Socrates: Admitted Gadfly… Unexamined Superpredator? Higher Pursuits Require Higher Knowledge

The big picture in 399 BCE is that Athens had lost half of her population in a terrible war, and lost… saved from annihilation by her enemy, Sparta. After a bout of tyranny from Socrates’ students, democracy was reestablished, and a general amnesty proclaimed… with one single exception… Socrates. Why? Traditional philosophy, singing the praises of Socrates-Plato-Aristotle, ignores the verdict of the jury, and the verdict of history. Why?

What feels “good” is what our brain deems to be good. Our brain, though, is the brain of Earth’s greatest superpredator ever...It goes without saying that prey frequently feels that what a predator views as good is as bad as it gets… And pretty much anything alive which we can discern with the unaided eye, is a prey for humanity… We even eat urchins, algae, insects, snails, frogs, mold and undescribable things at the bottom of the sea.

Philosophy martyr Socrates set up his definition of wisdom (“I am the wisest, but I know nothing”) in such a way that he should be admired (“I am the wisest“) but he could not be accused of anything bad… “I knew nothing” did he say when accused of the tyranny of his students over Athens -after all, he didn’t know anything.

Was such an attitude wise? Or was it what average crooks tend to do when confronted to crushing evidence?

In California more than fifty years ago, a cult developed around a drugged out crazed maniac called Charlie Manson. Some of his disciples left the desert, when to LA and murdered, in two separate attacks, seven (7) persons, including the eight month pregnant Sharon Tate. Manson insisted that “he was not bad”… And was nevertheless condemned to death for his influence upon the actual killers. Arguably, Socrates students killed through their action, hundreds of thousands of Athenians (Socrates’ Alcibiades was the force behind the attack on Syracuse, which failed and drained Athens’ military capability).

Socrates didn’t present excuses, to my knowledge, for the behavior of his students during the Pennepolese war. So how come this deep in denial Socrates person, is viewed as a pinnacle of martyred wisdom? Is denial the pinnacle of wisdom? Confusing denial of reality with wisdom is undeniably a problem. The Socrates problem is much more than just about figuring Socrates, but also how come a denialist got to be viewed as the epitome of wisdom? Because it was non-wisdom masquerading as wisdom? Some of Socrates’ discourses against war, while Athens, direct democracy, was engaged in a struggle for survival, could be assimilated to high treason. In WW1, Bertrand Russell was emprisoned, for 18 months, as deserved, for anti-war propaganda (some will scoff, but the WW1 Kaiserreich was fundamentally the same as Hitler’s Third Reich, and gave birth to it, often with the same famous actors, for example Goering or Luddendorf…)

I think here specifically of Menexenus dialogue, which Aristotle viewed as fundamental. And in which Socrates basically recognizes Aspasia’s importance as a philosopher.

The usual suspects, the plutocrats, sponsors of civilization, are behind the entire plot. Let’s explore… Socrates has this in common in appearance with Einstein that he looks a bit like those parodies of human beings made to amuse children that we call clowns. That may not be a coincidence.

Self-examination in full must master various good/bad perspectives… because it’s so basic to the human (super) condition. Someone’s bad is someone’s good, just as someone’s truth can be someone’s lie, especially if there is a mountain range in between (said Montaigne… he related both how good and evil and true and false, are relative [1]). The question then becomes: how does one adjudicate to find higher values which can help to determine which good, or evil, is the highest and most justified? In other words, most pragmatically: when does Hiroshima becomes a higher good and tolerable evil?

Full ethics require high and low to enter the dance of bad, good, true and false:’… “Super”, which means “above”, is then an indispensable technical term and concept. 

Higher pursuits are nothing new. Higher pursuits came first, and then the brain was evolved to exploit this aspect of nature. Let me explain: a brainless micro-organism will spend energy following up a sugar gradient: that’s higher pursuits in action. After all, indeed, the micro-organism is spending energy because in the long run, it will gain more. So short term bad (spending energy) brings long term good (gaining more energy). And the long term, bigger good erases the short term bad. This is what those who scream against Hiroshima don’t get. And the fact that, like Socrates, they don’t know that the nuclear bombings saved millions of lives, is no excuse: if they have an opinion on the subject, they should know. Just saying, like Socrates, that they don’t know anything is the key to complete amorality, as when Elon Musk claims that because Putin is the strongest and will win, he shouldn’t be fought…

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When Socrates stood in front of the death jury, the jury viewed him as a predator. Socrates naively, or desperately, in the guise of naivety, insisted he was not a predator, just a gadfly… which are predators! Indeed gadflies, horseflies in Americanese, suck blood, sting bad, and can cause lasting injury. As a superpredator, I kill, or shoo them away, ASAP… So the Athenian jury killed that human sized horsefly… (Aristotle in a similar situation to Socrates just fled in a timely manner, “to spare Athens another crime against philosophy….”..)

Socrates presented his thoughts as a gift to Athens. However Athens had just lost half her population in a terrible war, concluded by a tyranny of thirty mostly ex-students of Socrates… Some Greek city-states had proposed to annihilate Athens, as Athens had annihilated the island city-state of Melos.

So let’s imagine this. While your country, say, suffered from being at war with, and then invaded and ruled by Nazism, the Nazis’ wisdom adviser comes and informs you that he stings your society, and your society should be grateful? While a general amnesty was put in place… Only Socrates was excluded… I have not read how that happened exactly. However, Socrates’ student and lover, Alcibiades, had persuaded Athens to attack powerful Syracuse, was supposed to direct the assault, but then was accused of defacing idols, got ejected from his command, switched to Sparta, where he provided secrets and advice against Athens… And that was just the beginning. At Syracuse, Athens lost its army and its fleet. Alcibiades has been described as the “biggest jerk of antiquity“ (quite remarkable, considering the competition!). Alcibiades’ blatant lack of moral compass, aside from serving himself, is not just a question for the entire philosophical ecology of Socrates-Plato-Aristotle… But perhaps its very symbol!

Much criticism of Socrates against Athenian democracy was justified. However, after the catastrophe, Socrates should have laid low, be it just by respect for the lives lost and the democracy ruined. It was a major disaster which spanned millennia: democracy has not recovered fully yet (Rome had carefully studied Athens, so Roman direct democracy also got hit when Athens went down). 

Socrates did not present his excuses, because he was unable to consider the evil his actions, thoughts and feelings, directly or not, wittingly or not, had caused…

So implicit in Socrates’ behavior was the pretense that there are clear notions of good and evil. Socrates, Socrates told the world, was an intrinsic good. Besides, evil does not exist, so how could Socrates be no good? No excuses needed. Socrates’ actions may have bled democracy raw, but that was good because Socrates was right to go around stinging people: generals, Socrates said, had to be experts, just as shoemakers were experts. Right. However, in democracies and republics, the commander in chief is elected. In Syracuse, which Plato admired so much he got entangled in politics there to the point of being condemned to death… the tyrant was not elected: was that what Socrates wanted?

Socrates criticized, but he didn’t provide solutions (the Middle Ages found them: democratic institutions such as guilds and secular schools, universities…) Socrates should have self-examined enough to realize he was in the thick of the catastrophe that befell not just Athens, and her empire, but democracy itself. And that he was a core element. 

This is all quite troubling, because the fundamental thesis of Socrates about wisdom was that wisdom was first humility: ‘I am wise because I know that I know nothing“. This notion of wisdom as humility was sheer hypocrisy, though, because Socrates preached a lot ex-cathedra weird certainty. For example, that knowledge was innate (as demonstrated by having a boy discover geometry on his own). In the end the jury determined that Socrates’ wisdom consisted in “corrupting the  youth” (drinking, feasting, sexing, and dominating the wealthy kids he pretended to teach… wisdom to…) 

Socrates has this to say, in the Protagoras, about good and evil:

“No one who knows or believes there is something else better than what he is doing, something possible, will go on doing what he had been doing when he could be doing what is better.”

Thus, according to Socrates, individuals do not suffer from akrasia, i.e., no-power, weakness of the will, nor are they bad, by acting against their best judgment. Socrates thinks instead that people are doing exactly what they want to do, but are doing it because of bad judgment. Doing bad things is, therefore, a matter of ignorance (in the sense of amathia), not malice. However, the concept used, amathia, is more akin to intelligent stupidity… (So amathia has an element of ill will!… Will to not understanding…)

To believe that humans act from judgment always denies mental inertia, which is what motivates minds most of the time: most of the time, people do what they do because that’s what they are primed to do (a sort of generalized Hebbian mechanism). Also Socrates got drunk: what happened to best judgment when Socrates got drunk? So how come if Socrates wanted to be good and badness only arose from bad judgment, Socrates engaged in inebriation? He didn’t exert good enough judgment to realize no best judgment would come from inebriation? Or was he acting out of malice?  Stoics, who later claim to follow Socrates, used wine, but without getting drunk, they insisted. 

When one considers Alcibiades’ life, claiming Alcibiades never acted out of malice, or was not acted against out of malice, is just ridiculous. Among other exploits Alcibiades ran on the platform that subjugating Sicily would increase the Athenian empire, then communicated all Athenian war plans to Sparta, then slept and impregnated the Spartan queen, then went over to Persia, etc… Socrates and Alcibiades had been lovers for… ten years. Alcibiades was called back to Athens once democracy had been thrown out by his olygarchic friends…  

One can be very good, yet start an avalanche and people die: then sorrow and excuses are in order. Not making lousy jokes on how good one was, contributing to a magnificent disaster, as Socrates did. But then maybe Socrates himself believed that Socrates deserved the death penalty? This seems to be the case; he refused to flee and assimilated his own death as the cure of a disease…

Catholicism, which evolved for centuries inside the Roman empire, even with direct imperial intervention, close and personal, before congealing around 400 CE was centered, like the general Roman mentality, around the possibility of human malice, and the quasi-irresistible temptations it wrought. Rome controlled malice with the law. Catholicism with its heavens and hell theory.

Not anticipating human malice is not only stupid, it’s immoral. The Nazis, or Putin, had given clear signals of their evil nature (the Nazis in 1933, their first year in power, Putin in 1999, when he destroyed Chechnya)… So those who persisted in making them stronger did so, not out of bad judgment, but out of malice, because, by becoming collaborators to criminal enterprises, they augmented their own prosperity… As he hung around Athens’ golden youth instead of taking care of his family, Socrates was arguably doing the same, on a much smaller basis.

Nearly any serious human self-examination will find malice, either in action, or potential. To pretend otherwise is an ever greater order of malice.      

