We are now faced with compulsory fluoridation of our water supply, by remote authorities that are controlling the puppets in councils that we call councilors. We are expected to believe it is safe and effective, just like the recent compulsory vaccine, but now there is significant rejection by ratepayers. I want to fight them tooth and nail, cos they are only puppets of little conviction, and will run at the first sign of trouble. The idea that they can introduce another compulsory treatment, when no-one has received an apology over the Covid vaccines, means we need to serve them up some bad medicine, to make them reconsider. Are you ok with compulsory fluoridation ? It is time to show them who is really in charge here, the people.
The fluoride has been in the water for decades in the USA.
I'm confused as to why they started pushing fluoridation in the UK and other nations now, when reports of how it drops IQ, especially in children...
It's like they didn't plan right.
Same with the COVID stuff, they should have done the vaccine passport and laws stuff before they pushed COVID. Instead, they rammed it down on us with executive orders and other abuse of power.
Are they this stupid or lazy not to do it in a diligent manner?
That Power you mention has a price, both monetarily and conscientiously. I have watched a number of installments on the linked channel below, and what amazes me is the number of people who had it not been wartime would have likely carried on through life as 'normal' people, but the criminalist power base fostered a metamorphosis in these people who thus became monsters, devoid of all empathy, even humanity.
Perhaps a measure of the Asch paradigm drew out the inherent homicidal criminal in some, others were likely suppressed psychopaths, whatever, you would understand best Doc, but I see a similar spirit in the Covid era, the soft kill, as opposed to Zyklon B or bullet.
Nuremberg set a precedent for dealing with the Covid era 'soft killers' - the actual cost of the Power they abused.
Yes, a fighting chance. The nihilists generally say that those who are not nihilists want to sit back and wait for a saviour. But that's not so - we fight. It's just that with what is happening now we know we actually have a chance not to go down to raw, satanic power.
(Note ... heavy editing and expanding beyond substack's comment length, so will split this in two)
Part 1 ...
Spot on. Despite our best-dressed cultural conceits, "might makes right" appears to be at the dark heart of our collective human gene pool.
Warning, the following may be TLDR ... writing for my own clarification as much as the potential reader.
—————
42 years living and working in Japanese academia and the education system, and the title of a book I read a lifetime ago comes closest to mind in describing life as seen from the eyes of a marginalized, token foreigner ... 1818's publication of "The World as Will and Representation" by Arthur Schopenhauer. Or for that matter, Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will". Hmm ... thinking of that film, I can't help but to find the better bits in "Good Will Hunting". Thankful for a bit of age, otherwise I might have jumped to "Free Willy".
My anecdotal life is thankfully filled with a few personal relationships and acts of authentic kindness … many exceptions to a 'relentless will to power’. But in institutional, transactional settings (gotta pay the rent, buy the food), the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against non-Japanese, in a tribal "us" vs. "them" thingy. A hint about the provisional, emergent nature of the self-selecting “us" might be found in the first half of clif high’s recent substack https://clifhigh.substack.com/p/the-rabbis-bigly-mistake. Simply replace “superior civilizations” and “inferior civilizations” with “the powerful” and “the marginalized”, and scale down to the level of individual relationships. Large scale or small, the patterns are fractals of each other. (As for the rest of clif’s analysis and the power structures of the deep state, I have no knowledge, and no comment, lest I make the mistake of marginalizing innocent individuals by virtue of their group identity.)
Returning to the scale of my life in Japan, the “will to power” does not take the form of racism as has often been found in the West. That Freudian “narcissism of small differences” is in the eye of the beholder. Many Japanese consider residents of Korean, Chinese, or other Far Eastern descent, or even other Japanese citizens such as Ryukyu Islanders (Okinawa), Ainu, Burakumin, Zainichi, women, students, the elderly, and so on, as convenient targets to be reduced to a single group identity, capitalized upon, and marginalized as outsourced costs for the self-entitled. This is not so different from bureaucracies in the U.S. requiring citizens to categorize themselves by "race" ... a scientifically outdated term … or the weaponization of shame regarding past racist policies into policies which unfairly outsource the burden to other individuals.
