructs us that ‘the voter knows best’. In aesthetics, humanism says that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. If people think that a urinal is a beautiful work of art – then it is. What higher authority is there that can tell people they are wrong?<br />Note: The consequence of no objective standard <br /><br />No amount of data and no mathematical wizardry can prove that it is wrong to murder. Yet human societies cannot survive without such value judgements.<br /><br />Humanism split into three main branches. The orthodox branch holds that each human being is a unique individual possessing a distinctive inner voice and a never-to-be-repeated string of experiences. Every human being is a singular ray of light, which illuminates the world from a different perspective, and which adds colour, depth and meaning to the universe. Hence we ought to give as much freedom as possible to every individual to experience the world, follow his or her inner voice and express his or her inner truth. Whether in politics, economics or art, individual free will should have far more weight than state interests or religious doctrines. The more liberty individuals enjoy, the more beautiful, rich and meaningful is the world. Due to this emphasis on liberty, the orthodox branch of humanism is known as ‘liberal humanism’ or simply as ‘liberalism’.<br /><br />However, both socialists and evolutionary humanists pointed out that the liberal understanding of the human experience is flawed. Liberals think the human experience is an individual phenomenon. But there are many individuals in the world, and they often feel different things and have contradictory desires. If all authority and meaning flows from individual experiences, how do you settle contradictions between different such experiences?<br /><br />People feel bound by democratic elections only when they share a basic bond with most other voters. If the experience of other voters is alien to me, and if I believe they don’t understand my feelings and don’t care about my vital interests, then even if I am outvoted by a hundred to one, I have absolutely no reason to accept the verdict. Democratic elections usually work only within populations that have some prior common bond, such as shared religious beliefs and national myths. They are a method to settle disagreements between people who already agree on the basics.<br /><br />Socialist humanism has taken a very different course. Socialists blame liberals for focusing our attention on our own feelings instead of on what other people experience. Yes, the human experience is the source of all meaning, but there are billions of people in the world, and all of them are just as valuable as I am. Whereas liberalism turns my gaze inwards, emphasising my uniqueness and the uniqueness of my nation, socialism demands that I stop obsessing about me and my feelings and instead focus on what others are feeling and about how my actions influence their experiences. Global peace will be achieved not by celebrating the distinctiveness of each nation, but by unifying all the workers of the world; and social harmony won’t be achieved by each person narcissistically exploring their own inner depths, but rather by each person prioritising the needs and experiences of others over their own desires.<br /><br />My current political views, my likes and dislikes, and my hobbies and ambitions do not reflect my authentic self. Rather, they reflect my upbringing and social surrounding. They depend on my class, and are shaped by my neighbourhood and my school. Rich and poor alike are brainwashed from birth.<br /><br />Evolutionary humanism has a different solution to the problem of conflicting human experiences. Rooting itself in the firm ground of Darwinian evolutionary theory, it says that conflict is something to applaud rather than lament. Conflict is the raw material of natural selection, which pushes evolution forward. Some humans are simply superior to others, and when human experiences collide, the fittest humans should steamroll everyone else. Evolution didn’t stop with Homo sapiens – there is still a long way to go. However, if in the name of human rights or human equality we emasculate the fittest humans, it will prevent the rise of the superman, and may even cause the degeneration and extinction of Homo sapiens.<br /><br />Just as Stalin’s gulags do not automatically nullify every socialist idea and argument, so too the horrors of Nazism should not blind us to whatever insights evolutionary humanism might offer.<br /><br />Whereas liberals tiptoe around the minefield of cultural comparisons, fearful of committing some politically incorrect faux pas, and whereas socialists leave it to the party to find the right path through the minefield, evolutionary humanists gleefully jump right in, setting off all the mines and relishing the mayhem. They may start by pointing out that both liberals and socialists draw the line at other animals, and have no trouble admitting that humans are superior to wolves, and that consequently human music is far more valuable than wolf howls. Yet humankind itself is not exempt from the forces of evolution. Just as humans are superior to wolves, so some human cultures are more advanced than others. There is an unambiguous hierarchy of human experiences, and we shouldn’t be apologetic about it. The Taj Mahal is more beautiful than a straw hut, Michelangelo’s David is superior to my five-year-old niece’s latest clay figurine, and Beethoven composed far better music than Chuck Berry or the Congolese pygmies. There, we’ve said it! According to evolutionary humanists, anyone arguing that all human experiences are equally valuable is either an imbecile or a coward. Such vulgarity and timidity will lead only to the degeneration and extinction of humankind, as human progress is impeded in the name of cultural relativism or social equality. <br /><br />Despite the support of all these colonels and generals, militarily the Warsaw Pact had a huge numerical superiority over NATO. In order to reach parity in conventional armament, Western countries would probably have had to scrap liberal democracy and the free market, and become totalitarian states on a permanent war footing. Liberal democracy was saved only by nuclear weapons. NATO adopted the doctrine of MAD (mutual assured destruction), according to which even conventional Soviet attacks would be answered by an all-out nuclear strike.<br /><br />Islamic fundamentalists may repeat the mantra that ‘Islam is the answer’, but religions that lose touch with the technological realities of the day lose their ability even to understand the questions being asked.<br /><br />But numbers alone don’t count for much in history. History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses. Ten thousand years ago most people were hunter-gatherers and only a few pioneers in the Middle East were farmers. Yet the future belonged to the farmers.<br /><br />Since Marx, questions of technology and economic structure became far more important and divisive than debates about the soul and the afterlife. In the second half of the twentieth century, humankind almost obliterated itself in an argument about production methods.<br /><br />In the early twenty-first century the train of progress is again pulling out of the station – and this will probably be the last train ever to leave the station called Homo sapiens. Those who miss this train will never get a second chance. In order to get a seat on it, you need to understand twenty-first-century technology, and in particular the powers of biotechnology and computer algorithms.<br /><br />What, then, will happen once we realise that customers and voters never make free choices, and once we have the technology to calculate, design or outsmart their feelings? If the whole universe is pegged to the human experience, what will happen once the human experience becomes just another designable product, no different in essence from any other item in the supermarket?<br /><br />In 2016 the world is dominated by the liberal package of individualism, human rights, democracy and the free market. Yet twenty-first-century science is undermining the foundations of the liberal order. Because science does not deal with questions of value, it cannot determine whether liberals are right in valuing liberty more than equality, or in valuing the individual more than the collective.<br /><br />The contradiction between free will and contemporary science is the elephant in the laboratory, whom many prefer not to see as they peer into their microscopes and fMRI scanners.<br /><br />To the best of our scientific understanding, determinism and randomness have divided the entire cake between them, leaving not even a crumb for ‘freedom’. The sacred word ‘freedom’ turns out to be, just like ‘soul’, an empty term that carries no discernible meaning. Free will exists only in the imaginary stories we humans have invented.<br /><br />Liberals believe that we have a single and indivisible self. To be an individual means that I am in-dividual. However, over the last few decades the life sciences have reached the conclusion that this liberal story is pure mythology. The single authentic self is as real as the eternal Christian soul, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. If you look really deep within yourself, the seeming unity that we take for granted dissolves into a cacophony of conflicting voices, none of which is ‘my true self’. Humans aren’t individuals. They are ‘dividuals’.<br /><br />The experiencing self remembers nothing. It tells no stories, and is seldom consulted when it comes to big decisions. Retrieving memories, telling stories and making big decisions are all the monopoly of a very different entity inside us: the narrating self. The narrating self is forever busy spinning yarns about the past and making plans for the future. Like every journalist, poet and politician, the narrating self takes many short cuts. It doesn’t narrate everything, and usually weaves the story only from peak moments and end results.<br /><br />Nevertheless, most people identify with their narrating self. When they say ‘I’, they mean the story in their head, not the stream of experiences they undergo. We identify with the inner system that takes the crazy chaos of life and spins out of it seemingly logical and consistent yarns. It doesn’t matter that the plot is full of lies and lacunas, and that it is rewritten again and again, so that today’s story flatly contradicts yesterday’s; the important thing is that we always retain the feeling that we have a single unchanging identity from birth to death<br /><br />Paradoxically, the more sacrifices we make for an imaginary story, the stronger the story becomes, because we desperately want to give meaning to these sacrifices and to the suffering we have caused.<br /><br />While it’s hard for a politician to tell parents that their son died for no good reason, it is far more difficult for parents to say this to themselves – and it is even harder for the victims. A crippled soldier who lost his legs would rather tell himself, ‘I sacrificed myself for the glory of the eternal Italian nation!’ than ‘I lost my legs because I was stupid enough to believe self-serving politicians.’ It is much easier to live with the fantasy, because the fantasy gives meaning to the suffering.<br /><br />If you want to make people believe in imaginary entities such as gods and nations, you should make them sacrifice something valuable. The more painful the sacrifice, the more convinced people are of the existence of the imaginary recipient. <br /><br />Not only governments fall into this trap. Business corporations often sink millions into failed enterprises, while private individuals cling to dysfunctional marriages and dead-end jobs. For the narrating self would much prefer to go on suffering in the future, just so it won’t have to admit that our past suffering was devoid of all meaning. Eventually, if we want to come clean about past mistakes, our narrating self must invent some twist in the plot that will infuse these mistakes with meaning.<br /><br />We see, then, that the self too is an imaginary story, just like nations, gods and money. Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies we saw, novels we read, speeches we heard, and from our own daydreams, and weaves out of all that jumble a seemingly coherent story about who I am, where I came from and where I am going. This story tells me what to love, whom to hate and what to do with myself. This story may even cause me to sacrifice my life, if that’s what the plot requires.<br /><br />Medieval crusaders believed that God and heaven provided their lives with meaning. Modern liberals believe that individual free choices provide life with meaning. They are all equally delusional.<br /><br />Liberalism did not become the dominant ideology simply because its philosophical arguments were the most accurate. Rather, liberalism succeeded because there was much political, economic and military sense in ascribing value to every human being. However, we are on the brink of a momentous revolution. Humans are in danger of losing their value, because intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.<br /><br />As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms, creating unprecedented social and political inequality. In the twenty-first century we might witness the creation of a new massive class: people devoid of any economic, political or even artistic value, who contribute nothing to the prosperity, power and glory of society.<br /><br />The crucial problem isn’t creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms.<br /><br />However, twenty-first-century technology may enable external algorithms to know me far better than I know myself, and once this happens, the belief in individualism will collapse and authority will shift from individual humans to networked algorithms. People will no longer see themselves as autonomous beings running their lives according to their wishes, and instead become accustomed to seeing themselves as a collection of biochemical mechanisms that is constantly monitored and guided by a network of electronic algorithms. Once developed, such an algorithm could replace the voter, the customer and the beholder. Then the algorithm will know best, the algorithm will always be right, and beauty will be in the calculations of the algorithm.<br /><br />The system will never know me perfectly, and will never be infallible. But there is no need for that. Liberalism will collapse on the day the system knows me better than I know myself. Which is less difficult than it may sound, given that most people don’t really know themselves well.<br /><br />Once Google, Facebook and other algorithms become all-knowing oracles, they may well evolve into agents and finally into sovereigns. Having so much power in its hands, and knowing far more than we know, it may start manipulating us, shaping our desires and making our decisions for us.<br /><br />Twentieth-century medicine aimed to heal the sick. Twenty-first-century medicine is increasingly aiming to upgrade the healthy. Healing the sick was an egalitarian project, because it assumed that there is a normative standard of physical and mental health that everyone can and should enjoy. If someone fell below the norm, it was the job of doctors to fix the problem and help him or her ‘be like everyone’. In contrast, upgrading the healthy is an elitist project, because it rejects the idea of a universal standard applicable to all, and seeks to give some individuals an edge over others.<br /><br />Techno-humanism expects our desires to choose which mental abilities to develop, and to thereby determine the shape of future minds. Yet what would happen once technological progress makes it possible to reshape and engineer our desires themselves? Once people could design and redesign their will, we could no longer see it as the ultimate source of all meaning and authority. For no matter what our will says, we can always make it say something else.<br /><br />Not only individual organisms are seen today as data-processing systems, but also entire societies such as beehives, bacteria colonies, forests and human cities. Economists increasingly interpret the economy, too, as a data-processing system.<br /><br />According to this view, free-market capitalism and state-controlled communism aren’t competing ideologies, ethical creeds or political institutions. At bottom, they are competing data-processing systems. Capitalism uses distributed processing, whereas communism relies on centralised processing. Capitalism processes data by directly connecting all producers and consumers to one another, and allowing them to exchange information freely and make decisions independently.<br /><br />As data-processing conditions change again in the twenty-first century, democracy might decline and even disappear. As both the volume and speed of data increase, venerable institutions like elections, parties and parliaments might become obsolete – not because they are unethical, but because they don’t process data efficiently enough. These institutions evolved in an era when politics moved faster than technology.<br /><br />The governmental tortoise cannot keep up with the technological hare. It is overwhelmed by data. The NSA may be spying on your every word, but to judge by the repeated failures of American foreign policy, nobody in Washington knows what to do with all the data. If in the twenty-first century traditional political structures can no longer process the data fast enough to produce meaningful visions, then new and more efficient structures will evolve to take their place.<br /><br />From a Dataist perspective, we may interpret the entire human species as a single data-processing system, with individual humans serving as its chips. If so, we can also understand the whole of history as a process of improving the efficiency of this system, through four basic methods: 1. Increasing the number of processors. A city of 100,000 people has more computing power than a village of 1,000 people. 2. Increasing the variety of processors. Different processors may use diverse ways to calculate and analyse data. Using several kinds of processors in a single system may therefore increase its dynamism and creativity. A conversation between a peasant, a priest and a physician may produce novel ideas that would never emerge from a conversation between three hunter-gatherers. 3. Increasing the number of connections between processors. There is little point in increasing the mere number and variety of processors if they are poorly connected to each other. A trade network linking ten cities is likely to result in many more economic, technological and social innovations than ten isolated cities. 4. Increasing the freedom of movement along existing connections. Connecting processors is hardly useful if data cannot flow freely. Just building roads between ten cities won’t be very useful if they are plagued by robbers, or if some autocratic despot doesn’t allow merchants and travellers to move as they wish.<br /><br />We often imagine that democracy and the free market won because they were ‘good’. In truth, they won because they improved the global data-processing system.<br /><br />As the global data-processing system becomes all-knowing and all-powerful, so connecting to the system becomes the source of all meaning. Humans want to merge into the data flow because when you are part of the data flow you are part of something much bigger than yourself.<br /><br />Data religion now says that your every word and action is part of the great data flow, that the algorithms are constantly watching you and that they care about everything you do and feel. Most people like this very much. For true-believers, to be disconnected from the data flow risks losing the very meaning of life. What’s the point of doing or experiencing anything if nobody knows about it, and if it doesn’t contribute something to the global exchange of information?<br /><br />In the days of Locke, Hume and Voltaire humanists argued that ‘God is a product of the human imagination’. Dataism now gives humanists a taste of their own medicine, and tells them: ‘Yes, God is a product of the human imagination, but human imagination in turn is the product of biochemical algorithms.’ In the eighteenth century, humanism sidelined God by shifting from a deo-centric to a homo-centric world view. In the twenty-first century, Dataism may sideline humans by shifting from a homo-centric to a data-centric view.<br /><br />Ideas change the world only when they change our behaviour.<br /><br />Whereas humanism commanded: ‘Listen to your feelings!’ Dataism now commands: ‘Listen to the algorithms! They know how you feel.’<br /><br />The seed algorithm may initially be developed by humans, but as it grows, it follows its own path, going where no human has gone before – and where no human can follow.<br /><br />When we think about the future, our horizons are usually constrained by present-day ideologies and social systems. Democracy encourages us to believe in a democratic future; capitalism doesn’t allow us to envisage a non-capitalist alternative; and humanism makes it difficult for us to imagine a post-human destiny.<br /><br />Humans relinquish authority to the free market, to crowd wisdom and to external algorithms partly because they cannot deal with the deluge of data. In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. People just don’t know what to pay attention to, and they often spend their time investigating and debating side issues.<br /><br />In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.<br /><br />These three processes raise three key questions, which I hope will stick in your mind long after you have finished this book: 1. Are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing? 2. What’s more valuable – intelligence or consciousness? 3. What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?<br /><br /><br />",
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"content": "Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow\nby Yuval Noah Harari\n\nThis is the type of book that leaves you a much better person for having read it. \n\nThere are few books that come close to covering as much breadth or depth as Homo Deus while elegantly tying together a grand narrative that weaves together threads of history, ideology, religion, economics, politics, culture, biology, psychology, philosophy, mind, cognition, information & communications, technology, futurism, artificial intelligence, identity, free will, and meaning. It is the sort of book that should be re-read, and which will necessarily have a greater impact and impression on those who are already familiar with many of the topics that are discussed. I can guarantee that you’ve never seen all of these crucially important topics brought together in one cohesive framework like this before. \n\nOne of the biggest benefits is that it will force you to question. Everything. With renewed insight. \n\nHarari’s intellectual honesty is admirable. While there is an easy to detect and clearly expressed bias on certain topics, he presents alternatives honestly and with the open mindedness to seriously consider their legitimacy in various domains. That’s another benefit; forcing the reader to leave their echo chamber and be open to considering ideas they might have never entertained. \n\nMy attempt to summarise the thesis is: \nFrom an understanding of religion as anything that confers superhuman legitimacy on human social structures, tracing the evolution of religion and related intersubjective realities from monotheism to liberal humanism and the provision of meaning built into each, considering the competition between the sects of liberal humanism, and digging into the historical framework and societal development around each leading to the present time . . . we see that advanced developments in biotechnology, neuropsychology, computing, and communications technology threaten to undermine the fundamental structures built into liberal humanist societies that dominate today, destroy the meaning they provide, consign into irrelevance human will, identity, and purpose, and birth entirely new religions, value structures, and meaning in their place. Above all, question the desirability of this post-human outcome and the assumptions that support it. \n\nSelected Highlights & Excerpts:\nThis is a culled list from an original collection over twice as long.\n\nThe physicist Max Planck famously said that science advances one funeral at a time. He meant that only when one generation passes away do new theories have a chance to root out old ones. This is true not only of science.\n\nIn 1776 the Founding Fathers of the United States established the right to the pursuit of happiness as one of three unalienable human rights, alongside the right to life and the right to liberty. It’s important to note, however, that the American Declaration of Independence guaranteed the right to the pursuit of happiness, not the right to happiness itself. Crucially, Thomas Jefferson did not make the state responsible for its citizens’ happiness. Rather, he sought only to limit the power of the state. The idea was to reserve for individuals a private sphere of choice, free from state supervision. Yet over the last few decades the tables have turned. People increasingly believe that the immense systems established more than a century ago to strengthen the nation should actually serve the happiness and well-being of individual citizens. We are not here to serve the state – it is here to serve us. The right to the pursuit of happiness, originally envisaged as a restraint on state power, has imperceptibly morphed into the right to happiness – as if human beings have a natural right to be happy, and anything which makes us dissatisfied is a violation of our basic human rights, so the state should do something about it.\n\nFor 4 billion years natural selection has been tweaking and tinkering with these bodies, so that we have gone from amoeba to reptiles to mammals to Sapiens. Yet there is no reason to think that Sapiens is the last station. Relatively small changes in genes, hormones and neurons were enough to transform Homo erectus – who could produce nothing more impressive than flint knives – into Homo sapiens, who produces spaceships and computers. Who knows what might be the outcome of a few more changes to our DNA, hormonal system or brain structure.\n\nThis is what we fear collectively, as a species, when we hear of superhumans. We sense that in such a world, our identity, our dreams and even our fears will be irrelevant, and we will have nothing more to contribute. Whatever you are today – be it a devout Hindu cricket player or an aspiring lesbian journalist – in an upgraded world you will feel like a Neanderthal hunter in Wall Street. You won’t belong.\n\nThis is the paradox of historical knowledge. Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.\n\nEach and every one of us has been born into a given historical reality, ruled by particular norms and values, and managed by a unique economic and political system. We take this reality for granted, thinking it is natural, inevitable and immutable. We forget that our world was created by an accidental chain of events, and that history shaped not only our technology, politics and society, but also our thoughts, fears and dreams. The cold hand of the past emerges from the grave of our ancestors, grips us by the neck and directs our gaze towards a single future. We have felt that grip from the moment we were born, so we assume that it is a natural and inescapable part of who we are.\n\nMovements seeking to change the world often begin by rewriting history, thereby enabling people to reimagine the future. Whether you want workers to go on a general strike, women to take possession of their bodies, or oppressed minorities to demand political rights – the first step is to retell their history. The new history will explain that ‘our present situation is neither natural nor eternal. Things were different once. Only a string of chance events created the unjust world we know today. If we act wisely, we can change that world, and create a much better one.’ \n\nThis is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies.\n\nIn order to transmit genes to the next generation, it is not enough to solve survival problems. Animals also need to solve reproduction problems too, and this depends on calculating probabilities. Natural selection evolved passion and disgust as quick algorithms for evaluating reproduction odds. Beauty means ‘good chances for having successful offspring’. When a woman sees a man and thinks, ‘Wow! He is gorgeous!’ and when a peahen sees a peacock and thinks, ‘Jesus! What a tail!’ they are doing something similar to the automatic vending machine. As light reflected from the male’s body hits their retinas, extremely powerful algorithms honed by millions of years of evolution kick in. Within a few milliseconds the algorithms convert tiny cues in the male’s external appearance into reproduction probabilities, and reach the conclusion: ‘In all likelihood, this is a very healthy and fertile male, with excellent genes. If I mate with him, my offspring are also likely to enjoy good health and excellent genes.’ Of course, this conclusion is not spelled out in words or numbers, but in the fiery itch of sexual attraction. Peahens, and most women, don’t make such calculations with pen and paper. They just feel them.\n\nHistory provides ample evidence for the crucial importance of large-scale cooperation. Victory almost invariably went to those who cooperated better – not only in struggles between Homo sapiens and other animals, but also in conflicts between different human groups.\n\nIf you want to launch a revolution, don’t ask yourself, ‘How many people support my ideas?’ Instead, ask yourself, ‘How many of my supporters are capable of effective collaboration?’\n\nIn 1917, at a time when the Russian upper and middle classes numbered at least 3 million people, the Communist Party had just 23,000 members. The communists nevertheless gained control of the vast Russian Empire because they organised themselves well. \n\nEgypt had only two institutions sufficiently organised to rule the country: the army and the Muslim Brotherhood. Hence the revolution was hijacked first by the Brotherhood, and eventually by the army.\n\nWe refuse unfair offers because people who meekly accepted unfair offers didn’t survive in the Stone Age. The monkey experiment, along with the Ultimatum Game, has led many to believe that primates have a natural morality, and that equality is a universal and timeless value. People are egalitarian by nature, and unequal societies can never function well due to resentment and dissatisfaction. But is that really so? These theories may work well on chimpanzees, capuchin monkeys and small hunter-gatherer bands. They also work well in the lab, where you test them on small groups of people. Yet once you observe the behaviour of human masses you discover a completely different reality. Most human kingdoms and empires were extremely unequal, yet many of them were surprisingly stable and efficient. Large numbers of people behave in a fundamentally different way than do small numbers.\n\nAll large-scale human cooperation is ultimately based on our belief in imagined orders. These are sets of rules that, despite existing only in our imagination, we believe to be as real and inviolable as gravity.\n\nAs long as all Sapiens living in a particular locality believe in the same stories, they all follow the same rules, making it easy to predict the behaviour of strangers and to organise mass-cooperation networks. Sapiens often use visual marks such as a turban, a beard or a business suit to signal ‘you can trust me, I believe in the same story as you’.\n\nHowever, there is a third level of reality: the intersubjective level. Intersubjective entities depend on communication among many humans rather than on the beliefs and feelings of individual humans. Many of the most important agents in history are intersubjective. Money, for example, has no objective value. You cannot eat, drink or wear a dollar bill. Yet as long as billions of people believe in its value, you can use it to buy food, beverages and clothing.\n\nThe value of money is not the only thing that might evaporate once people stop believing in it. The same can happen to laws, gods and even entire empires. One moment they are busy shaping the world, and the next moment they no longer exist.\n\nIt is relatively easy to accept that money is an intersubjective reality. Most people are also happy to acknowledge that ancient Greek gods, evil empires and the values of alien cultures exist only in the imagination. Yet we don’t want to accept that our God, our nation or our values are mere fictions, because these are the things that give meaning to our lives. We want to believe that our lives have some objective meaning, and that our sacrifices matter to something beyond the stories in our head. Yet in truth the lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another.\n\nMeaning is created when many people weave together a common network of stories. People constantly reinforce each other’s beliefs in a self-perpetuating loop. Each round of mutual confirmation tightens the web of meaning further, until you have little choice but to believe what everyone else believes. Yet over decades and centuries the web of meaning unravels and a new web is spun in its place. To study history means to watch the spinning and unravelling of these webs, and to realise that what seems to people in one age the most important thing in life becomes utterly meaningless to their descendants. A hundred years hence, our belief in democracy and human rights might look equally incomprehensible to our descendants.\n\nSapiens rule the world because only they can weave an intersubjective web of meaning: a web of laws, forces, entities and places that exist purely in their common imagination. This web allows humans alone to organise crusades, socialist revolutions and human rights movements.\n\nThe Sumerian gods fulfilled a function analogous to modern brands and corporations. Today, corporations are fictional legal entities that own property, lend money, hire employees and initiate economic enterprises. In ancient Uruk, Lagash and Shurupak the gods functioned as legal entities that could own fields and slaves, give and receive loans, pay salaries and build dams and canals. For the Sumerians, Enki and Inanna were as real as Google and Microsoft are real for us.\n\nThis obstacle was finally removed about 5,000 years ago, when the Sumerians invented both writing and money. These Siamese twins – born to the same parents at the same time and in the same place – broke the data-processing limitations of the human brain. Writing and money made it possible to start collecting taxes from hundreds of thousands of people, to organise complex bureaucracies and to establish vast kingdoms.\n\nWriting has thus enabled humans to organise entire societies in an algorithmic fashion.\n\nIn illiterate societies people make all calculations and decisions in their heads. In literate societies people are organised into networks, so that each person is only a small step in a huge algorithm, and it is the algorithm as a whole that makes the important decisions. This is the essence of bureaucracy.\n\nAbraham Lincoln said you cannot deceive everybody all the time. Well, that’s wishful thinking. In practice, the power of human cooperation networks rests on a delicate balance between truth and fiction. If you distort reality too much, it will weaken you, and you will not be able to compete against more clear-sighted rivals. On the other hand, you cannot organise masses of people effectively without relying on some fictional myths. So if you stick to pure reality, without mixing any fiction with it, few people would follow you.\n\nFictions enable us to cooperate better. The price we pay is that the same fictions also determine the goals of our cooperation. So we may have very elaborate systems of cooperation, which are harnessed to serve fictional aims and interests. Consequently the system may seem to be working well, but only if we adopt the system’s own criteria. The key question, though, is whether this is the right yardstick for measuring success.