According to Plato, Socrates said during his long defense before the Athenian judges: And now, Athenians, I am not going to argue for my own sake, as you may think, but for yours, that you may not sin against God by condemning me, who am his gift to you. For if you kill me you will not easily find a successor to me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by God; and the state is a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you.   

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy spends nearly half of its entry on wisdom discussing Socrates’ views on wisdom before rejecting most of them, only retaining obvious parcels of it … including of the so-called Socrates Method… which does not seem different to me from the most basic debate technique. Then SEP switches to Aristotle’s approach to wisdom as knowledge…

Wisdom as humility was Socrates’ unlikely claim: “The Oracle said that I am the wisest of men, but I know nothing” enabled Socrates to claim superior wisdom while ignoring… the potential consequences of his acts… simultaneously. meanwhile, he had a merry life at the top of society, while he seems to have been ignoring his three sons… In

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Fundamentally though, wisdom is the ability to proceed with superpredation, as an individual or as a group. This is why the name of the superpredator is Homo Wisdom. The woke are not awake enough to have figured that one out.

For example the Russian Czar decided it would be wise to kill his main opponent in 2024, while making it even more obvious that he killed him, than last time he killed his main opponent or the time before that… Putin believe that instilling in all the notion that his opponents will be killed will bring more respect: Navalny was killed the same day as the French and German Republics made a military alliance with Ukraine. The message to the three leaders is unmistakable: if you oppose me too much, I will kill you, and make the world know it was me who did it.

Such is wisdom, the Kremlin’s way. Whereas Socrates thought it was wise to please the wealthy elite which supported him and made him famous, an advancement of his simple eating, drinking, sexing and boasting… Putin feels it’s wise to recover Russia at its greatest extent, and to militarize Russian society as much as possible; in Putin’s view that serves historical justice, or so he claims, using partial and biased versions of history. But the real motivations of the Czar may be even more sinister. Considering statements he made twenty years ago, Putin’s motivation may be to unite Europe… under the Kremlin’s rule (he then said it would be “natural”).

In other words, if we want to study human psychology on the grandest scale, we live in the grandest times. It is a question of survival to psychoanalyze the leaders. Socrates was a leader of group of golden youth, crazed military adventurists, spies, and tyrants. Psychoanalyzing a party animal with pretense to wisdom from 24 centuries ago is useful, but only as a low dimensional case study. Putin is the real thing, and Hitler just a training device.

Only the biggest predation will reveal the debates of the most significative wisdom. This is why classical English and French authors wrote down theater about some of history’s most famous figures. However they could hardly write about the tyrants under whom they were living. But we can.

We have a greater object of admiration than Socrates at the ready, and Socrates himself provided her: ASPASIA… a female thinker to whom Socrates attributes the Socrates method, among other teachings. Aspasia’s Direct Democratic credentials are second to none: she was also an immigrant and invented explicitly the concept of Open Society (narrated by her lover Pericles).

Socrates as a so-far unexamined fascist is not a new theme: I have developed it before, and other classicists increasingly arrive to the same conclusion. Looking at the most significant facts, that conclusion should be obvious. Let’s progress. The war with Sparta was not caused by Socrates, and its mismanagement had not started with Alcibiades. Pericles admitted partial culpability. As Athenian democracy slowly recovered from the catastrophe, it tolerated Aristotle and related influencers too much, not taking the warnings of Demosthenes against Macedonia as seriously as it should have. The end result is that, in the crucial battle against the Macedonian king and his son Alexander (Aristotle’s student, who won the battle with a cavalry charge)… Sparta was not present (that would have ensured victory).

Aspasia was sort of cancelled by the male chauvinist pigs (but not Plutarch). With queen Bathilde (who outlawed slavery in 657 CE) and Emilie du Chatelet (who discovered energy after she found Newton had confused it with momentum), she belongs to the highest reaches of human thought. Let the all-knowing wisdom of these women stand on Socrates’ decomposing humility!

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Michel de Montaigne: “Quelle vérité que ces montagnes bornent, qui est mensonge au monde qui se tient au-delà? repris par Blaise Pascal parrot: “Vérité en deçà des Pyrénées, mensonge au delà“

Tyrant Putin Wants Nuclear War. Start Judicial Proceedings Against Him As A War Criminal, For His War Of Aggression.

Putin claims NATO threatens Russia, but he also complained bitterly, among many other grotesque assertions, that the West occupied Poland, causing him grief… that happened under Charlemagne, before the Vikings invaded and created Rus… In Ukraine, around Kyiv. That was even before  the invention of the Cyrillic alphabet (which was made by two Bulgarian brothers to fight the Franks culturally)… That was three centuries before the schism between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. 

Putin has such propaganda control in his realm, that he thinks he can get away with the biggest enormities in his fanciful alternate reality.

So Putin’s claims against NATO are a coverup. Putin marches us to nuclear war, no less. That, actually, is, obviously, his plan. A little bit of nuclear war will insure his rule, ad vitam eternam. Maybe his daughters can succeed him. So he hopes. Hey, he really loves his daughters!

Putin has started forcefully a conversation with civilization. Putin has to be answered in the only language he understands and respects, overwhelming military force. Because Putin will keep on escalating, he will have no choice. He went too far, he crossed too many Rubicons, with too many institutions, including international law and the United Nations. When Putin describes, say, what happened in Kosovo as an attack of NATO against the rightful rule of Moscow, and the Slavic tribe, he is describing a liberation of a small subjugated Muslim population north of Greece, and just east of Italy, as an offense against the right of Slavs to enslave, as he sees it… Putin went off the deep end, for all to see, by pretending that Russians are the victims of a genocide, in real time, now. He ominously declared his intent to pursue whom he calls anti-Russian criminals, throughout Ukraine, as far away as Odessa and beyond.

And, of course, Putin went too far in his mismanagement of the Russian socioeconomy.

Putin’s reading of history is similar to Hitler’s: the biased invention of an ethnic subjugation, a national victimization which requires rightful redress.

In truth, Putin controls what is still, by far, the largest empire on Earth, larger by more than 70% than China, the US or Canada.

Putin goes even further than Hitler in two ways: first he claims that Russians are presently victim of a “genocide” an invention so grotesque that Hitler did not even try it. Second, Putin and his main propagandist, have threatened to reduce the world (no less!) to “radioactive ashes”. This is the case of the first historical dictator who, threatened by extinction as tyrants tend to be, can, and does, threaten all of civilization. It goes without saying that, by threatening the world, Putin also threatens the Russian elite (who then will try to flee).  

This is a classical Kaiser Trap… with nukes, lots of them. The hour is grave.

It is time for no holds barred. Nazism was defeated from overwhelming force against German cities. In retrospect, it was a mistake not to have accused the Nazi leaders of crime against humanity, early in their monstruous adventure. As the top Nazi leadership was an association of thugs, it should have been treated as such. Once, in the Fourteenth Century, French King Philippe IV Le Bel, and his vassal, the King of England, decided that the Pope was not behaving appropriately. The French state issued an international warrant of arrest against the Pope. Philippe sent his most trusted right hand man, a (non-noble) lawyer, at the head of special forces, to arrest the Pope in Rome. The Pope was arrested.

War of aggression is a recognized war crime. In this particular case, it is blatant: Putin said, many times, in many ways, that Ukraine should not exist. This is different from the George W Bush attack against Saddam Hussein, which did not aim at the annihilation of Iraq (I was against it, but that’s besides the point).

An international judicial procedure should be started against Putin for war of aggression and making nuclear war threats (I long advocated one against George W Bush… precisely to avoid the scenario we are in now; the crimes Bush committed are slight, relative to those Putin has said he will commit…)

This war has to be made personal, because it is personal. It is really the case of one unhinged madman armed with nuclear weapons who has decided to distract himself from the aging decrepitude encroaching upon himself, by making his own person the most important enemy civilization ever had. That way, he can bask in the terror he instills the world with.

All associates and families of the tyrant and his associates should be arrested. Russian Tyrant Vladimir Putin’s daughter Maria Putina amusing herself in the Netherlands where she owns an expensive penthouse on top of a high rise. Russian Tyrant Vladimir Putin is said to be fuming after Ukrainian media published a photograph of one of his daughters. Although the American president’s family are very much in the public eye, the Russian Tyrant keeps all information about his family a closely guarded secret. They almost never feature in Russian media, and the last time a Russian journalist asked the tyrant a question about his family he not only did not get an answer… but he lost his job. There is reportedly a team constantly monitoring picture usage of Putin’s family so it was no surprise when a photograph of Maria Putina, 29, who lives in Holland, appeared on a Facebook page and a short while later the image quickly vanished again. But it was up there long enough to have been noticed by Ukrainian media, and it was quickly republished together with an article about her on the news website Obozrevatel. A Russian media insider confirmed that the publication would have made the Russian tyrant furious and it was well known that pressure was put on the media in the region to keep his family life private. Putin is separated from Maria’s former Aeroflot airline stewardess mother Lyudmila, but still remains close to his daughters Maria, and Yekatrina, 30. According to the article Maria who has a degree in economics lives in Holland after marrying a Dutch man. The couple had their holiday honeymoon in Greece. Maria’s sister meanwhile is single and has reportedly been dating a Korean man. She spends a lot of time in Korea rather than in the West.

I repeat: All associates and families of the nuclear tyrant and his associates and the families of his associates should be arrested, and their properties seized, same as Assad’s family, for example his ultra wealthy niece… Putin’s violonist is known to have a wealth of at least two billion dollars invested in the West. An ex-husband of one of Putin’s daughters is the youngest billionaire in Russia, and so on… There are 498 oligarchic billionaire families, all of them pro-Putin, historically speaking (some famous oligarchs who didn’t agree with Putin early on, were destroyed, and, or, jailed, and expropriated). They were crucial in Putin’s ascent, but now the maximally evil one is powerful enough to not depend upon his ex-sponsors.

Let’s stay legal, some will cackle desultorily. Indeed. But international has to adapt to the nature of the crime. Turning the world to “radioactive ashes” is more serious than anything the Nazis did. Threatening the planet with turning into “radioactive ashes” is a threat of an unprecedented magnitude. It should be reacted against with unprecedented rigor.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S 1: On Sunday, 2/20/2022, German media noticed the presence of the “Graceful”, Putin’s 82 meter long yacht, in Hamburg’s port, next to a German corvette under construction. The yacht left the next day, taking the Kiel canal from the North Sea to the Baltic. Why was not it seized? After all, it’s the yacht of a war criminal (war of aggression is a crime against humanity). The very fact the yacht fled so fast means that the Russians know well who they are, criminals against humanity, and all they own should be confiscated. Lavrov is the new Von Ribbentrop, Putin the new Hitler, etc.

