Jun 9, 2023·edited Jun 9, 2023Liked by Johann Kurtz
Apropos turning us into cogs of the machine:
Google elevates nearly every random fear into a "phobia".
"Lachanophobia, also known as fear of vegetables, is a legit phobia!"
But fear of forms is not allowed. "The fear of filling out forms is not a recognized phobia in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) or other established diagnostic ..."
Jun 10, 2023·edited Jun 10, 2023Liked by Johann Kurtz
Thanks, your article really struck a nerve!
The other thing that gets me about government forms is how they all mention the "Paperwork Reduction Act". It's like they are mocking us: Even though there is a law to "reduc[e] the burden of government paperwork on the public", you peons still have to fill out this stupid form.
Insightful and an excellent counterpoint to Andressen’s lofty Pollyannic vision. In the dim light of an era wrought with overcrowded cities, unemployment, tech dependencies, and depressive states brought on by AI-driven social media, I believe there will be an amazing opportunity for the flourishing of human art, outdoor recreation and the underground “disconnected” and disenfranchised. Civilizational homeostasis is a force that will endeavor to counterbalance the scales. And what an opportunity for the resurgence of the most noble elements of humanity. Hope and light will flourish. Even in the matrix.
I recently wrote a post on my substack titled "The God in the Machine" in which I critiqued Marc Andreessen's and Yuval Harari's projections about the future of AI based on the classical understanding of intelligence in which I concluded that what is artificial can't be truly intelligent. I was a professional web developer for 30 years and I've studied AI though I am not a specialist. You may be familiar with a recent presentation called "The A.I. Dilemma" in which well-known Silicon Valley pundit Tristan Harris issued dire warnings about AI and strongly suggested that it was starting to become independent of its human programmers, specifically that it was becoming like a "Gollum", an artificial creature from Jewish folklore who is infused with life through ritual incantations. The implication is that AI is becoming self-aware and able to function independently of its human masters.
I try to show that such independent self-consciousness is not possible for a machine, nor is intelligence in the true sense of the word. I fully agree with you that the regime will try to replace human decision makers with AI and that this replacement is doomed to failure. My article makes the argument that only a rational creature made in the image of God is capable of true intelligence because understanding requires insight into concepts such as numbers, justice, and truth which are not made of matter. If you're interested, you can read it here: The God in the Machine: (https://christianpresence.substack.com/p/the-god-in-the-machine)
"Forget about bringing about the apocalypse - ‘AI’ can’t even drive a car properly." Great take on all of it. I truly believe the human spirit can never be captured by a machine. We are not God, and we cannot create as he has done.
The reality is the system is proving its own worst enemy. What needs to be understood, is why.
When it's hundreds of millions and billions of people, it's not politics, sociology, or economics, so much as it's biology and physics.
Galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in.
Societies are the social energies propelling them on, as the civil and cultural forms give them structure. Liberal social energies, versus conservative cultural forms.
People, as biological organisms, have the digestive system processing the energy driving us on, while the nervous system sorts the information precipitating out. Motor and steering.
The anarchies of desire, versus the tyrannies of judgement.
It's a fundamantal dichotomy. Dialectics, if you prefer. Yin and yang.
The problem is that we try to frame it monolithically, so each side sees themselves on the road to nirvana, while the other side is misinformed, if not evil.
Remember that democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The family as godhead.
To the Ancients, monotheism meant monoculture. One people, one rule, one god.
The Romans adopted a monotheistic sect as state religion around the time the Empire was rising from the ashes of the Republic. The Big Guy Rules.
Logically though, a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The light shining through the film, rather than the images on it. More the new born babe, than the wise old man.
Ideals are not absolutes. Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. A village totem is an ideal.
The clinical term for people who assume an ideal as absolute, is obsessive/compulsive.
When the entire culture is founded on the principle, it is endless conflict, as every ideology, from Wahabi to Woke, has to assert universality.
What pulls structure in, is synchronization. Everything folding into the same wavelength is centripetal.
The energy radiating out equalizes across the entire field of forms, thus harmonization.
Black holes to black body radiation.
So organisms and ecosystems, nodes and networks, particles and fields.
Everything between the absolute and the infinite is relational.
The West is collapsing into the end state vortex of its monolithic creed, as the rest of the nations of the planet respond, not by unifying as one, but by networking, as nations in the global ecosystem.
After the fall, either we go back to forms of neo-feudalism, or we figure out what is going on.
