Huxley warned us, but we didn’t listen
Why we want to achieve artificial intelligence when we deliberately created artificial stupidity, what public education and mainstream media have done successfully, in behalf of social stability and national unity. More precisely: Community, Identity, Stability. And the eternal challenge of ruling elite to make masses love their servitude. We want artificial stupidity. The useful idiots keep system stable. Two things they require only; circus and bread. Or only one thing; illusion of choice.
All what the West achieved in the last two hundred years is artificial stupidity, using this phrase after the great American libertarian, Thomas Sowell. What yet threatens Western Civilization, I have to say, nothing anymore. In the period between the industrial revolution and the first great industrial war the cancellation of civilization was completed in the West, with forced intellectual decline. This is the price we paid for technological advancement, and comfort.
New technology always endangers old realm and status quo. But since human being can’t handle with power, since he is always motivated in avoiding the negative consequence of his action, the old is replaced by worse. With the invention of printing and spreading enforced literacy, the ground slipped from under the old regime.
We would think that the age of enlightenment would follow, which it did for a short, temporary period. But printing and education soon became the most efficient weapon in hand of new elite to brainwash in mass scale. The new technology does not set you free, but enslaves you. Every further technological advancement is a new opportunity for power to control you. When I was a child, fingerprints were only taken from criminals, nowadays you can’t even apply for a passport without one. You cannot keep even your DNA in secret before the authority.
But the evergreen challenge what elite has to face, is maintaining stability with making masses love their servitude. Scientists, engineers, managers are always welcome to make it work, artists, scholars, philosophers, sages, on the other hand, are not. Because they are obstacles with their unwanted thoughts, and subversive ideas about society. Stability and science are above all.
However even rising new technology is able to ruin a current status quo more efficiently but invisible way.
Once we let politicians support science, art, sport, education, even religion, those all lose their original function. They are all degenerated to tool of propaganda. As result, scientists no longer serve science, but the ideology. Art has no longer mere artistic purposes, but propagandistic. The religious ceremony is not about explaining the gospels, but bringing alien ideas into church. Such as social justice, anti-racist agenda and transgenderism, even nationalism. Thus the biggest enemies of Christianity are the christians themselves.
Religion is no longer a voice of transcendental God, but a servant of state worship. Companionship with Jesus is forsaken for the national community and socal common good. What can I say about education that suffered the most severe government intervention all around the world, targeting the most vulnerables, the children? When you do not teach child how to think, but what to think, you actually teach them how not to think. And in case like this you don’t educate child, but indoctrinate. And if we ever let government ‘educate’ our children, the intellectual decline is inevitable.
As result, the schools are no longer function as schools, which enjoyed a wide range of autonomy in the past, that protected the scholars from an ideological and bureaucratic pressure, and where everyone came together to learn, teach, and share new ideas, but as an indoctrination camp where ploitical agenda always preveals, and where’s no room for healthy discussion, and true learning anymore. Teachers no longer meet any of the criteria for being a teacher, because they are not teachers, but bureaucrats, prison guards, and ideological soldiers. The children’s parents no longer function as parents, but a caretakers, who have absolutely no control over educating and raising their own children. They are public servants without knowing it. I am amazed that childbirth was left as a parental task. Why? They are too amateur to give a birth to child, it must be outsourced to ‘professionals’. Safety first!
How far are we from the Brave New World? More precisely what have we do to attain the complete stability? If I would be a director of the world, or the chief organizer of world controller syndicate, I would say, we need less people and more control. But we live in dystopian world even now, the society is unarmed intellectually. And what keeps us still far away from generations of Bokanovsky babies and mandatory eugenics is definitely neither a conscience of people nor their common sense. Not at all. We are frustratingly undeveloped technologically to obtain a total ‘social stability’, and mass surveillance. And society can only function well if everyone knows and voluntarily accepts their place in society without wanting to be more.
They have to believe that they already have everything for happiness. This is the only way to make them accept their current status. They need stimulus, erotic play, and soma holiday. One thing Brave New World is unable to provide by any means, the meaning. This intellectual need requires to be disabled. I wonder on why Stoicism so popular and damn attractive nowadays, because it offers common sense and emotional undisturbedness as an antidote to madness. What Stoics say, control what you can control, and do not bother with that you no way can control. The stoicism is a self-defence, a fight back, an incredibly masculine answer to challenge of modernism.
They don’t want masculinity. They hate masculinity. They abhor philosophers. Because masculinity is unconquerable, unbeatable, untameable. Masculinity thereby is ‘toxic’. The real man discards ‘erotic play’, which is a mutual mastrurbation, that keeps you weak. What if everyone would gain back control over they can control, over their lives. End of hope of desired ‘social stability’?