Presently the Luna (112 meters long) and the Dilbar (world’s largest yacht, 156 meters long; owner Alicher Ousmanov) are other Russian plutocrats’ yachts in Hamburg…

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P/S 2: A reflection of the corruption in the Putinreich is that Russians file more complaints with the European Court of Human Rights than the citizens of any of the 46 countries that make up the Council of Europe, 13,645 complaints in 2020. The figure for the U.K. was 124. Putin is the ultimate violator of human rights in Russia.

Saving The Animals, Thus Ourselves

Animals die in great numbers trying to cross human transportation systems. When one provides the animals with crossings, they rush to use them (so are used even before they are finished, by a Noah’s ark of species). Respecting nature is not just about the beauty and naturalness it provides us with, it is about respecting how we became who we are, at our best. We have to learn to share the planet with animals. Not just because we are smart, but also because they are smart and our smarts evolved from interacting with their smarts. So interacting with wild animals is smart all around… and it has made our species smarter! Wildlife interaction is how we evolved our smarts. Not book smarts, but the deepest smarts.

Hence by respecting animals, we respect how we became human… and it keeps on being human to do so.
Economy means managing the house, in particular, managing earth, which is our common house. As the greenhouse heating proceeds at an accelerating pace, we then have to reserve an increasing part of our economic activity to save the animals by helping them to cope with the changes we have brought.
Morality comes from the mores, the old ways, the ways which perdured, and thus, insure survival. Having a natural environment, full of animals, is the ultimate morality. If we can’t save them, how can we learn to save ourselves? So it is not just smart and economic to save the animals, but also moral. The money engaged so far is quite small. But the price of an unbalanced environment tottering towards ruin, is incomparably higher. For a nice article with nice videos of animals using their smarts crossing freeways and roads, consider:

As a badger digs, say for ground squirrels whose borrows have many exits, could not it be that the coyote would seize a fleeing squirrel, and share the meal? This is basic economics and strategy, and it turns out that coyotes and badgers have figured out that behavior, and cooperate together. The next question would be this: do the individuals concerned figure it out by themselves, as cephalopods do, or is the behavior culturally instigated, namely both badgers and coyotes learn elements of interspecific cooperation from teaching by their elders? I believe the latter.

After all, I trained the (wild) nesting birds on my balcony to benignantly ignore my weird and intrusive ways… which thus had to learn to be a bit more respectful than they usually are. But of course these ways tend to incite the red tail hawks to not land on this particular balcony on a determined culinary mission (as they have been seen doing…) And the birds know this [1].

Saving the animals is first of all about saving us… Not just our sense of beauty.

Patrice Ayme

[1] Hummingbirds set their nests below hawks’ nests, as this protects them from gays. Local hawks do attack nests of birds who are big enough (like gays, crows, etc).And I have seen them pass 10 feet from me, eyeing me suspiciously… Their feathers can be two feet long…

https://www.audubon.org/news/why-hawk-hummingbirds-best-friend

Do Onto Others, As You Want Them Do Onto You? Not So Fast

TOWARDS MORAL DIFFERENTIAL GEOMETRY:

The Golden Rule: do onto others as you would like them to do onto you, was spread around by Thales, Confucius, 26 centuries ago, but it is already found in Egypt’s Middle Kingdom 40 centuries ago, in the mightiest form. The idea is also found in the fundamentals of India:

…“O King, dharma is the best quality to have, wealth the medium and desire (kāma) the lowest. Hence, (keeping these in mind), by self-control and by making dharma (right conduct) your main focus, treat others as you treat yourself.”

— Mahābhārata Shānti-Parva 167:9

Egypt’s Ma’at, the goddess of truth, enjoins to follow the golden truth that, to impel a behavior onto others, one better embrace it first.

The Golden Rule is completely obvious, it’s a matter of basic logic: even Capuchin monkeys are familiar with it. Capuchins expect some reciprocity standards, and if they get violated, those intelligent monkeys get very angry, experiments have shown. 

So the Golden Rule is the essential cement to hold together a society. When buffaloes charge lions who have seized a youngster, they use a version of the Golden Rule. Thus, if it’s a basic principle of buffaloes, it should be one of humans. However, the Golden Rule is often used as a supreme philosophical principle, for humans… reducing humans at bovid level. The Golden Rule as a philosophical principle is terribly flawed.

A general principle should resist particular counterexamples. Indeed, what does the Golden Rule imply, when applied to masochists who want to be eaten alive piece by piece? Do we want masochists to do onto others what they want done to themselves? Before scoffing consider this: it’s called sadomasochism for some reason… (There have been even contemporary examples, say in Germany, of guys eating guys, consensually). Some may still scoff, because they like to scoff. However, as Salvador Dali pointed out the entire launch into a World War by the Nazis was an exercise in sadomasochism: the Nazis launched the war so they could lose it. I have argued the details of what exactly happened before, when I researched the plausibility of Dali’s assertion (At what point did German Commanders realize the war (WWII) was lost for Germany?)… which initially stunned me (and made me scoff, before I thought twice about it; now I consider Dali correct).  

In Eighteenth Century England, children as young as seven were hanged for setting a fire deliberately (fire was feared at the time, cities being made of wooden high rises pressed on each other). Deeply religious people were all for hanging children. They would also have liked to be hanged, as children, had they sinned that way, to partly attune for their crimes (thus opening to themselves the gates of heavens a bit wider…) 

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Chinese philosopher Mengzi (“Mencius”) has his own version of the Golden Rule: his motivation may have been to differentiate himself from Confucius, who advocated the Golden Rule, two centuries prior. Mengzi suggested, 24 centuries ago, that if one wants to treat nicely neighbor x according to principle p, one should extend that kind treatment p to more distant person y. In Mengzi original example, a king had treated well a frightened ox, and was asked to extend this courtesy to the People he ruled over. 

Mengzi’s version of the Golden Rule has been the moral engine of globalization: one had to be as nice to Chinese workers and leaders as one would be to European, or American workers or leaders. It’s, superficially a moral idea, and it has been used as cover for the so-called “left”, when in power, in America or Europe, to foster the plutocratization of the planet. 

Is this great moral progress? No. It endorses unwittingly deep psychopathy. Indeed Mengzi’s Golden Rule is very well known of serial killers, in its mirror image version: if a serial killer K, wants to kill person x, but can’t, he may as well kill person y, who reminds him of x, however more distantly related to x is y. (The most basic version of this is found in Lafontaine, Le Loup et l’Agneau, an improvement on the older original. The lamb shows to the wolf he is innocent, so the wolf concludes that:”if it’s not you, it’s your brother.” After these words, he eats him.) 

Golden Rule in action, or when the gold beasts go at each other… Do onto others as they do onto you, can turn into another version of a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye, etc. We humans are smarter than that!

 The Golden Rule, especially in Mengzi’s version, ignores that loving depends upon discernment. It’s easier to discern those who are close-by, starting with oneself. Ignoring the lack of discernment that loving those who are far way implies, is to be blind to a reduction in knowledge, and its impact on one’s emotional intelligence.

Actually, it’s exactly what happened to the real Mengzi. Unbeknownst to the professional philosopher who wrote the adulating piece in Aeon (linked to above) about Mengzi, the latter gave the green light to the mass murdering invasion of the kingdom of Yan by Qin (where Mengzi was an official) [1].

To extend altruism at an arbitrarily large distances brings contradictions, especially in the age of globalization. 

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Towards MORAL DIFFERENTIAL GEOMETRY: 

Ethics is not a flat, but curved, even twisted, space, with variable local metric (the local morality). A curved space has an event horizon, beyond which, one cannot see, let alone act. Thus straight segments parallel here, when parallel transported along different histories, will end up not parallel. This is true in differential geometry, it should be true in differential morality.  

Thus if we want European or US workers to have work and be treated according to the Rights of Man, Bill of Rights, etc. we should want the same for Chinese workers. However the latter having work and dignity, may mean the former don’t, so, it’s seems to be a zero sum game: the rights given to them are removed from us… Actually, it’s worse: the rights removed from here aren’t even given there.

A related application of Mengzi’s Golden Rule is when Democratic candidates want illegal aliens forcing their way into the USA to receive free medical care. Is that because they would like their neighbor to get free medical care too? It’s another case of stealing those around us to give at a distance.

When the Huns (who originated in north-central Mongolia) were roaming around western Europe, it was not only hard to want to treat Hunnish babies just like European babies, but it turned out to be impossible (for reason of agricultural productivity, the Huns wanted what the Europeans had). Ultimately the Huns had to be massacred into submission. 

The most basic objection to the Golden Rule is that we are what we eat, and if we can’t eat, we can’t be. Sometimes, historically speaking, one has to eat another, and better a distant one than a neighbor.

The main problem with claiming the Golden Rule as the last word, is that it reduces us to Capuchin Monkey level. Sorry, we are above that. Imposing on humanity the Golden Rule is like imposing upon us the “moral” principle that we ought to breathe. Real human morality, the debate, is at a much higher level, and we need to impose upon all the desire to commit to the work out to reach there. This is what Obama basically said when he criticize the recent craze of the “woke”, “call-out” and “cancel” “cultures found in today’s so-called youth. Youth in body, old in obsolete culture. To contradict Obama, all the New York Times could do was to roll out a youngster who called Obama old and a “boomer“. I pointed out that the argument was ageist thus racist: calling Obama “old“, thus wrong, is the essence of judging from appearance, not substance. Of course the New York Times censored my (very polite) comment.

Next Bill Gates declared “I’m all for super-progressive tax systems. I’ve paid over $10bn in taxes. I’ve paid more than anyone in taxes. If I had to pay $20bn, it’s fine… But when you say I should pay $100bn, then I’m starting to do a little math about what I have left over… [Scratching his head]… Sorry, I’m just kidding. So you really want the incentive system to be there and you can go a long ways without threatening that.”

This is a grotesque myth out there: nobody would do anything anymore if we lost the possibility of being worth a billion dollars someday. Gathering enormous wealth is gathering enormous power on other people, thus an incentive worth having only in a sadomasochist society.

