How dystopias can arise

[FlashDangerpants]

Further as showing a pattern of what he sees as good intentions - faith in technological solutions, sense of himself as a visionary, and sense of superiority to most other people - that could usher in some kind of technofascism if these ideas were held by someone with more charisma and guided by a good corporate PR department.

If you delve a little further into his post history you will find two utterly contradictory claims. One being his regular announcement that he has completed a most in depth study of moral philosophy... and against that, his single mention ever of Isiah Berlin in which he decided that he has no need to read Berlin at all. As if it were possible to be 'well read' in this subject without reading any Berlin at all.

If he were to read Berlin, and in the unlikely event that he were to reasonably well comprehend what was written there, he would realise that the two concepts essay is all about how people like himself - those who believe in the ultimate perfectibility of man in rational concert towards a singular vision of excellence - are the ones who create the dystopic nightmares.

[Iwannaplato]

Further as showing a pattern of what he sees as good intentions - faith in technological solutions, sense of himself as a visionary, and sense of superiority to most other people - that could usher in some kind of technofascism if these ideas were held by someone with more charisma and guided by a good corporate PR department.

If you delve a little further into his post history you will find two utterly contradictory claims. One being his regular announcement that he has completed a most in depth study of moral philosophy... and against that, his single mention ever of Isiah Berlin in which he decided that he has no need to read Berlin at all. As if it were possible to be 'well read' in this subject without reading any Berlin at all.

If he were to read Berlin, and in the unlikely event that he were to reasonably well comprehend what was written there, he would realise that the two concepts essay is all about how people like himself - those who believe in the ultimate perfectibility of man in rational concert towards a singular vision of excellence - are the ones who create the dystopic nightmares.

I didn't know he aimed at perfection. If so, that adds to the profile of what to me is the dangerous visionary gestalt. I find the technocratic solution aimed at brains, to be particularly disturbing, because it is anti-political. IOW the solution is the change us fundamentally to suit some ideal, rather than to move towards a society that fits us.

These are not necessarily mutually exclusive and I am certain not saying that humans don't need to change. But the moment there is, what I see as, a fundamental distaste for the limbic system, say, it seems like a fascism with a smile.

I think there are a number of pretty powerful players out there who are thinking along these lines.

[Gary Childress]

Further as showing a pattern of what he sees as good intentions - faith in technological solutions, sense of himself as a visionary, and sense of superiority to most other people - that could usher in some kind of technofascism if these ideas were held by someone with more charisma and guided by a good corporate PR department.

If you delve a little further into his post history you will find two utterly contradictory claims. One being his regular announcement that he has completed a most in depth study of moral philosophy... and against that, his single mention ever of Isiah Berlin in which he decided that he has no need to read Berlin at all. As if it were possible to be 'well read' in this subject without reading any Berlin at all.

If he were to read Berlin, and in the unlikely event that he were to reasonably well comprehend what was written there, he would realise that the two concepts essay is all about how people like himself - those who believe in the ultimate perfectibility of man in rational concert towards a singular vision of excellence - are the ones who create the dystopic nightmares.

This reminds me of Hannah Arendt's assessment of Adolf Eichman. Arendt perceived Eichman as much an ordinary technocrat who more or less did his job to the best of his ability, irrespective of the fact that his job was to facilitate genocide. My fear is that if technology gets us to a point of automatic destruction, it will be carried out by technocrats who are simply doing their jobs to the best of their ability. I don't share promethean75's faith that the human side of us can prevent evil. It hasn't necessarily done so in the past.

[Iwannaplato]

This reminds me of Hannah Arendt's assessment of Adolf Eichman. Arendt perceived Eichman as much an ordinary technocrat who more or less did his job to the best of his ability, irrespective of the fact that his job was to facilitate genocide. My fear is that if technology gets us to a point of automatic destruction, it will be carried out by technocrats who are simply doing their jobs to the best of their ability. I don't share promethean75's faith that the human side of us can prevent evil. It hasn't necessarily done so in the past.