I think the cognitive equivalence of Dunbar's number and its moral implications is at work here. Beyond that number, roughly 200, we do not have the neural capacity to empathize with more than a couple of 200 individuals max, roughly the same maximum size as a chimpanzee troop. Reminds me of that old Three Dog Night classic, "Easy to be Hard".
When our populations scale in size, we do not, can not, change our neurological constraints. Rather, a small ruling class (that "club that we ain't in" George Carlin referred to), maintains their Dunbar's number, but at the expense of dehumanizing the rest of us. Back when NPR had a bit more meat on the bone, I remember an interview of a British Historian who remarked that Marie Antoinette was not the "Let them eat cake" monster that many are led to believe. Within her bubble of Dunbar's number, she seemed to have true friends who shared secrets and intuited happiness and suffering ... just like other neurotypical people. Within her bubble. Reminds me of former U.S. politician and Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, televising how she is weathering the lockdowns by digging into her freezer stashed with boutique ice cream.
Rather than having the luxury of intuitive-driven behavior, the rest of us, through scale alone, are forced to depend on the ruling class's proxies for intuition or empathy in the form of rule-driven behavior ... or a combination of propaganda and censurship . That "laws for thee, not for me" thingy behind Biden pardoning Biden.
Populations of scale beyond families and small communities necessarily depend on systems, bureaucracies, and/or hierarchies for laws, labels, and groups defined by 'salient' (in the eyes of the ruling class) characteristics, rather than seeing everyone as unique individuals deserving immediate, intuitive, empathy-driven behavior.
For example, here in Japan ... no matter how many decades or how much quality I put into becoming a dedicated "educator", in the eyes of those who hold the purse strings, I am nothing more than a token foreigner ... an easily replaceable asset and expenditure for an institutional machine, or would-be entrepreneurs needing to outsource the losses and authentic work to anyone but themselves.
Would be "educators" moving to Japan (or Korea or China) beware. 42 years here, award-winning academic presentations, one of two foreigners in the country on the Ministry of Education's textbook committee, judging "Ivy League" nationwide speech contests for over a dozen years, tenure in a Japanese college, decades as a volunteer community and international social activist (Cambodia) ... yadda, yadda, yadda. But a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, 20-year-old from an Anglo-speaking country, fresh off the boat and knowing nothing of Japan or the language, has more social currency than myself ... as well as more job opportunities. In the eyes of all save a handful of close friends, I am not only "just another foreigner", I am an old, beyond expiry-date foreigner. Education and experience need not apply. But that's Japan. A nice place to visit. Back to some observations about power ...
Fascinating commentary -- an essay in its own right, and I could respond to so many of the issues and points you raise ... Yes, Schopenhauer's work is brilliant. Now, I am reminded of Chris Markers Sans Soleil -- have you seen this film, which features elements in Japan? Chomsky showed his true self when he said that the non-jabbed should be left to forage for their food ... Enough for now, thank you so much. But it's absolutely brilliant, what you've written.
Just popped in to see this, and have to pop out again soon ... but for a quick replay, haven't seen or heard of the film, but now intrigued. And bingo for Chomsky. I had no use for his deep structures as an applied linguist, but Manufacturing Consent was a good read. After that ... meh. Even that 2010 Chapel Hill speech has not aged well with what we now know about the weaponization of weather and DEWs.
Was also disappointed with Naomi Klein, "The Shock Doctrine" now transformed into "Schlock Dogma."
Gotta run for now, but wanted to let you know that I am honored with your response.
Traditions, laws, and algorithms are among the many "rule-driven" ways of defining us as a member of a provisional social construct of "group", choosing the degree of granularization of our group identity, and then manipulating us according to the whims of those in power.
A couple of other thoughts on the correlation between power and corruption that have come to mind recently include a rebuttal to Lord Acton's "Power Corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely" by proposing that concentrations of power attract the corruptible ... both ideas, the heart and soul of The Lord of the Rings.
Another fly in the ointment are those who seem to be genetically pre-disposed for Cluster B anti-social behavior ... the pathological narcissists, machiavellian opportunists, and born-to-the-bone psychopaths among us ... those dark-triad, kulangeta (thanks Mathew Crawford). Certainly, unresolved childhood trauma can play a role. In extreme cases, whole generations have been traumatized as victims of war, bondage, or worse. But if even kittens and puppies can display unique personalities among a litter, how much more so for humans?