Top Roman republicans had much more incentive than a half boiled squid such as bill Gates. They could go, unflinching towards certain, horrible death, at the hand of their enemies. One could argue that the 100% wealth tax made them stronger.

Great creators of humanity were obviously not motivated by being one million times wealthier than the average citizen… I just computed this is the rough quotient of (Gates wealth)/(Average US citizen wealth). Power onto the rest of the monkeys was not, never is, the incentive of humanity’s greatest creators: only satanic dimwits think that way… plutocrats. Plutocrats are not just too powerful, they are too dumb. And, moreover, their power enables them to leverage, not just their power, but also their stupidity, including their version of the Golden Rule (whatever looks golden should rule).

Yet, a society where billionaire rule, is a society where wealth is perceived as the greatest incentive. Because the rule of wealth percolates down: it costs roughly of the order of a million dollars, around twenty times the median US family income, to get a top “college” (first four years university) education in the USA.

A society where money, let alone evil, rules, twists even the Golden Rule: when the only thing one can do to others, or from others to you, is through money, that is, through the rawest power, you get a gold plated Golden Rule. Just as with lions the meaning of action upon and from others, has been perverted. 

Patrice Ayme

***

***

[1] Mencius held office in the legally minded state of Qin (I have argued that it is the importance given to law which enabled Qin to unify China). During this tenure, he was involved in Qi’s invasion of Yan, although the precise nature of his role was disputed (as Mengzi/Mencius is the number two Confucian after Confucius, one doesn’t want to accuse him of being a war criminal, in the Joachim Von Ribbentrop style…). The state of Yan was in turmoil due to a succession crisis. Mencius was asked, “unofficially”, whether it might be legitimate to invade Yan to “restore order”.

Mengzi replied that it was. However, after Qin successfully invaded and annexed Yan, the invasion turned into a fiasco (a full century of war between Qin and Yan, part of present day Manchuria, would follow). Mencius complained that he had not encouraged the specific actions that Qin took, which apparently included widespread killing of noncombatants and taking spoils of war… Anyway, so much for at-a-distance morality. It was actually an explicit strategic doctrine of Qin, one of “36 stratagems”, to make war with those in the distance, after allying the state with neighbors… Like Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Heidegger, Mengzi leaves a strange taste of plutocratically inclined philosophy… no wonder the contrived Golden Rule…

 

Evil & its Good God, Versus Wisdom, Crown of Creation

More theology? Enough with that!!!… Except that Judeo-Christian values are all around, ever since our cultural ancestors, the Greeks, not to say the Egyptians, and Phoenicians, came in contact with the Jews around 33 centuries ago (that probably started with the enormous turmoil known by Pharaoh Ramses III as the “Peoples of the Sea” invasion; all old states succumbed to it… but for Egypt, which survived in extremis).

Thereafter, a hierarchy of values was proposed, which became part of the philosophical problems which brought down the Roman Republic, and, centuries later, the Roman empire itself (it’s pudically refered as the seduction of Rome by “Oriental values”…). In Judeo-Christianism, the top notions, the top values, are omnipotence and goodness. Even after the Judeo-Christian was lethally wounded by the Enlightenment and toasted to a crisp at Auschwitz, the hierarchy of values it carries is still around, orienting the psyche of most people. And those values imparted by Judeo-Christianism, omnipotence and 100% goodness, are, contrary to repute, deeply inhuman.

There is a well-known trilemma, between “God”, omnipotence, and evil. The Cathars founded their religion on it. The fundamental idea of God, one and indivisible, is that He is omnipotent, like the savage of old, over his wife and children! Omnipotence is the definition of “God”: no omnipotence, no “God”.

However, if God is willing to prevent evil, but can’t do it, He is not omnipotent. Thus not God. Yet, if God is unwilling to prevent evil, “God” is evil, or, at least, no good. If God is both incapable of preventing evil, and unwilling to prevent evil, He is both incapable and evil, so why to call Him “God”, and debase oneself, kneeling to Him and his incapable, evil nature?

Of the Cathars, only castles are left. The obsession of Christians with “omnipotence” and “goodness” (of said omnipotence) brought this result. The Christians exterminated to the last, with an enthusiasm Hitler would try to direct toward the Jews, eight centuries later. Vatican, greed, and Paris (“French”) king Philip Augustus dispatched Catholic armies who killed most Cathars, at least 700,000, in France alone, and destroyed all their works (further eradication was pursued in Italy and the Balkans, killing hundreds of thousands more, if not millions). The Pope had decreed that Cathar properties and lands were there for the taking.

Confronted to the previous trilemma, the ancient Greco-Romans, Phoenicians, Hindus, Celts and Germans, who had plenty of half potent, half evil gods, would have scoffed: why should gods have to be good and omnipotent? Isn’t it enough to be gods? Can’t gods be free to do as they please, and be incapable and evil, as they pleased? As a Chinese emperor famously noticed, not taking action is itself an action.

The Judeo-Christians have a problem, though, because their “God” is omnipotent, omniscient, and supposedly “good”. The Islamists have less of a problem than their Judeo-Christian predecessors: God, in their Islamist version, although “merciful”, is horrendously cruel and torturous, to the point of sounding completely unhinged. However, Allah has lots of problems (as related by the Qur’an) with human contradictors, thus suggesting he is not omnipotent. To avoid this, the Qur’an claims that Allah laid traps to all these people He wants to “throw into the fire”. So people are not bad because Allah is weak, but bad because Allah is crafty, and misled them.

The Cathars read the Bible: clearly the Old Testament is a piece of evil trash (with God ordering holocausts, right and left, torturing David’s son, to death, over a week, just because David had refused to enact a gratuitous holocaust, etc. Thus the Cathars deduced that the Old Testament showed the Devil created the world (the Vatican was not amused, and fought the Cathars with Inquisition as early as 1022 CE; finally launching a crusade against them, in 1209 CE, two centuries later).

Christo-Islamism is the ideology of tyranny, made by dictators, for dictators. Thus it represents as ultimate goods the values which should be perceived as the characteristics of absolute dictatorship: omnipotence, and goodness as defined by said omnipotence

Why this obsession with power and goodness? Christo-Islamism was engineered mostly by Roman emperor Constantine and caravan raider Muhammad, both of whom were, if not the fiercest, bloodiest dictators ever, certainly the intellectual progenitors of many of the worst dictators. (Constantine assassinated wife, son and nephew.) So Christo-Islamism is the ideology of tyranny, made by dictators, for dictators. Thus it represents as ultimate goods the two values which should be perceived as the characteristics of absolute dictatorship: omnipotence, and goodness as defined by said omnipotence.   

Yet, pretend goodness and omnipotence are not the top values of the crown of creation, Homo Sapiens. Wisdom is more like it. Wisdom is the top value.

Wisdom is not indifferent to good and evil. Wisdom gives primacy to goodness over evil (as babies can’t do without goodness and altruism directed at them, thus wisdom couldn’t even exist without goodness!)

However wisdom. Once it exists, is first about growing ever more intelligence. Intelligence etymologically, that is, in the logic of its true sense, means: reading between the lines.

It doesn’t mean being good, 24/7. Fundamentally, goodness is needed, for babies, children and for fostering enough altruism for whatever society needs to function. Beyond that, in the realm of good and evil, anything goes.

In particular, hatred and fascism, both related to war making and keeping human numbers low enough to prevent mass extinction(s), have their uses.

We are not omnipotent, but ever more potent, because we can read ever more between the lines. That’s all the divine We The People need.

Omnipotent dictators playing pretend goodness are incompatible with advancing wisdom. How will we get rid of them? With good old, evolutionary honed anger, and combat. All these qualities Judeo-Christianism insist we shouldn’t have (they are reserved to the divinity). All these qualities the founders of Israel rejected… rightly so (the philosopher Isaiah Berlin complained that “they listened to Hitler, not us”).

A bit of hatred for evil makes a most worthy ethics good. This is the human way to go. Anything else invites collaboration with the enemy, the most despicable, and vicious ways (for a contemporary example, consider the situation in Burma, where an entire Muslim population is kicked out by otherwise resplendent, self-absorbed Buddhists…)

Patrice Aymé

IMMORAL & UNSCIENTIFIC, To Crisp CRISPR

Abstract: We can edit genetics now. Should we? Of course. It’s the moral thing to do. First, because it’s moral to try to know what we don’t know, even when, and especially when, it’s a great jump in the unknown (I will explain why in a follow-up essay). Second, because, by pushing the CRISPR technology, we can save billions of hours of quality of life for millions of human beings, very soon.

***

In 2012, a collaboration between  Jennifer Doudna (from Hawai’i; then a professor at UC Berkeley) and  Emmanuelle Charpentier (a French professor from Paris working all over Europe) brought a huge invention. The two collaborating professors harnessed CRISPR into a method to edit DNA at will. Doudna learned first from CRISPR thanks to another female professor at Berkeley.

(Doudna wrote an excellent book on this “A Crack In Creation”, which I highly recommend; the title itself has a triple meaning.)

CRISPR is the abbreviation of: Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. They are segments of prokaryotic DNA containing short, repetitive base sequences. These play a key role in a bacterial defence system: bacteria get attacked by viruses, bacteriophages. RNA harboring the spacer sequence helps Cas proteins recognize and cut the enemy (exogenous DNA) in two. Other RNA-guided Cas proteins cut enemy RNA.

Several elements intervene in CRISPR: tracing with RNA attached to a pair of scissors, adding (or not!) what DNA piece one wants, & then automatic repair DNA…

Gene editing proceeds by attaching a DNA-breaking natural bacterial defense against virus to a particular region of the DNA, thanks to a recognizing RNA. Then whatever one wants to splice is brought in by another RNA. DNA. 

The potential is to create species at will. Or to remove diseases at will. Let’s hasten to say, that the process can, and has, happened spontaneously in the wild (so to speak). Some patients have had grave genetic diseases they were affected by, disappear, from the cutting effect appearing on its own in one stem cell’s DNA. (If that stem cell had enough descendants to compensate for the deleterious effects of others, wrong-DNA cells, a cure can be achieved!)

Some “bioethicists” are all alarmed by gene editing, and use big words, about the potential damage to life for frivolous pursuits.

Technically, CRISPR alarmists are panicking too early: first, and most importantly, the phenotype does not reduce to the genotype. Human beings’ inheritance is mostly phenotype, not genotype: this is why we can share 99% of our genotype with mice, and still be quite different  (except for those addicted to plutocracy, who may as well be mice).