\n\nHuman cooperative networks usually judge themselves by yardsticks of their own invention, and not surprisingly, they often give themselves high marks.\n\nFiction isn’t bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function.\n\nCorporations, money and nations exist only in our imagination. We invented them to serve us; how come we find ourselves sacrificing our lives in their service?\n\nIn the twenty-first century we will create more powerful fictions and more totalitarian religions than in any previous era. With the help of biotechnology and computer algorithms, these religions will not only control our minute-by-minute existence, but will be able to shape our bodies, brains and minds, and to create entire virtual worlds. Being able to distinguish fiction from reality will therefore become more difficult but more vital than ever before.\n\nDefining religion as ‘belief in gods’ is also problematic. We tend to say that a devout Christian is religious because she believes in God, whereas a fervent communist isn’t religious, because communism has no gods. However, religion is created by humans rather than by gods, and it is defined by its social function rather than by the existence of deities. Religion is anything that confers superhuman legitimacy on human social structures. It legitimises human norms and values by arguing that they reflect superhuman laws. Religion asserts that we humans are subject to a system of moral laws that we did not invent and that we cannot change.\n\nLiberals, communists and followers of other modern creeds dislike describing their own system as a ‘religion’, because they identify religion with superstitions and supernatural powers. If you tell communists or liberals that they are religious, they think you accuse them of blindly believing in groundless pipe dreams. In fact, it means only that they believe in some system of moral laws that wasn’t invented by humans, but which humans must nevertheless obey. As far as we know, all human societies believe in this. Every society tells its members that they must obey some superhuman moral law, and that breaking this law will result in catastrophe. Without the guiding hand of some religion, it is impossible to maintain large-scale social orders.\n\nAs individuals, scientists and priests may give immense importance to the truth; but as collective institutions, science and religion prefer order and power over truth.\n\nModernity is a surprisingly simple deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.\n\nWe are constrained by nothing except our own ignorance.\n\nThe modern deal thus offers humans an enormous temptation, coupled with a colossal threat. Omnipotence is in front of us, almost within our reach, but below us yawns the abyss of complete nothingness. On the practical level, modern life consists of a constant pursuit of power within a universe devoid of meaning. Modern culture is the most powerful in history, and it is ceaselessly researching, inventing, discovering and growing. At the same time, it is plagued by more existential angst than any previous culture.\n\nThe economy froze, and science stood still. The cycle was eventually broken in the modern age thanks to people’s growing trust in the future, and the resulting miracle of credit. Credit is the economic manifestation of trust.\n\nFrom its belief in the supreme value of growth, capitalism deduces its number one commandment: thou shalt invest thy profits in increasing growth.\n\nThe traditional view of the world as a pie of a fixed size presupposes there are only two kinds of resources in the world: raw materials and energy. But in truth, there are three kinds of resources: raw materials, energy and knowledge. Raw materials and energy are exhaustible – the more you use, the less you have. Knowledge, in contrast, is a growing resource – the more you use, the more you have. Indeed, when you increase your stock of knowledge, it can give you more raw materials and energy as well.\n\nThe greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.\n\nThis is the primary commandment humanism has given us: create meaning for a meaningless world. Accordingly, the central religious revolution of modernity was not losing faith in God; rather, it was gaining faith in humanity.\n\nMeaning and authority always go hand in hand. Whoever determines the meaning of our actions – whether they are good or evil, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly – also gains the authority to tell us what to think and how to behave.\n\nNo wonder then that when we come to evaluate art, we no longer believe in any objective yardsticks. Instead, we again turn to our subjective feelings. In ethics, the humanist motto is ‘if it feels good – do it’. In politics, humanism instructs us that ‘the voter knows best’. In aesthetics, humanism says that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. If people think that a urinal is a beautiful work of art – then it is. What higher authority is there that can tell people they are wrong?\nNote: The consequence of no objective standard \n\nNo amount of data and no mathematical wizardry can prove that it is wrong to murder. Yet human societies cannot survive without such value judgements.\n\nHumanism split into three main branches. The orthodox branch holds that each human being is a unique individual possessing a distinctive inner voice and a never-to-be-repeated string of experiences. Every human being is a singular ray of light, which illuminates the world from a different perspective, and which adds colour, depth and meaning to the universe. Hence we ought to give as much freedom as possible to every individual to experience the world, follow his or her inner voice and express his or her inner truth. Whether in politics, economics or art, individual free will should have far more weight than state interests or religious doctrines. The more liberty individuals enjoy, the more beautiful, rich and meaningful is the world. Due to this emphasis on liberty, the orthodox branch of humanism is known as ‘liberal humanism’ or simply as ‘liberalism’.\n\nHowever, both socialists and evolutionary humanists pointed out that the liberal understanding of the human experience is flawed. Liberals think the human experience is an individual phenomenon. But there are many individuals in the world, and they often feel different things and have contradictory desires. If all authority and meaning flows from individual experiences, how do you settle contradictions between different such experiences?\n\nPeople feel bound by democratic elections only when they share a basic bond with most other voters. If the experience of other voters is alien to me, and if I believe they don’t understand my feelings and don’t care about my vital interests, then even if I am outvoted by a hundred to one, I have absolutely no reason to accept the verdict. Democratic elections usually work only within populations that have some prior common bond, such as shared religious beliefs and national myths. They are a method to settle disagreements between people who already agree on the basics.\n\nSocialist humanism has taken a very different course. Socialists blame liberals for focusing our attention on our own feelings instead of on what other people experience. Yes, the human experience is the source of all meaning, but there are billions of people in the world, and all of them are just as valuable as I am. Whereas liberalism turns my gaze inwards, emphasising my uniqueness and the uniqueness of my nation, socialism demands that I stop obsessing about me and my feelings and instead focus on what others are feeling and about how my actions influence their experiences. Global peace will be achieved not by celebrating the distinctiveness of each nation, but by unifying all the workers of the world; and social harmony won’t be achieved by each person narcissistically exploring their own inner depths, but rather by each person prioritising the needs and experiences of others over their own desires.\n\nMy current political views, my likes and dislikes, and my hobbies and ambitions do not reflect my authentic self. Rather, they reflect my upbringing and social surrounding. They depend on my class, and are shaped by my neighbourhood and my school. Rich and poor alike are brainwashed from birth.\n\nEvolutionary humanism has a different solution to the problem of conflicting human experiences. Rooting itself in the firm ground of Darwinian evolutionary theory, it says that conflict is something to applaud rather than lament. Conflict is the raw material of natural selection, which pushes evolution forward. Some humans are simply superior to others, and when human experiences collide, the fittest humans should steamroll everyone else. Evolution didn’t stop with Homo sapiens – there is still a long way to go. However, if in the name of human rights or human equality we emasculate the fittest humans, it will prevent the rise of the superman, and may even cause the degeneration and extinction of Homo sapiens.\n\nJust as Stalin’s gulags do not automatically nullify every socialist idea and argument, so too the horrors of Nazism should not blind us to whatever insights evolutionary humanism might offer.\n\nWhereas liberals tiptoe around the minefield of cultural comparisons, fearful of committing some politically incorrect faux pas, and whereas socialists leave it to the party to find the right path through the minefield, evolutionary humanists gleefully jump right in, setting off all the mines and relishing the mayhem. They may start by pointing out that both liberals and socialists draw the line at other animals, and have no trouble admitting that humans are superior to wolves, and that consequently human music is far more valuable than wolf howls. Yet humankind itself is not exempt from the forces of evolution. Just as humans are superior to wolves, so some human cultures are more advanced than others. There is an unambiguous hierarchy of human experiences, and we shouldn’t be apologetic about it. The Taj Mahal is more beautiful than a straw hut, Michelangelo’s David is superior to my five-year-old niece’s latest clay figurine, and Beethoven composed far better music than Chuck Berry or the Congolese pygmies. There, we’ve said it! According to evolutionary humanists, anyone arguing that all human experiences are equally valuable is either an imbecile or a coward. Such vulgarity and timidity will lead only to the degeneration and extinction of humankind, as human progress is impeded in the name of cultural relativism or social equality. \n\nDespite the support of all these colonels and generals, militarily the Warsaw Pact had a huge numerical superiority over NATO. In order to reach parity in conventional armament, Western countries would probably have had to scrap liberal democracy and the free market, and become totalitarian states on a permanent war footing. Liberal democracy was saved only by nuclear weapons. NATO adopted the doctrine of MAD (mutual assured destruction), according to which even conventional Soviet attacks would be answered by an all-out nuclear strike.\n\nIslamic fundamentalists may repeat the mantra that ‘Islam is the answer’, but religions that lose touch with the technological realities of the day lose their ability even to understand the questions being asked.\n\nBut numbers alone don’t count for much in history. History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses. Ten thousand years ago most people were hunter-gatherers and only a few pioneers in the Middle East were farmers. Yet the future belonged to the farmers.\n\nSince Marx, questions of technology and economic structure became far more important and divisive than debates about the soul and the afterlife. In the second half of the twentieth century, humankind almost obliterated itself in an argument about production methods.\n\nIn the early twenty-first century the train of progress is again pulling out of the station – and this will probably be the last train ever to leave the station called Homo sapiens. Those who miss this train will never get a second chance. In order to get a seat on it, you need to understand twenty-first-century technology, and in particular the powers of biotechnology and computer algorithms.\n\nWhat, then, will happen once we realise that customers and voters never make free choices, and once we have the technology to calculate, design or outsmart their feelings? If the whole universe is pegged to the human experience, what will happen once the human experience becomes just another designable product, no different in essence from any other item in the supermarket?\n\nIn 2016 the world is dominated by the liberal package of individualism, human rights, democracy and the free market. Yet twenty-first-century science is undermining the foundations of the liberal order. Because science does not deal with questions of value, it cannot determine whether liberals are right in valuing liberty more than equality, or in valuing the individual more than the collective.\n\nThe contradiction between free will and contemporary science is the elephant in the laboratory, whom many prefer not to see as they peer into their microscopes and fMRI scanners.\n\nTo the best of our scientific understanding, determinism and randomness have divided the entire cake between them, leaving not even a crumb for ‘freedom’. The sacred word ‘freedom’ turns out to be, just like ‘soul’, an empty term that carries no discernible meaning. Free will exists only in the imaginary stories we humans have invented.\n\nLiberals believe that we have a single and indivisible self. To be an individual means that I am in-dividual. However, over the last few decades the life sciences have reached the conclusion that this liberal story is pure mythology. The single authentic self is as real as the eternal Christian soul, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. If you look really deep within yourself, the seeming unity that we take for granted dissolves into a cacophony of conflicting voices, none of which is ‘my true self’. Humans aren’t individuals. They are ‘dividuals’.\n\nThe experiencing self remembers nothing. It tells no stories, and is seldom consulted when it comes to big decisions. Retrieving memories, telling stories and making big decisions are all the monopoly of a very different entity inside us: the narrating self. The narrating self is forever busy spinning yarns about the past and making plans for the future. Like every journalist, poet and politician, the narrating self takes many short cuts. It doesn’t narrate everything, and usually weaves the story only from peak moments and end results.\n\nNevertheless, most people identify with their narrating self. When they say ‘I’, they mean the story in their head, not the stream of experiences they undergo. We identify with the inner system that takes the crazy chaos of life and spins out of it seemingly logical and consistent yarns. It doesn’t matter that the plot is full of lies and lacunas, and that it is rewritten again and again, so that today’s story flatly contradicts yesterday’s; the important thing is that we always retain the feeling that we have a single unchanging identity from birth to death\n\nParadoxically, the more sacrifices we make for an imaginary story, the stronger the story becomes, because we desperately want to give meaning to these sacrifices and to the suffering we have caused.\n\nWhile it’s hard for a politician to tell parents that their son died for no good reason, it is far more difficult for parents to say this to themselves – and it is even harder for the victims. A crippled soldier who lost his legs would rather tell himself, ‘I sacrificed myself for the glory of the eternal Italian nation!’ than ‘I lost my legs because I was stupid enough to believe self-serving politicians.’ It is much easier to live with the fantasy, because the fantasy gives meaning to the suffering.\n\nIf you want to make people believe in imaginary entities such as gods and nations, you should make them sacrifice something valuable. The more painful the sacrifice, the more convinced people are of the existence of the imaginary recipient. \n\nNot only governments fall into this trap. Business corporations often sink millions into failed enterprises, while private individuals cling to dysfunctional marriages and dead-end jobs. For the narrating self would much prefer to go on suffering in the future, just so it won’t have to admit that our past suffering was devoid of all meaning. Eventually, if we want to come clean about past mistakes, our narrating self must invent some twist in the plot that will infuse these mistakes with meaning.\n\nWe see, then, that the self too is an imaginary story, just like nations, gods and money. Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies we saw, novels we read, speeches we heard, and from our own daydreams, and weaves out of all that jumble a seemingly coherent story about who I am, where I came from and where I am going. This story tells me what to love, whom to hate and what to do with myself. This story may even cause me to sacrifice my life, if that’s what the plot requires.\n\nMedieval crusaders believed that God and heaven provided their lives with meaning. Modern liberals believe that individual free choices provide life with meaning. They are all equally delusional.\n\nLiberalism did not become the dominant ideology simply because its philosophical arguments were the most accurate. Rather, liberalism succeeded because there was much political, economic and military sense in ascribing value to every human being. However, we are on the brink of a momentous revolution. Humans are in danger of losing their value, because intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.\n\nAs algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms, creating unprecedented social and political inequality. In the twenty-first century we might witness the creation of a new massive class: people devoid of any economic, political or even artistic value, who contribute nothing to the prosperity, power and glory of society.\n\nThe crucial problem isn’t creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms.\n\nHowever, twenty-first-century technology may enable external algorithms to know me far better than I know myself, and once this happens, the belief in individualism will collapse and authority will shift from individual humans to networked algorithms. People will no longer see themselves as autonomous beings running their lives according to their wishes, and instead become accustomed to seeing themselves as a collection of biochemical mechanisms that is constantly monitored and guided by a network of electronic algorithms. Once developed, such an algorithm could replace the voter, the customer and the beholder. Then the algorithm will know best, the algorithm will always be right, and beauty will be in the calculations of the algorithm.\n\nThe system will never know me perfectly, and will never be infallible. But there is no need for that. Liberalism will collapse on the day the system knows me better than I know myself. Which is less difficult than it may sound, given that most people don’t really know themselves well.\n\nOnce Google, Facebook and other algorithms become all-knowing oracles, they may well evolve into agents and finally into sovereigns. Having so much power in its hands, and knowing far more than we know, it may start manipulating us, shaping our desires and making our decisions for us.\n\nTwentieth-century medicine aimed to heal the sick. Twenty-first-century medicine is increasingly aiming to upgrade the healthy. Healing the sick was an egalitarian project, because it assumed that there is a normative standard of physical and mental health that everyone can and should enjoy. If someone fell below the norm, it was the job of doctors to fix the problem and help him or her ‘be like everyone’. In contrast, upgrading the healthy is an elitist project, because it rejects the idea of a universal standard applicable to all, and seeks to give some individuals an edge over others.\n\nTechno-humanism expects our desires to choose which mental abilities to develop, and to thereby determine the shape of future minds. Yet what would happen once technological progress makes it possible to reshape and engineer our desires themselves? Once people could design and redesign their will, we could no longer see it as the ultimate source of all meaning and authority. For no matter what our will says, we can always make it say something else.\n\nNot only individual organisms are seen today as data-processing systems, but also entire societies such as beehives, bacteria colonies, forests and human cities. Economists increasingly interpret the economy, too, as a data-processing system.\n\nAccording to this view, free-market capitalism and state-controlled communism aren’t competing ideologies, ethical creeds or political institutions. At bottom, they are competing data-processing systems. Capitalism uses distributed processing, whereas communism relies on centralised processing. Capitalism processes data by directly connecting all producers and consumers to one another, and allowing them to exchange information freely and make decisions independently.\n\nAs data-processing conditions change again in the twenty-first century, democracy might decline and even disappear. As both the volume and speed of data increase, venerable institutions like elections, parties and parliaments might become obsolete – not because they are unethical, but because they don’t process data efficiently enough. These institutions evolved in an era when politics moved faster than technology.\n\nThe governmental tortoise cannot keep up with the technological hare. It is overwhelmed by data. The NSA may be spying on your every word, but to judge by the repeated failures of American foreign policy, nobody in Washington knows what to do with all the data. If in the twenty-first century traditional political structures can no longer process the data fast enough to produce meaningful visions, then new and more efficient structures will evolve to take their place.\n\nFrom a Dataist perspective, we may interpret the entire human species as a single data-processing system, with individual humans serving as its chips. If so, we can also understand the whole of history as a process of improving the efficiency of this system, through four basic methods: 1. Increasing the number of processors. A city of 100,000 people has more computing power than a village of 1,000 people. 2. Increasing the variety of processors. Different processors may use diverse ways to calculate and analyse data. Using several kinds of processors in a single system may therefore increase its dynamism and creativity. A conversation between a peasant, a priest and a physician may produce novel ideas that would never emerge from a conversation between three hunter-gatherers. 3. Increasing the number of connections between processors. There is little point in increasing the mere number and variety of processors if they are poorly connected to each other. A trade network linking ten cities is likely to result in many more economic, technological and social innovations than ten isolated cities. 4. Increasing the freedom of movement along existing connections. Connecting processors is hardly useful if data cannot flow freely. Just building roads between ten cities won’t be very useful if they are plagued by robbers, or if some autocratic despot doesn’t allow merchants and travellers to move as they wish.\n\nWe often imagine that democracy and the free market won because they were ‘good’. In truth, they won because they improved the global data-processing system.\n\nAs the global data-processing system becomes all-knowing and all-powerful, so connecting to the system becomes the source of all meaning. Humans want to merge into the data flow because when you are part of the data flow you are part of something much bigger than yourself.\n\nData religion now says that your every word and action is part of the great data flow, that the algorithms are constantly watching you and that they care about everything you do and feel. Most people like this very much. For true-believers, to be disconnected from the data flow risks losing the very meaning of life. What’s the point of doing or experiencing anything if nobody knows about it, and if it doesn’t contribute something to the global exchange of information?\n\nIn the days of Locke, Hume and Voltaire humanists argued that ‘God is a product of the human imagination’. Dataism now gives humanists a taste of their own medicine, and tells them: ‘Yes, God is a product of the human imagination, but human imagination in turn is the product of biochemical algorithms.’ In the eighteenth century, humanism sidelined God by shifting from a deo-centric to a homo-centric world view. In the twenty-first century, Dataism may sideline humans by shifting from a homo-centric to a data-centric view.\n\nIdeas change the world only when they change our behaviour.\n\nWhereas humanism commanded: ‘Listen to your feelings!’ Dataism now commands: ‘Listen to the algorithms! They know how you feel.’\n\nThe seed algorithm may initially be developed by humans, but as it grows, it follows its own path, going where no human has gone before – and where no human can follow.\n\nWhen we think about the future, our horizons are usually constrained by present-day ideologies and social systems. Democracy encourages us to believe in a democratic future; capitalism doesn’t allow us to envisage a non-capitalist alternative; and humanism makes it difficult for us to imagine a post-human destiny.\n\nHumans relinquish authority to the free market, to crowd wisdom and to external algorithms partly because they cannot deal with the deluge of data. In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. People just don’t know what to pay attention to, and they often spend their time investigating and debating side issues.\n\nIn ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.\n\nThese three processes raise three key questions, which I hope will stick in your mind long after you have finished this book: 1. Are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing? 2. What’s more valuable – intelligence or consciousness? 3. What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?\n\n\n",
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"content": "Trump and a Post-Truth World; An Evolutionary Self-Correction<br />by Ken Wilber<br /><br />Brexit and Trump were good and necessary things. This is the conclusion that very liberal and progressive Ken Wilber comes to by viewing events through a lens of cultural evolution and Integral Theory. According to Wilber, the alternatives to Brexit and Trump would have been pathologically worse as they would have represented an example of cultural evolution attempting to press forward in a direction that had failed and could only have resulted in more carnage and suffering. <br /><br />I first came to this realisation in approximately June 2016, although being unable to articulate it in such terms at the time it was more of a visceral intuition. The intervening 12 months has resulted in a deep-dive into these areas and the realisation that our culture had reached the equivalent of a local maxima, but hampered by lies or untruths that altered the cultural ecosystem to an extent that we were threatened with being stuck on that local maxima and at serious risk of decline if not worse. Only by conducting a sudden, traumatic, and chaotic search for new models and new worldviews could we hope to migrate to a fitter, higher, maxima on the cultural evolutionary fitness landscape. And the first step of course was to go back to foundational basics. <br /><br />This is why I posted in January 2017 that the year of 2016 was a great year. <br /><br />Consideration of these major societal issues in such a way demands that a great many things - actors, forces, trends, ideologies, events - are considered together. With many people I’ve discussed these cultural and political issues with there has been an explanatory gap, like we’re talking a different language or rather relying on or assuming the integration of so many disparate factors that one party lacks the framework necessary to even discuss these different worldviews. Almost like the concept of Future Shock levels and trying to explain high level scenarios to those who haven’t encountered the intervening levels before. <br /><br />I don’t agree with everything Ken presents in his short book, but in the main there are too many novel ideas, metaphors, and insights that provide the framework for a deeper way of looking at things and a better explanatory framework for what exactly is going on in our current cultural-political malaise. And the post-truth world that Ken mentions has little to do with Trump, for as he outlines, our current post-truth world was created by the Progressive-Postmodern-Left-(Green) worldview that dominates the cultural elite. <br /><br />Ken Wilber’s short book can be found, for free by signing up for email, here: <a href=\"https://integrallife.com/trump-post-truth-world/\" target=\"_blank\">https://integrallife.com/trump-post-truth-world/</a> <br /><br />Selected excerpts:<br /><br />On balance, the response to the recent election of Donald Trump as the next President of the United States has been extreme, visceral, and loudly vocal, on both sides. Both sides, in my opinion, are caught in too narrow a view. There is a bigger picture operating here, and it represents a larger, more integral view that is both illuminating and liberating.<br /><br />Every now and then, evolution itself has to adjust course, in light of new information on how its path is unfolding, and it starts by making various moves that are, in effect, self-correcting evolutionary realignments. The leading-edge of cultural evolution is today—and has been for four or five decades—the green wave (“green” meaning the basic stage of human development known to various developmental models as pluralistic, postmodern, relativistic, individualistic, beginning self actualization, human-bond, multicultural, etc.—and generically referred to as “postmodern”).<br /><br />But as the decades unfolded, green increasingly began veering into extreme, maladroit, dysfunctional, even clearly unhealthy, forms. Its broad-minded pluralism slipped into a rampant and runaway relativism (collapsing into nihilism), and the notion that all truth is contextualized (or gains meaning from its cultural context) slid into the notion that there is no real universal truth at all, there are only shifting cultural interpretations (which eventually slid into a widespread narcissism). If there was one line that summarized the gist of virtually all postmodern writers is that “there is no truth.”<br /><br />They believed there is no universal moral framework—what’s true for you is true for you, and what’s true for me is true for me—and neither of those claims can be challenged on any grounds that do not amount to oppression; the same is true for value: no value is superior to another (another version of egalitarianism). In short, the aperspectival madness of “there is no truth” left nothing but nihilism and narcissism as motivating forces.<br /><br />The catch-22 here was that postmodernism itself did not actually believe a single one of those ideas. For postmodernists, all knowledge is non-universal, contextual, constructivist, interpretive—found only in a given culture, at a given historical time, in a particular geopolitical location. Unfortunately, for the postmodernists, every one of its summary statements given in the previous paragraph was aggressively maintained to be true for all people, in all places, at all times—no exceptions. Their entire theory itself is a very Big Picture about why all Big Pictures are wrong, a very extensive metanarrative about why all metanarratives are oppressive. They most definitely and strongly believe that it is universally true that there is no<br />universal truth.<br /><br />When not just that all individuals have the right to choose their own values (as long as they don’t harm others), but that hence there is nothing universal (or held in common) in any values at all, leads straight to axiological nihilism—there are no believable, real values anywhere. And when all truth is a cultural fiction, then there simply is no truth at all—epistemic and ontic nihilism. And when there are no binding moral norms anywhere, there’s only normative nihilism. Nihilism upon nihilism upon nihilism. And when there are no binding guidelines for individual behavior, the individual has only his or her own self-promoting wants and desires to answer to—in short, narcissism. And that is why the most influential postmodern elites ended up embracing, explicitly or implicitly, that tag-team from postmodern hell: nihilism and narcissism—in short, aperspectival madness. The culture of post-truth.<br /><br />There were many responses to this aperspectival madness. But the major driver behind all of them, the ultimate causative agent, was that the leading-edge of evolution itself had begun<br />failing badly, obviously, and often. When the leading-edge has no idea where it’s going, then naturally it doesn’t know where to go at all. When no direction is true (because there is no truth), then no direction can be favored, and thus no direction is taken—the process just comes to a screeching halt, it jams, it collapses. Nihilism and narcissism are not traits<br />that any leading-edge can actually operate with. And thus, if it’s infected with them, it indeed simply ceases to functionally operate. Seeped in aperspectival madness, it stalls, and then begins a series of regressive moves, shifting back to a time and configuration when it was essentially operating adequately as a true leading-edge. And this regression is one of the<br />primary factors we see now operating worldwide. And the primary and central cause of all of this is a failure of the green leading-edge to be able to lead at all. Nihilism and narcissism brings evolution to a traffic-jam halt. This is a self-regulating and necessary move, as the evolutionary current itself steps back, reassess, and reconfigures, a move that often includes<br />various degrees of temporary regression, or retracing its footsteps to find the point of beginning collapse and then reconfigure from there.<br /><br />Meanwhile, the leading-edge green cultural elites—upper-level liberal government, virtually all university teachers (in the humanities), technology innovators, human services professions, most media, entertainment, and most highly liberal thought leaders—had continued to push into green pluralism/relativism—“what’s true for you is true for you, and what’s true for me is true for me”—all largely with intentions of pure gold, but shot through with an inherently self-contradictory stance with its profound limitations (if all truth is just truth for me and truth for you, then there is no “truth for us”—or collective, universal, cohering truths— and hence, in this atmosphere of aperspectival madness, the stage was set for massively fragmented culture, which the siloed boxes and echo chambers of social media were beginning to almost exclusively promote and enhance).<br /><br />The cultural belief was that everybody is created equal, that all people have a perfect and equal right to full personal empowerment, that nobody is intrinsically superior to others (beliefs that flourished with green). Yet the overwhelming reality was increasingly one of a stark and rapidly growing inequality—in terms of income and overall worth, property ownership, employment opportunity, healthcare access, life satisfaction issues. The culture was constantly telling us one thing, and the realities of society were consistently failing to deliver it—the culture was lying. This was a deep and serious legitimation crisis— a culture that is lying to its members simply cannot move forward for long. And if a culture has “no truth,” it has no idea when it’s lying—and thus it naturally lies as many times as it accidentally tells the truth, and hence faster than you can say “deconstruction,” it’s in the midst of a legitimation crisis.