Not all psychopaths are "bad", and in many conversational uses, the term for that particular neurological condition is misused. I suspect many famous people throughout history have had to create their own morality based logic because they did not have the capacity for immediate empathy. I suspect Immanuel Kant's entire ethics depends on logic, not to mention my initial reference to Schopenhauer. But there are more contemporary cases such as the otherwise "good" James Fallon, author of "The Psychopath Within", or advocate Athena Walker (on Quora) with whom I've shared many exchanges. Still, many, if not most, are "Snakes in Suits".
The most conservative estimate I've come across in the literature is 1% of any given population will be predisposed to such sociopathic potential, 30% for American CEOs. I can't help but to think the limits of A.I. will be determined by those who have the power and lack of moral restraints to use it. For example, the recent assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealthCare Brian Thompson revealed that "under Thompson's leadership, UnitedHealthcare began using artificial intelligence (AI) to automate claim denials, resulting in patients being unable to access medical care." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Brian_Thompson
But I suspect any domain in large-scale populations will include a high percentage of Cluster B types near the top of the hierarchy of that domain. For example, many actors/actresses can successfully step into a role because they have done that all their life. Like morphologically defined psychopaths who lack the capacity for immediate empathy, from birth, they depended on extra-keen powers of observation and mimicry for survival, if not success. The same can be said for those at the top of their game in law, politics, sales, sports, academics, you name it.
Ha. To be fair, the above includes some top substack writers. Although substack originally served as a refuge for those marginalized by captured institutions, like all bureaucracies, hierarchies, and even more general "systems" that emerge with scale, the rule-driven behavior mentioned above, initially emerges as a proxy for immediate intuition ... but is eventually 'captured' and weaponized by the Cluster B's.
But this problem may be a subset of a larger phenomenon. As a biology undergrad getting his first taste of 'education' as competition for brute memorization on standardized tests, a series of experiences and a natural inclination to grow led me into exploring what biology was all about (Aldo Leopold my first love), then science (Karl Popper, T.S. Kuhn, etc.), then language and logic (Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Gödel, etc.), and then life (too many thinkers, writers, and artists to even begin a list). One conclusion I've reached is that anything that can be expressed in language or mathematics is ultimately and necessarily metaphorical in nature. The edge of any systematic paradigm breaks down into an "Alice in Wonderland" cascade of contradictions and tautologies. That book could only have come from a mathematician.
I do not dismiss the descriptive usefulness and predictive power of mathematics and language, but try to modestly relegate those tools as provisional social constructs. My favorite metaphor for emergent phenomenon (epiphenomenon?) is the Mandelbrot set. I remember devoting some time in Comparative Culture classes to tracing the evolution of animal totems to religious symbols to national flags and corporate branding to the mandelbrot set as metaphors for identity. But ironically, I had to use language to point to the limits of language ... not unlike the dilemma and heuristics of a zen priest from another era ... or Kierkegaard retelling the story of the lone traveler who mistakes the street sign pointing to the village for the village itself.
But I preserved my sanity by grounding myself in the fact that I am an animal, a social primate, navigating life and eventual death, with a good imagination and capacity for abstraction, but that intellectual capacity as essentially serving the same drives and instincts as other animals. Even post-pubescent hormones are a reminder that explanations for largely subconsciou behavior tend to be post-hoc justifications. There is a Japanese proverb which roughly translates as "Asking for forgiveness is more effective than asking for permission." Perhaps that serves as the guiding principle for those driven by blind, personal ambition. My salvation is in reminding myself that as a "social" primate, there are times when I am personally compelled to sacrifice my personal needs for the marginalized "other" ... if for no other reason than for survival of the group. I guess that is as good a working definition for 'empathy' as any other.