Funnily enough, Kaczynski has something to say about this:
"204. Revolutionaries should have as many children as they can. There is strong scientific evidence that social attitudes are to a significant extent inherited. No one suggests that a social attitude is a direct outcome of a person’s genetic constitution, but it appears that personality traits are partly inherited and that certain personality traits tend, within the context of our society, to make a person more likely to hold this or that social attitude. Objections to these findings have been raised, but the objections are feeble and seem to be ideologically motivated. In any event, no one denies that children tend on the average to hold social attitudes similar to those of their parents. From our point of view it doesn’t matter all that much whether the attitudes are passed on genetically or through childhood training. In either case they ARE passed on."
"205. The trouble is that many of the people who are inclined to rebel against the industrial system are also concerned about the population problems, hence they are apt to have few or no children. In this way they may be handing the world over to the sort of people who support or at least accept the industrial system. To insure the strength of the next generation of revolutionaries the present generation should reproduce itself abundantly."
Incredibly based and Casti-Connubii-pilled of Kaczinski.
Everyday I seem to discover new empirical evidence that supports Catholic morality. We don’t need the empirical evidence to know how to live. The natural law is sufficient for that. But it’s handy to have facts on our side. Birth control = mind control, in more ways than are evident at first.
I haven’t read Kaczinski in over a decade, your post here is giving me good incentive to revisit him.
And happily for us, living a normal family lifestyle is increasingly rebellious. So the population obsessed rebels will die off and the TLM parishioners will thrive. And produce “rebels” who are not anti-social and ghey.
As a professional programmer for 30 years, I have been part of the process of defining how large international companies manage their software development infrastructure. I have also managed teams of foreign workers and can confirm what you are saying about replacing high-agency Anglo and European populations. I have studied AI, particularly machine learning, though I have not applied it professionally.
I agree that AI is the next step in worker replacement and have been following how this technology is being over-hyped. For instance, Elon Musk and other tech leaders have called for it to put on hold until its existential threat to humanity can be fully assessed. The hype has gotten so extreme that a major tech influencer Tristan Harris recently released a video in which he strongly suggested that AI was becoming conscious and independent of its human programmers. He seemed to be hinting that human intelligence was about to be surpassed by its evolutionary successor.
I believe that the attempt to replace workers with AI will ultimately fail because AI will always lack the creative intelligence of human beings. I have laid out the reasons in detail in this article "The God in the Machine" on my substack The Gates of the City of God. Essentially, AI can only reflect human mental processes, it can't actually carry them out. Only a mind with access to the intelligible realm which contains concepts such as numbers and goodness can be truly intelligent.
Having established that what is artificial can't actually be intelligent, I conclude that AI may be part of a new governance strategy that would require widespread belief in its ethical neutrality and superior intelligence.
Fortunately, I agree that its failure is inevitable and that its collapse will open a tremendous opportunity to return to human-centered governance structures as well as toppling the god in the machine. Thanks for your article that provides much needed perspective.
I note your point about 'Western' and 'non-Western' cogs. When I was younger I used to watch football and around that time the Premier League was turning into a global league of the best on the planet, replacing the British with various Africans, Arabs and so on. They all looked miserable in training: the Brits dressed normally but the foreigners had to have gloves, hats, maybe a coat. They'd even play a 90-minute game with gloves and a vest. This, in a sport founded by miners and factory workers!
Without central heating and industrial food production they'd not last a week. You can't replace one people with another when the environment won't let them.
Yes - for me the spirit of watching big-money sports like football has been broken by the fact that you're no longer supporting a 'local team'. You watch those sports to know that your boys from your town can stand toe-to-toe with those from the next town over, and so to feel a sense of pride in your place and people. What does that mean when the Arab billionaire that now owns your club pays 100m for an Ecuadorian to fly over and play?
Aug 21, 2023·edited Aug 21, 2023Liked by Johann Kurtz
Well it's the only form of nationalism or tribalism that is now permitted in Britain. This partly explains the yobbish, vulgar behaviour displayed at many of the games. Not a few of the spectators are fat, unathletic blobs who don't compete and would be better off if the old workplace teams still existed.
One good example was a match when a coloured player complained that he had been racially abused when retrieving the ball for a throw-in. The footage showed that he was clearly being shouted at but the actual words were debated. The player insisted they had called him a "black cunt". They denied this and said that they had only called him a "cunt" without the reference to race. One is just banter, part of the game etc but the addition of "black" is beyond the pale, disgusting and so on. What a joke.
Apropos turning us into cogs of the machine:
Google elevates nearly every random fear into a "phobia".
"Lachanophobia, also known as fear of vegetables, is a legit phobia!"
But fear of forms is not allowed. "The fear of filling out forms is not a recognized phobia in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) or other established diagnostic ..."