<br /><br />Originated by the green leading-edge in academia, this aperspectival madness of “no truth” leapt out of the universities, and morphed into an enormous variety of different forms—from direct “no-truth” claims, to rabid egalitarianism, to excessive censoring of free speech and unhampered knowledge acquisition, to extreme political correctness, to far-left political agendas that in effect “equalized poverty,” to egalitarian “no judgment” attitudes that refused to see any “higher” or “better” views at all (even though its own view was judged “higher” and “better” than any other), to modes of entertainment that everywhere eulogized egalitarian flatland, to a denial of all growth hierarchies by confusing them with dominator hierarchies (which effectively crushed all routes to actual growth in any systems anywhere), to echo chambered social media where “pleasant lies” and “reassuring falsehoods” were the standard currency. Extreme political correctness was simply aperspectival madness gone emotionally berserk. <br /><br />Under such circumstances, evolution finds it’s necessary to take certain self-correcting moves. These moves will not obviously appear as necessary correctives—they might indeed appear alarming. But the only thing more alarming would be for evolution to try and move forward on the basis of an already badly broken leading-edge. The disasters would simply increase. Green, as a leading-edge, had collapsed; and evolution itself had no choice but to take up a broadly “anti-green” atmosphere as it tried to self-correct the damage. And the one thing that was true of Donald Trump, more than any other single characteristic that defined him, is that every word out of his mouth was anti-green.<br /><br />The progressive Left is now divided between its original, foundational values of the Enlightenment and the novel values of “equality” with an emphasis on group rights and a curtailing of individual rights. <br /><br />And here’s its performative contradiction. Green officially will perceive nobody as fundamentally “lower” or “needing to actually grow,” because to suggest that any group truly needs to increase its developmental depth— implying that some levels are “better” or “higher” than others—is to be guilty, in a world of aperspectival madness and extreme political correctness, of being “racist” or “sexist” or some horrible crime against humanity. <br /><br />But green, we have seen, has gone off the deep end. In its intense aperspectival madness, it has heightened and inflamed its own madness and inflicted that illness on every area of society that it possibly can. The primary symptom of this is a widespread negative judgment and condemnation of anything different and not green.<br /><br />And there is a truly simple reason that the introduction of growth holarchies is so crucial for any effective path forward. Green is rightly concerned with dominator hierarchies. But, when green rejects all hierarchies (dominator and growth), it manages to accurately spot the problem but also, in the very same step, to completely destroy the cure. This is a cultural disaster of the first magnitude—blame for which lies squarely on broken green’s doorstep. Thus we have one of the greatest, most widespread, most damaging disasters handed us by aperspectival madness. <br /><br />The “culture wars” (which, by the way, are exactly the battle between traditional mythic religion, modern science and business, and postmodern multiculturalism) under green “leadership,” went nuclear. What green was teaching this culture, by example, were sophisticated ways to despise (and deconstruct) those who disagreed with you—they aren’t just wrong, they are the source of every major force of oppression, injustice, slavery, and worse. You do not want to embrace them with kindness and understanding, you literally want to deconstruct them.<br /><br />The leading-edge cannot lead if it despises those whom it is supposed to lead or considers them deplorable. It cannot go forward one more step if it has no idea of what a true “forward” means (which it doesn’t if it has no belief in “truth” itself ). It cannot move into a greater tomorrow if it denies “greater” and “lesser” (growth holarchies) altogether, and instead simply sees all values as absolutely equal.<br /><br />The Internet’s personality has changed. Once it was a geek with lofty ideals about the free flow of information. Now the web is a sociopath with Asperger’s. If you need help improving your upload speeds it’s eager to help with technical details, but if you tell it you’re struggling with<br />depression it will try to goad you into killing yourself. Psychologists call this the online disinhibition effect, in which factors like anonymity, invisibility, a lack of authority, and not communicating in real time strip away the mores society spent millennia building. And it’s seeping from our smartphones into every aspect of our lives.<br /><br />In the very same vein, liberals must acknowledge the way in which we refer to Trump’s base, the way we emphasize his support from the ‘non-college educated,’ the way we approach the premise of rural white America generally, relies on that very same prejudicial inference. Our hated for these people is at its very essence class-ism. This cannot be stressed enough. Contempt for white ruralites is built into the fabric of the modern liberal lexicon. We set them up as a vessel of every oppressive construct university liberalism has aimed to dismantle and we’ve sculpted these people into a caricature of barbarian ignorance. And then when we come knocking for votes, we expect them not to have noticed. In taking these people’s votes for granted while unabashedly airing our hostility, we pushed them ever closer to the precipice, and then watched in shock as they jumped. And if our own class-ism prevents us from caring about the emotional needs of those we derided as deplorable, we are not really progressives. Solidarity is a story. It’s composed of our actions and our authenticity. It’s about collective identity and collective struggle. We are not ‘stronger together’ when half of us are ‘deplorable.’ We embraced an academic, impersonal style of politics, and through our tone and narrative, the Democratic party came to embody exactly the kind of elitist hierarchy it was built to overcome.<br /><br />Without a countervailing current tilting and trending us toward our highest worldcentric and integral possibilities, we slide into our lowest common denominators, our egocentric and ethnocentric drives. (And when originally worldcentric notions regress to ethnocentric displays,<br />they take on the flavor of all amber-stage productions: an absolutistic, fundamentalist, “one-true-way” attitude, and we buy into it with a religious fervor that takes no prisoners. We have seen this happen with feminism—as, for many, it slid into an absolutistic religion, the slightest disagreement with which was viewed as deeply demonic; we saw it with Marxism—as it slid into a de facto zealot religion for millions: while religion may or may not be the opiate of the masses, Marxism became the opiate of the intellectuals; and we’ve seen it<br />with many political ideologies, when latched onto with an unquestioning fervor and absolutistic enthusiasm, slid into their lowest ethnocentric and even egocentric displays, with disaster a short step away.)<br /><br />Cultural Evolution itself finds its own headlights shining beams of nihilism, which can actually see nothing, or of narcissism, which can see only itself.<br /><br />Conversely, feeling nothing but despair at Trump’s victory is to fail to see the larger currents at work in this situation. Understanding this election—as well as similar events now occurring all over the world—as a manifestation of a self-correcting drive of evolution itself, as it routes around a broken leading-edge green and attempts to restore the capacity of its leading-edge<br />to actually lead.<br /><br /><br />",
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"content": "Trump and a Post-Truth World; An Evolutionary Self-Correction\nby Ken Wilber\n\nBrexit and Trump were good and necessary things. This is the conclusion that very liberal and progressive Ken Wilber comes to by viewing events through a lens of cultural evolution and Integral Theory. According to Wilber, the alternatives to Brexit and Trump would have been pathologically worse as they would have represented an example of cultural evolution attempting to press forward in a direction that had failed and could only have resulted in more carnage and suffering. \n\nI first came to this realisation in approximately June 2016, although being unable to articulate it in such terms at the time it was more of a visceral intuition. The intervening 12 months has resulted in a deep-dive into these areas and the realisation that our culture had reached the equivalent of a local maxima, but hampered by lies or untruths that altered the cultural ecosystem to an extent that we were threatened with being stuck on that local maxima and at serious risk of decline if not worse. Only by conducting a sudden, traumatic, and chaotic search for new models and new worldviews could we hope to migrate to a fitter, higher, maxima on the cultural evolutionary fitness landscape. And the first step of course was to go back to foundational basics. \n\nThis is why I posted in January 2017 that the year of 2016 was a great year. \n\nConsideration of these major societal issues in such a way demands that a great many things - actors, forces, trends, ideologies, events - are considered together. With many people I’ve discussed these cultural and political issues with there has been an explanatory gap, like we’re talking a different language or rather relying on or assuming the integration of so many disparate factors that one party lacks the framework necessary to even discuss these different worldviews. Almost like the concept of Future Shock levels and trying to explain high level scenarios to those who haven’t encountered the intervening levels before. \n\nI don’t agree with everything Ken presents in his short book, but in the main there are too many novel ideas, metaphors, and insights that provide the framework for a deeper way of looking at things and a better explanatory framework for what exactly is going on in our current cultural-political malaise. And the post-truth world that Ken mentions has little to do with Trump, for as he outlines, our current post-truth world was created by the Progressive-Postmodern-Left-(Green) worldview that dominates the cultural elite. \n\nKen Wilber’s short book can be found, for free by signing up for email, here: https://integrallife.com/trump-post-truth-world/ \n\nSelected excerpts:\n\nOn balance, the response to the recent election of Donald Trump as the next President of the United States has been extreme, visceral, and loudly vocal, on both sides. Both sides, in my opinion, are caught in too narrow a view. There is a bigger picture operating here, and it represents a larger, more integral view that is both illuminating and liberating.\n\nEvery now and then, evolution itself has to adjust course, in light of new information on how its path is unfolding, and it starts by making various moves that are, in effect, self-correcting evolutionary realignments. The leading-edge of cultural evolution is today—and has been for four or five decades—the green wave (“green” meaning the basic stage of human development known to various developmental models as pluralistic, postmodern, relativistic, individualistic, beginning self actualization, human-bond, multicultural, etc.—and generically referred to as “postmodern”).\n\nBut as the decades unfolded, green increasingly began veering into extreme, maladroit, dysfunctional, even clearly unhealthy, forms. Its broad-minded pluralism slipped into a rampant and runaway relativism (collapsing into nihilism), and the notion that all truth is contextualized (or gains meaning from its cultural context) slid into the notion that there is no real universal truth at all, there are only shifting cultural interpretations (which eventually slid into a widespread narcissism). If there was one line that summarized the gist of virtually all postmodern writers is that “there is no truth.”\n\nThey believed there is no universal moral framework—what’s true for you is true for you, and what’s true for me is true for me—and neither of those claims can be challenged on any grounds that do not amount to oppression; the same is true for value: no value is superior to another (another version of egalitarianism). In short, the aperspectival madness of “there is no truth” left nothing but nihilism and narcissism as motivating forces.\n\nThe catch-22 here was that postmodernism itself did not actually believe a single one of those ideas. For postmodernists, all knowledge is non-universal, contextual, constructivist, interpretive—found only in a given culture, at a given historical time, in a particular geopolitical location. Unfortunately, for the postmodernists, every one of its summary statements given in the previous paragraph was aggressively maintained to be true for all people, in all places, at all times—no exceptions. Their entire theory itself is a very Big Picture about why all Big Pictures are wrong, a very extensive metanarrative about why all metanarratives are oppressive. They most definitely and strongly believe that it is universally true that there is no\nuniversal truth.\n\nWhen not just that all individuals have the right to choose their own values (as long as they don’t harm others), but that hence there is nothing universal (or held in common) in any values at all, leads straight to axiological nihilism—there are no believable, real values anywhere. And when all truth is a cultural fiction, then there simply is no truth at all—epistemic and ontic nihilism. And when there are no binding moral norms anywhere, there’s only normative nihilism. Nihilism upon nihilism upon nihilism. And when there are no binding guidelines for individual behavior, the individual has only his or her own self-promoting wants and desires to answer to—in short, narcissism. And that is why the most influential postmodern elites ended up embracing, explicitly or implicitly, that tag-team from postmodern hell: nihilism and narcissism—in short, aperspectival madness. The culture of post-truth.\n\nThere were many responses to this aperspectival madness. But the major driver behind all of them, the ultimate causative agent, was that the leading-edge of evolution itself had begun\nfailing badly, obviously, and often. When the leading-edge has no idea where it’s going, then naturally it doesn’t know where to go at all. When no direction is true (because there is no truth), then no direction can be favored, and thus no direction is taken—the process just comes to a screeching halt, it jams, it collapses. Nihilism and narcissism are not traits\nthat any leading-edge can actually operate with. And thus, if it’s infected with them, it indeed simply ceases to functionally operate. Seeped in aperspectival madness, it stalls, and then begins a series of regressive moves, shifting back to a time and configuration when it was essentially operating adequately as a true leading-edge. And this regression is one of the\nprimary factors we see now operating worldwide. And the primary and central cause of all of this is a failure of the green leading-edge to be able to lead at all. Nihilism and narcissism brings evolution to a traffic-jam halt. This is a self-regulating and necessary move, as the evolutionary current itself steps back, reassess, and reconfigures, a move that often includes\nvarious degrees of temporary regression, or retracing its footsteps to find the point of beginning collapse and then reconfigure from there.\n\nMeanwhile, the leading-edge green cultural elites—upper-level liberal government, virtually all university teachers (in the humanities), technology innovators, human services professions, most media, entertainment, and most highly liberal thought leaders—had continued to push into green pluralism/relativism—“what’s true for you is true for you, and what’s true for me is true for me”—all largely with intentions of pure gold, but shot through with an inherently self-contradictory stance with its profound limitations (if all truth is just truth for me and truth for you, then there is no “truth for us”—or collective, universal, cohering truths— and hence, in this atmosphere of aperspectival madness, the stage was set for massively fragmented culture, which the siloed boxes and echo chambers of social media were beginning to almost exclusively promote and enhance).\n\nThe cultural belief was that everybody is created equal, that all people have a perfect and equal right to full personal empowerment, that nobody is intrinsically superior to others (beliefs that flourished with green). Yet the overwhelming reality was increasingly one of a stark and rapidly growing inequality—in terms of income and overall worth, property ownership, employment opportunity, healthcare access, life satisfaction issues. The culture was constantly telling us one thing, and the realities of society were consistently failing to deliver it—the culture was lying. This was a deep and serious legitimation crisis— a culture that is lying to its members simply cannot move forward for long. And if a culture has “no truth,” it has no idea when it’s lying—and thus it naturally lies as many times as it accidentally tells the truth, and hence faster than you can say “deconstruction,” it’s in the midst of a legitimation crisis.\n\nOriginated by the green leading-edge in academia, this aperspectival madness of “no truth” leapt out of the universities, and morphed into an enormous variety of different forms—from direct “no-truth” claims, to rabid egalitarianism, to excessive censoring of free speech and unhampered knowledge acquisition, to extreme political correctness, to far-left political agendas that in effect “equalized poverty,” to egalitarian “no judgment” attitudes that refused to see any “higher” or “better” views at all (even though its own view was judged “higher” and “better” than any other), to modes of entertainment that everywhere eulogized egalitarian flatland, to a denial of all growth hierarchies by confusing them with dominator hierarchies (which effectively crushed all routes to actual growth in any systems anywhere), to echo chambered social media where “pleasant lies” and “reassuring falsehoods” were the standard currency. Extreme political correctness was simply aperspectival madness gone emotionally berserk. \n\nUnder such circumstances, evolution finds it’s necessary to take certain self-correcting moves. These moves will not obviously appear as necessary correctives—they might indeed appear alarming. But the only thing more alarming would be for evolution to try and move forward on the basis of an already badly broken leading-edge. The disasters would simply increase. Green, as a leading-edge, had collapsed; and evolution itself had no choice but to take up a broadly “anti-green” atmosphere as it tried to self-correct the damage. And the one thing that was true of Donald Trump, more than any other single characteristic that defined him, is that every word out of his mouth was anti-green.\n\nThe progressive Left is now divided between its original, foundational values of the Enlightenment and the novel values of “equality” with an emphasis on group rights and a curtailing of individual rights. \n\nAnd here’s its performative contradiction. Green officially will perceive nobody as fundamentally “lower” or “needing to actually grow,” because to suggest that any group truly needs to increase its developmental depth— implying that some levels are “better” or “higher” than others—is to be guilty, in a world of aperspectival madness and extreme political correctness, of being “racist” or “sexist” or some horrible crime against humanity. \n\nBut green, we have seen, has gone off the deep end. In its intense aperspectival madness, it has heightened and inflamed its own madness and inflicted that illness on every area of society that it possibly can. The primary symptom of this is a widespread negative judgment and condemnation of anything different and not green.\n\nAnd there is a truly simple reason that the introduction of growth holarchies is so crucial for any effective path forward. Green is rightly concerned with dominator hierarchies. But, when green rejects all hierarchies (dominator and growth), it manages to accurately spot the problem but also, in the very same step, to completely destroy the cure. This is a cultural disaster of the first magnitude—blame for which lies squarely on broken green’s doorstep. Thus we have one of the greatest, most widespread, most damaging disasters handed us by aperspectival madness. \n\nThe “culture wars” (which, by the way, are exactly the battle between traditional mythic religion, modern science and business, and postmodern multiculturalism) under green “leadership,” went nuclear. What green was teaching this culture, by example, were sophisticated ways to despise (and deconstruct) those who disagreed with you—they aren’t just wrong, they are the source of every major force of oppression, injustice, slavery, and worse. You do not want to embrace them with kindness and understanding, you literally want to deconstruct them.\n\nThe leading-edge cannot lead if it despises those whom it is supposed to lead or considers them deplorable. It cannot go forward one more step if it has no idea of what a true “forward” means (which it doesn’t if it has no belief in “truth” itself ). It cannot move into a greater tomorrow if it denies “greater” and “lesser” (growth holarchies) altogether, and instead simply sees all values as absolutely equal.\n\nThe Internet’s personality has changed. Once it was a geek with lofty ideals about the free flow of information. Now the web is a sociopath with Asperger’s. If you need help improving your upload speeds it’s eager to help with technical details, but if you tell it you’re struggling with\ndepression it will try to goad you into killing yourself. Psychologists call this the online disinhibition effect, in which factors like anonymity, invisibility, a lack of authority, and not communicating in real time strip away the mores society spent millennia building. And it’s seeping from our smartphones into every aspect of our lives.\n\nIn the very same vein, liberals must acknowledge the way in which we refer to Trump’s base, the way we emphasize his support from the ‘non-college educated,’ the way we approach the premise of rural white America generally, relies on that very same prejudicial inference. Our hated for these people is at its very essence class-ism. This cannot be stressed enough. Contempt for white ruralites is built into the fabric of the modern liberal lexicon. We set them up as a vessel of every oppressive construct university liberalism has aimed to dismantle and we’ve sculpted these people into a caricature of barbarian ignorance. And then when we come knocking for votes, we expect them not to have noticed. In taking these people’s votes for granted while unabashedly airing our hostility, we pushed them ever closer to the precipice, and then watched in shock as they jumped. And if our own class-ism prevents us from caring about the emotional needs of those we derided as deplorable, we are not really progressives. Solidarity is a story. It’s composed of our actions and our authenticity. It’s about collective identity and collective struggle. We are not ‘stronger together’ when half of us are ‘deplorable.’ We embraced an academic, impersonal style of politics, and through our tone and narrative, the Democratic party came to embody exactly the kind of elitist hierarchy it was built to overcome.\n\nWithout a countervailing current tilting and trending us toward our highest worldcentric and integral possibilities, we slide into our lowest common denominators, our egocentric and ethnocentric drives. (And when originally worldcentric notions regress to ethnocentric displays,\nthey take on the flavor of all amber-stage productions: an absolutistic, fundamentalist, “one-true-way” attitude, and we buy into it with a religious fervor that takes no prisoners. We have seen this happen with feminism—as, for many, it slid into an absolutistic religion, the slightest disagreement with which was viewed as deeply demonic; we saw it with Marxism—as it slid into a de facto zealot religion for millions: while religion may or may not be the opiate of the masses, Marxism became the opiate of the intellectuals; and we’ve seen it\nwith many political ideologies, when latched onto with an unquestioning fervor and absolutistic enthusiasm, slid into their lowest ethnocentric and even egocentric displays, with disaster a short step away.)\n\nCultural Evolution itself finds its own headlights shining beams of nihilism, which can actually see nothing, or of narcissism, which can see only itself.\n\nConversely, feeling nothing but despair at Trump’s victory is to fail to see the larger currents at work in this situation. Understanding this election—as well as similar events now occurring all over the world—as a manifestation of a self-correcting drive of evolution itself, as it routes around a broken leading-edge green and attempts to restore the capacity of its leading-edge\nto actually lead.\n\n\n",
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"content": "SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down The Thought Police<br />by Vox Day<br /><br />In SJWs Always Lie author Vox Day takes us into a deep dive into the modern social justice movement and its eponymous social justice warriors. We get a detailed characterisation of and insight into SJW psychology, SJW tactics, SJW ideology and importantly, how to tactically and strategically deal with the divisive authoritarian SJW threat that society faces. A veteran of many SJW attacks, Vox presents numerous examples of interactions and the standard form that such attacks always take while explaining the motivations and actions of the perpetually-offended instigators and their supporters. <br /><br />By providing a foundational understanding of SJWs, a solid demonstration of the SJW narrative being always self-contradictory and internally inconsistent, and a crash course in the differences between and uses of dialectic and rhetoric, SJWs Always Lie is the definitive tome for combatting one of the more insidious threats that our society faces. <br /><br />A good read for anyone who stands for truth, liberty, justice, and classical liberalism, and who believes that this nihilistic and inherently bigoted ideology needs to be pushed back into the postmodern sewer from where it crawled out from. We fought back the Spanish Inquisition and fascist authoritarianism in times past and likewise we can fight back against SJWs today. <br /><br />Selected excerpts: <br /><br />Yet dig a little deeper, and you realise that the social justice view of the world is horribly patronising, two-dimensional and depressing. It suggests that our aspirations and opinions are necessarily bound by our circumstances of birth: that homosexuals must support grotesquely engorged public sectors to pay for “homophobia awareness” organisations whether they are needed or not; that women are always and in every circumstance victims; that blacks cannot succeed in life without special treatment.<br /><br />SJWs Always Lie is a truism because you cannot make social justice arguments without purposefully omitting crucial facts. You cannot, in other words, be a social justice warrior in good faith. SJWs see no irony in judging people according to their orientation, skin colour and gender. <br /><br />It is an ironic and remarkable feature of the American Left that there is no longer space for liberals within American liberalism.<br /><br />If you don't unquestioningly accept the SJW Narrative, then you not only cannot be oppressed, but you have taken the side of the privileged, and in doing so, have become an oppressor yourself.<br /><br />If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State. —Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda,<br /><br />The Social Justice Warrior is best regarded as a sort of unpaid amateur propagandist. The reason SJWs are so inclined to make false assertions stems from a motivation that is very similar to that of the professional propagandist, which is the need to disregard existing reality in order to bring about the preferred alternative. In the case of the SJW-preferred reality, this nonexistent alternative is known as the Narrative. The Narrative is the story that the SJWs want to tell. It is the fiction they want you to believe; it is the reality that they want to create through the denial of the problematic reality that happens to exist at the moment.<br /><br />The First Law of SJW is this: SJWs Always Lie.<br />The Second Law of SJW is this: SJWs Always Double Down.<br />The Third Law of SJW is this: SJWs Always Project.<br /><br />The SJW who has been caught lying will immediately resort to a reverse accusation intended to not only cast doubt on the credibility of the accuser, but to call the reliability of the evidence against the SJW into question as well.<br /><br />This tendency to project their own thoughts, feelings and tendencies on others can be one of the normal individual's most powerful weapons against the SJW. The accusations made by SJWs when they attack others usually reflect, on some level, something they know to be true about themselves. An SJW with creepy tendencies will tend to accuse others of sexual harassment.<br /><br />When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. —Theodore Dalrymple<br /><br />SJWs have refined speech-policing to an extent seldom imagined outside the world of George Orwell's 1984, and in doing so they have created an Animal Farm-like world where some animals are definitely more equal than others.<br /><br />The phrase “give them an inch, and they will take a mile” might well have been coined to describe SJWs.<br /><br />The SJW attack routine is loosely based on Rule 12 of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. <br /><br />SJWs don't like to be seen as the vicious attack dogs they are because that flies in the face of their determination to present themselves as victims holding the moral high ground. This presents somewhat of a challenge for them, of course, since it is difficult to be proactive about your thought-policing if you need to stand around waiting for someone to victimize you first. SJWs have solved this problem by adopting three standard tactics: self-appointed public defense, virtual victimhood, and creative offense-taking. They have also invented the useful concept of the “microaggression”. This is an inadvertent offense committed by an offender who violates the Narrative without even realizing he has done so. It is the most insidious violation because it means that the hate is buried so deeply inside the offender that he doesn't even realize it is there.<br /><br />The important thing to note here is that while the violation is always an action, the target is always an individual, and the object is always the casting out of the individual from the organization.<br /><br />The primary objective of both the isolating and the swarming is to demoralize the target by separating him from anyone who is likely to give him emotional support, and to elicit an apology for his actions.<br /><br />The reason SJWs demand apologies is in order to establish that the act they have deemed an offense is publicly recognized as an offense by the offender. The demand for an apology has nothing whatsoever to do with the offender. It is focused on the SJW's need to prove that the violation of the Narrative involved is publicly accepted as a real and legitimate offense for which punishment is merited.<br /><br />The ultimate purpose of an SJW attack is not to destroy the individual attacked, but rather to make an example of him that will dissuade others from violating the SJW Narrative in a similar fashion. And that is why it is absolutely and utterly futile for the target of an SJW attack to apologize for whatever offense he is said to have caused.<br /><br />The SJWs are “an army of self-appointed militants who see themselves as the guardians of correct thinking”, and their culture of thuggish speech-policing is on the verge of taking over society, if it has not already. <br /><br />More importantly, the coalition of gamers that coalesced around <a href=\"https://www.minds.com/search?f=top&t=all&q=GamerGate\" title=\"#GamerGate\" class=\"u-url hashtag\" target=\"_blank\">#GamerGate</a> has proven to be the first group to successfully drive back the SJWs assailing an industry, and for the first time, put the SJWs on the defensive. Where governments and militaries and corporations and church denominations and powerful organizations have failed to resist the SJWs for decades, a faceless group of loosely aligned gamers spanning the political spectrum has succeeded brilliantly.<br /><br />Game devs actually owe a tremendous debt to GamerGate, in my humble opinion. If GamerGate had not risen up, our creative freedom would be severely limited now. It's true. Gamers are the only ones who stopped SJWs and their crazy culture assault. Gamers conquer Dragons and fight Gods for a hobby. —Mark Kern,<br /><br />The lesson of the 2015 Hugo Awards is this: SJWs care so much about the institutions they control that they will destroy them rather than relinquish control over them.<br /><br />“We had to learn the hard way that by agreement to what were apparently empty generalizations or vague aspirations we were later held to have committed ourselves to political structures which were contrary to our interests.” – Lady Margaret Thatcher,<br /><br />There were a lot of things I wished to say while I was a part of the social justice movement that I couldn’t, because of “solidarity” and all sorts of other reasons. Dissent isn’t tolerated in the movement and stepping out of line will earn you whispers behind your back to ostracize you both socially and professionally. There’s always a sense that your position in the movement is precarious and that unless you stand in front of the charge, you’re going to be shut out and treated like a fairweather ally in spite of everything you’ve ever done to support the movement. It’s for this reason that you see people falling over each other to see who can vilify their targets the most. At some point, the targets that get picked are guilty of nothing more than making a joke, or saying something that could potentially be interpreted as problematic, but isn’t actually problematic. —“Games Media, Callout Culture and Gamers: an Interview With Ian Miles Cheong”<br /><br />The most important thing to accept here is the complete impossibility of compromise or even meaningful communication with your attackers. SJWs do not engage in rational debate because they are not rational, and they do not engage in honest discourse because they do not believe in objective truth. They do not compromise because the pure spirit of enlightened progressive social justice dare not sully itself with the evil of the outdated Endarkenment. They are the emotion-driven rhetoric-speakers of whom Aristotle wrote: “Before some audiences not even the possession of the exactest knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people whom one cannot instruct.”<br /><br />They don't care how you feel, they don't care about your future behavior, they don't expect to have a future relationship with you, and there is absolutely no chance they are going to forgive you for anything. You are, after all, a dangerous thought-criminal. When they push you for an apology after pointing and shrieking at you, what they are seeking is a confession to bolster their indictment. An apology is not going to relieve the pressure on you; it is only going to increase it.<br /><br />Reward enemies who leave you alone by leaving them in peace. Reward enemies who insist on continuing hostilities with disincentivizing responses that are disproportionate to their provocations. <br /><br />Van Creveld, who is Israel's leading military historian, considers practically every counterinsurgency around the world from the ancient Maccabees to the Second Palestinian Intifada before concluding that nothing, not even repeated victories on the battlefield, is as important as maintaining a high level of morale and discipline throughout the fighting forces. Remember that morale is more important than objectives, more important than leaders, more important than organization, and is even more important than victories.<br /><br />I believe that 'social justice' will ultimately be recognized as a will-o'-the-wisp which has lured men to abandon many of the values which in the past have inspired the development of civilization- an attempt to satisfy a craving inherited from the traditions of the small group but which is meaningless in the Great Society of free men. Unfortunately, this vague desire which has become one of the strongest bonds spurring people of good will to action, not only is bound to be disappointed. This would be sad enough. But, like most attempts to pursue an unattainable goal, the striving for it will also produce highly undesirable consequences, and in particular lead to the destruction of the indispensable environment in which the traditional moral values alone can flourish, namely personal freedom. —F.A. Hayek,<br /><br />Every ideology fades in time, and those founded on falsehoods tend to fade faster than most. The fact that most SJWs would genuinely deny that they are socialists or that they seek to destroy Western civilization means that sooner or later, they will be forced to confront the fact that the goals they seek, Equality, Diversity, and Inclusiveness, are utterly incompatible with personal freedom, societal wealth, and advanced technological civilization.<br /><br />Even as the institutions have been invaded and coopted in the interests of social justice, they have been rendered unable to fulfill their primary functions. This is the great internal contradiction that the SJWs will never be able to positively resolve, just as the Soviet communists were never able to resolve the contradiction of socialist calculation that brought down their economy and their empire.<br /><br />Our ideals of Truth, Liberty, and Justice are not only sufficient, but they are considerably superior to the nonsensical ideals of social justice. <br /><br />No one tells you what to do. You're just expected to look around, see what needs doing, and then do it. The only action that is completely ineffective is the one that is never taken.<br /><br />But the example of the Rangers makes clear that the combination of unpleasant tasks and high objective standards is also an effective means of keeping SJWs out of an organization. And, as before, it is apparent that SJWs inside the organization can be easily identified as those who insisted on the need to relax those standards by appealing to social justice ideals.<br /><br />It makes sense, of course, that if you are acting while your opponent is still deciding on his course of action, or better yet, still trying to get himself oriented, you have both the initiative and the advantage, and therefore your chances of winning are better than his.<br /><br />SJWs fall squarely into the category of people who cannot be instructed and cannot be convinced by knowledge. This is the key to understanding their astonishing ability to cling to their Narrative in the face of evidence that obliterates it as well as their insistence on clinging to it even as it shifts and contradicts itself.<br /><br />Dialectic is based on the construction of logical syllogisms, which therefore makes it very easy to anyone who is capable of following those syllogisms and ascertaining their validity to detect when one is lying. Rhetoric, on the other hand, is “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion”.<br /><br />Sooner or later, reality always tears through the veil of even the most powerful illusion. We have no need of numbers. One man armed with the truth will eventually overcome ten million preaching a lie. SJWs always lie. They are fundamentally in conflict with science, history, logic, and reality, and that is why they are doomed to defeat in the end.<br /><br /><br />",