A persistent problem within large populations is that the average neurotypical person tends to judge other people by their own neurotypical standards of empathy, and can not even imagine the predatory cunning of Cluster B types, and so become easy prey to "man as wolf to man". A substack writer I follow (whose name and link I will not post unless requested), recently uploaded a post which included links to videos of Mexican cartel members dismembering and beheading rival gang members while still alive. I regret (and not) clicking those links because even a brief view of a few seconds are traumatic, and will haunt me for years ... all the more because history is filled with facts and anecdotes proving such evil has been always among us.
But families and small communities are no guarantee of success either. Both have their share of skeletons in the closet (The Anna Karenina Principle). But the advantage of being at a scale of Dunbar's number or less is the greater chance of identifying and minimizing the potential damage of the sociopath through immediate intuition and/or empathy.
Though trying not to avoid any ideology, if backed into a corner on a bad day, I guess I would be a nihilist. And if not for a few close friends, a misanthrope in the mold of that old saw attributed to Mark Twain — "The more I learn about people, the better I like my dog."
Chomsky (along with Naomi Klein, my, how the mighty have fallen), in his 2010 Chapel Hill speech "Human Intelligence and the Environment", opened his speech with three paragraphs dedicated to the debate between Carl Sagan and evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr over the Fermi paradox. If there is intelligent life out there, why haven't we seen them? (According to substack writer "clif high", that may be soon a moot point, another story for another time.). While Sagan stood on statistical probability, Mayr stood on the evolutionary record saying that apex species tend to last about a hundred thousand years, and we are at about our shelf life. But the way he phrased it was compelling ... that human intelligence may be nothing more than a fatal mutation. Judging by history of concentrations of power, I tend to agree. The late Stephen Hawking put it more bluntly ... "Greed and stupidity will mark the end of the human race."
Oops ... looking at the time, although I could repeat and rephrase ad-infinitum, the immediate demands of life shows the minute hand ticking. Gotta run.
I can see why one would be attracted to condensing, expanding, and bringing otherwise abstract ideas to life through metaphor and fiction.
I think one of the good things to come out of COVID is that it has shifted many of us out of a nihilistic view of politics. Seeing the medical totalitarianism up close has fully revealed how slippery the slope is even, I suspect, to those who ostracized and shunned their friends during the hysteria.
Oct 23, 2024 RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, And Tucker Carlson Join Trump On Stage At Georgia Event
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Tucker Carlson join former President Trump on stage at Turning Point PAC's "Georgia for Trump" event in Duluth, Georgia.
Trump is fighting a smart war. He couldn't do anything in his first term yet he STILL managed not to start wars. He is assembling a formidable cabinet at the moment. You can't fight Goliath by yelling and screaming and throwing a spear!!!
When you look at all the mischief that has been done around the world with vaccines, education, and pharmaceuticals from past years, a trend begins to form. Education: History as taught now, is jaded as if we should be ashamed of it. reducing our IQ's not to be so aware, pharma drugs not really healthy. This is all sad. The Elites are not getting their own way. Bear in mind that the most potent force we have is the Truth, and it takes all of us to stand and be counted together, It may take some time, But as the philosopher Heraclitis said "The truth often evades being recognised, due to its utter incredibility"
We are now faced with compulsory fluoridation of our water supply, by remote authorities that are controlling the puppets in councils that we call councilors. We are expected to believe it is safe and effective, just like the recent compulsory vaccine, but now there is significant rejection by ratepayers. I want to fight them tooth and nail, cos they are only puppets of little conviction, and will run at the first sign of trouble. The idea that they can introduce another compulsory treatment, when no-one has received an apology over the Covid vaccines, means we need to serve them up some bad medicine, to make them reconsider. Are you ok with compulsory fluoridation ? It is time to show them who is really in charge here, the people.
I'm against fluoridation.
The fluoride has been in the water for decades in the USA.
I'm confused as to why they started pushing fluoridation in the UK and other nations now, when reports of how it drops IQ, especially in children...
It's like they didn't plan right.
Same with the COVID stuff, they should have done the vaccine passport and laws stuff before they pushed COVID. Instead, they rammed it down on us with executive orders and other abuse of power.
Are they this stupid or lazy not to do it in a diligent manner?