Yes, it hasn't. And a difference now compared to the past is that we have technologies that can spread globally. And compared to arming the Knights in your duchy, may actually be rather cheap. Further, good nature doesn't function without action and discussion. IOW if some people react to disturbing trends and you respond to them that it will all work out, then you may be stifling part of humans' good natures starting to react to building problems. IOW saying everything will work out as a criticism of people saying there may be a real problem here is a political act with possible consequences. Or to put it another way: it can be a part of how dystopias arise.

I'm certainly not saying we must have a dystopia in the future. I just see it as a real possibility. And I think in some ways the West, for example, is much more like a dystopia than it was earlier in recent history. People are working harder for less money. There has been an incredible concentration of power in a few corporations in a number of fields, including media. The middle class has been steadily shrinking. The executive branch has through both parties' administrations taken more and more power, though amongst other things executive orders.

[Agent Smith]

What could be wrong with a state of affairs where everybody's happy? Perhaps that's not the right question. May be this is: who is waiting for whom?

I don't know. If you simply want everyone to be happy you could just administer lethal doses of morphine to all of us too. But who wants to play God with people's lives? Not me. I couldn't carry that kind of burden, that I was responsible for the fate of every human on Earth.

I think you overestimate the power of an individual, but que sais-je? I haven't really been in the company of a great person ... ever!

[Agent Smith]

What could be wrong with a state of affairs where everybody's happy?

I'd rather fit the situation to us rather than fit us to the situation and make us smile. Stepford wives and husbands.

Statistically sound, me hopes!

[Gary Childress]

What could be wrong with a state of affairs where everybody's happy? Perhaps that's not the right question. May be this is: who is waiting for whom?

I don't know. If you simply want everyone to be happy you could just administer lethal doses of morphine to all of us too. But who wants to play God with people's lives? Not me. I couldn't carry that kind of burden, that I was responsible for the fate of every human on Earth.

I think you overestimate the power of an individual, but que sais-je? I haven't really been in the company of a great person ... ever!

Then I will change my question to who wants to be part of a group of people that would be playing God with the lives of others? You might earn some gold wings for the things you get right or good things that happened under your lead but you'll also earn plenty of black marks for what you do wrong or even allow to happen. Going back to Eichman, he didn't orchestrate the Holocaust by himself. He was part of a system comprised of many individuals that served to create the Holocaust. They apparently performed their jobs well enough to kill 6 million people or so, some of the architects of the Holocaust probably did their work without even knowing the full extent of what everyone else was doing or what the whole was accomplishing.

[Agent Smith]

I don't know. If you simply want everyone to be happy you could just administer lethal doses of morphine to all of us too. But who wants to play God with people's lives? Not me. I couldn't carry that kind of burden, that I was responsible for the fate of every human on Earth.

I think you overestimate the power of an individual, but que sais-je? I haven't really been in the company of a great person ... ever!

Then I will change my question to who wants to be part of a group of people that would be playing God with the lives of others? You might earn some gold wings for the things you get right or good things that happened under your lead but you'll also earn plenty of black marks for what you do wrong or even allow to happen. Going back to Eichman, he didn't orchestrate the Holocaust by himself. He was part of a system comprised of many individuals that served to create the Holocaust. They apparently performed their jobs well enough to kill 6 million people or so, some of the architects of the Holocaust probably did their work without even knowing the full extent of what everyone else was doing or what the whole was accomplishing.

I believe some other poster said/thinks the exact opposite. I suppose that explains it.

[Gary Childress]

I think you overestimate the power of an individual, but que sais-je? I haven't really been in the company of a great person ... ever!

Then I will change my question to who wants to be part of a group of people that would be playing God with the lives of others? You might earn some gold wings for the things you get right or good things that happened under your lead but you'll also earn plenty of black marks for what you do wrong or even allow to happen. Going back to Eichman, he didn't orchestrate the Holocaust by himself. He was part of a system comprised of many individuals that served to create the Holocaust. They apparently performed their jobs well enough to kill 6 million people or so, some of the architects of the Holocaust probably did their work without even knowing the full extent of what everyone else was doing or what the whole was accomplishing.

I believe some other poster said/thinks the exact opposite. I suppose that explains it.

Communication through quips...