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"content": "SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down The Thought Police\nby Vox Day\n\nIn SJWs Always Lie author Vox Day takes us into a deep dive into the modern social justice movement and its eponymous social justice warriors. We get a detailed characterisation of and insight into SJW psychology, SJW tactics, SJW ideology and importantly, how to tactically and strategically deal with the divisive authoritarian SJW threat that society faces. A veteran of many SJW attacks, Vox presents numerous examples of interactions and the standard form that such attacks always take while explaining the motivations and actions of the perpetually-offended instigators and their supporters. \n\nBy providing a foundational understanding of SJWs, a solid demonstration of the SJW narrative being always self-contradictory and internally inconsistent, and a crash course in the differences between and uses of dialectic and rhetoric, SJWs Always Lie is the definitive tome for combatting one of the more insidious threats that our society faces. \n\nA good read for anyone who stands for truth, liberty, justice, and classical liberalism, and who believes that this nihilistic and inherently bigoted ideology needs to be pushed back into the postmodern sewer from where it crawled out from. We fought back the Spanish Inquisition and fascist authoritarianism in times past and likewise we can fight back against SJWs today. \n\nSelected excerpts: \n\nYet dig a little deeper, and you realise that the social justice view of the world is horribly patronising, two-dimensional and depressing. It suggests that our aspirations and opinions are necessarily bound by our circumstances of birth: that homosexuals must support grotesquely engorged public sectors to pay for “homophobia awareness” organisations whether they are needed or not; that women are always and in every circumstance victims; that blacks cannot succeed in life without special treatment.\n\nSJWs Always Lie is a truism because you cannot make social justice arguments without purposefully omitting crucial facts. You cannot, in other words, be a social justice warrior in good faith. SJWs see no irony in judging people according to their orientation, skin colour and gender. \n\nIt is an ironic and remarkable feature of the American Left that there is no longer space for liberals within American liberalism.\n\nIf you don't unquestioningly accept the SJW Narrative, then you not only cannot be oppressed, but you have taken the side of the privileged, and in doing so, have become an oppressor yourself.\n\nIf you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State. —Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda,\n\nThe Social Justice Warrior is best regarded as a sort of unpaid amateur propagandist. The reason SJWs are so inclined to make false assertions stems from a motivation that is very similar to that of the professional propagandist, which is the need to disregard existing reality in order to bring about the preferred alternative. In the case of the SJW-preferred reality, this nonexistent alternative is known as the Narrative. The Narrative is the story that the SJWs want to tell. It is the fiction they want you to believe; it is the reality that they want to create through the denial of the problematic reality that happens to exist at the moment.\n\nThe First Law of SJW is this: SJWs Always Lie.\nThe Second Law of SJW is this: SJWs Always Double Down.\nThe Third Law of SJW is this: SJWs Always Project.\n\nThe SJW who has been caught lying will immediately resort to a reverse accusation intended to not only cast doubt on the credibility of the accuser, but to call the reliability of the evidence against the SJW into question as well.\n\nThis tendency to project their own thoughts, feelings and tendencies on others can be one of the normal individual's most powerful weapons against the SJW. The accusations made by SJWs when they attack others usually reflect, on some level, something they know to be true about themselves. An SJW with creepy tendencies will tend to accuse others of sexual harassment.\n\nWhen people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. —Theodore Dalrymple\n\nSJWs have refined speech-policing to an extent seldom imagined outside the world of George Orwell's 1984, and in doing so they have created an Animal Farm-like world where some animals are definitely more equal than others.\n\nThe phrase “give them an inch, and they will take a mile” might well have been coined to describe SJWs.\n\nThe SJW attack routine is loosely based on Rule 12 of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. \n\nSJWs don't like to be seen as the vicious attack dogs they are because that flies in the face of their determination to present themselves as victims holding the moral high ground. This presents somewhat of a challenge for them, of course, since it is difficult to be proactive about your thought-policing if you need to stand around waiting for someone to victimize you first. SJWs have solved this problem by adopting three standard tactics: self-appointed public defense, virtual victimhood, and creative offense-taking. They have also invented the useful concept of the “microaggression”. This is an inadvertent offense committed by an offender who violates the Narrative without even realizing he has done so. It is the most insidious violation because it means that the hate is buried so deeply inside the offender that he doesn't even realize it is there.\n\nThe important thing to note here is that while the violation is always an action, the target is always an individual, and the object is always the casting out of the individual from the organization.\n\nThe primary objective of both the isolating and the swarming is to demoralize the target by separating him from anyone who is likely to give him emotional support, and to elicit an apology for his actions.\n\nThe reason SJWs demand apologies is in order to establish that the act they have deemed an offense is publicly recognized as an offense by the offender. The demand for an apology has nothing whatsoever to do with the offender. It is focused on the SJW's need to prove that the violation of the Narrative involved is publicly accepted as a real and legitimate offense for which punishment is merited.\n\nThe ultimate purpose of an SJW attack is not to destroy the individual attacked, but rather to make an example of him that will dissuade others from violating the SJW Narrative in a similar fashion. And that is why it is absolutely and utterly futile for the target of an SJW attack to apologize for whatever offense he is said to have caused.\n\nThe SJWs are “an army of self-appointed militants who see themselves as the guardians of correct thinking”, and their culture of thuggish speech-policing is on the verge of taking over society, if it has not already. \n\nMore importantly, the coalition of gamers that coalesced around #GamerGate has proven to be the first group to successfully drive back the SJWs assailing an industry, and for the first time, put the SJWs on the defensive. Where governments and militaries and corporations and church denominations and powerful organizations have failed to resist the SJWs for decades, a faceless group of loosely aligned gamers spanning the political spectrum has succeeded brilliantly.\n\nGame devs actually owe a tremendous debt to GamerGate, in my humble opinion. If GamerGate had not risen up, our creative freedom would be severely limited now. It's true. Gamers are the only ones who stopped SJWs and their crazy culture assault. Gamers conquer Dragons and fight Gods for a hobby. —Mark Kern,\n\nThe lesson of the 2015 Hugo Awards is this: SJWs care so much about the institutions they control that they will destroy them rather than relinquish control over them.\n\n“We had to learn the hard way that by agreement to what were apparently empty generalizations or vague aspirations we were later held to have committed ourselves to political structures which were contrary to our interests.” – Lady Margaret Thatcher,\n\nThere were a lot of things I wished to say while I was a part of the social justice movement that I couldn’t, because of “solidarity” and all sorts of other reasons. Dissent isn’t tolerated in the movement and stepping out of line will earn you whispers behind your back to ostracize you both socially and professionally. There’s always a sense that your position in the movement is precarious and that unless you stand in front of the charge, you’re going to be shut out and treated like a fairweather ally in spite of everything you’ve ever done to support the movement. It’s for this reason that you see people falling over each other to see who can vilify their targets the most. At some point, the targets that get picked are guilty of nothing more than making a joke, or saying something that could potentially be interpreted as problematic, but isn’t actually problematic. —“Games Media, Callout Culture and Gamers: an Interview With Ian Miles Cheong”\n\nThe most important thing to accept here is the complete impossibility of compromise or even meaningful communication with your attackers. SJWs do not engage in rational debate because they are not rational, and they do not engage in honest discourse because they do not believe in objective truth. They do not compromise because the pure spirit of enlightened progressive social justice dare not sully itself with the evil of the outdated Endarkenment. They are the emotion-driven rhetoric-speakers of whom Aristotle wrote: “Before some audiences not even the possession of the exactest knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people whom one cannot instruct.”\n\nThey don't care how you feel, they don't care about your future behavior, they don't expect to have a future relationship with you, and there is absolutely no chance they are going to forgive you for anything. You are, after all, a dangerous thought-criminal. When they push you for an apology after pointing and shrieking at you, what they are seeking is a confession to bolster their indictment. An apology is not going to relieve the pressure on you; it is only going to increase it.\n\nReward enemies who leave you alone by leaving them in peace. Reward enemies who insist on continuing hostilities with disincentivizing responses that are disproportionate to their provocations. \n\nVan Creveld, who is Israel's leading military historian, considers practically every counterinsurgency around the world from the ancient Maccabees to the Second Palestinian Intifada before concluding that nothing, not even repeated victories on the battlefield, is as important as maintaining a high level of morale and discipline throughout the fighting forces. Remember that morale is more important than objectives, more important than leaders, more important than organization, and is even more important than victories.\n\nI believe that 'social justice' will ultimately be recognized as a will-o'-the-wisp which has lured men to abandon many of the values which in the past have inspired the development of civilization- an attempt to satisfy a craving inherited from the traditions of the small group but which is meaningless in the Great Society of free men. Unfortunately, this vague desire which has become one of the strongest bonds spurring people of good will to action, not only is bound to be disappointed. This would be sad enough. But, like most attempts to pursue an unattainable goal, the striving for it will also produce highly undesirable consequences, and in particular lead to the destruction of the indispensable environment in which the traditional moral values alone can flourish, namely personal freedom. —F.A. Hayek,\n\nEvery ideology fades in time, and those founded on falsehoods tend to fade faster than most. The fact that most SJWs would genuinely deny that they are socialists or that they seek to destroy Western civilization means that sooner or later, they will be forced to confront the fact that the goals they seek, Equality, Diversity, and Inclusiveness, are utterly incompatible with personal freedom, societal wealth, and advanced technological civilization.\n\nEven as the institutions have been invaded and coopted in the interests of social justice, they have been rendered unable to fulfill their primary functions. This is the great internal contradiction that the SJWs will never be able to positively resolve, just as the Soviet communists were never able to resolve the contradiction of socialist calculation that brought down their economy and their empire.\n\nOur ideals of Truth, Liberty, and Justice are not only sufficient, but they are considerably superior to the nonsensical ideals of social justice. \n\nNo one tells you what to do. You're just expected to look around, see what needs doing, and then do it. The only action that is completely ineffective is the one that is never taken.\n\nBut the example of the Rangers makes clear that the combination of unpleasant tasks and high objective standards is also an effective means of keeping SJWs out of an organization. And, as before, it is apparent that SJWs inside the organization can be easily identified as those who insisted on the need to relax those standards by appealing to social justice ideals.\n\nIt makes sense, of course, that if you are acting while your opponent is still deciding on his course of action, or better yet, still trying to get himself oriented, you have both the initiative and the advantage, and therefore your chances of winning are better than his.\n\nSJWs fall squarely into the category of people who cannot be instructed and cannot be convinced by knowledge. This is the key to understanding their astonishing ability to cling to their Narrative in the face of evidence that obliterates it as well as their insistence on clinging to it even as it shifts and contradicts itself.\n\nDialectic is based on the construction of logical syllogisms, which therefore makes it very easy to anyone who is capable of following those syllogisms and ascertaining their validity to detect when one is lying. Rhetoric, on the other hand, is “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion”.\n\nSooner or later, reality always tears through the veil of even the most powerful illusion. We have no need of numbers. One man armed with the truth will eventually overcome ten million preaching a lie. SJWs always lie. They are fundamentally in conflict with science, history, logic, and reality, and that is why they are doomed to defeat in the end.\n\n\n",
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"content": "How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big<br />by Scott Adams<br /><br />Dilbert creator and author Scott Adams presents How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big as part-life story, part-self-help book, and part- general tips and advice for living a happier, healthier, more successful and fulfilling life. One of the key themes is Adams’ strong skepticism for the ability of humans to make rational decisions and in any way develop an objective view of reality, and applying this to discuss how to both motivate ourselves and speak to others given this fact of reality. This theme carries over from extensive use in Adam’s blog <a href=\"http://blog.dilbert.com/\" target=\"_blank\">http://blog.dilbert.com/</a> where he uses it to provide sharp insights and enlightened commentary on recent political events, especially involving Trump’s election. <br /><br />The other key area is the continual emphasis of systems or habits as vastly more important to individual success than goals. A system or habit in place for continually doing a thing is overwhelmingly more likely to result in improved performance and successful outcomes over the long term compared to arbitrary goals set for some vague point in future. <br /><br />Overall a good, easy, and enjoyable read with lots of little lessons, anecdotes, and insights that are valuable in different areas of life. While many people will undoubtedly have come across variations of these before, there is enough novelty and breadth for plenty of new and interesting take-aways in here for everyone. <br /><br />Selected excerpts: <br /><br />Realistically, most people have poor filters for sorting truth from fiction, and there’s no objective way to know if you’re particularly good at it or not. Consider the people who routinely disagree with you. See how confident they look while being dead wrong? That’s exactly how you look to them.<br /><br />In our messy, flawed lives, the nearest we can get to truth is consistency. Consistency is the bedrock of the scientific method.<br /><br />Success caused passion more than passion caused success. Passion can also be a simple marker for talent. We humans tend to enjoy doing things we are good at, while not enjoying things we suck at.<br /><br />Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas.<br /><br />Goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary. That feeling wears on you. In time, it becomes heavy and uncomfortable.<br /><br />If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or set new goals and reenter the cycle of permanent presuccess failure.<br /><br />In the world of dieting, losing twenty pounds is a goal, but eating right is a system. In the exercise realm, running a marathon in under four hours is a goal, but exercising daily is a system. In business, making a million dollars is a goal, but being a serial entrepreneur is a system. For our purposes, let’s say a goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don’t sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal.<br /><br />If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it.<br /><br />A simplifier will prefer the easy way to accomplish a task, while knowing that some amount of extra effort might have produced a better outcome. An optimizer looks for the very best solution even if the extra complexity increases the odds of unexpected problems.<br /><br />Every second you look at a messy room and think about fixing it is a distraction from your more important thoughts.<br /><br />One of the biggest obstacles to success—and a real energy killer—is the fear that you don’t know how to do the stuff that your ideal career plans would require.<br /><br />When you know how to do something, you feel more energized to take it on.<br /><br />The smiling-makes-you-happy phenomenon is part of the larger and highly useful phenomenon of faking it until you make it. You’ll see this two-way causation in a wide variety of human activities. Later I’ll tell you that putting on exercise clothes will make you feel like working out. I’ve also discovered that acting confident makes you feel more confident. Feeling energetic makes you want to play a sport, but playing a sport will also make you feel energetic. Loving someone makes you want to have sex, but having sex also releases the bonding chemicals that make you feel love. High testosterone can help you win a competition, but winning a competition can also sometimes raise your testosterone. Being tired makes you want to lie down, but lying down when you are rested can put you in the mood for a nap. Feeling hungry can make you want to eat simple carbs, but eating simple carbs can make you feel hungry.<br /><br />A great strategy for success in life is to become good at something, anything, and let that feeling propel you to new and better victories. Success can be habit-forming.<br /><br />Every generation before us believed, like Snickers, that it had things figured out. We now know that every generation before us was wrong about a lot of it. Is it likely that you were born at the tipping point of history, in which humans know enough about reality to say we understand it?<br /><br />When you define yourself as a member of any group, you start to automatically identify with the other members and take on some of the characteristics of the group.<br /><br />The smartest system for discerning your best path to success involves trying lots of different things—sampling, if you will. For entrepreneurial ventures it might mean quickly bailing out if things don’t come together quickly. That approach might conflict with the advice you’ve heard all your life—that sticking with something, no matter the obstacles, is important to success. Indeed, most successful people had to chew through a wall at some point. Overcoming obstacles is normally an unavoidable part of the process. But you also need to know when to quit.<br /><br />Things that will someday work out well start out well. Things that will never work start out bad and stay that way. What you rarely see is a stillborn failure that transmogrifies into a stellar success.<br /><br />It’s generally true that if no one is excited about your art/product/idea in the beginning, they never will be. If the first commercial version of your work excites no one to action, it’s time to move on to something different.<br /><br />The Success Formula: Every Skill You Acquire Doubles Your Odds of Success and success-wise, you’re better off being good at two complementary skills than being excellent at one. My combined mediocre skills are worth far more than the sum of the parts.<br /><br />The Knowledge Formula: The More You Know, the More You Can Know<br /><br />A smarter approach is to think of learning as a system in which you continually expose yourself to new topics, primarily the ones you find interesting.<br /><br />The best way to increase your odds of success—in a way that might look like luck to others—is to systematically become good, but not amazing, at the types of skills that work well together and are highly useful for just about any job. This is another example in which viewing the world as math (adding skills together) and not magic allows you to move from a strategy with low odds of success to something better.<br /><br />Children are accustomed to a continual stream of criticisms and praise, but adults can go weeks without a compliment while enduring criticism both at work and at home. Adults are starved for a kind word.<br /><br />We don’t always have an accurate view of our own potential. I think most people who are frightened of public speaking can’t imagine they might feel different as a result of training. Don’t assume you know how much potential you have. Sometimes the only way to know what you can do is to test yourself.<br /><br />Quality is not an independent force in the universe; it depends on what you choose as your frame of reference.<br /><br />You’ve heard the old saying that knowledge is power. But knowledge of psychology is the purest form of that power. No matter what you’re doing or how well you’re doing it, you can benefit from a deeper understanding of how the mind interprets its world using only the clues that somehow find a way into your brain through the holes in your skull.<br /><br />I no longer see reason as the driver of behavior. I see simple cause and effect, similar to the way machines operate. If you believe people use reason for the important decisions in life, you will go through life feeling confused and frustrated that others seem to have bad reasoning skills.<br /><br />When politicians tell lies, they know the press will call them out. They also know it doesn’t matter. Politicians understand that reason will never have much of a role in voting decisions. A lie that makes a voter feel good is more effective than a hundred rational arguments.<br /><br />“The boy hit the ball” more easily than “The ball was hit by the boy.” In editors’ jargon, the first sentence is direct writing and the second is passive. It’s a tiny difference, but over the course of an entire document, passive writing adds up and causes reader fatigue.<br /><br />It’s a good idea to always have a backlog of stories you can pull out at a moment’s notice. And you’ll want to continually update your internal story database with new material. For example, if I know I’ll be seeing friends in a few days, I make a special note to myself to turn my recent experiences into story form because I know I’ll have a reason to bust one out.<br /><br />Studies by psychologist Robert Cialdini show that people are more cooperative when you ask for a favor using a sentence that includes the word because, even if the reason you offer makes little or no sense.<br /><br />Sometimes you hear statements that are so mind-numbingly stupid, evil, or mean that you know a direct frontal assault would only start a fight. People tend to double down when challenged, no matter how wrong they are. A more effective way to approach a dangerous social or business situation is sideways, by asking a question that starts with “I just wanted to clarify …”<br /><br />This Is Just Between You and Me. Research shows that people will automatically label you a friend if you share a secret. Sharing a confidence is a fast-track way to cause people to like and trust you.<br /><br />However, some people act much more decisively than others. And that can be both persuasive and useful. Decisiveness looks like leadership. Keep in mind that most normal people are at least a little bit uncertain when facing unfamiliar and complicated situations. What people crave in that sort of environment is anything that looks like certainty. If you can deliver an image of decisiveness, no matter how disingenuous, others will see it as leadership.<br /><br />Suppose you’re not insane. Can insanity help you? The answer is yes, but you want to use a calculated, emotional type of insanity. In any kind of negotiation, the worst thing you can do is act reasonable. Reasonable people generally cave in to irrational people because it seems like the path of least resistance. The way fake insanity works in a negotiation is that you assign a greater value to some element of a deal than an objective observer would consider reasonable. For example, you might demand that a deal be closed before the holidays so you can announce it to your family as a holiday present. When you bring in an emotional dimension, people know they can’t talk you out of it. Emotions don’t bend to reason. So wrap your arguments in whatever emotional blankets you can think of to influence others. A little bit of irrationality is a powerful thing.<br /><br />Another common speaking trick is to hum the first part of the “Happy Birthday” song and then speak in your normal voice right after.<br /><br />When you’re trying to convey a fake sense of confidence—which is often handy—you need to tell yourself you’re acting. Simply speak the way you imagine a confident person would speak and you’ll nail it on the first try.<br /><br />If you live near optimistic winners, those qualities are sure to rub off to some extent. And I advise you to consider this fact a primary tool for programming your moist-robot self. The programming interface is your location. To change yourself, part of the solution might involve spending more time with the people who represent the change you seek. For example, you’ll find it much easier to exercise in an environment where others are exercising. When you watch others exercise, it activates the exercise subroutine in your own brain.<br /><br />Happiness has more to do with where you’re heading than where you are. The directional nature of happiness is one reason it’s a good idea to have a sport or hobby that leaves you plenty of room to improve every year. Slow and steady improvement at anything makes you feel that you are on the right track. The feeling of progress stimulates your body to create the chemicals that make you feel happy.<br /><br />Pessimism is often a failure of imagination.<br /><br />Happiness is the natural state for most people whenever they feel healthy, have flexible schedules, and expect the future to be good.<br /><br />Just add pessimism and cynicism to any observation and you can manufacture bad news out of thin air.<br /><br />I’m here to tell you that the primary culprit in your bad moods is a deficit in one of the big five: flexible schedule, imagination, sleep, diet, and exercise.<br /><br />Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, tells us that people become unhappy if they have too many options in life. The problem with options is that choosing any path can leave you plagued with self-doubt. You quite rationally think that one of the paths not chosen might have worked out better. That can eat at you.<br /><br />The main point for both diet and exercise is that you want to reduce the amount of willpower required. Any other approach is unsustainable.<br /><br />But if I said you couldn’t have the delicious bread but you could have anything else you wanted, and you could have it right now, suddenly the bread would be easy to resist. An attractive alternative makes willpower less necessary. It frees up your stockpile of willpower for other uses.<br /><br />The surest way to identify those who won’t succeed at weight loss is that they tend to say things like “My goal is to lose ten pounds.” Weight targets often work in the short run. But if you need willpower to keep the weight off, you’re doomed in the long run. The only way to succeed in the long run is by using a system that bypasses your need for willpower.<br /><br />Ask any dedicated runner, biker, or swimmer how they feel on the occasional off day. They don’t like it. That’s where you want to be. And the only way that happens is if you make fitness—of any kind—a daily habit. Once exercise becomes habitual, you won’t need willpower to keep going because your body and brain will simply prefer it to being a couch spud. And your natural inclination for variety will drive you to do more stuff over time.<br /><br />The method that never succeeds is exercising whenever you have some spare time. If you’re like most adults, you haven’t seen spare time in years.<br /><br />Optimists notice more opportunities, have more energy because of their imagined future successes, and take more risks. Optimists make themselves an easy target for luck to find them.<br /><br /><br />",