We are fleas
On the backs of rats
In environments
Filled with cats
Where dogs roam free
And birds of prey
Circle skies both night and day
-
It's a dangerous world of cat and mouse
Dog eat dog
Bank eat house
Where bigger beasts crumble grounds
And send shockwaves throughout our towns
-
But wolves and Wall Street
Battle bonds
Internationals loot our ponds
And shatter dreams
They take the cheese
Bait it, poison, breaking knees
-
Treason, terror, it's all a ruse
They own our countries
Finance too
And take and torture as they like
Send the army, no fair fight
-
Fables, stories, big headlines
All controlled the stories bind
And run on repeat
Never stop
Screaming messages
From the top
-
We fleas
On the backs of rats
In environments
Filled with cats
Where lions sit upon the throne
And all we have
Is flesh and bone
I am against ALL compulsory mass medication!
so am I
Nice one Doc.
That Power you mention has a price, both monetarily and conscientiously. I have watched a number of installments on the linked channel below, and what amazes me is the number of people who had it not been wartime would have likely carried on through life as 'normal' people, but the criminalist power base fostered a metamorphosis in these people who thus became monsters, devoid of all empathy, even humanity.
Perhaps a measure of the Asch paradigm drew out the inherent homicidal criminal in some, others were likely suppressed psychopaths, whatever, you would understand best Doc, but I see a similar spirit in the Covid era, the soft kill, as opposed to Zyklon B or bullet.
Nuremberg set a precedent for dealing with the Covid era 'soft killers' - the actual cost of the Power they abused.
https://m.youtube.com/@WorldHistoryVideos/videos
Yes, a fighting chance. The nihilists generally say that those who are not nihilists want to sit back and wait for a saviour. But that's not so - we fight. It's just that with what is happening now we know we actually have a chance not to go down to raw, satanic power.
(Note ... heavy editing and expanding beyond substack's comment length, so will split this in two)
Part 1 ...
Spot on. Despite our best-dressed cultural conceits, "might makes right" appears to be at the dark heart of our collective human gene pool.
Warning, the following may be TLDR ... writing for my own clarification as much as the potential reader.
—————
42 years living and working in Japanese academia and the education system, and the title of a book I read a lifetime ago comes closest to mind in describing life as seen from the eyes of a marginalized, token foreigner ... 1818's publication of "The World as Will and Representation" by Arthur Schopenhauer. Or for that matter, Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will". Hmm ... thinking of that film, I can't help but to find the better bits in "Good Will Hunting". Thankful for a bit of age, otherwise I might have jumped to "Free Willy".
My anecdotal life is thankfully filled with a few personal relationships and acts of authentic kindness … many exceptions to a 'relentless will to power’. But in institutional, transactional settings (gotta pay the rent, buy the food), the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against non-Japanese, in a tribal "us" vs. "them" thingy. A hint about the provisional, emergent nature of the self-selecting “us" might be found in the first half of clif high’s recent substack https://clifhigh.substack.com/p/the-rabbis-bigly-mistake. Simply replace “superior civilizations” and “inferior civilizations” with “the powerful” and “the marginalized”, and scale down to the level of individual relationships. Large scale or small, the patterns are fractals of each other. (As for the rest of clif’s analysis and the power structures of the deep state, I have no knowledge, and no comment, lest I make the mistake of marginalizing innocent individuals by virtue of their group identity.)
Returning to the scale of my life in Japan, the “will to power” does not take the form of racism as has often been found in the West. That Freudian “narcissism of small differences” is in the eye of the beholder. Many Japanese consider residents of Korean, Chinese, or other Far Eastern descent, or even other Japanese citizens such as Ryukyu Islanders (Okinawa), Ainu, Burakumin, Zainichi, women, students, the elderly, and so on, as convenient targets to be reduced to a single group identity, capitalized upon, and marginalized as outsourced costs for the self-entitled. This is not so different from bureaucracies in the U.S. requiring citizens to categorize themselves by "race" ... a scientifically outdated term … or the weaponization of shame regarding past racist policies into policies which unfairly outsource the burden to other individuals.
I think the cognitive equivalence of Dunbar's number and its moral implications is at work here. Beyond that number, roughly 200, we do not have the neural capacity to empathize with more than a couple of 200 individuals max, roughly the same maximum size as a chimpanzee troop. Reminds me of that old Three Dog Night classic, "Easy to be Hard".