Granted, one should not do whatever. Fluorescent mini-pigs should be amusing, but not if their fluorescence prevents them to sleep. Worse: a very promising, but hyper dangerous technique exists, the GENE DRIVE. In a gene drive, the CRISPR itself is made part of the genetic information which is added.

Promising? Experimentally, some mosquitoes species were then infected with 99.5% success with immunity to the malaria parasite. That would make malaria disappear faster than Bill Gates takes to visit five-star hotels on his way to do whatever in the name of malaria. So it’s an excellent thing. On the danger side, species could be eradicated. That technique could also obviously be weaponized.

***

We are the astonishing the species. Stupendous astonishment is what we do.

What is predictable is not astonishing, and what is truly astonishing, is not predictable.

Such philosophical musings are actually intensely practical. I am going to show how.

***

With CRISPR all genetic diseases become potentially curable: Considering Huntington’s and Duchenne muscular dystrophy leads Doudna to write in her book: “The stakes are simply too high to exclude the possibility of eventually using germline editing.”Strange formulation: the stakes are simply too high to exclude the possibility of eventually using life saving technology?

I shall be even clearer. Those not all out for using CRISPR to cure human diseases are on the same moral side as those who didn’t go all out to prevent Auschwitz, although they knew about it. Yeah, no, I’m not exaggerating, but it’s going to be a bit difficult to explain why. 

By editing DNA at will, we become the architect of creation.

When one can alleviate human pain and suffering, absent adverse consequences, one has to do so. It’s a moral imperative. Otherwise one joins the ranks of those who could have done something about Auschwitz, and didn’t. Actually, it’s worse: opposing those who operated Auschwitz clearly had adverse consequences!

***

Same basic story as above, rolled out again to explain better…

Jennifer Doudna: “The truth is, I don’t have answers.” Doudna would like to have the public participate in the debate. However, says Doudna: “There’s a disconnect between the scientific community and mainstream culture, a real degradation in trust by the public. Many scientists — I’m guilty of this too — find it much more fun to do the next experiment in the lab than to take the time to explain to non-specialists what we do or how the scientific process actually works.”

Doudna is still searching for red lines that CRISPR technology shouldn’t cross. “I struggle with the question of crossing boundaries of speciation that are naturally in place” — For example 28,000 people are grafted every year in the USA. The demand is five times that, at least. Raising pigs with human-compatible organs becomes possible with CRISPR.  “You might decide that it would be unethical not to do that,” says Doudna, unhelpfully.

I love Doudna. She and Charpentier should get the Nobel. However, she somewhat disingenuously pretends to believe that, given our limited knowledge about the human genome, there shouldn’t be clinical use of CRISPR in the human germ line at present. (She does not really believes this, because she is not an idiot, but she affects to play a fair, Politically Correct game…) But she also admits that the balance is delicate. The same technology that might cure genetic-related conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Duchenne, diabetes and cancer might someday be used frivolously. Strangely Doudna pretends that “I don’t think that’s going to happen any time very soon, just because we don’t have the knowledge,” Doudna says. “But is it coming in 50 or 100 years?” She pauses to reflect, then says: “Yeah.”

However this is all a fake debate: it has been done with mice. Thus, it can be done with people. Thanks to the People’s Republic of China, it’s going to happen all over human disease. Mr. Xi just inverted the one-child policy established 40 years ago, he can earn more brownie points by curing human diseases.

CRISPR is a wonderful tool, to gather knowledge, and THEN to pontificate upon the morality this knowledge will entail. THEN.

To try to pontificate about the consequences of CRISPR now, when we don’t know so much, is unscientific. It will feed the enemy of the scientific method, by having scientists pretending to think when they can’t. As Doudna herself said, she doesn’t know.  

Indeed, the chicken-egg can’t come before the evolution which led to them. So the science has to plough ahead, and inform We The People. Then we can moralize.

Experiment, then moralize.

A reader told me, about the preceding aphorism that “Historically, you have it wrong; even though you may be right”. Right. I was expressing a moral imperative, not a historical observation of how people behaved. Experiment then moralize: the way of the thinker. Moralize, then be careful not to experiment: the way of those on the wrong side of history. 

CRISPR is on the right side of history. Follow it, to learn not just how to get more power, but how to become more moral…

Patrice Ayme’

TRANSCENDENTAL INTELLIGENCE: SAPIENS’ ETHOLOGICAL LAW

IDIOCY VIOLATES HUMANITY ITSELF

A question pertaining to the survival of civilization: is transcendental animal not to be boxed in, finally?

A biology professor asked: how far do you intend to carry that project of founding morality on genetics? Well, far enough to show how human ethology transcends genetics and epigenetics:

If one uses enough intelligence, the means become the end. The paradox of the human species!  

Maybe Homo Sapiens should be called the transcendental animal. Indeed what is wisdom, but for the ability to transcend problems… mostly by using physics?

***

Being right in matter transcendental, always starts as a first, not by following the herd:

Normal people indulging in mundane tasks feel that being right means to follow the ways of the herd, all over. The result is plain to see. The world is changing ever faster, yet the herd cannot follow itself out of the problems this generates. Going around news, media and Internet, I am amazed by the gullibility, stupidity, and the relish for the masses to indulge that way. Including masses of professionals paid to teach, or to act as medium (the so-called “media”). But what else to expect from the rabble? Supreme thinking was always from an elite, to an elite.

So much stupidity, and full of hatred too: all over. One can understand why so many gave full powers to Turkey’s Sultan Erdogan: out of rage, and the will to do something even more stupid, and more nefarious, yet, bearing the signature of their freedom.

Meanwhile Geneva and the Australia’s Great Barrier go topless. Desultory progress in the Alps, while uncomprehended tragedy is unfolding in the oceans. True human ethology should contest the legality of all what afflicts it: so-called “representative” democracy, which is truly plutocracy unbound, and its obnoxious little whip and distraction, Salafist Islam.

***

Wasteful GDP Corruption Flaunted:

Economists of the “Liberal” type crow that California’s GDP is larger than that of all but the Gross Domestic Products which the rest of the USA, China, Japan, and Germany are endowed with. Yes, of course: the more a country wastes, the higher the GDP. The USA averages 16 tons of CO2 emissions, per year, per capita. The European Union, only seven. Now that massive consumption of quasi-free fossil fuels in the USA has put it, and Canada and Australia, way ahead economically, as I showed.

GDP is not just an indicator of economic growth, but of massive corruption.

Also GDP is augmented when the world’s largest corporations sit in California and pay no taxes. Thanks to Obama, and, soon enough, Trump.

GDP should look as a defect, instead, it’s viewed as glorious. An ethical and intellectual failure. GDP is an indication not just of pollution, but of mental deliquescence, in those who laud it.

***

I was wondering why so many people hate to think. Is it because the Internet has made them increasingly disconnected with reality? Or is in part, because the Internet has made them suspect as they try to think, and fail, that they may feel they are coming short ethically. Hence all the hatred out there. And they are right (to hate themselves):

***

The Concept of Ethological Law: IDIOCY VIOLATES ALL OTHER HUMAN RIGHTS

Ethology can be scientifically defined through experiments. Some will scoff that the human species is too clever to be defined by gene-given, epigenetic-given law, that the ultimate law of Sapiens is intelligence. And whatever flows therefrom. Fair enough.

This point of view has the consequence that any law which is antagonistic to intelligence is inhuman. Examples of this inhumanity abound. One can only conclude that the general tension obvious around the world, and especially in so-called democracies, originate from all too much of society been organized in systematic violation of the Human Intelligence Principle (HIP).

This was the situation a year ago, in 2016. This year the situation has got much worse. The quest for the Golden Calf of Australian GDP Supreme is the proximal cause of this devastation. More generally GreenHouse Gas warming, induced by a GHG density now probably around 550 ppm, the highest since the Jurassic, 100 million years ago. Time to think and sacrifice, guys, and yes, it means you!

***

Puppets owe everything to those who pull the strings:

I was struck by the picture of the National Security Council, with a mysterious lonely pretty woman sandwiched there.

Dina Powell, a celebrity for our times, the sort of people who owes everything to those who created her (as Obama was). Thus, very pliable. All the more with arguably with all too little formal education, here she is at the top of the defense establishment, including extremely educated generals.

The more a civilization falls victim to plutocracy, the more celebritism is pushed onto people. Plutocracy is a form of generalized fascism, and celebritism, intellectual fascism: they reinforce each other. Celebritism is not just a moral flaw, it is a crime civilization is led to engage in.

***

All progressives should be resolute anti-sexists:

Women In Geneva were already allowed  to sunbathe topless. However, a law from 1929 forbade them to bathe in lakes and rivers, in the same attire. This law has now been changed; in the Canton de Genève (total population metropolitan area, one million). As it should have; enabling only men to go topless, was, and is, obviously sexist, wherever practiced.

In Black African “Islam”, women used to go topless, for obvious reasons: heat, hygiene. Something to emulate, as, worldwide, the planetary warming is accelerating:

***

The Great Barrier Reef, greatest structure on Earth built by animals, is dying:

345,000 square kilometers (as big as Germany). It is 2300 kilometers long. Now 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) are white, distressed, much of it dying.

The Great Barrier Reef is overheating, going white. During overheating, algae within the corral get expelled. In 1998, a colossal El Nino made the Great Barrier white. There was another whitening in 2008, and in 2016. The 2016 El Nino was as bad as the one of 1998. Coral gets overheated, and weakened by toxins (from coal, phosphates from chemical agriculture). Algae dies off in the coral with which they live in symbiosis, the coral goes white (“bleaches”). If bleaching happens again and again, the coral dies.

The Coral Great Barrier reef is dying from human action. Or more exactly mostly Australian action, as Australia does in its pursuit of GDP with corral, the same as it did with aborigines: kill all what’s needed, to get richer. It’s smart of the criminals involved, but there are millions. It’s not smart for humanity at large. This sort of things is solved by another great die-off, this time of human beings.

Human species had evolved in such a way that their actions could not put an end to the biosphere. A virus which cannot kill its host, lest it disappear. Sapiens was a virus, and Earth the host. But now, in a few decades, Sapiens has mutated in an industrial form lethal to Earth.

***

Fracking is good for the ecology, say Plutos:

This is the latest from the fossil fuel Plutos: Ban Fracking? Bad economics, Bad Ecology? Following the more genera cynical argument the USA, Russia and Canada have long been making, secretly, that warming is actually a good thing. Except now it’s not secret anymore: Vladimir Putin has said warming up the north will be a good thing (for Russia). And indeed, it will be for Russia. Canada will be less amused when the USA will insist that Canadian coastal water are actually international waterways… with more than the present day smiles. 