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"content": "How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big\nby Scott Adams\n\nDilbert creator and author Scott Adams presents How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big as part-life story, part-self-help book, and part- general tips and advice for living a happier, healthier, more successful and fulfilling life. One of the key themes is Adams’ strong skepticism for the ability of humans to make rational decisions and in any way develop an objective view of reality, and applying this to discuss how to both motivate ourselves and speak to others given this fact of reality. This theme carries over from extensive use in Adam’s blog http://blog.dilbert.com/ where he uses it to provide sharp insights and enlightened commentary on recent political events, especially involving Trump’s election. \n\nThe other key area is the continual emphasis of systems or habits as vastly more important to individual success than goals. A system or habit in place for continually doing a thing is overwhelmingly more likely to result in improved performance and successful outcomes over the long term compared to arbitrary goals set for some vague point in future. \n\nOverall a good, easy, and enjoyable read with lots of little lessons, anecdotes, and insights that are valuable in different areas of life. While many people will undoubtedly have come across variations of these before, there is enough novelty and breadth for plenty of new and interesting take-aways in here for everyone. \n\nSelected excerpts: \n\nRealistically, most people have poor filters for sorting truth from fiction, and there’s no objective way to know if you’re particularly good at it or not. Consider the people who routinely disagree with you. See how confident they look while being dead wrong? That’s exactly how you look to them.\n\nIn our messy, flawed lives, the nearest we can get to truth is consistency. Consistency is the bedrock of the scientific method.\n\nSuccess caused passion more than passion caused success. Passion can also be a simple marker for talent. We humans tend to enjoy doing things we are good at, while not enjoying things we suck at.\n\nGood ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas.\n\nGoal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary. That feeling wears on you. In time, it becomes heavy and uncomfortable.\n\nIf you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or set new goals and reenter the cycle of permanent presuccess failure.\n\nIn the world of dieting, losing twenty pounds is a goal, but eating right is a system. In the exercise realm, running a marathon in under four hours is a goal, but exercising daily is a system. In business, making a million dollars is a goal, but being a serial entrepreneur is a system. For our purposes, let’s say a goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don’t sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal.\n\nIf you want success, figure out the price, then pay it.\n\nA simplifier will prefer the easy way to accomplish a task, while knowing that some amount of extra effort might have produced a better outcome. An optimizer looks for the very best solution even if the extra complexity increases the odds of unexpected problems.\n\nEvery second you look at a messy room and think about fixing it is a distraction from your more important thoughts.\n\nOne of the biggest obstacles to success—and a real energy killer—is the fear that you don’t know how to do the stuff that your ideal career plans would require.\n\nWhen you know how to do something, you feel more energized to take it on.\n\nThe smiling-makes-you-happy phenomenon is part of the larger and highly useful phenomenon of faking it until you make it. You’ll see this two-way causation in a wide variety of human activities. Later I’ll tell you that putting on exercise clothes will make you feel like working out. I’ve also discovered that acting confident makes you feel more confident. Feeling energetic makes you want to play a sport, but playing a sport will also make you feel energetic. Loving someone makes you want to have sex, but having sex also releases the bonding chemicals that make you feel love. High testosterone can help you win a competition, but winning a competition can also sometimes raise your testosterone. Being tired makes you want to lie down, but lying down when you are rested can put you in the mood for a nap. Feeling hungry can make you want to eat simple carbs, but eating simple carbs can make you feel hungry.\n\nA great strategy for success in life is to become good at something, anything, and let that feeling propel you to new and better victories. Success can be habit-forming.\n\nEvery generation before us believed, like Snickers, that it had things figured out. We now know that every generation before us was wrong about a lot of it. Is it likely that you were born at the tipping point of history, in which humans know enough about reality to say we understand it?\n\nWhen you define yourself as a member of any group, you start to automatically identify with the other members and take on some of the characteristics of the group.\n\nThe smartest system for discerning your best path to success involves trying lots of different things—sampling, if you will. For entrepreneurial ventures it might mean quickly bailing out if things don’t come together quickly. That approach might conflict with the advice you’ve heard all your life—that sticking with something, no matter the obstacles, is important to success. Indeed, most successful people had to chew through a wall at some point. Overcoming obstacles is normally an unavoidable part of the process. But you also need to know when to quit.\n\nThings that will someday work out well start out well. Things that will never work start out bad and stay that way. What you rarely see is a stillborn failure that transmogrifies into a stellar success.\n\nIt’s generally true that if no one is excited about your art/product/idea in the beginning, they never will be. If the first commercial version of your work excites no one to action, it’s time to move on to something different.\n\nThe Success Formula: Every Skill You Acquire Doubles Your Odds of Success and success-wise, you’re better off being good at two complementary skills than being excellent at one. My combined mediocre skills are worth far more than the sum of the parts.\n\nThe Knowledge Formula: The More You Know, the More You Can Know\n\nA smarter approach is to think of learning as a system in which you continually expose yourself to new topics, primarily the ones you find interesting.\n\nThe best way to increase your odds of success—in a way that might look like luck to others—is to systematically become good, but not amazing, at the types of skills that work well together and are highly useful for just about any job. This is another example in which viewing the world as math (adding skills together) and not magic allows you to move from a strategy with low odds of success to something better.\n\nChildren are accustomed to a continual stream of criticisms and praise, but adults can go weeks without a compliment while enduring criticism both at work and at home. Adults are starved for a kind word.\n\nWe don’t always have an accurate view of our own potential. I think most people who are frightened of public speaking can’t imagine they might feel different as a result of training. Don’t assume you know how much potential you have. Sometimes the only way to know what you can do is to test yourself.\n\nQuality is not an independent force in the universe; it depends on what you choose as your frame of reference.\n\nYou’ve heard the old saying that knowledge is power. But knowledge of psychology is the purest form of that power. No matter what you’re doing or how well you’re doing it, you can benefit from a deeper understanding of how the mind interprets its world using only the clues that somehow find a way into your brain through the holes in your skull.\n\nI no longer see reason as the driver of behavior. I see simple cause and effect, similar to the way machines operate. If you believe people use reason for the important decisions in life, you will go through life feeling confused and frustrated that others seem to have bad reasoning skills.\n\nWhen politicians tell lies, they know the press will call them out. They also know it doesn’t matter. Politicians understand that reason will never have much of a role in voting decisions. A lie that makes a voter feel good is more effective than a hundred rational arguments.\n\n“The boy hit the ball” more easily than “The ball was hit by the boy.” In editors’ jargon, the first sentence is direct writing and the second is passive. It’s a tiny difference, but over the course of an entire document, passive writing adds up and causes reader fatigue.\n\nIt’s a good idea to always have a backlog of stories you can pull out at a moment’s notice. And you’ll want to continually update your internal story database with new material. For example, if I know I’ll be seeing friends in a few days, I make a special note to myself to turn my recent experiences into story form because I know I’ll have a reason to bust one out.\n\nStudies by psychologist Robert Cialdini show that people are more cooperative when you ask for a favor using a sentence that includes the word because, even if the reason you offer makes little or no sense.\n\nSometimes you hear statements that are so mind-numbingly stupid, evil, or mean that you know a direct frontal assault would only start a fight. People tend to double down when challenged, no matter how wrong they are. A more effective way to approach a dangerous social or business situation is sideways, by asking a question that starts with “I just wanted to clarify …”\n\nThis Is Just Between You and Me. Research shows that people will automatically label you a friend if you share a secret. Sharing a confidence is a fast-track way to cause people to like and trust you.\n\nHowever, some people act much more decisively than others. And that can be both persuasive and useful. Decisiveness looks like leadership. Keep in mind that most normal people are at least a little bit uncertain when facing unfamiliar and complicated situations. What people crave in that sort of environment is anything that looks like certainty. If you can deliver an image of decisiveness, no matter how disingenuous, others will see it as leadership.\n\nSuppose you’re not insane. Can insanity help you? The answer is yes, but you want to use a calculated, emotional type of insanity. In any kind of negotiation, the worst thing you can do is act reasonable. Reasonable people generally cave in to irrational people because it seems like the path of least resistance. The way fake insanity works in a negotiation is that you assign a greater value to some element of a deal than an objective observer would consider reasonable. For example, you might demand that a deal be closed before the holidays so you can announce it to your family as a holiday present. When you bring in an emotional dimension, people know they can’t talk you out of it. Emotions don’t bend to reason. So wrap your arguments in whatever emotional blankets you can think of to influence others. A little bit of irrationality is a powerful thing.\n\nAnother common speaking trick is to hum the first part of the “Happy Birthday” song and then speak in your normal voice right after.\n\nWhen you’re trying to convey a fake sense of confidence—which is often handy—you need to tell yourself you’re acting. Simply speak the way you imagine a confident person would speak and you’ll nail it on the first try.\n\nIf you live near optimistic winners, those qualities are sure to rub off to some extent. And I advise you to consider this fact a primary tool for programming your moist-robot self. The programming interface is your location. To change yourself, part of the solution might involve spending more time with the people who represent the change you seek. For example, you’ll find it much easier to exercise in an environment where others are exercising. When you watch others exercise, it activates the exercise subroutine in your own brain.\n\nHappiness has more to do with where you’re heading than where you are. The directional nature of happiness is one reason it’s a good idea to have a sport or hobby that leaves you plenty of room to improve every year. Slow and steady improvement at anything makes you feel that you are on the right track. The feeling of progress stimulates your body to create the chemicals that make you feel happy.\n\nPessimism is often a failure of imagination.\n\nHappiness is the natural state for most people whenever they feel healthy, have flexible schedules, and expect the future to be good.\n\nJust add pessimism and cynicism to any observation and you can manufacture bad news out of thin air.\n\nI’m here to tell you that the primary culprit in your bad moods is a deficit in one of the big five: flexible schedule, imagination, sleep, diet, and exercise.\n\nBarry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, tells us that people become unhappy if they have too many options in life. The problem with options is that choosing any path can leave you plagued with self-doubt. You quite rationally think that one of the paths not chosen might have worked out better. That can eat at you.\n\nThe main point for both diet and exercise is that you want to reduce the amount of willpower required. Any other approach is unsustainable.\n\nBut if I said you couldn’t have the delicious bread but you could have anything else you wanted, and you could have it right now, suddenly the bread would be easy to resist. An attractive alternative makes willpower less necessary. It frees up your stockpile of willpower for other uses.\n\nThe surest way to identify those who won’t succeed at weight loss is that they tend to say things like “My goal is to lose ten pounds.” Weight targets often work in the short run. But if you need willpower to keep the weight off, you’re doomed in the long run. The only way to succeed in the long run is by using a system that bypasses your need for willpower.\n\nAsk any dedicated runner, biker, or swimmer how they feel on the occasional off day. They don’t like it. That’s where you want to be. And the only way that happens is if you make fitness—of any kind—a daily habit. Once exercise becomes habitual, you won’t need willpower to keep going because your body and brain will simply prefer it to being a couch spud. And your natural inclination for variety will drive you to do more stuff over time.\n\nThe method that never succeeds is exercising whenever you have some spare time. If you’re like most adults, you haven’t seen spare time in years.\n\nOptimists notice more opportunities, have more energy because of their imagined future successes, and take more risks. Optimists make themselves an easy target for luck to find them.\n\n\n",
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"content": "The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that will Shape Our Future<br />by Kevin Kelly<br /><br />Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable explores the technological trends that got us to where we are today and that continue to push us and evolve our society along certain paths into the future. This is quintessential Kevin Kelly at his best, weaving powerful metaphor and technological poetry to present a compelling narrative for our civilisation, our species, and our role in the future. While specific technologies and their projected evolution into the future are discussed, these are only incidental, a footnote, used to flesh out the main trends and forces that act on all technologies to enhance their fitness by virtue of their role as pervasive selection mechanisms operating throughout the technium and the holos. Success will come to those who tend to work with these forces, not against them. <br /><br />Definitely worth a read from both a futurism and philosophy of technology perspective, but also for any entrepreneur or product developer seeking to build successful businesses and products now and in the future. <br /><br />Selected Highlights & Excerpts:<br /><br />Technology is humanity’s accelerant. Because of technology everything we make is always in the process of becoming. Every kind of thing is becoming something else, while it churns from “might” to “is.” All is flux. Nothing is finished. Nothing is done. This never-ending change is the pivotal axis of the modern world.<br /><br />Constant flux means more than simply “things will be different.” It means processes—the engines of flux—are now more important than products. Our greatest invention in the past 200 years was not a particular gadget or tool but the invention of the scientific process itself. Once we invented the scientific method, we could immediately create thousands of other amazing things we could have never discovered any other way. This methodical process of constant change and improvement was a million times better than inventing any particular product, because the process generated a million new products over the centuries since we invented it.<br /><br />This shift toward processes also means ceaseless change is the fate for everything we make. We are moving away from the world of fixed nouns and toward a world of fluid verbs. In the next 30 years we will continue to take solid things—an automobile, a shoe—and turn them into intangible verbs. Products will become services and processes.<br /><br />A world without discomfort is utopia. But it is also stagnant. A world perfectly fair in some dimensions would be horribly unfair in others. A utopia has no problems to solve, but therefore no opportunities either. Every utopian scenario contains self-corrupting flaws.<br /><br />Real dystopias are more like the old Soviet Union rather than Mad Max: They are stiflingly bureaucratic rather than lawless.<br /><br />The problems of today were caused by yesterday’s technological successes, and the technological solutions to today’s problems will cause the problems of tomorrow. This circular expansion of both problems and solutions hides a steady accumulation of small net benefits over time. <br /><br />Today truly is a wide-open frontier. We are all becoming. It is the best time ever in human history to begin. You are not late.<br /><br />The AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services—cheap, reliable, industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything, and almost invisible except when it blinks off. This common utility will serve you as much IQ as you want but no more than you need. You’ll simply plug into the grid and get AI as if it was electricity.<br /><br />Our most important mechanical inventions are not machines that do what humans do better, but machines that can do things we can’t do at all. Our most important thinking machines will not be machines that can think what we think faster, better, but those that think what we can’t think.<br /><br />This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines.<br /><br />This total sequence of perpetual upgrades is continuous. It’s a dream come true for our insatiable human appetite: rivers of uninterrupted betterment.<br /><br />Early gramophone equipment could make recordings that contained no more than four and a half minutes, so musicians abbreviated meandering works to fit to the phonograph, and today the standard duration of a pop song is four and a half minutes. <br /><br />When copies are superabundant, they become worthless. Instead, stuff that can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free, you need to sell things that cannot be copied. Trust, for instance. Trust cannot be reproduced in bulk. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be faked.<br /><br />Why would anyone ever pay for something they could get for free? And when they pay for something they could get for free, what are they purchasing? In a real sense, these uncopyable values are things that are “better than free.”<br /><br />Notions don’t stand alone but are massively interlinked to everything else; truth is not delivered by authors and authorities but is assembled in real time piece by piece by the audience themselves. People of the Screen make their own content and construct their own truth.<br /><br />Some scholars of literature claim that a book is really that virtual place your mind goes to when you are reading. It is a conceptual state of imagination that one might call “literature space.” According to these scholars, when you are engaged in this reading space, your brain works differently than when you are screening. One can spend hours reading on the web and never encounter this literature space. One gets fragments, threads, glimpses.<br /><br />Wikipedia is the first networked book. In the goodness of time, each Wikipedia page will become saturated with blue links as every statement is cross-referenced. In the goodness of time, as all books become fully digital, every one of them will accumulate the equivalent of blue underlined passages as each literary reference is networked within that book out to all other books. Each page in a book will discover other pages and other books. Thus books will seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together into one large metabook, the universal library. The resulting collective intelligence of this synaptically connected library allows us to see things we can’t see in a single isolated book.<br /><br />Science is on a long-term campaign to bring all knowledge in the world into one vast, interconnected, footnoted, peer-reviewed web of facts. Independent facts, even those that make sense in their own world, are of little value to science.<br /><br />We’ll unbundle books into their constituent bits and pieces and knit those into the web, but the higher-level organization of the book will be the focus for our attention—that remaining scarcity in our economy. A book is an attention unit. A fact is interesting, an idea is important, but only a story, a good argument, a well-crafted narrative is amazing, never to be forgotten.<br /><br />More important, our screens will also watch us. They will be our mirrors, the wells into which we look to find out about ourselves. Not to see our faces, but ourselves.<br /><br />Every year I own less of what I use. Possession is not as important as it once was. Accessing is more important than ever. Instant borrowing gives you most of the benefits of owning and few of its disadvantages. Access is so superior to ownership in many ways that it is driving the frontiers of the economy.<br /><br />On average most modern products have undergone dematerialization. The reason even solid physical goods—like a soda can—can deliver more benefits while inhabiting less material is because their heavy atoms are substituted by weightless bits. The tangible is replaced by intangibles—intangibles like better design, innovative processes, smart chips, and eventually online connectivity—that do the work that more aluminum atoms used to do. Soft things, like intelligence, are thus embedded into hard things, like aluminum, that make hard things behave more like software. Material goods infused with bits increasingly act as if they were intangible services. Nouns morph to verbs. Hardware behaves like software. In Silicon Valley they say it like this: “Software eats everything.”<br /><br />The general approach for entrepreneurs is to unbundle the benefits of transportation (or any X) into separate constituent goods and then recombine them in new ways. These startups try to exploit inefficiencies in novel ways. They take assets that are unused part-time (such as an empty bedroom, a parked car, unused office space) and match them to people eagerly waiting for them right this second.<br /><br />In other words, the long-term trend in our modern lives is that most goods and services will be short-term use. Therefore most goods and services are candidates for rental and sharing.<br /><br />Nearly every aspect of modern civilization has been flattening down except one: money. Minting money is one of the last jobs left for a central government that most political parties agree is legitimate. What if you created a distributed currency that was secure, accurate, and trustworthy without centralization? Because if money could be decentralized, then anything can be decentralized. Bitcoin is a fully decentralized, distributed currency that does not need a central bank for its accuracy, enforcement, or regulation. The blockchain is a radical invention that can decentralize many other systems beyond money.<br /><br />A platform is a foundation created by a firm that lets other firms build products and services upon it. It is neither market nor firm, but something new. Levels of highly interdependent products and services form an “ecosystem” that rests upon the platform. “Ecosystem” is a good description because, just as in a forest, the success of one species (product) depends on the success of others.<br /><br />The web is hyperlinked documents; the cloud is hyperlinked data. Ultimately the chief reason to put things onto the cloud is to share their data deeply.<br /><br />If a cloud company restricts or censors our actions, we’ll feel pain. Separation from the comfort and new identity afforded by the cloud will be horrendous and unbearable. If McLuhan is right that tools are extensions of our selves—a wheel an extended leg, a camera an extended eye—then the cloud is our extended soul. Or, if you prefer, our extended self.<br /><br />There are practical limits to how gigantic one company’s cloud can get, so the next step in the rise of clouds over the coming decades will be toward merging the clouds into one intercloud. Just as the internet is the network of networks, the intercloud is the cloud of clouds.<br /><br />Editors are the middle people—or what are called “curators” today—the professionals between a creator and the audience.<br /><br />Yet if the hive mind is so dumb, why bother with it at all? Because as dumb as it is, it is smart enough for a lot of work. Given enough time, decentralized connected dumb things can become smarter than we think. Even though a purely decentralized power won’t take us all the way, it is almost always the best way to start. It’s fast, cheap, and out of control.<br /><br />Anything that can be shared—thoughts, emotions, money, health, time—will be shared in the right conditions, with the right benefits. Anything that can be shared can be shared better, faster, easier, longer, and in a million more ways than we currently realize. At this point in our history, sharing something that has not been shared before, or in a new way, is the surest way to increase its value.<br /><br />The danger of being rewarded with only what you already like, however, is that you can spin into an egotistical spiral, becoming blind to anything slightly different, even if you’d love it. This is called a filter bubble. The technical term is “overfitting.” You get stuck at a lower than optimal peak because you behave as if you have arrived at the top, ignoring the adjacent environment. There’s a lot of evidence this occurs in the political realm as well: Readers of one political stripe who depend only on a simple filter of “more like this” rarely if ever read books outside their stripe. This overfitting tends to harden their minds. This kind of filter-induced self-reinforcement also occurs in science, the arts, and culture at large. The more effective the “more good stuff like this” filter is, the more important it becomes to alloy it with other types of filters. <br /><br />Every filter throws something good away. Filtering is a type of censoring, and vice versa. The inadequacies of a filter cannot be remedied by eliminating filters. The inadequacies of a filter can be remedied only by applying countervailing filters upon it. From the human point of view, a filter focuses content. But seen in reverse, from the content point of view, a filter focuses human attention.<br /><br />“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Simon’s insight is often reduced to “In a world of abundance, the only scarcity is human attention.”<br /><br />The filters have been watching us for years; they anticipate what we will ask. They can almost autocomplete it right now. Thing is, we don’t know what we want. We don’t know ourselves very well. To some degree we will rely on the filters to tell us what we want. Not as slave masters, but as a mirror. We’ll listen to the suggestions and recommendations that are generated by our own behavior in order to hear, to see who we are.<br /><br />Modern technologies are combinations of earlier primitive technologies that have been rearranged and remixed. Since one can combine hundreds of simpler technologies with hundreds of thousands of more complex technologies, there is an unlimited number of possible new technologies—but they are all remixes.<br /><br />The entire global economy is tipping away from the material and toward intangible bits. It is moving away from ownership and toward access. It is tilting away from the value of copies and toward the value of networks. It is headed for the inevitability of constant, relentless, and increasing remixing. The laws will be slow to follow, but they will follow.<br /><br />Appropriation of existing material is a venerable and necessary practice. As the economists Romer and Arthur remind us, recombination is really the only source of innovation—and wealth. I suggest we follow the question, “Has it been transformed by the borrower?” Did the remixing, the mashup, the sampling, the appropriation, the borrowing—did it transform the original rather than just copy it?<br /><br />A quantified-self experiment, on the other hand, is just N=1. The subject is yourself. At first it may seem that an N=1 experiment is not scientifically valid, but it turns out that it is extremely valid to you. In many ways it is the ideal experiment because you are testing the variable X against the very particular subject that is your body and mind at one point in time. Who cares whether the treatment works on anyone else? What you want to know is, How does it affect me? An N=1 provides that laser-focused result. The problem with an N=1 experiment (which was once standard procedure for all medicine before the age of science) is not that the results aren’t useful (they are), but that it is very easy to fool yourself.<br /><br />In formal studies, you need a control group to offset your bias toward positive results. So in lieu of a control group in an N=1 study, a quantified-self experimenter uses his or her own baseline. If you track yourself long enough, with a wide variety of metrics, then you can establish your behavior outside (or before) the experiment, which effectively functions as the control for comparison.<br /><br />The growth of information has been steadily increasing at an insane rate for at least a century. It is no coincidence that 66 percent per year is the same as doubling every 18 months, which is the rate of Moore’s Law. Five years ago humanity stored several hundred exabytes of information. That is the equivalent of each person on the planet having 80 Library of Alexandrias. Today we average 320 libraries each. There’s another way to visualize this growth: as an information explosion. Every second of every day we globally manufacture 6,000 square meters of information storage material—disks, chips, DVDs, paper, film—which we promptly fill up with data. That rate—6,000 square meters per second—is the approximate velocity of the shock wave radiating from an atomic explosion. Information is expanding at the rate of a nuclear explosion, but unlike a real atomic explosion, which lasts only seconds, this information explosion is perpetual, a nuclear blast lasting many decades.<br /><br />Metadata is the new wealth because the value of bits increases when they are linked to other bits. The least productive life for a bit is to remain naked and alone. A bit uncopied, unshared, unlinked with other bits will be a short-lived bit. The worst future for a bit is to be parked in some dark isolated data vault. What bits really want is to hang out with other related bits, be replicated widely, and maybe become a metabit, or an action bit in a piece of durable code. If we could personify bits, we’d say: Bits want to move. Bits want to be linked to other bits. Bits want to be reckoned in real time. Bits want to be duplicated, replicated, copied. Bits want to be meta.<br /><br />Anonymity enables the occasional whistle-blower and can protect the persecuted fringe and political outcasts. But if anonymity is present in any significant quantity, it will poison the system. While anonymity can be used to protect heroes, it is far more commonly used as a way to escape responsibility. A lack of responsibility unleashes the worst in us.<br /><br />Just as fleshy tissue yields a new, higher level of organization for a bunch of individual cells, these new social structures yield new tissue for individual humans. Tissue can do things that cells can’t. The collectivist organizations of Wikipedia, Linux, Facebook, Uber, the web—even AI—can do things that industrialized humans could not.<br /><br />Every minute a new impossible thing is uploaded to the internet and that improbable event becomes just one of hundreds of extraordinary events that we’ll see or hear about today. The internet is like a lens that focuses the extraordinary into a beam, and that beam has become our illumination. It compresses the unlikely into a small viewable band of everydayness.<br /><br />Ironically, in an age of instant global connection, my certainty about anything has decreased. Rather than receiving truth from an authority, I am reduced to assembling my own certainty from the liquid stream of facts flowing through the web. Truth, with a capital T, becomes truths, plural. I have to sort the truths not just about things I care about, but about anything I touch, including areas about which I can’t possibly have any direct knowledge. That means that in general I have to constantly question what I think I know. We might consider this state perfect for the advancement of science, but it also means that I am more likely to have my mind changed for incorrect reasons.<br /><br />I’ve noticed a different approach to my thinking now that the hive mind has spread it extremely wide and loose. My thinking is more active, less contemplative. Rather than begin a question or hunch by ruminating aimlessly in my mind, nourished only by my ignorance, I start doing things. I immediately go. I go looking, searching, asking, questioning, reacting, leaping in, constructing notes, bookmarks, a trail—I start off making something mine. I don’t wait. Don’t have to wait. I act on ideas first now instead of thinking on them. For some folks, this is the worst of the net—the loss of contemplation.<br /><br />Thus, even though our knowledge is expanding exponentially, our questions are expanding exponentially faster. And as mathematicians will tell you, the widening gap between two exponential curves is itself an exponential curve. That gap between questions and answers is our ignorance, and it is growing exponentially. In other words, science is a method that chiefly expands our ignorance rather than our knowledge.<br /><br />I asked it how many searches all search engines do per second? It said 600,000 searches per second, or 600 kilohertz. The internet is answering questions at the buzzing frequency of radio waves.<br /><br />There is an asymmetry in the work needed to generate a good question versus the work needed to absorb an answer. Answers become cheap and questions become valuable—the inverse of the situation now.<br /><br />A good question is not concerned with a correct answer. A good question cannot be answered immediately. A good question challenges existing answers. A good question is one you badly want answered once you hear it, but had no inkling you cared before it was asked. A good question creates new territory of thinking. A good question reframes its own answers. A good question is the seed of innovation in science, technology, art, politics, and business. A good question is a probe, a what-if scenario. A good question skirts on the edge of what is known and not known, neither silly nor obvious. A good question cannot be predicted. A good question will be the sign of an educated mind. A good question is one that generates many other good questions. A good question may be the last job a machine will learn to do. A good question is what humans are for.<br /><br /><br />",