Haha, that's very good. No bureaucrophobia, bigot.
Thanks, your article really struck a nerve!
The other thing that gets me about government forms is how they all mention the "Paperwork Reduction Act". It's like they are mocking us: Even though there is a law to "reduc[e] the burden of government paperwork on the public", you peons still have to fill out this stupid form.
Insightful and an excellent counterpoint to Andressen’s lofty Pollyannic vision. In the dim light of an era wrought with overcrowded cities, unemployment, tech dependencies, and depressive states brought on by AI-driven social media, I believe there will be an amazing opportunity for the flourishing of human art, outdoor recreation and the underground “disconnected” and disenfranchised. Civilizational homeostasis is a force that will endeavor to counterbalance the scales. And what an opportunity for the resurgence of the most noble elements of humanity. Hope and light will flourish. Even in the matrix.
Well said. Couldn't agree more.
I recently wrote a post on my substack titled "The God in the Machine" in which I critiqued Marc Andreessen's and Yuval Harari's projections about the future of AI based on the classical understanding of intelligence in which I concluded that what is artificial can't be truly intelligent. I was a professional web developer for 30 years and I've studied AI though I am not a specialist. You may be familiar with a recent presentation called "The A.I. Dilemma" in which well-known Silicon Valley pundit Tristan Harris issued dire warnings about AI and strongly suggested that it was starting to become independent of its human programmers, specifically that it was becoming like a "Gollum", an artificial creature from Jewish folklore who is infused with life through ritual incantations. The implication is that AI is becoming self-aware and able to function independently of its human masters.
I try to show that such independent self-consciousness is not possible for a machine, nor is intelligence in the true sense of the word. I fully agree with you that the regime will try to replace human decision makers with AI and that this replacement is doomed to failure. My article makes the argument that only a rational creature made in the image of God is capable of true intelligence because understanding requires insight into concepts such as numbers, justice, and truth which are not made of matter. If you're interested, you can read it here: The God in the Machine: (https://christianpresence.substack.com/p/the-god-in-the-machine)
"Forget about bringing about the apocalypse - ‘AI’ can’t even drive a car properly." Great take on all of it. I truly believe the human spirit can never be captured by a machine. We are not God, and we cannot create as he has done.
Amen, and thank you.
The reality is the system is proving its own worst enemy. What needs to be understood, is why.
When it's hundreds of millions and billions of people, it's not politics, sociology, or economics, so much as it's biology and physics.
Galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in.
Societies are the social energies propelling them on, as the civil and cultural forms give them structure. Liberal social energies, versus conservative cultural forms.
People, as biological organisms, have the digestive system processing the energy driving us on, while the nervous system sorts the information precipitating out. Motor and steering.
The anarchies of desire, versus the tyrannies of judgement.
It's a fundamantal dichotomy. Dialectics, if you prefer. Yin and yang.
The problem is that we try to frame it monolithically, so each side sees themselves on the road to nirvana, while the other side is misinformed, if not evil.
Remember that democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The family as godhead.
To the Ancients, monotheism meant monoculture. One people, one rule, one god.
The Romans adopted a monotheistic sect as state religion around the time the Empire was rising from the ashes of the Republic. The Big Guy Rules.
Logically though, a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The light shining through the film, rather than the images on it. More the new born babe, than the wise old man.
Ideals are not absolutes. Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. A village totem is an ideal.
The clinical term for people who assume an ideal as absolute, is obsessive/compulsive.
When the entire culture is founded on the principle, it is endless conflict, as every ideology, from Wahabi to Woke, has to assert universality.
What pulls structure in, is synchronization. Everything folding into the same wavelength is centripetal.
The energy radiating out equalizes across the entire field of forms, thus harmonization.
Black holes to black body radiation.
So organisms and ecosystems, nodes and networks, particles and fields.
Everything between the absolute and the infinite is relational.
The West is collapsing into the end state vortex of its monolithic creed, as the rest of the nations of the planet respond, not by unifying as one, but by networking, as nations in the global ecosystem.
After the fall, either we go back to forms of neo-feudalism, or we figure out what is going on.
How many of us will be left by the time the moment of potential has come? I fear we will be too few by then.
But no matter, I will be working hard every day, silently and secretly to ensure that I and my kind are ready when the time comes.