Actually we are approaching 550 ppm of GreenHouse Gas (GHG) equivalent. As I already said, but it’s never repeated enough; it’s a number much more astonishing than anything, even the percentage of the human population deliberately assassinated in World War Two. An astounding number, increasing fast. Levels not seen for 100 million years. Spaceship Earth has been highjacked with raving maniacs.

When all hell will break loose, pretty soon, the Plutos will be at home.

They create their own, most sustainable environment.

This is why when real democracy failed in Athens, more than 23 centuries ago, not only it stayed failed to this day, but Greece knew 22 centuries of foreign occupation.

Nowadays, the stakes are much higher: the biosphere itself is facing its sixth massive extinction. The survival of wisdom is in play. It’s a game that was probably lost by wisdom itself in many a galaxy. Now our turn to show if transcendental intelligence can overcome amor fati…

Patrice Ayme’  

How Social Media Fosters Intellectual Fascism

Social media, as presently practiced, is without appropriate moral guidance: no philosopher has come and established what proper behavior ought to be (here I am, like Zorro!)  First, one should avoid alienation. Instead alienation is presently encouraged.

Social media, as presently practiced, encourages intellectual fascism, from lack of wisdom, education, poor mastery of the participants’ own emotional systems, lack of understanding of how one gets to superior knowledge, etc..

Such is the present state of affairs.

It needs to be rectified, otherwise nukes will fly. Can it be rectified?

29 Year Old Attacker Of The Louvres, Son Of An Egyptian General. People Become Like This, Because they Have Not Been Taught Alternative Knowledge From The Hatred, Disguised As Coming From The Great Dog In The Sky…

Yes. Studies such as the one in the Guardian have to be advertized, debated. “Twitter accounts really are echo chambers, study finds

As in ancient human cultures, users of the social media site interact most with those who share their political views, Demos report reveals

When it comes to politics and the internet, birds of a feather really do flock together, according to research confirming the existence of online echo chambers among the most politically engaged Twitter users.

A study of 2,000 Twitter users who publicly identified as either Labour, Tory, Ukip or SNP supporters has found they are far more likely to interact with others from the same party and to share articles from publications that match their views. Ukip supporters are also far more engaged with “alternative” media outlets, including Breitbart and Infowars, two US-based sites identified with the alt-right that have been regularly accused of publishing misleading or false stories.

The research was carried out by the thinktank Demos, which looked at the tweets sent between May and August last year by 2,000 people who have publicly stated their political allegiance on their profiles and who had at some point addressed a member of parliament in their tweets.

Report author Krasodomski-Jones said the behaviour was exacerbated by some media outlets using polarised views to attract audiences. “This attention economy, vying for clicks, eyeballs, pushes people into very confirmatory outlets. The rising popularity of this sort of alternative news is something that caters specifically to a specific group. It’s more than just news – it’s ideologically driven.”

…Tom Stafford, a cognitive scientist at Sheffield University, said that those who had already shared their political allegiance in their Twitter profile could be even more likely to use the articles they shared to reinforce that identity… Stafford added: “Homophily, where we hang out with people like us, is an ancient human trait, resulting from our basic psychology. That applies to segmentation of media as well.”

It’s not just in the matter of politics: after I exposed letters of Marcus Aurelius, showing his burning hatred of Christians, a philosopher in New York, Massimo P. banned and blocked me angrily from diverse sites he commands. (Marcus Aurelius is the Muhammad of “stoics”.)

Another name for homophily (loving the same) is tribalism.

I have observed the social media madness as a personal victim of it in the last six months. I saw individuals who I long considered to be friends engage in public campaigns against me, calling me a lot of things they admitted (even then!) that I was not (such as a “racist troll”). One of them who has a significant management position in New York (plutocratic) media confided he had to do so, because his employers read his Twitter and Facebook accounts! “Nice” excuse. Meanwhile, thousands of people who don’t know me, nor what I write, were told I am a racist, and that’s all they know about me. Those thousands in the public who don’t know me were also informed I am anti-Muslim (I am anti-Literal Islam, and that’s just the opposite! I have at least a dozen very close “Muslim” friends… all of them, like me, critical about the Islamist ideology! Ironically, I share housing with them, especially on vacation. I was educated in “Muslim” countries…)

The result of the campaign of hatred against me was that several social media contacts I had in Academia “blocked” me (some were physicists, other philosophers). Thus my alternative version of reality, which would otherwise have added dimensions to their minds, has been annihilated. I am also now deprived of their views, which, however silly, I often found interesting.

I am not a racist. My family is multi-racial from three continents and Pacific islands. Many pseudo-leftists call people they don’t like “racist”, these days, using the word for whatever, including the weather.

So why is the insult “racist” hurled at me so often these days? Their excuse, beside plain rage? As I said above, some cynically some told me:’my job depends upon it!‘ My superiors, bemoaned the art director in New York, watch my social web activity, so I had to publicly hate you, renounce you, condemn you… I have been told this, and was supposed, me the hated one, to show empathy… to my haters. It sounds straight out of a passage in the Bible, the Last Supper…

Another cause of the rage is plain incomprehension. Not only they do not understand what I say, but when they start to understand a bit, the first thing they understand, is that there are very important things they did not even know existed. These huge gaps in understanding have to do with their (mostly self-imposed) tribalism and their closely related alienation (to reality in this case). Tribalism is an addiction, it probably excites the same rewarding circuits in the brain as other drugs.

If one wants to make war to people, the first step is to alienate them. This is French for cutting “Liens” (bounds, relationships).

The present mentality to insult, block, & not reflectively debate, contradictors on the Internet boosts & teaches alienation, violence, war.

Real damage is done when real debate is made impossible. Worse: alienation is presently viewed as glorious. The damage is not just to individuals, but to the collective. Tribalism makes the collective stupid, aggressive. 

Intellectual fascism consists in being led by only a few ideas. The best way is to tweet like a bird, exclusively among one’s flock.

The arch-typical leading fascist idea is that of Judeo-Christo-Islamist metaprinciple: “God is great, Allahu Akbar”. A friend of his being: “Dieu le veut, God wills it, Inch Allah”.Those are traditionally uttered, while committing the greatest infamies. They excuse them all.

The attacker of the Louvres in Paris tweeted less than 20 minutes before attack:…His last tweet posted before the attack, shows on the account a smiling El-Hamahmy leaning against a wall, a number of angry messages, including: ‘No negotiation, no compromise, no letting up, certainly no climb down, relentless war.’

His father is an Egyptian general. The enthusiastic Islamist rented a $2000/week apartment in the center of Paris. He went to the French Republic from Dubai, to attack the world’s most visited museum (justly so!) Hamahmy was following the most glorified mood of Muhammad, made explicit in the Qur’an, of hatred for the Republic and secular law. Yes, Islamism has to be eradicated, and it’s, first, a philosophical problem: one cannot put soldiers everywhere. All the more as such individuals are not just Islamists, or terrorists, they are TWITTERRORISTS.

Patrice Ayme’

WE WANT IT DARKER

Should we fear the opprobium of those who are scared that others may become afraid of our thoughts? This is the latest hilarious twist of “identity politics” in the USA. “Identity politics”, also known as tribalism, in times less twisted by unhinged euphemisms. In other words, should we bow to the worst of the Middle Ages’ theological ways and means? Quite the opposite: it is high time to fight back against intellectual fascism of the basest kind, the kind which claims to defend the sheep, by preaching it to bleat, rather than teaching the sheep to learn to think. Creating thinking means learning to debate, unafraid of all and any possible logic. But for that one has to be in the right mood. So what is the proper mood for more advanced thinking? Here it is, and even “Scripture” agrees with us:

WE PHILOSOPHERS OF THE DANGEROUS MAYBES, WANT IT DARKER. 

Those who are afraid of getting afraid, maybe, perhaps, can now stop reading: they belong to what fails, and will always fail. That includes the lack of reading comprehension, which they delve in. Those robust enough to read the Book, can hang on. Our predecessors wanted it darker, because it was the only way to greater greatness. And greatness, is not just what we are. But greatness is what we need. 

Greatness is not just what we became, and are. It is what we, humanity as it stands today, needed to survive. We evolved into greatness. (Slogan for humanity: ‘make humanity great again!’)

We wanted it darker, otherwise, we would never have gone where those who did not become our ancestors  didn’t. They didn’t get there because they both did not want to, and thus, could not, dash through the dark. And feel the pull of the dark.

When our predecessors wanted to understand what others didn’t even suspect, they have got to have wanted it darker.

There is glory in the human species, only because we wanted it darker. It’s written in the scriptures, and yes, it’s no idle claim. We wrote, because we wanted it darker. Bacteria only search for more sugar. We searched darkness, through more darkness. Darkness is sugar for intelligence aspiring to ultimate greatness.

The Gate May Be Golden, But Surviving Is The Only Manifest Destiny Of A World Around A Star. We Want It Darker, Be It Only Because We Need A Rest From The Light, And Need To Go To The Bottom Of Things.

Some have meekly whined that philosophers (yours truly, Patrice Aymé, much later Slavoj Žižek) went to the Dark Side by demolishing the Democratic party, this horror of the demonic side, hidden in the light of its self-glorification. However, only philosophers who love to understand the Dark Side with undisguised enthusiasm, sanctifying thoroughness, could expose the viciousness of the Democratic Party.

And thus helping to get Trump elected, over the twitching bodies of countless, half-wit, rich, politically connected entertainers, globalocrats, and wealthiest people in the world. (A difference between me and Slavoj Žižek is that The Guardian or the New  York Times interview Slavoj Žižek, whereas they censor all and any of my comments relentlessly; those pseudo-left, plutocratically owned, Main Stream Media have, correctly, perceived that I am  better informed, and thus much more dangerous, than the relatively meek, much more predictable, very official Žižek ; The Guardian is financed by Plutos like the holy  Gates conspirators. The same Plutos have owned, mostly, the New York Times, since the Nineteenth Century…)

Ah, and yes, Trump is supposed to be the Dark Side. Little do these little ones know. What Dark really is. (There is a whole tradition, dating to Rousseau, to refuse to look at the Dark Side, and, instead, of accusing civilization; De Sade excoriated Rousseau for his criminal naivety; in this, and many other related matters pertaining to the Revolution of 1789, De Sade would be proven right. Sade was right about the Revolution, because he was a specialist of the Dark Side, and thus could easily predict how the calculus of Evil would turn out, in consequence of apparently innocuous strategies full of goodness, but, also, full of long-term idiocy!)