When our populations scale in size, we do not, can not, change our neurological constraints. Rather, a small ruling class (that "club that we ain't in" George Carlin referred to), maintains their Dunbar's number, but at the expense of dehumanizing the rest of us. Back when NPR had a bit more meat on the bone, I remember an interview of a British Historian who remarked that Marie Antoinette was not the "Let them eat cake" monster that many are led to believe. Within her bubble of Dunbar's number, she seemed to have true friends who shared secrets and intuited happiness and suffering ... just like other neurotypical people. Within her bubble. Reminds me of former U.S. politician and Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, televising how she is weathering the lockdowns by digging into her freezer stashed with boutique ice cream.
Rather than having the luxury of intuitive-driven behavior, the rest of us, through scale alone, are forced to depend on the ruling class's proxies for intuition or empathy in the form of rule-driven behavior ... or a combination of propaganda and censurship . That "laws for thee, not for me" thingy behind Biden pardoning Biden.
Populations of scale beyond families and small communities necessarily depend on systems, bureaucracies, and/or hierarchies for laws, labels, and groups defined by 'salient' (in the eyes of the ruling class) characteristics, rather than seeing everyone as unique individuals deserving immediate, intuitive, empathy-driven behavior.
For example, here in Japan ... no matter how many decades or how much quality I put into becoming a dedicated "educator", in the eyes of those who hold the purse strings, I am nothing more than a token foreigner ... an easily replaceable asset and expenditure for an institutional machine, or would-be entrepreneurs needing to outsource the losses and authentic work to anyone but themselves.
Would be "educators" moving to Japan (or Korea or China) beware. 42 years here, award-winning academic presentations, one of two foreigners in the country on the Ministry of Education's textbook committee, judging "Ivy League" nationwide speech contests for over a dozen years, tenure in a Japanese college, decades as a volunteer community and international social activist (Cambodia) ... yadda, yadda, yadda. But a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, 20-year-old from an Anglo-speaking country, fresh off the boat and knowing nothing of Japan or the language, has more social currency than myself ... as well as more job opportunities. In the eyes of all save a handful of close friends, I am not only "just another foreigner", I am an old, beyond expiry-date foreigner. Education and experience need not apply. But that's Japan. A nice place to visit. Back to some observations about power ...
Fascinating commentary -- an essay in its own right, and I could respond to so many of the issues and points you raise ... Yes, Schopenhauer's work is brilliant. Now, I am reminded of Chris Markers Sans Soleil -- have you seen this film, which features elements in Japan? Chomsky showed his true self when he said that the non-jabbed should be left to forage for their food ... Enough for now, thank you so much. But it's absolutely brilliant, what you've written.
Thanks NZDoc
Just popped in to see this, and have to pop out again soon ... but for a quick replay, haven't seen or heard of the film, but now intrigued. And bingo for Chomsky. I had no use for his deep structures as an applied linguist, but Manufacturing Consent was a good read. After that ... meh. Even that 2010 Chapel Hill speech has not aged well with what we now know about the weaponization of weather and DEWs.
Was also disappointed with Naomi Klein, "The Shock Doctrine" now transformed into "Schlock Dogma."
Gotta run for now, but wanted to let you know that I am honored with your response.
Cheers from Japan
steve
Part 2 ...
Traditions, laws, and algorithms are among the many "rule-driven" ways of defining us as a member of a provisional social construct of "group", choosing the degree of granularization of our group identity, and then manipulating us according to the whims of those in power.
A couple of other thoughts on the correlation between power and corruption that have come to mind recently include a rebuttal to Lord Acton's "Power Corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely" by proposing that concentrations of power attract the corruptible ... both ideas, the heart and soul of The Lord of the Rings.
Another fly in the ointment are those who seem to be genetically pre-disposed for Cluster B anti-social behavior ... the pathological narcissists, machiavellian opportunists, and born-to-the-bone psychopaths among us ... those dark-triad, kulangeta (thanks Mathew Crawford). Certainly, unresolved childhood trauma can play a role. In extreme cases, whole generations have been traumatized as victims of war, bondage, or worse. But if even kittens and puppies can display unique personalities among a litter, how much more so for humans?