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"content": "The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that will Shape Our Future\nby Kevin Kelly\n\nKevin Kelly’s The Inevitable explores the technological trends that got us to where we are today and that continue to push us and evolve our society along certain paths into the future. This is quintessential Kevin Kelly at his best, weaving powerful metaphor and technological poetry to present a compelling narrative for our civilisation, our species, and our role in the future. While specific technologies and their projected evolution into the future are discussed, these are only incidental, a footnote, used to flesh out the main trends and forces that act on all technologies to enhance their fitness by virtue of their role as pervasive selection mechanisms operating throughout the technium and the holos. Success will come to those who tend to work with these forces, not against them. \n\nDefinitely worth a read from both a futurism and philosophy of technology perspective, but also for any entrepreneur or product developer seeking to build successful businesses and products now and in the future. \n\nSelected Highlights & Excerpts:\n\nTechnology is humanity’s accelerant. Because of technology everything we make is always in the process of becoming. Every kind of thing is becoming something else, while it churns from “might” to “is.” All is flux. Nothing is finished. Nothing is done. This never-ending change is the pivotal axis of the modern world.\n\nConstant flux means more than simply “things will be different.” It means processes—the engines of flux—are now more important than products. Our greatest invention in the past 200 years was not a particular gadget or tool but the invention of the scientific process itself. Once we invented the scientific method, we could immediately create thousands of other amazing things we could have never discovered any other way. This methodical process of constant change and improvement was a million times better than inventing any particular product, because the process generated a million new products over the centuries since we invented it.\n\nThis shift toward processes also means ceaseless change is the fate for everything we make. We are moving away from the world of fixed nouns and toward a world of fluid verbs. In the next 30 years we will continue to take solid things—an automobile, a shoe—and turn them into intangible verbs. Products will become services and processes.\n\nA world without discomfort is utopia. But it is also stagnant. A world perfectly fair in some dimensions would be horribly unfair in others. A utopia has no problems to solve, but therefore no opportunities either. Every utopian scenario contains self-corrupting flaws.\n\nReal dystopias are more like the old Soviet Union rather than Mad Max: They are stiflingly bureaucratic rather than lawless.\n\nThe problems of today were caused by yesterday’s technological successes, and the technological solutions to today’s problems will cause the problems of tomorrow. This circular expansion of both problems and solutions hides a steady accumulation of small net benefits over time. \n\nToday truly is a wide-open frontier. We are all becoming. It is the best time ever in human history to begin. You are not late.\n\nThe AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services—cheap, reliable, industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything, and almost invisible except when it blinks off. This common utility will serve you as much IQ as you want but no more than you need. You’ll simply plug into the grid and get AI as if it was electricity.\n\nOur most important mechanical inventions are not machines that do what humans do better, but machines that can do things we can’t do at all. Our most important thinking machines will not be machines that can think what we think faster, better, but those that think what we can’t think.\n\nThis is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines.\n\nThis total sequence of perpetual upgrades is continuous. It’s a dream come true for our insatiable human appetite: rivers of uninterrupted betterment.\n\nEarly gramophone equipment could make recordings that contained no more than four and a half minutes, so musicians abbreviated meandering works to fit to the phonograph, and today the standard duration of a pop song is four and a half minutes. \n\nWhen copies are superabundant, they become worthless. Instead, stuff that can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free, you need to sell things that cannot be copied. Trust, for instance. Trust cannot be reproduced in bulk. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be faked.\n\nWhy would anyone ever pay for something they could get for free? And when they pay for something they could get for free, what are they purchasing? In a real sense, these uncopyable values are things that are “better than free.”\n\nNotions don’t stand alone but are massively interlinked to everything else; truth is not delivered by authors and authorities but is assembled in real time piece by piece by the audience themselves. People of the Screen make their own content and construct their own truth.\n\nSome scholars of literature claim that a book is really that virtual place your mind goes to when you are reading. It is a conceptual state of imagination that one might call “literature space.” According to these scholars, when you are engaged in this reading space, your brain works differently than when you are screening. One can spend hours reading on the web and never encounter this literature space. One gets fragments, threads, glimpses.\n\nWikipedia is the first networked book. In the goodness of time, each Wikipedia page will become saturated with blue links as every statement is cross-referenced. In the goodness of time, as all books become fully digital, every one of them will accumulate the equivalent of blue underlined passages as each literary reference is networked within that book out to all other books. Each page in a book will discover other pages and other books. Thus books will seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together into one large metabook, the universal library. The resulting collective intelligence of this synaptically connected library allows us to see things we can’t see in a single isolated book.\n\nScience is on a long-term campaign to bring all knowledge in the world into one vast, interconnected, footnoted, peer-reviewed web of facts. Independent facts, even those that make sense in their own world, are of little value to science.\n\nWe’ll unbundle books into their constituent bits and pieces and knit those into the web, but the higher-level organization of the book will be the focus for our attention—that remaining scarcity in our economy. A book is an attention unit. A fact is interesting, an idea is important, but only a story, a good argument, a well-crafted narrative is amazing, never to be forgotten.\n\nMore important, our screens will also watch us. They will be our mirrors, the wells into which we look to find out about ourselves. Not to see our faces, but ourselves.\n\nEvery year I own less of what I use. Possession is not as important as it once was. Accessing is more important than ever. Instant borrowing gives you most of the benefits of owning and few of its disadvantages. Access is so superior to ownership in many ways that it is driving the frontiers of the economy.\n\nOn average most modern products have undergone dematerialization. The reason even solid physical goods—like a soda can—can deliver more benefits while inhabiting less material is because their heavy atoms are substituted by weightless bits. The tangible is replaced by intangibles—intangibles like better design, innovative processes, smart chips, and eventually online connectivity—that do the work that more aluminum atoms used to do. Soft things, like intelligence, are thus embedded into hard things, like aluminum, that make hard things behave more like software. Material goods infused with bits increasingly act as if they were intangible services. Nouns morph to verbs. Hardware behaves like software. In Silicon Valley they say it like this: “Software eats everything.”\n\nThe general approach for entrepreneurs is to unbundle the benefits of transportation (or any X) into separate constituent goods and then recombine them in new ways. These startups try to exploit inefficiencies in novel ways. They take assets that are unused part-time (such as an empty bedroom, a parked car, unused office space) and match them to people eagerly waiting for them right this second.\n\nIn other words, the long-term trend in our modern lives is that most goods and services will be short-term use. Therefore most goods and services are candidates for rental and sharing.\n\nNearly every aspect of modern civilization has been flattening down except one: money. Minting money is one of the last jobs left for a central government that most political parties agree is legitimate. What if you created a distributed currency that was secure, accurate, and trustworthy without centralization? Because if money could be decentralized, then anything can be decentralized. Bitcoin is a fully decentralized, distributed currency that does not need a central bank for its accuracy, enforcement, or regulation. The blockchain is a radical invention that can decentralize many other systems beyond money.\n\nA platform is a foundation created by a firm that lets other firms build products and services upon it. It is neither market nor firm, but something new. Levels of highly interdependent products and services form an “ecosystem” that rests upon the platform. “Ecosystem” is a good description because, just as in a forest, the success of one species (product) depends on the success of others.\n\nThe web is hyperlinked documents; the cloud is hyperlinked data. Ultimately the chief reason to put things onto the cloud is to share their data deeply.\n\nIf a cloud company restricts or censors our actions, we’ll feel pain. Separation from the comfort and new identity afforded by the cloud will be horrendous and unbearable. If McLuhan is right that tools are extensions of our selves—a wheel an extended leg, a camera an extended eye—then the cloud is our extended soul. Or, if you prefer, our extended self.\n\nThere are practical limits to how gigantic one company’s cloud can get, so the next step in the rise of clouds over the coming decades will be toward merging the clouds into one intercloud. Just as the internet is the network of networks, the intercloud is the cloud of clouds.\n\nEditors are the middle people—or what are called “curators” today—the professionals between a creator and the audience.\n\nYet if the hive mind is so dumb, why bother with it at all? Because as dumb as it is, it is smart enough for a lot of work. Given enough time, decentralized connected dumb things can become smarter than we think. Even though a purely decentralized power won’t take us all the way, it is almost always the best way to start. It’s fast, cheap, and out of control.\n\nAnything that can be shared—thoughts, emotions, money, health, time—will be shared in the right conditions, with the right benefits. Anything that can be shared can be shared better, faster, easier, longer, and in a million more ways than we currently realize. At this point in our history, sharing something that has not been shared before, or in a new way, is the surest way to increase its value.\n\nThe danger of being rewarded with only what you already like, however, is that you can spin into an egotistical spiral, becoming blind to anything slightly different, even if you’d love it. This is called a filter bubble. The technical term is “overfitting.” You get stuck at a lower than optimal peak because you behave as if you have arrived at the top, ignoring the adjacent environment. There’s a lot of evidence this occurs in the political realm as well: Readers of one political stripe who depend only on a simple filter of “more like this” rarely if ever read books outside their stripe. This overfitting tends to harden their minds. This kind of filter-induced self-reinforcement also occurs in science, the arts, and culture at large. The more effective the “more good stuff like this” filter is, the more important it becomes to alloy it with other types of filters. \n\nEvery filter throws something good away. Filtering is a type of censoring, and vice versa. The inadequacies of a filter cannot be remedied by eliminating filters. The inadequacies of a filter can be remedied only by applying countervailing filters upon it. From the human point of view, a filter focuses content. But seen in reverse, from the content point of view, a filter focuses human attention.\n\n“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Simon’s insight is often reduced to “In a world of abundance, the only scarcity is human attention.”\n\nThe filters have been watching us for years; they anticipate what we will ask. They can almost autocomplete it right now. Thing is, we don’t know what we want. We don’t know ourselves very well. To some degree we will rely on the filters to tell us what we want. Not as slave masters, but as a mirror. We’ll listen to the suggestions and recommendations that are generated by our own behavior in order to hear, to see who we are.\n\nModern technologies are combinations of earlier primitive technologies that have been rearranged and remixed. Since one can combine hundreds of simpler technologies with hundreds of thousands of more complex technologies, there is an unlimited number of possible new technologies—but they are all remixes.\n\nThe entire global economy is tipping away from the material and toward intangible bits. It is moving away from ownership and toward access. It is tilting away from the value of copies and toward the value of networks. It is headed for the inevitability of constant, relentless, and increasing remixing. The laws will be slow to follow, but they will follow.\n\nAppropriation of existing material is a venerable and necessary practice. As the economists Romer and Arthur remind us, recombination is really the only source of innovation—and wealth. I suggest we follow the question, “Has it been transformed by the borrower?” Did the remixing, the mashup, the sampling, the appropriation, the borrowing—did it transform the original rather than just copy it?\n\nA quantified-self experiment, on the other hand, is just N=1. The subject is yourself. At first it may seem that an N=1 experiment is not scientifically valid, but it turns out that it is extremely valid to you. In many ways it is the ideal experiment because you are testing the variable X against the very particular subject that is your body and mind at one point in time. Who cares whether the treatment works on anyone else? What you want to know is, How does it affect me? An N=1 provides that laser-focused result. The problem with an N=1 experiment (which was once standard procedure for all medicine before the age of science) is not that the results aren’t useful (they are), but that it is very easy to fool yourself.\n\nIn formal studies, you need a control group to offset your bias toward positive results. So in lieu of a control group in an N=1 study, a quantified-self experimenter uses his or her own baseline. If you track yourself long enough, with a wide variety of metrics, then you can establish your behavior outside (or before) the experiment, which effectively functions as the control for comparison.\n\nThe growth of information has been steadily increasing at an insane rate for at least a century. It is no coincidence that 66 percent per year is the same as doubling every 18 months, which is the rate of Moore’s Law. Five years ago humanity stored several hundred exabytes of information. That is the equivalent of each person on the planet having 80 Library of Alexandrias. Today we average 320 libraries each. There’s another way to visualize this growth: as an information explosion. Every second of every day we globally manufacture 6,000 square meters of information storage material—disks, chips, DVDs, paper, film—which we promptly fill up with data. That rate—6,000 square meters per second—is the approximate velocity of the shock wave radiating from an atomic explosion. Information is expanding at the rate of a nuclear explosion, but unlike a real atomic explosion, which lasts only seconds, this information explosion is perpetual, a nuclear blast lasting many decades.\n\nMetadata is the new wealth because the value of bits increases when they are linked to other bits. The least productive life for a bit is to remain naked and alone. A bit uncopied, unshared, unlinked with other bits will be a short-lived bit. The worst future for a bit is to be parked in some dark isolated data vault. What bits really want is to hang out with other related bits, be replicated widely, and maybe become a metabit, or an action bit in a piece of durable code. If we could personify bits, we’d say: Bits want to move. Bits want to be linked to other bits. Bits want to be reckoned in real time. Bits want to be duplicated, replicated, copied. Bits want to be meta.\n\nAnonymity enables the occasional whistle-blower and can protect the persecuted fringe and political outcasts. But if anonymity is present in any significant quantity, it will poison the system. While anonymity can be used to protect heroes, it is far more commonly used as a way to escape responsibility. A lack of responsibility unleashes the worst in us.\n\nJust as fleshy tissue yields a new, higher level of organization for a bunch of individual cells, these new social structures yield new tissue for individual humans. Tissue can do things that cells can’t. The collectivist organizations of Wikipedia, Linux, Facebook, Uber, the web—even AI—can do things that industrialized humans could not.\n\nEvery minute a new impossible thing is uploaded to the internet and that improbable event becomes just one of hundreds of extraordinary events that we’ll see or hear about today. The internet is like a lens that focuses the extraordinary into a beam, and that beam has become our illumination. It compresses the unlikely into a small viewable band of everydayness.\n\nIronically, in an age of instant global connection, my certainty about anything has decreased. Rather than receiving truth from an authority, I am reduced to assembling my own certainty from the liquid stream of facts flowing through the web. Truth, with a capital T, becomes truths, plural. I have to sort the truths not just about things I care about, but about anything I touch, including areas about which I can’t possibly have any direct knowledge. That means that in general I have to constantly question what I think I know. We might consider this state perfect for the advancement of science, but it also means that I am more likely to have my mind changed for incorrect reasons.\n\nI’ve noticed a different approach to my thinking now that the hive mind has spread it extremely wide and loose. My thinking is more active, less contemplative. Rather than begin a question or hunch by ruminating aimlessly in my mind, nourished only by my ignorance, I start doing things. I immediately go. I go looking, searching, asking, questioning, reacting, leaping in, constructing notes, bookmarks, a trail—I start off making something mine. I don’t wait. Don’t have to wait. I act on ideas first now instead of thinking on them. For some folks, this is the worst of the net—the loss of contemplation.\n\nThus, even though our knowledge is expanding exponentially, our questions are expanding exponentially faster. And as mathematicians will tell you, the widening gap between two exponential curves is itself an exponential curve. That gap between questions and answers is our ignorance, and it is growing exponentially. In other words, science is a method that chiefly expands our ignorance rather than our knowledge.\n\nI asked it how many searches all search engines do per second? It said 600,000 searches per second, or 600 kilohertz. The internet is answering questions at the buzzing frequency of radio waves.\n\nThere is an asymmetry in the work needed to generate a good question versus the work needed to absorb an answer. Answers become cheap and questions become valuable—the inverse of the situation now.\n\nA good question is not concerned with a correct answer. A good question cannot be answered immediately. A good question challenges existing answers. A good question is one you badly want answered once you hear it, but had no inkling you cared before it was asked. A good question creates new territory of thinking. A good question reframes its own answers. A good question is the seed of innovation in science, technology, art, politics, and business. A good question is a probe, a what-if scenario. A good question skirts on the edge of what is known and not known, neither silly nor obvious. A good question cannot be predicted. A good question will be the sign of an educated mind. A good question is one that generates many other good questions. A good question may be the last job a machine will learn to do. A good question is what humans are for.\n\n\n",
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"content": "Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save The World<br />by Andrew Breitbart <br /><br />The single best and most powerful contribution this book will make on any reader is Chapter 6: Breakthrough. Breakthrough is the history lesson that almost nobody is aware of but which everybody should get. It maps the founding roots of progressivism, social justice, postmodernism, and critical theory, the pervasive impact all of these cultural factors are now having in western democracies, and how they ultimately all relate to, and fundamentally stem from, Marxism. Overviewing Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals as part of the history provides an additional, invaluable insight into the tactics of these movements as the raw, visible, and enabling feature of the ethos and strategy embodied by the above philosophical ideologies. <br /><br />These ideas are not new, but have been developing, incubating in, and indoctrinating western populations for a century. Even if you’re sympathetic to these ideologies understanding their root should grant you a new and more knowledgeable perspective. <br /><br />Much of the rest of the book tracks key events and transitions in Breitbart’s life, from University binge drinking and liberalism to conservatism and libertarianism. These transitions are narrated through the major stories and events that shaped his life and career and which are told in a thrilling, edge-of-your-seat manner that conveys the stakes, risks, and euphoria that surrounded the actors, events, and powerful influence at hand. It is of course a different lens, a different counter-narrative, to the one that many have been lead to believe as the only version of the truth. Not many people know that he didn’t just help launch Breitbart.com but The Huffington Post, which these days stand in stark contrast to one another. <br /><br />The overarching theme throughout the whole book is a righteous and indignant critique of the media, the fourth estate, that he refers to as the Complex. Most of the Complex is a pervasive self-reinforcing system built on hard-left progressivist ideologies that is intolerant of dissent and deploys biased and increasingly hateful criticism of anyone and everyone who dares to have different opinions and not toe the party line. The outright hypocrisy, slander, witch hunts, and authoritarianism that are endemic within the mainstream media is what forced Breitbart down this path and his declaration of war against them. <br /><br />It is pretty clear that he would have loved the 2016 election cycle. <br /><br /><br />Highlights & Excerpts:<br /> <br />Make no mistake: America is in a media war. It is an extension of the Cold War that never ended but shifted to an electronic front. The war between freedom and statism ended geographically when the Berlin Wall fell. But the existential battle never ceased. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the battle simply took a different form. Instead of missiles the new weapon was language and education, and the international left had successfully constructed a global infrastructure to get its message out. Schools. Newspapers. Network news. Art. Music. Film. Television.<br /><br />The left does not win its battles in debate. It doesn’t have to. In the twenty-first century, media is everything. The left wins because it controls the narrative. The narrative is controlled by the media. The left is the media. Narrative is everything.<br /><br />I felt myself moving past this defensive irony, toward that least hip of beliefs: values.<br /><br />I was gaining nourishment from something outside of humor and cynicism; I’d found that reading about big issues and listening to other people’s thinking about ideas, morality, and societal standards was actually fulfilling. I guess I was looking for authenticity.<br /><br />I’m at war with the mainstream media because they portray themselves as objective observers of reality when they’re no such thing—they’re partisan “critical theory” hacks who think they can destroy everything America stands for by standing on the sidelines and sniping at patriotic Americans with all their favorite slurs. They have nothing but contempt for the American people. They use all the weapons they have at their disposal to intimidate every one of us and force us to shut up and not to speak our minds.<br /><br />This is not journalism. It’s the vicious actions of a perverse, degraded, and disgusting human being. And Salon ran it without question. Why? “It was savage (no pun intended), powerful writing, Swiftian in its desperate, satiric outrage at anti-gay discrimination.” In other words, the ends justify the means. This was Salon.com.<br /><br />I had watched the forces of the New Media hold him accountable in a way the Old Media would not. I had also studied the perfection of the politics of personal destruction under the Clintons.<br /><br />I believe in an equal society with equal rights for individuals—not a balkanized society where membership in certain groups guarantees special privileges and rights.<br /><br />The biggest point I wanted to make was one I’m still making: Hollywood is more important than Washington. It can’t be overstated how important this message is: pop culture matters. What happens in front of the cameras on a soundstage at the Warner Bros. lot often makes more difference to the fate of America than what happens in the back rooms of the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill.<br /><br />I began to see the fundamental flaw in the left’s scorched-earth tactics—they can only tear down, not build up. And it hit me that the tearing down of The Other wasn’t enough. Every time I did a Fox News hit where I attacked Michael Moore, no matter how valid the attack, no matter how much I had raised my fledgling Q rating, I felt emasculated and cheapened because I was only tearing down, not building.<br /><br />I was realizing that the most brutal, evil force I could imagine wasn’t Al Qaeda or radical Islam (at least you know where they’re coming from, the brutality of their mission and their anti-Western, anticlassical, liberal hatred), but the Complex surrounding me 24/7 in the form of attractive people making millions of dollars whose moral relativism and historical revisionism and collective cultural nihilism were putting them in the same boat as the martyrs of radical Islam rather than red-state Americans… at the exact time when I was undergoing the fundamental recognition that my neighbors in West Los Angeles were acting to undermine national cohesion in a time of war, which put me in a perennial state of psychic dissonance…<br /><br />The greatest victory for the right with regard to the site is that for years, conservatives argued that the New York Times, the most important journalistic entity in the United States, was radically left of center. And for years, the left denied it. But the Huffington Post was different—it was openly and loudly and radically leftist. When you read the Huffington Post, you knew there was a collective mind-set, a groupthink. And the great irony was that if you looked at the front page of the Huffington Post on any given day and matched it with the front page of the New York Times, they were virtually identical.<br /><br />When you look at the history of the Soviet Union, what you see is the conversion of hundreds of millions to a corrupt and insidious worldview via the overpowering propaganda of communism. Yes, they used force. But they also used every means at their disposal to control the culture, the everyday lives, the very thoughts of their citizens. When I was at Tulane, I saw the same cultural forces at work: the forces of the thought police, of the cultural fascisti.<br /><br />John Adams knew government had to be limited, since “it is weakness rather than wickedness which renders men unfit to be trusted with unlimited power.” <br />That was why the Founders were so ardent about instilling in future generations moral teaching, virtuous teaching—men were not naturally good and needed moral education. Smith knew that capitalism—the exchange of the products of one’s best efforts for the products of someone else’s best efforts—required people to act with virtue. To sum up, the Founders’ view was this: human nature is variable and requires training in virtue; no government should be given too much power, or the people comprising that government will use the power in the worst ways possible; individual freedom, when used within the boundaries of morality, is the highest good. The Constitution was written as a living testimony to this view.<br /><br />Progressivism was a strain in American thought that merged the Hegelian dialectic with Marxism, backed by a rosy Rousseau-ian view of humanity and the general will—basically, it was soft Marxism without the class struggle.<br /><br />Those who stand for Progressivism, said Teddy, “stand for the forward movement… for the uplift and betterment, who have faith in the people.” Ends, not means, matter: “We of today who stand for the Progressive movement here in the United States are not wedded to any particular kind of machinery, save solely as means to the end desired. Our aim is to secure the real and not the nominal rule of the people.” That’s scary stuff—the business of government is all about means, which is why the Constitution is mostly a document describing how things get done, not what things should get done. Once a president starts ignoring means to get to ends, we’ve got a serious constitutional problem on our hands.<br /><br />Critical theory was exactly the material we were taught at Tulane. It was, quite literally, a theory of criticizing everyone and everything everywhere. It was an attempt to tear down the social fabric by using all the social sciences (sociology, psychology, economics, political science, etc.); it was an infinite and unending criticism of the status quo, adolescent rebellion against all established social rules and norms.<br /><br />Critical theory, says Horkheimer, is “suspicious of the very categories of better, useful, appropriate, productive, and valuable, as those are understood in the present order.”<br /><br />The real idea behind all of this was to make society totally unworkable by making everything basically meaningless. Critical theory does not create; it only destroys, as Horkheimer himself openly stated, “Above all… critical theory has no material accomplishments to show for itself.”<br /><br />Marcuse was a former student of future Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, the father of “deconstruction,” a process by which every thought or writing from the past had to be examined and torn down as an outgrowth of its social milieu.<br /><br />Marcuse’s mission was to dismantle American society by using diversity and “multiculturalism” as crowbars with which to pry the structure apart, piece by piece. He wanted to set blacks in opposition to whites, set all “victim groups” in opposition to the society at large. Marcuse’s theory of victim groups as the new proletariat, combined with Horkheimer’s critical theory, found an outlet in academia, where it became the basis for the post-structural movement—Gender Studies, LGBT/“Queer” Studies, African-American Studies, Chicano Studies, etc. All of these “Blank Studies” brazenly describe their mission as tearing down traditional Judeo-Christian values and the accepted traditions of Western culture, and placing in their stead a moral relativism that equates all cultures and all philosophies—except for Western civilization, culture, and philosophy, which are “exploitative” and “bad.”<br /><br />America’s founding ideology is still far sexier than that of the Marxists, who insist on a tyrannical state of equality rather than freedom with personal responsibility.<br />In 1965, Marcuse wrote an essay called “Repressive Tolerance” in which he argued that tolerance was good only if nondominating ideas were allowed to flourish—and that nondominating ideas could flourish only if dominating ideas were shut down. “[T]he realization of the objective of tolerance,” he wrote, “would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.” America was experiencing a “repressive tolerance” under which dissenting viewpoints were stifled; what it needed was “partisan tolerance.” In other words, if you disagreed with Marcuse, you should be forcefully shut up, according to Marcuse. This made political debate very convenient for him and his allies. This totalitarianism is now standard practice on college campuses, in the media, and in Hollywood—the very places that the Frankfurt School sought to control.<br /><br />Marcuse called for a tyranny of the minority, since the tyranny of the majority could not be overcome without a total shutdown. There’s another name for Marcuse’s “partisan tolerance”: Political Correctness.<br /><br />Rules for Radicals might just as well be entitled How to Take Over America from the Inside. It’s theory made flesh. The people, Alinsky thinks, are like happy sheep. In order to steer them in the politically correct direction, they first must be made unhappy, and that unhappiness will result in passivity, then finally in discontent, and then, in the end, revolution. Incrementalism, as Frankfurt School’s Antonio Gramsci taught, is the name of the game. And the only way to begin opening the door to the revolution is to make people unhappy with the status quo.<br /><br />Alinsky believes that the ends justify the means as a general rule. He believes that fearing corruption of your internal values only leads to paralysis, and that the only way to truly win is to abandon yourself wholly to your ends. As Stalin would have put it, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Alinsky liked omelets. This obviously runs directly counter to the notions of Judeo-Christian morality, which ardently state that right ends cannot justify wrong means.<br /><br />Hypocrisy is obviously the key word here, and it’s the left’s favorite charge for the simple reason that the vast majority of people with standards are “hypocrites” at some point in their lives. Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.<br /><br />It took Alinsky to shut up the opposition using the methodologies of political correctness, to frighten people into submission and create an informal anti–First Amendment regime where if you speak out, you become a personal target.<br /><br />We can’t win the political war until we win the cultural war.<br /><br />If you’ve made mistakes, reveal them at the first available opportunity. Embrace those mistakes. Don’t talk about how you regret them—talk about how you lived through them and how they made you who you are today. Embracing your mistakes makes you invulnerable to their slings.<br /><br />I intentionally co-created the Huffington Post in order to grant the hard left a place in the blogosphere to express itself. I knew that in the future I wanted to provide a similar platform for citizen journalists who relate more to my way of thinking on the center right, on the side of individual freedoms and individual liberties and individual rights over group rights, group thinking, and categorizing people into racial, gender, and sexual-orientation categories only to then pit them against one another.<br /><br /><br /><br />",