[FlashDangerpants]

Further as showing a pattern of what he sees as good intentions - faith in technological solutions, sense of himself as a visionary, and sense of superiority to most other people - that could usher in some kind of technofascism if these ideas were held by someone with more charisma and guided by a good corporate PR department.

If you delve a little further into his post history you will find two utterly contradictory claims. One being his regular announcement that he has completed a most in depth study of moral philosophy... and against that, his single mention ever of Isiah Berlin in which he decided that he has no need to read Berlin at all. As if it were possible to be 'well read' in this subject without reading any Berlin at all.

If he were to read Berlin, and in the unlikely event that he were to reasonably well comprehend what was written there, he would realise that the two concepts essay is all about how people like himself - those who believe in the ultimate perfectibility of man in rational concert towards a singular vision of excellence - are the ones who create the dystopic nightmares.

I didn't know he aimed at perfection.

VA wouldn't use that word - his entire legendary "God is an impossibility" argument being frocussed on the natural impossiblity of perfection.

The terminology of the perfectibility of man comes via Isaiah Berlin. He's dicussing a theme that you can find in the ancients, but is commonly associtated with moderns from Rousseau, then various German Romantics, onward through Marx and into the twentieth with all the gore that entails, and then it caries on through to VA.

The whole big idea of these theories is that there is a way (that usually is assumed good because it is 'modern' or 'scientific' and so it must be for modern and scientific men) for all tjhe most significant problems of the world to be reduced to a single flaw in humanity that can be fixed. That flaw is typically a mistaken belief that everyone holds, or else a bad impulse or desire.

By providing the fix for this faulty desire or belief, the Stalinist now creates the means by which a new and more perfect man can see and desire and believe all the same things that every other new and more perfect man can see and desire. This is exactly what VA is offering with his future generations who follow his Stalinist neurological moral system.

Of course Berlin wrote directly to this point in his essay "Two Concepts of Liberty" available here in PDF for anyone who wants a quick read. And one can wonder about that title: so relevant to Rousseau and Marx, yet so meaningless in reference to VA. Our guy never addresses any concept of liberty, let alone two of the fucking things. And that's because .... well let's be real, it's because he has an outright obsession with orderly formations of hierarchy and the placing of things into such systems. Everything he ever writes is about that activity. It doesn't even occur to him that most of us don't have a desire to be exactly alike in all things.

Real philosophers who go this route have to account for how all the people in some imaginary society all end up wanting the same things and believing the same things. VA doesn't do that because he just doesn't get that there is any need.

If so, that adds to the profile of what to me is the dangerous visionary gestalt. I find the technocratic solution aimed at brains, to be particularly disturbing, because it is anti-political. IOW the solution is the change us fundamentally to suit some ideal, rather than to move towards a society that fits us.

It's kind of the point really, a system is democratic in as much as the politics realigns to suit the demands of the people, and totalitarian in so far as it arranges the people to suit policy needs. Usually there's a balance to those things and even that isn't nice to think about, but VA is a Stalinist through and through.

These are not necessarily mutually exclusive and I am certain not saying that humans don't need to change. But the moment there is, what I see as, a fundamental distaste for the limbic system, say, it seems like a fascism with a smile.

I think there are a number of pretty powerful players out there who are thinking along these lines.

VA's whole thing is not concerning, there's science-fiction and then there's what he does, pseudoscience-fiction I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Agent Smith]

Then I will change my question to who wants to be part of a group of people that would be playing God with the lives of others? You might earn some gold wings for the things you get right or good things that happened under your lead but you'll also earn plenty of black marks for what you do wrong or even allow to happen. Going back to Eichman, he didn't orchestrate the Holocaust by himself. He was part of a system comprised of many individuals that served to create the Holocaust. They apparently performed their jobs well enough to kill 6 million people or so, some of the architects of the Holocaust probably did their work without even knowing the full extent of what everyone else was doing or what the whole was accomplishing.

I believe some other poster said/thinks the exact opposite. I suppose that explains it.

Communication through quips...

Me? Nah! I'm an ol', dull blade mon ami. Just givin' you some feedback. Dystopia is usually part of prediction by futurologists; may be it isn't.