Not all psychopaths are "bad", and in many conversational uses, the term for that particular neurological condition is misused. I suspect many famous people throughout history have had to create their own morality based logic because they did not have the capacity for immediate empathy. I suspect Immanuel Kant's entire ethics depends on logic, not to mention my initial reference to Schopenhauer. But there are more contemporary cases such as the otherwise "good" James Fallon, author of "The Psychopath Within", or advocate Athena Walker (on Quora) with whom I've shared many exchanges. Still, many, if not most, are "Snakes in Suits".
The most conservative estimate I've come across in the literature is 1% of any given population will be predisposed to such sociopathic potential, 30% for American CEOs. I can't help but to think the limits of A.I. will be determined by those who have the power and lack of moral restraints to use it. For example, the recent assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealthCare Brian Thompson revealed that "under Thompson's leadership, UnitedHealthcare began using artificial intelligence (AI) to automate claim denials, resulting in patients being unable to access medical care." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Brian_Thompson
But I suspect any domain in large-scale populations will include a high percentage of Cluster B types near the top of the hierarchy of that domain. For example, many actors/actresses can successfully step into a role because they have done that all their life. Like morphologically defined psychopaths who lack the capacity for immediate empathy, from birth, they depended on extra-keen powers of observation and mimicry for survival, if not success. The same can be said for those at the top of their game in law, politics, sales, sports, academics, you name it.
Ha. To be fair, the above includes some top substack writers. Although substack originally served as a refuge for those marginalized by captured institutions, like all bureaucracies, hierarchies, and even more general "systems" that emerge with scale, the rule-driven behavior mentioned above, initially emerges as a proxy for immediate intuition ... but is eventually 'captured' and weaponized by the Cluster B's.
But this problem may be a subset of a larger phenomenon. As a biology undergrad getting his first taste of 'education' as competition for brute memorization on standardized tests, a series of experiences and a natural inclination to grow led me into exploring what biology was all about (Aldo Leopold my first love), then science (Karl Popper, T.S. Kuhn, etc.), then language and logic (Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Gödel, etc.), and then life (too many thinkers, writers, and artists to even begin a list). One conclusion I've reached is that anything that can be expressed in language or mathematics is ultimately and necessarily metaphorical in nature. The edge of any systematic paradigm breaks down into an "Alice in Wonderland" cascade of contradictions and tautologies. That book could only have come from a mathematician.
I do not dismiss the descriptive usefulness and predictive power of mathematics and language, but try to modestly relegate those tools as provisional social constructs. My favorite metaphor for emergent phenomenon (epiphenomenon?) is the Mandelbrot set. I remember devoting some time in Comparative Culture classes to tracing the evolution of animal totems to religious symbols to national flags and corporate branding to the mandelbrot set as metaphors for identity. But ironically, I had to use language to point to the limits of language ... not unlike the dilemma and heuristics of a zen priest from another era ... or Kierkegaard retelling the story of the lone traveler who mistakes the street sign pointing to the village for the village itself.
But I preserved my sanity by grounding myself in the fact that I am an animal, a social primate, navigating life and eventual death, with a good imagination and capacity for abstraction, but that intellectual capacity as essentially serving the same drives and instincts as other animals. Even post-pubescent hormones are a reminder that explanations for largely subconsciou behavior tend to be post-hoc justifications. There is a Japanese proverb which roughly translates as "Asking for forgiveness is more effective than asking for permission." Perhaps that serves as the guiding principle for those driven by blind, personal ambition. My salvation is in reminding myself that as a "social" primate, there are times when I am personally compelled to sacrifice my personal needs for the marginalized "other" ... if for no other reason than for survival of the group. I guess that is as good a working definition for 'empathy' as any other.
A persistent problem within large populations is that the average neurotypical person tends to judge other people by their own neurotypical standards of empathy, and can not even imagine the predatory cunning of Cluster B types, and so become easy prey to "man as wolf to man". A substack writer I follow (whose name and link I will not post unless requested), recently uploaded a post which included links to videos of Mexican cartel members dismembering and beheading rival gang members while still alive. I regret (and not) clicking those links because even a brief view of a few seconds are traumatic, and will haunt me for years ... all the more because history is filled with facts and anecdotes proving such evil has been always among us.