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"content": "Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save The World\nby Andrew Breitbart \n\nThe single best and most powerful contribution this book will make on any reader is Chapter 6: Breakthrough. Breakthrough is the history lesson that almost nobody is aware of but which everybody should get. It maps the founding roots of progressivism, social justice, postmodernism, and critical theory, the pervasive impact all of these cultural factors are now having in western democracies, and how they ultimately all relate to, and fundamentally stem from, Marxism. Overviewing Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals as part of the history provides an additional, invaluable insight into the tactics of these movements as the raw, visible, and enabling feature of the ethos and strategy embodied by the above philosophical ideologies. \n\nThese ideas are not new, but have been developing, incubating in, and indoctrinating western populations for a century. Even if you’re sympathetic to these ideologies understanding their root should grant you a new and more knowledgeable perspective. \n\nMuch of the rest of the book tracks key events and transitions in Breitbart’s life, from University binge drinking and liberalism to conservatism and libertarianism. These transitions are narrated through the major stories and events that shaped his life and career and which are told in a thrilling, edge-of-your-seat manner that conveys the stakes, risks, and euphoria that surrounded the actors, events, and powerful influence at hand. It is of course a different lens, a different counter-narrative, to the one that many have been lead to believe as the only version of the truth. Not many people know that he didn’t just help launch Breitbart.com but The Huffington Post, which these days stand in stark contrast to one another. \n\nThe overarching theme throughout the whole book is a righteous and indignant critique of the media, the fourth estate, that he refers to as the Complex. Most of the Complex is a pervasive self-reinforcing system built on hard-left progressivist ideologies that is intolerant of dissent and deploys biased and increasingly hateful criticism of anyone and everyone who dares to have different opinions and not toe the party line. The outright hypocrisy, slander, witch hunts, and authoritarianism that are endemic within the mainstream media is what forced Breitbart down this path and his declaration of war against them. \n\nIt is pretty clear that he would have loved the 2016 election cycle. \n\n\nHighlights & Excerpts:\n \nMake no mistake: America is in a media war. It is an extension of the Cold War that never ended but shifted to an electronic front. The war between freedom and statism ended geographically when the Berlin Wall fell. But the existential battle never ceased. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the battle simply took a different form. Instead of missiles the new weapon was language and education, and the international left had successfully constructed a global infrastructure to get its message out. Schools. Newspapers. Network news. Art. Music. Film. Television.\n\nThe left does not win its battles in debate. It doesn’t have to. In the twenty-first century, media is everything. The left wins because it controls the narrative. The narrative is controlled by the media. The left is the media. Narrative is everything.\n\nI felt myself moving past this defensive irony, toward that least hip of beliefs: values.\n\nI was gaining nourishment from something outside of humor and cynicism; I’d found that reading about big issues and listening to other people’s thinking about ideas, morality, and societal standards was actually fulfilling. I guess I was looking for authenticity.\n\nI’m at war with the mainstream media because they portray themselves as objective observers of reality when they’re no such thing—they’re partisan “critical theory” hacks who think they can destroy everything America stands for by standing on the sidelines and sniping at patriotic Americans with all their favorite slurs. They have nothing but contempt for the American people. They use all the weapons they have at their disposal to intimidate every one of us and force us to shut up and not to speak our minds.\n\nThis is not journalism. It’s the vicious actions of a perverse, degraded, and disgusting human being. And Salon ran it without question. Why? “It was savage (no pun intended), powerful writing, Swiftian in its desperate, satiric outrage at anti-gay discrimination.” In other words, the ends justify the means. This was Salon.com.\n\nI had watched the forces of the New Media hold him accountable in a way the Old Media would not. I had also studied the perfection of the politics of personal destruction under the Clintons.\n\nI believe in an equal society with equal rights for individuals—not a balkanized society where membership in certain groups guarantees special privileges and rights.\n\nThe biggest point I wanted to make was one I’m still making: Hollywood is more important than Washington. It can’t be overstated how important this message is: pop culture matters. What happens in front of the cameras on a soundstage at the Warner Bros. lot often makes more difference to the fate of America than what happens in the back rooms of the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill.\n\nI began to see the fundamental flaw in the left’s scorched-earth tactics—they can only tear down, not build up. And it hit me that the tearing down of The Other wasn’t enough. Every time I did a Fox News hit where I attacked Michael Moore, no matter how valid the attack, no matter how much I had raised my fledgling Q rating, I felt emasculated and cheapened because I was only tearing down, not building.\n\nI was realizing that the most brutal, evil force I could imagine wasn’t Al Qaeda or radical Islam (at least you know where they’re coming from, the brutality of their mission and their anti-Western, anticlassical, liberal hatred), but the Complex surrounding me 24/7 in the form of attractive people making millions of dollars whose moral relativism and historical revisionism and collective cultural nihilism were putting them in the same boat as the martyrs of radical Islam rather than red-state Americans… at the exact time when I was undergoing the fundamental recognition that my neighbors in West Los Angeles were acting to undermine national cohesion in a time of war, which put me in a perennial state of psychic dissonance…\n\nThe greatest victory for the right with regard to the site is that for years, conservatives argued that the New York Times, the most important journalistic entity in the United States, was radically left of center. And for years, the left denied it. But the Huffington Post was different—it was openly and loudly and radically leftist. When you read the Huffington Post, you knew there was a collective mind-set, a groupthink. And the great irony was that if you looked at the front page of the Huffington Post on any given day and matched it with the front page of the New York Times, they were virtually identical.\n\nWhen you look at the history of the Soviet Union, what you see is the conversion of hundreds of millions to a corrupt and insidious worldview via the overpowering propaganda of communism. Yes, they used force. But they also used every means at their disposal to control the culture, the everyday lives, the very thoughts of their citizens. When I was at Tulane, I saw the same cultural forces at work: the forces of the thought police, of the cultural fascisti.\n\nJohn Adams knew government had to be limited, since “it is weakness rather than wickedness which renders men unfit to be trusted with unlimited power.” \nThat was why the Founders were so ardent about instilling in future generations moral teaching, virtuous teaching—men were not naturally good and needed moral education. Smith knew that capitalism—the exchange of the products of one’s best efforts for the products of someone else’s best efforts—required people to act with virtue. To sum up, the Founders’ view was this: human nature is variable and requires training in virtue; no government should be given too much power, or the people comprising that government will use the power in the worst ways possible; individual freedom, when used within the boundaries of morality, is the highest good. The Constitution was written as a living testimony to this view.\n\nProgressivism was a strain in American thought that merged the Hegelian dialectic with Marxism, backed by a rosy Rousseau-ian view of humanity and the general will—basically, it was soft Marxism without the class struggle.\n\nThose who stand for Progressivism, said Teddy, “stand for the forward movement… for the uplift and betterment, who have faith in the people.” Ends, not means, matter: “We of today who stand for the Progressive movement here in the United States are not wedded to any particular kind of machinery, save solely as means to the end desired. Our aim is to secure the real and not the nominal rule of the people.” That’s scary stuff—the business of government is all about means, which is why the Constitution is mostly a document describing how things get done, not what things should get done. Once a president starts ignoring means to get to ends, we’ve got a serious constitutional problem on our hands.\n\nCritical theory was exactly the material we were taught at Tulane. It was, quite literally, a theory of criticizing everyone and everything everywhere. It was an attempt to tear down the social fabric by using all the social sciences (sociology, psychology, economics, political science, etc.); it was an infinite and unending criticism of the status quo, adolescent rebellion against all established social rules and norms.\n\nCritical theory, says Horkheimer, is “suspicious of the very categories of better, useful, appropriate, productive, and valuable, as those are understood in the present order.”\n\nThe real idea behind all of this was to make society totally unworkable by making everything basically meaningless. Critical theory does not create; it only destroys, as Horkheimer himself openly stated, “Above all… critical theory has no material accomplishments to show for itself.”\n\nMarcuse was a former student of future Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, the father of “deconstruction,” a process by which every thought or writing from the past had to be examined and torn down as an outgrowth of its social milieu.\n\nMarcuse’s mission was to dismantle American society by using diversity and “multiculturalism” as crowbars with which to pry the structure apart, piece by piece. He wanted to set blacks in opposition to whites, set all “victim groups” in opposition to the society at large. Marcuse’s theory of victim groups as the new proletariat, combined with Horkheimer’s critical theory, found an outlet in academia, where it became the basis for the post-structural movement—Gender Studies, LGBT/“Queer” Studies, African-American Studies, Chicano Studies, etc. All of these “Blank Studies” brazenly describe their mission as tearing down traditional Judeo-Christian values and the accepted traditions of Western culture, and placing in their stead a moral relativism that equates all cultures and all philosophies—except for Western civilization, culture, and philosophy, which are “exploitative” and “bad.”\n\nAmerica’s founding ideology is still far sexier than that of the Marxists, who insist on a tyrannical state of equality rather than freedom with personal responsibility.\nIn 1965, Marcuse wrote an essay called “Repressive Tolerance” in which he argued that tolerance was good only if nondominating ideas were allowed to flourish—and that nondominating ideas could flourish only if dominating ideas were shut down. “[T]he realization of the objective of tolerance,” he wrote, “would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.” America was experiencing a “repressive tolerance” under which dissenting viewpoints were stifled; what it needed was “partisan tolerance.” In other words, if you disagreed with Marcuse, you should be forcefully shut up, according to Marcuse. This made political debate very convenient for him and his allies. This totalitarianism is now standard practice on college campuses, in the media, and in Hollywood—the very places that the Frankfurt School sought to control.\n\nMarcuse called for a tyranny of the minority, since the tyranny of the majority could not be overcome without a total shutdown. There’s another name for Marcuse’s “partisan tolerance”: Political Correctness.\n\nRules for Radicals might just as well be entitled How to Take Over America from the Inside. It’s theory made flesh. The people, Alinsky thinks, are like happy sheep. In order to steer them in the politically correct direction, they first must be made unhappy, and that unhappiness will result in passivity, then finally in discontent, and then, in the end, revolution. Incrementalism, as Frankfurt School’s Antonio Gramsci taught, is the name of the game. And the only way to begin opening the door to the revolution is to make people unhappy with the status quo.\n\nAlinsky believes that the ends justify the means as a general rule. He believes that fearing corruption of your internal values only leads to paralysis, and that the only way to truly win is to abandon yourself wholly to your ends. As Stalin would have put it, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Alinsky liked omelets. This obviously runs directly counter to the notions of Judeo-Christian morality, which ardently state that right ends cannot justify wrong means.\n\nHypocrisy is obviously the key word here, and it’s the left’s favorite charge for the simple reason that the vast majority of people with standards are “hypocrites” at some point in their lives. Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.\n\nIt took Alinsky to shut up the opposition using the methodologies of political correctness, to frighten people into submission and create an informal anti–First Amendment regime where if you speak out, you become a personal target.\n\nWe can’t win the political war until we win the cultural war.\n\nIf you’ve made mistakes, reveal them at the first available opportunity. Embrace those mistakes. Don’t talk about how you regret them—talk about how you lived through them and how they made you who you are today. Embracing your mistakes makes you invulnerable to their slings.\n\nI intentionally co-created the Huffington Post in order to grant the hard left a place in the blogosphere to express itself. I knew that in the future I wanted to provide a similar platform for citizen journalists who relate more to my way of thinking on the center right, on the side of individual freedoms and individual liberties and individual rights over group rights, group thinking, and categorizing people into racial, gender, and sexual-orientation categories only to then pit them against one another.\n\n\n\n",
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"content": "Paul Bloom on Effective Altruism vs Pathological Empathy<br /><br />Excerpts:<br />Empathy is myopic, innumerate, concrete, and biased, and ultimately leads to bad decision making resulting from emotionally-based arguments. There are many cases where our empathy pushes us one way, and our morality - our more attuned moral sense - pushes us in a different way, and in these cases empathy is clouding you to a more objective moral judgement. <br /><br />Empathy is a spotlight, it zooms your attention into an individual and motivates your concern and your kindness. Empathy can catalyse an otherwise indifferent moral response. However, research shows that you will give more to save one person, than you will for five people, so long as that one person has a face and a name. The spotlight of empathy has a narrow focus, only points in the direction that we point it in, and sometimes we point it in the wrong direction. This personal focus can lead to one person’s kidnapping receiving 13 times more media coverage than 100,000 people starving to death. <br /><br />Studies also show that the neural signatures of empathy are exquisitely sensitive to in-group out-group, race, nationality, etc. Even giving food or money to beggars in Africa for example has been shown to often result in supporting criminal, despotic organisations. Effective Altruism seeks to overcome these failings of empathy, and true moral action involves distancing rather than engaging ourselves. <br /><br />To be a good person you need two things, (i) superior reasoning and understanding in order to anticipate the consequences of your actions, and (ii) self-command, because even if you know the right thing to do you might be tempted to do something else and such impulses need to be controlled. <br /><br />Interestingly, studies show that psychological tests on callousness & empathy have no predictive power on future criminality. <br /><br /><a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrQMn8ynrcE\" target=\"_blank\">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrQMn8ynrcE</a> ",
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"content": "Paul Bloom on Effective Altruism vs Pathological Empathy\n\nExcerpts:\nEmpathy is myopic, innumerate, concrete, and biased, and ultimately leads to bad decision making resulting from emotionally-based arguments. There are many cases where our empathy pushes us one way, and our morality - our more attuned moral sense - pushes us in a different way, and in these cases empathy is clouding you to a more objective moral judgement. \n\nEmpathy is a spotlight, it zooms your attention into an individual and motivates your concern and your kindness. Empathy can catalyse an otherwise indifferent moral response. However, research shows that you will give more to save one person, than you will for five people, so long as that one person has a face and a name. The spotlight of empathy has a narrow focus, only points in the direction that we point it in, and sometimes we point it in the wrong direction. This personal focus can lead to one person’s kidnapping receiving 13 times more media coverage than 100,000 people starving to death. \n\nStudies also show that the neural signatures of empathy are exquisitely sensitive to in-group out-group, race, nationality, etc. Even giving food or money to beggars in Africa for example has been shown to often result in supporting criminal, despotic organisations. Effective Altruism seeks to overcome these failings of empathy, and true moral action involves distancing rather than engaging ourselves. \n\nTo be a good person you need two things, (i) superior reasoning and understanding in order to anticipate the consequences of your actions, and (ii) self-command, because even if you know the right thing to do you might be tempted to do something else and such impulses need to be controlled. \n\nInterestingly, studies show that psychological tests on callousness & empathy have no predictive power on future criminality. \n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrQMn8ynrcE ",
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"content": "Strengthen the Individual: A Counterpoint to Modern Political Correctness<br /><a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwcVLETRBjg\" target=\"_blank\">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwcVLETRBjg</a><br /><br />Near-Complete Transcript: <br />When people examine something horrifying that humanity has done, for example Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, they make the assumption that it is other people doing it. That is a big mistake because if a lot of human beings have done something terrible you can be sure that, being a human being, that you are capable of it. In order for us to come to terms with this we need to understand not only how it happened, but more importantly, what role we still play as individuals in acting in such a way that such things are not only likely but desired. <br /><br />Nietzsche left a major problem behind. If it is the case that the ideational foundation of western civilisation was predicated on an illusion (that God was the foundation), then what would we do next? Nietzsche thought that what we will certainly do next is descend into an unholy combination of nihilism and totalitarianism, because they will be the things that beckon most clearly in the chaotic aftermath after the dissolution of the value structure upon which our society had been predicated. Nietzsche further prophesised that as a result of this millions of people would die in the twentieth century, purely as a result of communist revolutions.<br /><br />Jung’s idea was that we weren’t going to be able to create our own values because human beings can simply not create their own values. You can make resolutions and you can act in a particular way that you believe will make you better, but you find out very quickly that you can’t enslave yourself and tell yourself what to do or boss yourself around. You do have an underlying nature and you can’t just arbitrarily mold and shape that nature because you will rebel against your own will. Jung contended that we would have to go back inside ourselves, into the symbolic background of our psychological structure and rediscover what we had lost. <br /><br />A belief system exists because we have to deal with an infinitely complex world and we have to simplify it down to portions that we can manage because we do not have infinite cognitive or emotional or physiological resources. We are very bounded creatures living in an unbounded environment; we have to impose simplifications on the world or we get so stressed we die. For example, people can develop post traumatic stress disorder when they encounter an event that they cannot compute, sending them into emergency preparation mode, being hyper-responsive to threats, which is so physiologically demanding that over the long term it demolishes your health; it isn’t merely psychological, it damages your brain. <br /><br />We organise ourselves into these structures of simplification - that is what our cultures are - we negotiate them, we inhabit them jointly. Because of this, when we run into people who do that differently the probability that we will engage in conflict is extraordinarily high. I can’t give up my beliefs just because you have different beliefs, and if we don’t have the same beliefs then we can’t peacefully occupy the same territory. If we can’t negotiate then we have to fight. <br /><br />Nietzsche's contention was that what had happened in the West was that the Judeo-CHristian tradition and even the precursors to that tradition from which that tradition emerge had insisted for millennia that the pursuit of truth was the highest moral value. One of the consequences of that was that the West developed science as part of that pursuit of the truth. Then the tools of science, once successfully grasped and universalised, were then turned against the dogmatic structure of the church when everyone woke up “as scientists” and thought that we are living by a set of superstitions that are not true and that need to be dispensed with. <br /><br />One of the most terrible things about discovering that a system you believed in no longer functions, is no longer sufficient, or can be undermined is that it raises the spectre that all such systems have the same flaws. For example, someone may jump from atheism to christianity to socialism, and be faithless from within the perspective of a given system but you’re faithful to the idea that there are in fact systems that will work. But if your system fails enough you can end up in a situation where you no longer have faith that systems as such can work. And that makes you nihilistic. Fundamentally hopeless. <br /><br />Nietzsche also talked about the rise of totalitarianism as a medication for the loss of all meaning. If you’re in a chaotic state because you no longer know what to believe, and someone offers you a set of certainties to guide your life by, then it is very attractive for you to reach out and grip onto those with all of your being because that stops you from merely being adrift. <br /><br />The terrible thing about being nihilistic is that nothing that you do has any meaning. But this is actually untrue because there are forms of meaning in life that nihilism won’t protect you from or may even increase your exposure to. Those are the tragic meanings of life. I don’t care how nihilistic you are and what you don’t believe it, you’re going to believe in your own pain, you’re going to believe in your own anxiety, you’re going to believe in the fact of pain and anxiety for everyone else, and you’re going to believe in catastrophe. You can’t think yourself out of the catastrophe of the world by being nihilistic. The negative meanings remain. <br /><br />You can dispense with the positive meanings, which seems to be a bad bargain, but the upside of doing so is straightforward. Here are your alternatives: nothing you do matters or has any meaning, or, everything you do matters and has meaning. The first option may appear horrifying but on examination the second is more horrifying because it means that the things that you do, for better or for worse, actually do matter, and you are responsible for them. Not only for the effect that they have on you in the immediate circumstances of your life, but for the effect they have radiating out from you to the other people that you are networked to, and for the effect they have radiating out through time. <br /><br />It could be that everything you do does matter, that every choice that you make matters. And I do believe that that is the case, that you are constantly making choices between good and evil, and that that determines the destiny of being. And it isn’t obvious to me at all that that is something that you would wish upon yourself. One of the advantages to being nihilistic is that is enables you to be totally irresponsible, even though the price you pay for that is the sacrifice of all positive meaning. <br /><br />The story means that structure extracts habitable order from chaos through speech. That is what we do. This has meaning that is utterly profound. It means something that we cannot forget, for we forget it at our peril. There is something about the human being, that makes us conscious, that interacts with the chaotic potential that constitutes reality and extracts out from that the order in which we live. This represents the ineradicable value of the human being. This leads to the idea that each individual, even the worst and most reprehensible people, have to be treated with the respect due a divinity because we partake in the capacity to extract habitable order from chaos with our consciousness, with our speech, and with our capacity to communicate. We recognise each other as valuable, as we each have something to offer each other, and something vital. <br /><br />You know this. If you engage in a real conversation with someone, a meaningful conversation that suspends your sense of fragile mortality for a moment you understand that in that communication between people something of inestimable value emerges that you have to pursue. You live for this. You live for this relationship with yourself, you live for that discovery of that relationship when you are engaged in an artistic pursuit; it is the core of meaning in life. It is not an illusion, in fact, it is a manifestation of the highest functions of your nervous system. <br /><br />Because what your nervous system does is signal to you that you are in a place and time that you cannot see when you are engaged in something meaningful. It comes upon you. It is the cure for catastrophes of tragic mortality, that wonderful engagement in what is meaningful that you can and do experience. Your nervous system has learned, over billions of years, that when you’re standing on the border between chaos and order, and keeping them in balance, that this is what manifests itself as meaningful. <br /><br />People live in an amalgam of nature and culture, which is a variant of the juxtaposition of the order of culture and the chaos of nature. We live in the balance between nature and culture, and if it is properly balanced it is as close to paradise as it can get. But paradise is flawed because there is always something lurking in it that can turn it upside down. The circuits that we use to process the things that turn our lives upside down are the same circuits that our tree-dwelling ancestors used to identify predators 60 million years ago. The symbolic structure has remained exactly the same. <br /><br />That which lies outside what you understand is predatory and dangerous. But due to their intelligence human beings also have noted that that terrible predator that lurks outside the domains of what you understand is also the thing that bears gold. This is the classic dragon myth: the hero goes out beyond the confines of order and culture into the chaotic unknown to confront the ultimate predator that simultaneously offers the best that can possibly be gathered. Human beings are simultaneously predator animals and prey animals. <br /><br />Respect for logos and respect for free speech are the same thing. Without that respect our society cannot maintain its structure, differentiate, and progress. We use our free speech to face the chaotic potential of the world and its horrors, to structure it, to understand it, to communicate about it, and to reach consensus. It is the mechanism by which we adapt. There can be no restrictions put upon that unless you want to sacrifice adaptation. Without adaptation things get stale, old, decayed, dead, and dangerous with extraordinary rapidity if people don’t maintain their responsibility to update the state. This is an ancient idea and the reason we haven’t forgotten it is because everyone who forgot it, died. <br /><br />Nietzsche said that after God had died there would be two things that would happen. One would be the emergence of nihilism as a temptation as a logical consequence of the collapse of value systems and as a place for the irresponsible to hide. Nietzsche believed that once you experienced the collapse of a value system you were unlikely to put your faith in any value systems. Nationalism and communism were both absolutely catastrophic evolutionary dead ends. Nationalism is easier to understand. You need an identity, and it has to be collective because human beings live collectively. It is the fact that we share an identity that we can all sit here in this room peacefully because the identity is partly who you think you are and partly what you expect from the world and from others. You can sit together peacefully because you both desire the same thing; this is what it means to have a shared culture. <br /><br />You have to defend that culture and it has to be of sufficient tightness and magnitude so that it makes sense for you to belong to it and it isn’t so diverse and chaotic that it means nothing. One of the reasons why we’re seeing a return to nationalism in places like Europe is because the European identity is so amorphous that people can’t establish a relationship with with it. And that is not a good thing because identity is something you have to have a relationship with. <br /><br />It is your identity, it is the identity of you within your family, it is the identity of your family within the small community, then the broader community of the town, then the somewhat broader community of the province and the state. But as it expands it gets vague and it disperses. At some point the identity that is universal is so all-encompassing that it means nothing at all and leaves people chaotic. This is also happening in the United States and elsewhere as well, because we’ve been pushed so quickly forward to adopt a global identity that people are shaking because that is too amorphous for them. We pull back and say we need to be around people that we understand. <br /><br />We’re trying to sort out the proper balance between differentiated identity at the nation-state level, and the global identity that seems to be manifesting itself partly because of our widespread electronic communication. When religion collapses nationalism can fill the void; Gallop polls revealed that if you were a lapsed catholic then you were 10 times more likely to be a separatist in Quebec. You have to have an identity, and so people can often turn from church to state. But the state cannot be the ultimate identity, which is technically wrong. The problem with the state is that the state is what is uniform across people and the thing is that we need is what is actually diverse across people in order to rejuvenate the state and keep it awake.If you reduce individuals to what is homogenous about them across all people you eradicate the very variability that allows people to adapt to new things. <br /><br />Because we are constantly being presented with new things we need to keep that individual variability paramount. Because it is upon that variability that the very state depends. That is what the west discovered. That is why we’ve always subordinated the state to the divinity of the individual. This is expressed as the primacy of free speech in our civilisation. It is because the individual has something to offer the state. State identity can structure, and it can reassure, but it also constrains to too great a degree. Societies that become only state immediately become old and blind, malevolent, and collapse. <br /><br />If you find that the tragedy of life is too much for you to bear without you becoming resentful and bitter and murderous and genocidal it means that you haven’t picked up enough responsibility. Because if you pick up enough responsibility for the revivification of the state and the eradication of unnecessary suffering you’d find enough meaning that the idea of meaninglessness would vanish in an instant. You’d have more meaning than you knew what to do with. <br /><br />Postmodernism is a response to the Nietzschean dilemma. The cornerstone of civilisation has been demolished by rational critique. It needed to be criticised and more deeply understood. Criticism and understanding are the same thing unless the criticism is only destruction. Postmodernists are the logical conclusion to the dilemma, because the post modernist dogma is that all value structures have collapsed and are only there for the purposes of exclusion and have no intrinsic value. It allows people to dispense with their moral responsibility. <br /><br />The problem with postmodernism is that if all value structures have collapsed then there is nothing to do. In order to do something one thing has to be better than another. People who are ensconced in the post modernist tradition are undermined by their own philosophy; they can deconstruct their own deconstruction and in which case they might as well just sit there and do nothing. Postmodernists don’t believe in logic, dialogue they don’t believe in, because these represent the logos, which they have dispensed with. They revert to the Marxist doctrines from which postmodernism emerged, and to the degree that they are communitarian they take out their nihilistic resentment and arrogance and ingratitude on every single person we deem to have something more than they have. <br /><br />This explains why certain values can exist in the absence of any value you have to look no farther than to understand that people who are desperate and chaotic will still be angry and destructive. They can manifest that perfectly with the moral mast that says “I’m not really after what you have because you have a little more than me, I’m speaking on behalf of these people who have even less.” This is the mindset of those with damaged mental health that hurt our society and bring things down. The postmodernists manage to be nihilistic and totalitarian at the same time, while combining both with the worst aspects of dogmatic religion because what they have essentially established is a cult into which children who attend University are now indoctrinated. <br /><br />The alternative is a proper return to the past, to journey into the chaos, to look at the worst possible thing and to pull the dead father up from the chaotic depths. That is how you stop being a puppet, someone whose strings are being pulled by forces they do not understand behind the scenes. You find out about what is great about your culture, that thing that has provided us with everything we see around us, the fact that our buildings are warm, that the electricity goes on, that we have the computational resources that we do, and that we can all sit here peacefully, and that no one is hungry. We should have some gratitude for what has been produced that has brought us to this point. <br /><br />I learned that the reason the Cold War existed was because I was not good enough. The reasons that the terrible situations in the world exist now is because you are not good enough. We can solve any problem if we used all of the resources that were available to us. If we lived properly we have no idea what we could turn what we’re in, into. You support free speech because it is the mechanism that maintains the sanity of the individual and the society. You live in relationship to the spoken truth to the best of your ability. Because the alternative is hell. If hell is what you want then you can remain arrogant and resentful and deceitful. But if you want to better the world, to bring it up to what it might be, then you speak forthrightly, you clarify yourself, and you act properly in the world and then you see what happens. Aim for the highest possible good that you can conceive of and speak the truth. The act of faith here is that whatever the truth reveals is the best of all possible worlds regardless of how it appears to you now. <br /><br />What would happen if you just said what you thought, stupid as it is, inaccurate as it is? And listen to people criticise you in response, to shape you and make you more articulate? What would your life be like? The answer is that your life gets better, and better, and better, and richer, and deeper, but this comes with a heavier and heavier burden of responsibility. You use the observation of your own capability to bear responsibility, to buttress yourself against the terrors of being finite. You say, weak and miserable as I am, I can still stand up to the terrible tragedy of life and prevail. And that is good enough. ",