Just think about how everyone is keen to fight for rights of women, rights of gays, rights of every possible minority, while everyone ignores the rights of the minorest minority, the rights of individual. Whether, why they don’t target the core of every problem? The Brave New World has not yet come, because no one wants to accept their social status dedicated to them? The people are still dissatisfied dispite the endless stimulus they are bombarded? But an answer is more pudent. They don’t want rights, they want control. The best way for them to gain control over you, making you outrage on events you can’t control. Your national pride got offended, or you’re sexual rights got offended on the Pride. You are victimazed. It distracts your attention from that you would, and you should control. There are no individuals that would matter anymore. Only ‘groups’. The rights of imaginary groups. Groups, they don’t exist in reality. They want weak men, who are too weak alone. They need to be in group.
And thanks to technological advancement today an average man can access to more information than the U.S. president thirty years ago. We are a superhumans in some sense, not in Nietzschean terms of course, but according to technogeniuses like Elon Musk. It’s an odd opportunity for such a creator like me indeed, but what the average intelligence can start with this tremendous flow of information? Unfortunately, average intelligence has not increased in direct proportion to technological progress. Moreover, technological development is inversely proportional to intellectual development. The Internet is the most effective and cheapest tool for mass brainwashing. The proof for this is the rise of the porn industry and ninety percent of the content of social media devoid of any intellectual value. And this is only a legal one third of internet.
Who rules the past, rules the future
This is the goal of falsifying history, depriving people of compass point of past, and they lose conclusions for future. One who does not learn from History is doomed to repeat. But in reality no one rules history, as no one rules the entropy. The political demagogues, and their ideological paraselene are all emperors of the moment. They are designed to survive the moment. There is not a single one among them whose theses survived his rule. There have been so many new world orders, but none of them lasted more than a few decades. Today’s reality in fact rather is the constant ‘crisis management’. I am not worried about actions of individual governments, but about the trend which seemed to be perpetuated. Russia and China challenged the age of Pax Americana. They want to put into operation their own version of Brave New World. Especially China has surpassed the West in this, if we see the new Chinese social credit system in practice, what is an absolutely fascistoid Orwellian nightmare. They have achieved much more in mass surveillance with Western technology, with no resistance. But China is a totalitarian state, and it’s not a result of rising the new wave of Russian nihilists in the nineteenth century. They adapted communism just like western technology, but China has never been famous for freedom.
It’s interesting to see, hogy science can be used as weapon on any intellectual performance. In the past the religion is weaponized, now the science. Lo, as you can see, few who achieved something, but none of them was able to resist the seductive temptation of acting as ruler of history. They all failed with their delusions, but philosophers and sages are still remained. They don’t control anything, they just follow and comment on the events. They do not possess political and economic power. And yet, posterity will never forget their names and doctrines. The philosopher is the only intact brick left behind from collapsing building structure. On those, in turn, who act as a ruler of history, the history steps over relentlessly.
Western Europe has been undergoing an Americanization process since the Second World War, which gained new momentum after 68. It arrived in Eastern Europe in the nineties, with the breakup of the Eastern bloc. In Europe, but especially in its eastern half, the previous centuries-old social structure fell into an unstructured setting. No one was able to resist, and no one even wanted to resist to this americanization. In America, there is also a kind of nostalgia for Europe, but it was limited to a narrow elite and was confined to curiosity for a superficial exoticism. But Europe was by no means an example for America to follow after the WWI. In Europe, on the other hand, America mania permeates everything. Europe was americanized unnoticed. This manifests itself in everything, automobiles, fast food chains, malls and valentine days, halloween, and US style xmas, 24-hour news channels, movies, music, even giving birth in presence of father, simply everything. Everything is American. Where the Soviet Red Army failed relying on their tanks and weapons, America won with Coca Cola and jeans. The new consumerism. I tell you what is astonishing about this.
The americanization doesn’t confront European traditions and cultures, which no longer exist, just in level of a showcase. It fills a void, a vacuum actually, otherwise it wouldn’t have succeeded. It is as if Europe does not have its own tradition, culture and history. And it does not have indeed. No anymore. Europe is an object-lesson of canceled culture, especially the Eastern part. It’s an echo, museum of itself, which acts as imitation of America, as a ‘United Europe’, which is totally alien to its historical structure. How can an imitation be better than the original? How can a bureaucratically controlled from above be more competitive than one that is naturally organized from below? If we see this way, America’s contempt towards Europe is righteous. As for the old non-existent Europe, America could learn something from it, but especially Europe. And here is something even more shocking.
The USA beats Europe in virtually everything. Europa is impressed by the creativity and dynamic of America, but it’s unable to adapt it. I’m just writing an example for this. In the USA, works are created every week that Europe can hardly sweat out in co-production in a few decades. Until the First World War, Europe’s intellectual superiority over America was unquestionable. But for today that has also reversed. In America, the currents of intellectual life and philosophical streams are so broad that it is unimaginable from Europe. And do these intellectual ideas and values reach Europe? No way. Only the mindless consumerism. Boredom, stupidity, uniformity, the idiotic hipster mass culture, and moron flow of mediocracy. Boredom, boredom, boredom!!!