But families and small communities are no guarantee of success either. Both have their share of skeletons in the closet (The Anna Karenina Principle). But the advantage of being at a scale of Dunbar's number or less is the greater chance of identifying and minimizing the potential damage of the sociopath through immediate intuition and/or empathy.
Though trying not to avoid any ideology, if backed into a corner on a bad day, I guess I would be a nihilist. And if not for a few close friends, a misanthrope in the mold of that old saw attributed to Mark Twain — "The more I learn about people, the better I like my dog."
Chomsky (along with Naomi Klein, my, how the mighty have fallen), in his 2010 Chapel Hill speech "Human Intelligence and the Environment", opened his speech with three paragraphs dedicated to the debate between Carl Sagan and evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr over the Fermi paradox. If there is intelligent life out there, why haven't we seen them? (According to substack writer "clif high", that may be soon a moot point, another story for another time.). While Sagan stood on statistical probability, Mayr stood on the evolutionary record saying that apex species tend to last about a hundred thousand years, and we are at about our shelf life. But the way he phrased it was compelling ... that human intelligence may be nothing more than a fatal mutation. Judging by history of concentrations of power, I tend to agree. The late Stephen Hawking put it more bluntly ... "Greed and stupidity will mark the end of the human race."
Oops ... looking at the time, although I could repeat and rephrase ad-infinitum, the immediate demands of life shows the minute hand ticking. Gotta run.
I can see why one would be attracted to condensing, expanding, and bringing otherwise abstract ideas to life through metaphor and fiction.
I wish I had more time to read.
More time to write.
Enjoyed being motivated by your latest.
Cheers from Japan.
Steve
Brilliant summary Doc
I think one of the good things to come out of COVID is that it has shifted many of us out of a nihilistic view of politics. Seeing the medical totalitarianism up close has fully revealed how slippery the slope is even, I suspect, to those who ostracized and shunned their friends during the hysteria.
"The Covid downpour may have ended, but the Covid Clous remains above us all..." you mean "cloud", I think.
indeed - thank you!
Thank you for that article . We are not alone , like you said . We are many and we won’t give in /up .⚡️⭐️
Oct 23, 2024 RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, And Tucker Carlson Join Trump On Stage At Georgia Event
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Tucker Carlson join former President Trump on stage at Turning Point PAC's "Georgia for Trump" event in Duluth, Georgia.
https://youtu.be/QBa3JKiZaEs?si=95uIlaIE1PKDT0lJ
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f1181f251d8d63c376b2a80b3d60b8132d741601fd80b5a4bffb94633e2ebd74.jpg
Fascinating essay and some intriguing comments. Chomsky is a secular humanist. 😁
Modern physics is very much like medical science today.... Based on delusions,assumptions and bad methods.
Here's a playlist on the bs in physics.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkdAkAC4ItcFyNFBywN0wiZ45pCnMr-Ay
As for Trump, he screwed rfk Jr and Aaron Siri by not giving them the access to the vaccine safety database. Ok...
His excuse: Bill Gates told him it's not a good idea.
I shit you not.
Sorry but even if he were that stupid, he is following power at the cost of truth.
We will see what happens in this term...
Trump is fighting a smart war. He couldn't do anything in his first term yet he STILL managed not to start wars. He is assembling a formidable cabinet at the moment. You can't fight Goliath by yelling and screaming and throwing a spear!!!
I hope that this time he's not looking to please the swamp things anymore.
At least he brings health freedom to the focus.
When you look at all the mischief that has been done around the world with vaccines, education, and pharmaceuticals from past years, a trend begins to form. Education: History as taught now, is jaded as if we should be ashamed of it. reducing our IQ's not to be so aware, pharma drugs not really healthy. This is all sad. The Elites are not getting their own way. Bear in mind that the most potent force we have is the Truth, and it takes all of us to stand and be counted together, It may take some time, But as the philosopher Heraclitis said "The truth often evades being recognised, due to its utter incredibility"