The Romans knew well how dark darkness was: right from the start, king Tarquinus Superbus threatened their freedoms. Thereafter, over the centuries, in many wars Rome’s very existence was called into question (Gauls from the Paris area even conquered Rome around 390 CE).

When finally Rome became master of the world, ‘man is a wolf for man‘ (Homo Homini Lupus) had become a motto never to be forgotten. Judeo-Christian ideology then augmented Rome, and spread, far out of the Roman empire, even before the Roman state morphed into the Frankish state.  It is fascinating that Jews and Romans came to the same conclusion. But they were war people, that’s how they survived. And why they merged: made for each other (the Franks were even more war-like, allowing them to gobble everybody happily, in a digestive consensus).

Countless thinkers and philosophers have been tortured to death, through the ages. Just because they wanted it darker, they had to want it darker, and the commons hated them for it. (The superiority of the West mostly originates from just enough original thinking squeaking through to save the progress of civilization.)

The truth always starts dark, and in the dark. The Enlightenment always starts the hard way, in the Dark. It is the first thing they have to do: creative thinkers stop fearing the Dark Side. They have this in common with little children.

Thus, Dark Side tourism is necessary for depth. So what? No Dark Side, no humanity. (Actually this propensity and necessity, this breathing of fear, is why people love horror stories, scary movies, cliffhangers, dangerous sports, bad news, etc.)

Notice that this interest for all things dark, is a much greater vision than the well-known observation that the Dark Side is necessary for goodness to triumph over evil. Carpet bombing with flowers did not deconstruct Nazism, right. Eradication of evil, is no evil. One just want to make sure.

But physical power of evil is not all what there is to destroy. Even worse is the power of evil ideas.  We will destroy evil ideas, we can only destroy them, by bringing the fury of light, on the darkest dark.

Let’s spell it shockingly enough to leave a trace: To put it roughly, changing one’s mind, and the minds of others, is all about destroying brain tissue. One has to wreck the old mind, to build a better one. This is really about the most delicate circuitry being wiped out, and setting up a new one.

Too much light brings blindness, thus darkness. We have seen this in the US election: sixty million Americans, including millions of Obama lovers, wanted to “shake things up”. At any cost. The 60 millions who voted Trump had finally seen through the darkness, because they had not been afraid of the dark: they wanted, they had got ready for darker explanations of what was really going on. One has to love conspiracies, to bring them to light.

Blinded by this undeniable light, many Clinton fanatics went completely berserk, heaping insults on their fellow Americans, in the name, they claimed, of the goodness which defined them. Enraged Clinton supporters are pushed, by the light, into ignominous darkness. Enlightened into a darkness they are ill-trained to handle properly. Why? Because they never visited darkness before, they denied its very existence, at least inside themselves. They denied it, because they did not want it. They did not want to consider it so much, they did not see it grow into themselves and their hearts, or from the policies the “Democratic” Party supported sometimes for more than 40 years (like invading Afghanistan). 

So why do we want it darker? Not just because there is no light without dark. Not just because no ying, no yang.

WE WANT IT DARKER, BECAUSE WE WANT TO TURN ON THE MOOD, THE MOOD WHICH REALITY INFLICTS, SO MUCH WE ARE IT.

Now that I got accused of blatant Nazism, antisemitism, xenophobia, OCD, and exuberant SSitude, by crazed pseudo-progressives, let me add to the torture of my moaning victims, by rolling out a Cohen, (Hebrew: כֹּהֵן, kōhēn, “priest“), to my rescue.

Indeed, the late, great, Leonard Cohen came partly to some of the conclusions in the present essay, in his last work, released a few weeks ago: You Want It Darker. One point Leonard Cohen makes is that the Judeo-Christian scriptures depicted an intrinsically very dark picture of the human condition. Hey, don’t look at us funny: the divine condition itself is strikingly dark, so this is essay is not just a justification of man, but even god! (Yes, I am an “atheist”. Of sorts. In practice, though, and hard-core atheists don’t understand this, god exists, it’s a useful abbreviation). Here is Leonard Cohen latest, and last, title track:

“If you are the dealer, I’m out of the game

If you are the healer, it means I’m broken and lame

If thine is the glory then mine must be the shame

You want it darker

We kill the flame

Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name

Vilified, crucified, in the human frame

A million candles burning for the help that never came

You want it darker

Hineni, hineni

I’m ready, my lord”

All right, full stop, let me provide readers with a text explanation many are going to need. Hineni, Hineni means: “Here I am, here I am”… in Hebrew.; “Hineni” was supposedly uttered by Moses. And also for Abraham, when god felt like killing his child.

“We Want It Darker” is serious psychobiology, it does not get any more serious. It is evolutionary, it is how we were made: with an irresistible attraction for what is out there in the dark. Curiosity may kill the cat, but curiosity enabled us to set a trap for the cat. By forgetting this, mad bull has lost his way.  

Back to Leonard Cohen, and his song, We Want It Darker:

“There’s a lover in the story

But the story’s still the same

There’s a lullaby for suffering

And a paradox to blame

But it’s written in the scriptures

And it’s not some idle claim

You want it darker

We kill the flame”

“It is written in the scriptures and it’s not some idle claim” You want it darker.” Yes, we want it darker, and please kill the flame. Kill that light from out there, and let’s please concentrate on what we are. What you are, yes.

Watch those ridiculous protesters in the streets, finally waking up to the fact they need to help the president of the USA, with healthy protests. Where were they, eight years ago, when Obama needed their help? To protest against the pro-plutocratic policies which were forced (let’s say) onto Obama? When a lonely and misdirected Obama was sucking at the teat of hedge funds, to better prepare him for his presidency of shoe shining? And nobody protested? (OK, I did, but I am nothing.) Why did the protesters not help Obama to stay honest and true? Why so keen to help keep Trump honest, with their unhinged Dark Side?  

They say with undiscerning grammar: ‘Trump Hate’. But that’s rather ambiguous. Where were they, for all these long years, when Obama was doing nothing? What did they advocate when a dictator started to ravage Syria? Or when billions were sent to health care plutocrats, in the guise of “covering everybody”?

Instead of protesting then, they were blinded, blinded by the light from Obama’s brown skin, and Michelle’s magnificently empty, astounding rhetoric. We want it darker, turn those lights off, and reflect on what has been really going on: a globalocracy on a worldwide satanic rampage. And even the poles are melting.

Leonard Cohen’s We Want It Darker:

“They’re lining up the prisoners

And the guards are taking aim

I struggled with some demons

They were middle class and tame

I didn’t know I had permission to murder and to maim

You want it darker

Hineni, hineni

I’m ready, my lord”

Here Leonard Cohen alludes to a precise historical facts, or how the Jews stayed supine, while the Nazis roamed. Jewish silence, or even collaboration, made Hitler’s full folly possible, historical evidence shows. Hannah Arendt wrote: “the Zionists could, for a time, at least, engage in a certain amount of non-criminal cooperation with the Nazi authorities; the Zionists too believed that ‘dissimilation’, combined with the emigration to Palestine of Jewish youngsters and, they hoped, Jewish capitalists, could be a ‘mutually fair solution.’  At the time, many German officials held this opinion…” What happened? Nobody wanted it darker. It was kept pleasant. Germans were told Jews were removed “for their safety“.

Cohen also alludes to the fact that big time murderers get away with it. That’s why the God of the Jews in the Bible gets enraged against King David. God had ordered David to massacre a tribe, and David had refused to do so. Why can’t you kill, when ordered to do so? By superior principle (“God”)? This was an important principle God tried to teach to David (and the Abraham, and to all Judeo-Christians and Jews following the “Scripture”): there are circumstances when you have permission, and even when you ought, to murder and aim.

Evolutionarily, massacring lesser human beings has been much of how humanity progressed (hence the God of the Bible insistence upon it; Mayas, Aztecs, Incas, and 99% of the world’s known religions would agree…)

However, now we know more. Not all of evolution happened that way by a long shot: ethologically driven epigenetics played an important role… for example in the disappearing act of Neanderthals (which vanished inside ourselves, I have suggested, and the most recent science increasingly confirms).

What “scripture” guessed was that the Dark Side was not just an essential characteristic of humanity, but also essential to the human condition. This is found in the Hebrew Bible, and in the older Homer. Actually the general orientation in that sinister way is found in the even more ancient Hindu scriptures and the roots of Zoroastrianism, the root of all Indo-European religions (and by “Indo-European” here I mean the region, not just the languages).

Before the pseudo-scientists start to cackle away in derision for all this mythology, let me point out that those who spent millennia concocting logic with myths did not get it all wrong. The Dark Side phenomenon is essentially evolutionary. “Evolution” is not nice. It just is. It just is God: The One who created us.

If you want it funny, watch all the Clinton fanatics crying ignominiously, all over the world, after the defeat of their demiurge. I went to harass a few with the most courteous presentation of serious data, rolling out graphs, just to see them become even more dishevelled, haggard, disconsolate. Yet, they stopped crying, as they left their dream to enter the nightmare of reality. It’s not just that I like it Dark, but I study stupidity. As it is a part of darkness which needs to be enlightened.

But let’s reconsider what happened to the Jews under Nazism. Hannah Arendt (& others) accused the “Judenraten”, the Jewish Councils, to have helped the Nazis (I discovered this independently by reading original literature; I was pretty surprised by it; I learned of Arendt’s views decades later; she missed some documents I think even more important).

Zoroastrianism viewed the human condition as a struggle to help the God of Light against the God of the Dark Side, thanks to Truth.

Well, in truth, the God of Truth needs Light and Dark to write upon the world, with the world. The world is a book for the mind.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin, a Latvian-British Jew, was dismayed after the creation of Israel: ‘They listened to Hitler, they did not listen to us.’ Yes, well, thank you, my Lord.

Berlin could have guessed why he had made a darker interpretation of his own writings. “Moral conflicts are an intrinsic, irremovable element in human life”. “These collisions of values are of the essence of what they are and what we are.” he wrote in “The proper study of mankind” For Berlin, this clashing of incommensurate values within, and between, individuals, constitutes the tragedy of human life.

There are all sort of philosophers: some are giants straddling across the stars, like Giordano Bruno. Most of them are smaller fry, like those who brandish the ‘human good’ like the measure of all things. It’s not. They forget that knowledge often precedes goodness.