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"content": "Strengthen the Individual: A Counterpoint to Modern Political Correctness\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwcVLETRBjg\n\nNear-Complete Transcript: \nWhen people examine something horrifying that humanity has done, for example Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, they make the assumption that it is other people doing it. That is a big mistake because if a lot of human beings have done something terrible you can be sure that, being a human being, that you are capable of it. In order for us to come to terms with this we need to understand not only how it happened, but more importantly, what role we still play as individuals in acting in such a way that such things are not only likely but desired. \n\nNietzsche left a major problem behind. If it is the case that the ideational foundation of western civilisation was predicated on an illusion (that God was the foundation), then what would we do next? Nietzsche thought that what we will certainly do next is descend into an unholy combination of nihilism and totalitarianism, because they will be the things that beckon most clearly in the chaotic aftermath after the dissolution of the value structure upon which our society had been predicated. Nietzsche further prophesised that as a result of this millions of people would die in the twentieth century, purely as a result of communist revolutions.\n\nJung’s idea was that we weren’t going to be able to create our own values because human beings can simply not create their own values. You can make resolutions and you can act in a particular way that you believe will make you better, but you find out very quickly that you can’t enslave yourself and tell yourself what to do or boss yourself around. You do have an underlying nature and you can’t just arbitrarily mold and shape that nature because you will rebel against your own will. Jung contended that we would have to go back inside ourselves, into the symbolic background of our psychological structure and rediscover what we had lost. \n\nA belief system exists because we have to deal with an infinitely complex world and we have to simplify it down to portions that we can manage because we do not have infinite cognitive or emotional or physiological resources. We are very bounded creatures living in an unbounded environment; we have to impose simplifications on the world or we get so stressed we die. For example, people can develop post traumatic stress disorder when they encounter an event that they cannot compute, sending them into emergency preparation mode, being hyper-responsive to threats, which is so physiologically demanding that over the long term it demolishes your health; it isn’t merely psychological, it damages your brain. \n\nWe organise ourselves into these structures of simplification - that is what our cultures are - we negotiate them, we inhabit them jointly. Because of this, when we run into people who do that differently the probability that we will engage in conflict is extraordinarily high. I can’t give up my beliefs just because you have different beliefs, and if we don’t have the same beliefs then we can’t peacefully occupy the same territory. If we can’t negotiate then we have to fight. \n\nNietzsche's contention was that what had happened in the West was that the Judeo-CHristian tradition and even the precursors to that tradition from which that tradition emerge had insisted for millennia that the pursuit of truth was the highest moral value. One of the consequences of that was that the West developed science as part of that pursuit of the truth. Then the tools of science, once successfully grasped and universalised, were then turned against the dogmatic structure of the church when everyone woke up “as scientists” and thought that we are living by a set of superstitions that are not true and that need to be dispensed with. \n\nOne of the most terrible things about discovering that a system you believed in no longer functions, is no longer sufficient, or can be undermined is that it raises the spectre that all such systems have the same flaws. For example, someone may jump from atheism to christianity to socialism, and be faithless from within the perspective of a given system but you’re faithful to the idea that there are in fact systems that will work. But if your system fails enough you can end up in a situation where you no longer have faith that systems as such can work. And that makes you nihilistic. Fundamentally hopeless. \n\nNietzsche also talked about the rise of totalitarianism as a medication for the loss of all meaning. If you’re in a chaotic state because you no longer know what to believe, and someone offers you a set of certainties to guide your life by, then it is very attractive for you to reach out and grip onto those with all of your being because that stops you from merely being adrift. \n\nThe terrible thing about being nihilistic is that nothing that you do has any meaning. But this is actually untrue because there are forms of meaning in life that nihilism won’t protect you from or may even increase your exposure to. Those are the tragic meanings of life. I don’t care how nihilistic you are and what you don’t believe it, you’re going to believe in your own pain, you’re going to believe in your own anxiety, you’re going to believe in the fact of pain and anxiety for everyone else, and you’re going to believe in catastrophe. You can’t think yourself out of the catastrophe of the world by being nihilistic. The negative meanings remain. \n\nYou can dispense with the positive meanings, which seems to be a bad bargain, but the upside of doing so is straightforward. Here are your alternatives: nothing you do matters or has any meaning, or, everything you do matters and has meaning. The first option may appear horrifying but on examination the second is more horrifying because it means that the things that you do, for better or for worse, actually do matter, and you are responsible for them. Not only for the effect that they have on you in the immediate circumstances of your life, but for the effect they have radiating out from you to the other people that you are networked to, and for the effect they have radiating out through time. \n\nIt could be that everything you do does matter, that every choice that you make matters. And I do believe that that is the case, that you are constantly making choices between good and evil, and that that determines the destiny of being. And it isn’t obvious to me at all that that is something that you would wish upon yourself. One of the advantages to being nihilistic is that is enables you to be totally irresponsible, even though the price you pay for that is the sacrifice of all positive meaning. \n\nThe story means that structure extracts habitable order from chaos through speech. That is what we do. This has meaning that is utterly profound. It means something that we cannot forget, for we forget it at our peril. There is something about the human being, that makes us conscious, that interacts with the chaotic potential that constitutes reality and extracts out from that the order in which we live. This represents the ineradicable value of the human being. This leads to the idea that each individual, even the worst and most reprehensible people, have to be treated with the respect due a divinity because we partake in the capacity to extract habitable order from chaos with our consciousness, with our speech, and with our capacity to communicate. We recognise each other as valuable, as we each have something to offer each other, and something vital. \n\nYou know this. If you engage in a real conversation with someone, a meaningful conversation that suspends your sense of fragile mortality for a moment you understand that in that communication between people something of inestimable value emerges that you have to pursue. You live for this. You live for this relationship with yourself, you live for that discovery of that relationship when you are engaged in an artistic pursuit; it is the core of meaning in life. It is not an illusion, in fact, it is a manifestation of the highest functions of your nervous system. \n\nBecause what your nervous system does is signal to you that you are in a place and time that you cannot see when you are engaged in something meaningful. It comes upon you. It is the cure for catastrophes of tragic mortality, that wonderful engagement in what is meaningful that you can and do experience. Your nervous system has learned, over billions of years, that when you’re standing on the border between chaos and order, and keeping them in balance, that this is what manifests itself as meaningful. \n\nPeople live in an amalgam of nature and culture, which is a variant of the juxtaposition of the order of culture and the chaos of nature. We live in the balance between nature and culture, and if it is properly balanced it is as close to paradise as it can get. But paradise is flawed because there is always something lurking in it that can turn it upside down. The circuits that we use to process the things that turn our lives upside down are the same circuits that our tree-dwelling ancestors used to identify predators 60 million years ago. The symbolic structure has remained exactly the same. \n\nThat which lies outside what you understand is predatory and dangerous. But due to their intelligence human beings also have noted that that terrible predator that lurks outside the domains of what you understand is also the thing that bears gold. This is the classic dragon myth: the hero goes out beyond the confines of order and culture into the chaotic unknown to confront the ultimate predator that simultaneously offers the best that can possibly be gathered. Human beings are simultaneously predator animals and prey animals. \n\nRespect for logos and respect for free speech are the same thing. Without that respect our society cannot maintain its structure, differentiate, and progress. We use our free speech to face the chaotic potential of the world and its horrors, to structure it, to understand it, to communicate about it, and to reach consensus. It is the mechanism by which we adapt. There can be no restrictions put upon that unless you want to sacrifice adaptation. Without adaptation things get stale, old, decayed, dead, and dangerous with extraordinary rapidity if people don’t maintain their responsibility to update the state. This is an ancient idea and the reason we haven’t forgotten it is because everyone who forgot it, died. \n\nNietzsche said that after God had died there would be two things that would happen. One would be the emergence of nihilism as a temptation as a logical consequence of the collapse of value systems and as a place for the irresponsible to hide. Nietzsche believed that once you experienced the collapse of a value system you were unlikely to put your faith in any value systems. Nationalism and communism were both absolutely catastrophic evolutionary dead ends. Nationalism is easier to understand. You need an identity, and it has to be collective because human beings live collectively. It is the fact that we share an identity that we can all sit here in this room peacefully because the identity is partly who you think you are and partly what you expect from the world and from others. You can sit together peacefully because you both desire the same thing; this is what it means to have a shared culture. \n\nYou have to defend that culture and it has to be of sufficient tightness and magnitude so that it makes sense for you to belong to it and it isn’t so diverse and chaotic that it means nothing. One of the reasons why we’re seeing a return to nationalism in places like Europe is because the European identity is so amorphous that people can’t establish a relationship with with it. And that is not a good thing because identity is something you have to have a relationship with. \n\nIt is your identity, it is the identity of you within your family, it is the identity of your family within the small community, then the broader community of the town, then the somewhat broader community of the province and the state. But as it expands it gets vague and it disperses. At some point the identity that is universal is so all-encompassing that it means nothing at all and leaves people chaotic. This is also happening in the United States and elsewhere as well, because we’ve been pushed so quickly forward to adopt a global identity that people are shaking because that is too amorphous for them. We pull back and say we need to be around people that we understand. \n\nWe’re trying to sort out the proper balance between differentiated identity at the nation-state level, and the global identity that seems to be manifesting itself partly because of our widespread electronic communication. When religion collapses nationalism can fill the void; Gallop polls revealed that if you were a lapsed catholic then you were 10 times more likely to be a separatist in Quebec. You have to have an identity, and so people can often turn from church to state. But the state cannot be the ultimate identity, which is technically wrong. The problem with the state is that the state is what is uniform across people and the thing is that we need is what is actually diverse across people in order to rejuvenate the state and keep it awake.If you reduce individuals to what is homogenous about them across all people you eradicate the very variability that allows people to adapt to new things. \n\nBecause we are constantly being presented with new things we need to keep that individual variability paramount. Because it is upon that variability that the very state depends. That is what the west discovered. That is why we’ve always subordinated the state to the divinity of the individual. This is expressed as the primacy of free speech in our civilisation. It is because the individual has something to offer the state. State identity can structure, and it can reassure, but it also constrains to too great a degree. Societies that become only state immediately become old and blind, malevolent, and collapse. \n\nIf you find that the tragedy of life is too much for you to bear without you becoming resentful and bitter and murderous and genocidal it means that you haven’t picked up enough responsibility. Because if you pick up enough responsibility for the revivification of the state and the eradication of unnecessary suffering you’d find enough meaning that the idea of meaninglessness would vanish in an instant. You’d have more meaning than you knew what to do with. \n\nPostmodernism is a response to the Nietzschean dilemma. The cornerstone of civilisation has been demolished by rational critique. It needed to be criticised and more deeply understood. Criticism and understanding are the same thing unless the criticism is only destruction. Postmodernists are the logical conclusion to the dilemma, because the post modernist dogma is that all value structures have collapsed and are only there for the purposes of exclusion and have no intrinsic value. It allows people to dispense with their moral responsibility. \n\nThe problem with postmodernism is that if all value structures have collapsed then there is nothing to do. In order to do something one thing has to be better than another. People who are ensconced in the post modernist tradition are undermined by their own philosophy; they can deconstruct their own deconstruction and in which case they might as well just sit there and do nothing. Postmodernists don’t believe in logic, dialogue they don’t believe in, because these represent the logos, which they have dispensed with. They revert to the Marxist doctrines from which postmodernism emerged, and to the degree that they are communitarian they take out their nihilistic resentment and arrogance and ingratitude on every single person we deem to have something more than they have. \n\nThis explains why certain values can exist in the absence of any value you have to look no farther than to understand that people who are desperate and chaotic will still be angry and destructive. They can manifest that perfectly with the moral mast that says “I’m not really after what you have because you have a little more than me, I’m speaking on behalf of these people who have even less.” This is the mindset of those with damaged mental health that hurt our society and bring things down. The postmodernists manage to be nihilistic and totalitarian at the same time, while combining both with the worst aspects of dogmatic religion because what they have essentially established is a cult into which children who attend University are now indoctrinated. \n\nThe alternative is a proper return to the past, to journey into the chaos, to look at the worst possible thing and to pull the dead father up from the chaotic depths. That is how you stop being a puppet, someone whose strings are being pulled by forces they do not understand behind the scenes. You find out about what is great about your culture, that thing that has provided us with everything we see around us, the fact that our buildings are warm, that the electricity goes on, that we have the computational resources that we do, and that we can all sit here peacefully, and that no one is hungry. We should have some gratitude for what has been produced that has brought us to this point. \n\nI learned that the reason the Cold War existed was because I was not good enough. The reasons that the terrible situations in the world exist now is because you are not good enough. We can solve any problem if we used all of the resources that were available to us. If we lived properly we have no idea what we could turn what we’re in, into. You support free speech because it is the mechanism that maintains the sanity of the individual and the society. You live in relationship to the spoken truth to the best of your ability. Because the alternative is hell. If hell is what you want then you can remain arrogant and resentful and deceitful. But if you want to better the world, to bring it up to what it might be, then you speak forthrightly, you clarify yourself, and you act properly in the world and then you see what happens. Aim for the highest possible good that you can conceive of and speak the truth. The act of faith here is that whatever the truth reveals is the best of all possible worlds regardless of how it appears to you now. \n\nWhat would happen if you just said what you thought, stupid as it is, inaccurate as it is? And listen to people criticise you in response, to shape you and make you more articulate? What would your life be like? The answer is that your life gets better, and better, and better, and richer, and deeper, but this comes with a heavier and heavier burden of responsibility. You use the observation of your own capability to bear responsibility, to buttress yourself against the terrors of being finite. You say, weak and miserable as I am, I can still stand up to the terrible tragedy of life and prevail. And that is good enough. ",
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"content": "The moment you’re using violence to prevent someone from speaking you are on the wrong side of the argument, by definition. - Sam Harris<br /><a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHf3hbQIpfw\" target=\"_blank\">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHf3hbQIpfw</a><br /> <br />Transcript:<br />It has been instructive to see that there is virtually no space to occupy between the extreme left and the extreme right that doesn’t get you attacked by both sides on this issue. By virtue of that conversation I’m getting attacked as an Islamist shill and as a racist xenophobe. It is incredible. There is no place, not even a razors edge where you can stand to make sense of this issue. <br /><br />That’s what I’m feeling about political debate. There is no sensible center. It is becoming extremely partisan. Majorities come and go, and sooner or later people from opposing sides have to get together and agree on some basics. Because if they don’t the outcome could be much worse. We could all get out of the echo-chamber a little more and listen to the arguments from people on the other side of the debate. <br /><br />Milo Yiannopoulos at Berkeley, was one of the best things that could have happened to Milo in terms of proving his points and raising his stature. What worries me about this moment, politically, is that the left seems capable of doing everything wrong in response to the rise the alt-right and the Trump presidency. This antipathy to free speech, this idea that rioting to prevent a lecture as an example of liberal free speech in action is just so confused and destructive. I have to say that the Left is irredeemable at this point. There just seems to be so little insight. And coming fresh out of my interview with Bill Maher I can see this. <br /><br />There are people who have contacted me who heard in my discussion with Bill a horrifying expression of racist hatred, or who are pretending to have heard such a thing and this judgement is echoed by the usual suspects on the left. That position is so crazy that I just don’t know how to interact with it, so it is not an accident that people on the right can’t see any way to interact with it. All I can say is that if I’m a bigot and a racist and a xenophobe, if that is how i appear to you based on what I said on RealTime, what words are you going to use for the real bigots and racists and xenophobes?<br /><br />Milo is at this point a professional troll. Some of his criticism of the left is no doubt sincere, but he is a kind of performance artist, he’s just winding up the left. I haven’t seen anything from him that is real racist bigotry; the Milo I have seen is very far from being a Neo-Nazi or someone whose attitudes is truly of the right. That probably is not an accident: he is flamboyantly gay and half-Jewish. But this response at Berkeley wouldn’t even be warranted even if he was a KKK member. <br /><br />The moment you’re using violence to prevent someone from speaking you are on the wrong side of the argument, by definition. How is that not obvious on the left? You’re, what, going to burn down your own University to prevent someone from expressing views that you could otherwise just criticise? All of these protests we’re seeing in response to rightwing speakers being invited to college campuses are so uncivil and unproductive. Again, this is almost entirely a phenomenon of the left. If you heard generically, that some college campus had erupted in violence because a student mob had prevented a lecture from taking place, and the people who wanted to hear that lecture were spat upon and finally attacked you could bet with 99% confidence that this was coming from the left. <br /><br />In the age of Trump, when you really want to be able to say things against creeping right wing authoritarianism, having an authoritarian anti-free speech movement subsume the Left is a disaster politically. But I actually think the Left is irredeemable at this point, which is why I’ve begun to use the phrase “The New Center” to our politics. I don’t know how you get people writing at the Intercept or the people at The Young Turks to be reasonable human beings given what they’ve done in recent years, but that is the Left as it currently stands. <br /><br />Of course it is no accident that the women's march, which otherwise seemed like a great thing, was vitiated by its alliance with Linda Sarsour and these closeted Islamists who have co-opted the women's movement and have convinced millions of people apparently that the Hijab is a sign of women's empowerment. That is fairly mind-boggling. Just so there is no confusion on this point, I think that you should be free to wear that Hijab if you want to, but you should recognise that most women the world over who are veiled to some degree are living that way not out of choice, and are living in a community that will treat them like whores or worse if they don’t veil themselves; this is not the political empowerment of women.<br /><br />Someone like Linda Sarsour, one of the principal organisers of the women's march is a theocrat who lies about this, who attacks Ayaan Hirsi Ali. This is how the left will die. On the basis of its own moral relativism, locking arms with Islamism and stealth theocracy, which is what it has done. Just as you know that if you travel too far right on the political spectrum you will encounter the most repulsive, callous, authoritarian attitudes, I think you should know that if you travel too far left you will encounter a kind of moral confusion and identity politics that is in its actual application to the world, [no] better. I don’t see how that changes at this point. <br /><br />Closely related to Sam's comment about a sensible center is an excellent discussion by independent journalist Tim Pool concerning this very problem, that of there being no centrist space to occupy in reporting or journalism, and how this poisons our discourse and how any impartial attempt at reporting results in attacks from both sides, here <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3diqe04ezek\" target=\"_blank\">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3diqe04ezek</a>. <br />",
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"content": "The moment you’re using violence to prevent someone from speaking you are on the wrong side of the argument, by definition. - Sam Harris\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHf3hbQIpfw\n \nTranscript:\nIt has been instructive to see that there is virtually no space to occupy between the extreme left and the extreme right that doesn’t get you attacked by both sides on this issue. By virtue of that conversation I’m getting attacked as an Islamist shill and as a racist xenophobe. It is incredible. There is no place, not even a razors edge where you can stand to make sense of this issue. \n\nThat’s what I’m feeling about political debate. There is no sensible center. It is becoming extremely partisan. Majorities come and go, and sooner or later people from opposing sides have to get together and agree on some basics. Because if they don’t the outcome could be much worse. We could all get out of the echo-chamber a little more and listen to the arguments from people on the other side of the debate. \n\nMilo Yiannopoulos at Berkeley, was one of the best things that could have happened to Milo in terms of proving his points and raising his stature. What worries me about this moment, politically, is that the left seems capable of doing everything wrong in response to the rise the alt-right and the Trump presidency. This antipathy to free speech, this idea that rioting to prevent a lecture as an example of liberal free speech in action is just so confused and destructive. I have to say that the Left is irredeemable at this point. There just seems to be so little insight. And coming fresh out of my interview with Bill Maher I can see this. \n\nThere are people who have contacted me who heard in my discussion with Bill a horrifying expression of racist hatred, or who are pretending to have heard such a thing and this judgement is echoed by the usual suspects on the left. That position is so crazy that I just don’t know how to interact with it, so it is not an accident that people on the right can’t see any way to interact with it. All I can say is that if I’m a bigot and a racist and a xenophobe, if that is how i appear to you based on what I said on RealTime, what words are you going to use for the real bigots and racists and xenophobes?\n\nMilo is at this point a professional troll. Some of his criticism of the left is no doubt sincere, but he is a kind of performance artist, he’s just winding up the left. I haven’t seen anything from him that is real racist bigotry; the Milo I have seen is very far from being a Neo-Nazi or someone whose attitudes is truly of the right. That probably is not an accident: he is flamboyantly gay and half-Jewish. But this response at Berkeley wouldn’t even be warranted even if he was a KKK member. \n\nThe moment you’re using violence to prevent someone from speaking you are on the wrong side of the argument, by definition. How is that not obvious on the left? You’re, what, going to burn down your own University to prevent someone from expressing views that you could otherwise just criticise? All of these protests we’re seeing in response to rightwing speakers being invited to college campuses are so uncivil and unproductive. Again, this is almost entirely a phenomenon of the left. If you heard generically, that some college campus had erupted in violence because a student mob had prevented a lecture from taking place, and the people who wanted to hear that lecture were spat upon and finally attacked you could bet with 99% confidence that this was coming from the left. \n\nIn the age of Trump, when you really want to be able to say things against creeping right wing authoritarianism, having an authoritarian anti-free speech movement subsume the Left is a disaster politically. But I actually think the Left is irredeemable at this point, which is why I’ve begun to use the phrase “The New Center” to our politics. I don’t know how you get people writing at the Intercept or the people at The Young Turks to be reasonable human beings given what they’ve done in recent years, but that is the Left as it currently stands. \n\nOf course it is no accident that the women's march, which otherwise seemed like a great thing, was vitiated by its alliance with Linda Sarsour and these closeted Islamists who have co-opted the women's movement and have convinced millions of people apparently that the Hijab is a sign of women's empowerment. That is fairly mind-boggling. Just so there is no confusion on this point, I think that you should be free to wear that Hijab if you want to, but you should recognise that most women the world over who are veiled to some degree are living that way not out of choice, and are living in a community that will treat them like whores or worse if they don’t veil themselves; this is not the political empowerment of women.\n\nSomeone like Linda Sarsour, one of the principal organisers of the women's march is a theocrat who lies about this, who attacks Ayaan Hirsi Ali. This is how the left will die. On the basis of its own moral relativism, locking arms with Islamism and stealth theocracy, which is what it has done. Just as you know that if you travel too far right on the political spectrum you will encounter the most repulsive, callous, authoritarian attitudes, I think you should know that if you travel too far left you will encounter a kind of moral confusion and identity politics that is in its actual application to the world, [no] better. I don’t see how that changes at this point. \n\nClosely related to Sam's comment about a sensible center is an excellent discussion by independent journalist Tim Pool concerning this very problem, that of there being no centrist space to occupy in reporting or journalism, and how this poisons our discourse and how any impartial attempt at reporting results in attacks from both sides, here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3diqe04ezek. \n",
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"content": "How the Mainstream Media Works, Fake News, and Propaganda<br /><br />Award winning, ground-breaking, freelance journalist Tim Pool discusses various aspects of the media, its failures, and how the Internet has helped drive established media outlets towards the current state of affairs. 15 Minutes. <br /><br /><a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYXeNfxFfs4\" target=\"_blank\">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYXeNfxFfs4</a> <br /><br />This seems more relevant than ever because I’m still baffled by just how often I see some conventional news article or another being uncritically shared as if it portrayed some objective truth worth knowing, when even a cursory look typically reveals an incomplete account designed to support some narrative.<br /><br />This relates closely to my collective thoughts on this topic The Failure of The Fourth Estate, here <a href=\"https://failureofthefourthestate.wordpress.com/\" target=\"_blank\">https://failureofthefourthestate.wordpress.com/</a> <br /><br />In addition I wanted to raise another related and important philosophical concept, that of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. While Plato’s Cave refers to deeper knowledge of reality, it nonetheless provides a powerful yet conceptually simple metaphor with which to explain the workings and failure of the media to accurately portray reality. More information on Plato’s Cave here <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave\" target=\"_blank\">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave</a>, and this YouTube video provides an excellent adaptation and summary <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69F7GhASOdM\" target=\"_blank\">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69F7GhASOdM</a>. <br /><br />The best stand-alone image variation I could find to represent this concept is here <a href=\"http://i.imgur.com/VyD1E9v.jpg\" target=\"_blank\">http://i.imgur.com/VyD1E9v.jpg</a> <br />",
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"content": "How the Mainstream Media Works, Fake News, and Propaganda\n\nAward winning, ground-breaking, freelance journalist Tim Pool discusses various aspects of the media, its failures, and how the Internet has helped drive established media outlets towards the current state of affairs. 15 Minutes. \n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYXeNfxFfs4 \n\nThis seems more relevant than ever because I’m still baffled by just how often I see some conventional news article or another being uncritically shared as if it portrayed some objective truth worth knowing, when even a cursory look typically reveals an incomplete account designed to support some narrative.\n\nThis relates closely to my collective thoughts on this topic The Failure of The Fourth Estate, here https://failureofthefourthestate.wordpress.com/ \n\nIn addition I wanted to raise another related and important philosophical concept, that of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. While Plato’s Cave refers to deeper knowledge of reality, it nonetheless provides a powerful yet conceptually simple metaphor with which to explain the workings and failure of the media to accurately portray reality. More information on Plato’s Cave here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave, and this YouTube video provides an excellent adaptation and summary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69F7GhASOdM. \n\nThe best stand-alone image variation I could find to represent this concept is here http://i.imgur.com/VyD1E9v.jpg \n",
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"content": "The mainstream story about Syria is bizarre and doesn't make any sense. A good attempt to deconstruct narratives: <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmxRddgpo-I\" target=\"_blank\">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmxRddgpo-I</a> <br />Sources: <a href=\"https://www.minds.com/blog/view/700017955710181391\" target=\"_blank\">https://www.minds.com/blog/view/700017955710181391</a> ",
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"content": "The mainstream story about Syria is bizarre and doesn't make any sense. A good attempt to deconstruct narratives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmxRddgpo-I \nSources: https://www.minds.com/blog/view/700017955710181391 ",
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