It’s mindblowing how Americans learned from old Europe, while Europe nowadays fails to learn from America despite its ‘America mania’, but even from its own past version. No wonder that Russia and China don’t wish this americanization onto their back, yet they took some of it. They don’t need western value system either, however, they adapt and steal Western technology with no any ethical concern. The technology that this value system and freedom of thoughts, creativity created, now is used against them. They are degenerated to the means of ultramodern oppression. They threaten West with nuke, what they stole from the West. But they don’t want western value system, such as freedom of thought, freedom of speech, individual freedom. They use western technology to oppress them. And what is even more shocking, this is becoming a trend in the West as well. I no longer believe for a minute that scientific progress inherently good and beneficial, and the science is the answer to everything. No any longer.
Can it fly?
Brave New World ain’t democratic. Caste system and democracy don’t tolerate each other very well. In fact the democracy is very unstable and overactive method. But hey, if there is a scientific solution to every challenge, why can we not apply this excuse to keep social stability? The enforced eugenics can make democracy unnecessary. The system which function flawless, because everyone accepts their dedicated place in it voluntarily, without wanting to get better. This is the dream of every regime. Although we are still very far from this, because technologically we are pathetically undeveloped, and on the other hand the world is too multipolar yet. But one thing has already come true from this, the new totalitarianism does not threatens disobedience with using terror like in the Orwellian dystopia, but rather offers them comfort and exempt from facing the negative consequence of transgression and mistake.
This is the holy grail of every human endeavour, avoiding the negative consequence of action. This is what almost everyone can be hooked on. The people don’t want freedom at same way they don’t want responsibility. They want banality, vurgality, toys, erotic plays, and soma holydays. They want to escape reality. The reality that haunts everyone for not having meaning of life. The tyranny of loathsome reality. The severe punisher of hedonists. Actually people do every possible thing to get rid of meaning of their lives. The political revolution as the most superficial revolution is not for the change but for not to change. This kind of revolution is a bribe to be paid for political demagogues for avoiding the urge of change in mentality. You pay for having comfort now, and postponing disaster whatever the price is. Even freedom is not too huge a price. There is a pitfall of course besides losing individual freedom. Postponing disaster is a multiplying disaster. Ignoring problem does not eliminate or solve the problem itself, but multiplies it for the future.
If you see the reality of world today, it’s nothing but buying comfort, buying the illusion of security, and paying with freedom. The freedom became is the new global currency. This is the voting for. This is the fiat money, or token money for. And tinder and similar apps are the sinister sign of upcoming enforced promiscuity. In many western countries the number of divorces approaches or even exceeds the number of marriages. And the court system encouraged this. No one wants freedom anymore, everyone wants comfort, joy, pleasure, fun, not having face consequences. Rulers want freedom, our freedom. And they are coming for us. And we will be happy to give them it. Only civil society can limit the freedom of the state. But we employ the state to deprive us of freedom.
This happens because in the new dark age, the technodarkage, there is no such intellectual elite, what would want to strive for telling truth uncorruptably, saving society from the worst. And we enter the age where is no intellectual elite independent of power. If the intellectualism is backed by the power, the political demagogues inevitably make way for their ideological agendas in it. And the new intellectualism was born with cancer. Instead of these intellectuals trying to reveal and speak the truth, they sell own ‘truth’ of certain political and economic interest groups. They are intellectuals in their name only, they are merchants, advertisers. Societies don’t need philosophers, the civilization does. The average person doesn’t want to face their own insufficiency, the rulers don’t want to have less power. If they control everything there’s no room for healthy discussion anymore, nor even for free speech. The society what is dead intellectually, will be dead in every possible way either. Because the healthy intellectuals are the mind and heart of healthy society. There is a great danger when people stop asking questions and waiting for answers. Science and technology make profound thinking unnecessary, hence disable true intellectuals. Thus, we already entered stage of technological dark age, or technodarkage. When the centrally organized ‘happiness’ can be provided, on the other hand, we arrived at brave new world.
The really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in external world, but in the soul and flesh of human beings. Living as he did in a revolutionary period, The Marquis de Sade very naturally made us of this theory of revolutions in order to rationalize his peculiar brand of insanity. Robespierre had achieved the most superficial kind of revolutions, the political. Going a little deeper, Babeuf had attempted the economic revolution. Sade regarded himself as the apostle of truly revolutionary revolution, beyond mere politics and economics – the revolution of individual men, women and children, whose bodies were henceforward to become the common sexual property of all the natural decencies, all the laboriously acquired inhibitions of traditional civilization. Between sadism and really revolutionary revolution there is, of course, no necessary or inevitable connection. Sade was a lunatic and the more or less conscious goal of his revolution was universal chaos and destruction. The people who govern the Brave New World may not be sane (in what may be called the absolute sense of that word); but they are not mad either, and their aim is not anarchy but social stability. It is in order to achieve stability that they carry out, by scientific means, the ultimate, personal, really revolutionary revolution.
There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely inhumane (nobody cares much about that nowadays); it is demonstrably inefficiency is the sin against Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministers of propaganda, newspaper editors and school-teachers.
Aldous Huxley
details from foreword of Brave New World 1946When we are headed the wrong way, the last thing we need is progress.
Nick Bostrom
Thanks for reading me!