Funnily enough, Kaczynski has something to say about this:
"204. Revolutionaries should have as many children as they can. There is strong scientific evidence that social attitudes are to a significant extent inherited. No one suggests that a social attitude is a direct outcome of a person’s genetic constitution, but it appears that personality traits are partly inherited and that certain personality traits tend, within the context of our society, to make a person more likely to hold this or that social attitude. Objections to these findings have been raised, but the objections are feeble and seem to be ideologically motivated. In any event, no one denies that children tend on the average to hold social attitudes similar to those of their parents. From our point of view it doesn’t matter all that much whether the attitudes are passed on genetically or through childhood training. In either case they ARE passed on."
"205. The trouble is that many of the people who are inclined to rebel against the industrial system are also concerned about the population problems, hence they are apt to have few or no children. In this way they may be handing the world over to the sort of people who support or at least accept the industrial system. To insure the strength of the next generation of revolutionaries the present generation should reproduce itself abundantly."
Incredibly based and Casti-Connubii-pilled of Kaczinski.
Everyday I seem to discover new empirical evidence that supports Catholic morality. We don’t need the empirical evidence to know how to live. The natural law is sufficient for that. But it’s handy to have facts on our side. Birth control = mind control, in more ways than are evident at first.
I haven’t read Kaczinski in over a decade, your post here is giving me good incentive to revisit him.
And happily for us, living a normal family lifestyle is increasingly rebellious. So the population obsessed rebels will die off and the TLM parishioners will thrive. And produce “rebels” who are not anti-social and ghey.
Amen. It's an interesting and not overly-long read. I think it took up six pages of broadsheet when he forced the Washington Post to publish it.
As a professional programmer for 30 years, I have been part of the process of defining how large international companies manage their software development infrastructure. I have also managed teams of foreign workers and can confirm what you are saying about replacing high-agency Anglo and European populations. I have studied AI, particularly machine learning, though I have not applied it professionally.
I agree that AI is the next step in worker replacement and have been following how this technology is being over-hyped. For instance, Elon Musk and other tech leaders have called for it to put on hold until its existential threat to humanity can be fully assessed. The hype has gotten so extreme that a major tech influencer Tristan Harris recently released a video in which he strongly suggested that AI was becoming conscious and independent of its human programmers. He seemed to be hinting that human intelligence was about to be surpassed by its evolutionary successor.
I believe that the attempt to replace workers with AI will ultimately fail because AI will always lack the creative intelligence of human beings. I have laid out the reasons in detail in this article "The God in the Machine" on my substack The Gates of the City of God. Essentially, AI can only reflect human mental processes, it can't actually carry them out. Only a mind with access to the intelligible realm which contains concepts such as numbers and goodness can be truly intelligent.
Having established that what is artificial can't actually be intelligent, I conclude that AI may be part of a new governance strategy that would require widespread belief in its ethical neutrality and superior intelligence.
Fortunately, I agree that its failure is inevitable and that its collapse will open a tremendous opportunity to return to human-centered governance structures as well as toppling the god in the machine. Thanks for your article that provides much needed perspective.
Very good to know that your experience and perspective aligns with my position
What concerns me most of all is that statistics seem like they would be mighty useful in the monitoring and elimination of dissent.
I note your point about 'Western' and 'non-Western' cogs. When I was younger I used to watch football and around that time the Premier League was turning into a global league of the best on the planet, replacing the British with various Africans, Arabs and so on. They all looked miserable in training: the Brits dressed normally but the foreigners had to have gloves, hats, maybe a coat. They'd even play a 90-minute game with gloves and a vest. This, in a sport founded by miners and factory workers!
Without central heating and industrial food production they'd not last a week. You can't replace one people with another when the environment won't let them.
Yes - for me the spirit of watching big-money sports like football has been broken by the fact that you're no longer supporting a 'local team'. You watch those sports to know that your boys from your town can stand toe-to-toe with those from the next town over, and so to feel a sense of pride in your place and people. What does that mean when the Arab billionaire that now owns your club pays 100m for an Ecuadorian to fly over and play?
Well it's the only form of nationalism or tribalism that is now permitted in Britain. This partly explains the yobbish, vulgar behaviour displayed at many of the games. Not a few of the spectators are fat, unathletic blobs who don't compete and would be better off if the old workplace teams still existed.
One good example was a match when a coloured player complained that he had been racially abused when retrieving the ball for a throw-in. The footage showed that he was clearly being shouted at but the actual words were debated. The player insisted they had called him a "black cunt". They denied this and said that they had only called him a "cunt" without the reference to race. One is just banter, part of the game etc but the addition of "black" is beyond the pale, disgusting and so on. What a joke.
Along those lines https://frederickrsmith.substack.com/p/in-the-year-2525
👍
What is the source of the quote at the top? I love it.
BAP's book 'Bronze Age Mindset'