Israel did not listen to the fry ready to get fried, because, it decided that, to survive, and, even better, to be reborn, it wanted it darker:

The Jews, waiting for Hitler like others for Godot, had forgotten that they had permission to murder and to maim. Israel now knows this. It was in the scripture, all along, and no idle claim. Philosophers of the possible want it darker, ever since their ancestors crawled on land through the mud.

The pseudo-progressives who claimed to “be with her“, are part of a vast movement which want to interdict anything which could make themselves, or someone else, afraid. This includes, naturally enough, all and any critical thinking.  So now Donald Trump will do the thinking.

Meanwhile, the Artificial Intelligence Industry (AII) has depicted itself as goodness incarnate (old slogan of Google: ‘don’t be evil’). They scream, all over:’We Want It Lighter!’. Lighter taxes, certainly: Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, have been cheating massively with the taxes they owe, worldwide (this will change with the reign of Trump).

Not only those companies, the most powerful in the world, under Obama, and the richest, are viewed as intrinsically good (thus harboring no interesting darkness), but view themselves as such. Hence the silly-colonization(Silicolonization) of the world, above all laws, has proceeded, in plain sight, and not seen. The globalocracy has persuaded everybody that there is no darkness anywhere having to do with themselves: in particular all and any tribalism (such as Wahhabism), is fine.

They all supported Hillary Clinton, and proclaimed themselves to be ultimate good, light personified. Thanks to control of the Main Stream Media by global plutocrats, all over (the paymasters of Clinton), they wiped their blind supporters in a frenzy. For them, the Dark Side is not interesting, it’s an object of horror. Thus, who they were imprinted to support, Clinton, her Goldman government, her plutocrats, and her globalocrats, were all goodness, and Trump and his supporters, and ideas, all Darkness, something to refuse to consider at all cost.

It’s revealing how the hatred of pseudo-liberal posers has thus no limit: they are all light, them and their celebrities, and their Silicon Valley fascist corporations, and their opponents, ultimate evil. As all and any people in such a mood, their hatred has no limit. It goes all the way to genocide. Hollywood actor Michael Shannon wants all Trump supporters to die: “But if you’re voting for Trump, it’s time for the urn.” Michael Shannon has just a high school education (no college), but is “worth” eight million dollars. (As many of the rich celebrities out there, he then is offered the supplementary power of being taken seriously, advertised widely.)

At this point, some may say:’Oh, but didn’t you want it darker? Is not a would-be genocider like Shannon, right up your alley?” No. Michael Shannon understands so little, he sees monsters all over, where, if he could see through the Darkness of those who own and created him, he would just see only transparent logic. Shannon and his ilk are afraid to learn that all they made their mental circuitry from, all they are, are lies. If they had wanted it Darker, they would have been more suspicious of the bromine of the Main Stream Media. (As indeed happened to many people who voted for Obama, and, still loving Obama as a person, voted for Trump, as they were rightly suspicious of the motives of Obama calling them to vote for Clinton/Goldman Sachs…)

Yes, we want it darker, because we are not afraid to look into the dark. Take Turkey: I am not afraid to consider the darkness, I look at what is happening there now (although I have Turkish friends who loved Erdogan, and now we avoid the subject). I know what is going-on in Turkey means: if I look at the Caliphate in Turkey, I will look deep in the dark, and questions like favoring a coup in Turkey will, eventually, arise.

(Or even expelling Turkey from NATO, and war.) I know Islam is not a religion in all ways wonderful. And I am not afraid to look inside Islam: because I like it dark. If you want to rape a child in Turkey, the ruling AKP Party suggests now that you only have to marry her: a proposed Turkish bill clears men of statutory rape if they marry (18 November 2016). As the BBC puts it:

“A bill which would allow men accused of raping underage girls to be cleared if they marry the girl has been preliminarily backed by Turkish MPs. The bill would pardon men only if they had sex without “force or threat” and if they married the victim. Critics say it legitimises rape and child marriage, and lets off men who are aware of their crime.

[OK, there are 3,000 children from underage unions, in Turkey, each year. Right now, fathers go to jail. Not good.]
Violence against women in Turkey has increased in the past decade – 40% of women report sexual or physical abuse. Statistics also show the murder rate of women increased by 1,400% between 2003 and 2010.”

Evil, the power of Pluto, Pluto-kratos, has grown and ruled ever more, because all too many did not want it darker, and thus, they averted their eyes, wishfully. Because those who do not want to harbor ill-feeling, and see it as it is, dark as it is, cannot think it, as it is.

Whereever it is very dark, it’s good to look carefully. Take the iceshelves around Antarctica. Yes, it’s dark down there in the ocean, below half a mile of ice, 500 miles from the shore. There, in the dark, much is happening: all too much warmth, 100 millions of climate in question. But we have to ask, and we have to look.

If Obama had wanted it darker, he would have the desire to break a few shells, and made an omelette: his presidency would have amounted to something, perhaps even something digestible. Instead, most of its ineffectual, slow and paralysed presidency is going to be vomited all over the south lawn of the White House starting in two months, and one day. Doing anything serious in plain sight, requires serious destruction, in plain sight (annihilating weddings in Yemen by drones does not qualify).  When president Johnson wanted to pass the Civil Rights Act and other “Great Society” laws LBJ turned off the lights, and used the Dark Side (LBJ did not have thoughts which were dark enough about Vietnam, with catastrophic consequences).

Consider terror. Right now, it’s associated to Literal Islam: a bomb here, a shooting there, collapsing buildings, here and there. Small terror relative to the one a dictator getting excited with nuclear tipped ballistic missiles would bring. Thus a deeper problem. Fighting terror is a great idea. Fighting savagery would be an even greater idea. But for that, one has to look first at darkness in the eye.

The will to see only goodness out there, the will to be afraid of fear itself at the cost of reality, is a will to idiocy, and, thus, in the end, a will to full immorality, degeneracy, despondency, annihilation…. (For annihilation, see the Democratic Party.)

The will to refuse to want it darker brings forth impotence, and hatred. And even the threat of extinction. Sea ice finds difficult to form this year, in part because scientists refuse to want it as dark as they should have wished for (and I predicted that Antarctica ice system may significantly collapse in our lifetime, because I wanted my predictions as dark as they needed to be).

Yes, the preceding has to do with epistemology, the logic of knowledge. There is no knowledge acquisition, if we are not drawn, not just to the unknown, but to the dark. The most powerful epistemology is born from the darkest mood.

Pragmatically, people who do not want to look at reality, who orders the only reality they deign to perceive to be rosy, are bound to moral impotency. They’re the ultimate nihilists.

We Want It Darker. We Need It Darker.

Patrice Aymé

No Many-Worlds Consciousness

OFF WITH DENNETT’S CONFUSED THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Consciousness is not part of science… Yet. Science will be complete, when it is. Except, and that is a huge ‘except’, possibly, most people would have to admit, consciousness may already haunt the foundations of Quantum Physics: this is what the ‘Schrodinger Cat’ paradox is all about (the lives of cats depends upon what we think!). And, indeed, I believe consciousness has to do with the Quantum.

But first I have to dispose of those who claim that consciousness is a non-problem. The famous academic philosopher Dennett asserts that consciousness has to do with brain parallelism. My friend Karen Eilbeck, a ‘biomedical informatics’ professor: “I never was satisfied with [Dennett’s] explanation of consciousness”. Indeed. Consciousness and ‘multimodal parcellation’ are completely unrelated.

It is now considered that there are around 180 different areas of the cortex, per hemisphere, each doing different things (it used to be 83 different “areas”). 

The Brain Is An Orchestra With More Than 180 Players, Per Hemisphere

As the authors of  “A multi-modal parcellation of human cerebral cortex” (August 11, 2016), have it:

“Understanding the amazingly complex human cerebral cortex requires a map (or parcellation) of its major subdivisions, known as cortical areas. Making an accurate areal map has been a century-old objective in neuroscience. Using multi-modal magnetic resonance images from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) and an objective semi-automated neuroanatomical approach, we delineated 180 areas per hemisphere bounded by sharp changes in cortical architecture, function, connectivity, and/or topography in a precisely aligned group average of 210 healthy young adults. We characterized 97 new areas and 83 areas previously reported using post-mortem microscopy or other specialized study-specific approaches. To enable automated delineation and identification of these areas in new HCP subjects and in future studies, we trained a machine-learning classifier…”

Thus the science of finding regions in the brain is more than a century old, it was not viewed as, nor has anything to do with trying to make a theory of consciousness . Yet, Dennett confuses brain activity here, there, and every way, with consciousness. 

Dennett observes that there are “various events of content-fixation occurring in various places at various times in the brain”. (everybody knows this: reach synapse, each neuron, even each axon and dendrite, etc.) The brain consists of a “bundle of semi-independent agencies“; when “content-fixation” takes place in one of these, its effects may propagate so that it leads to the utterance of sentences that make up the story in which the central character is one’s “self”.

A pretty useless ‘explanation’, dear Dennett, and not the problem of consciousness: consciousness is a feeling we all have, not just an utterance. If consciousness were an utterance, the speaking robots we are now interacting with, would be conscious. They are not. They are just algorithms. An algorithm does not have any more consciousness than a canal system. (Philosophers love to pontificate by calling what Dennett did, a ‘category error’; namely one confuses unrelated categories.)

Dennett followers claim that “subjectivity” can NEVER be made a subject to objective inquiry. That is a contradiction with the entire history of science, ever since the first Homo made the first fire.

What do I mean by this? ANY scientific theory started from a subjective experience. The first hominid who realized he could generate sparks with flints was subjectively engaged. So was the first who realized rubbing sticks could also generate incandescence. So the entire history of science, in the last three million years, has consisted, again and again and again, into turning subjectivity into objective inquiry.

When Dennett’s followers claim to have discovered that ‘subjectivity’ can never turn ‘objective’, they fail to understand that science rests precisely on this. In other words, they think as if they did not know that science is possible. Sorry to ask them to jump three million years.

Dennett looks a bit like Socrates with a big bushy beard, he is paid to utter statements viewed as philosophical, and has no doubt many other duties to attend to his enthusiastic following. So much thinking to produce, so little time, drowning in an ocean of fame. Can’t be easy.

How can fame and mental depth coincide? They are adverse to each other. It would be like getting money from oligarchs or financial monopolists, while claiming to want to help average people.

Is there really no connection whatsoever between the brain’s cortex working in plenty of little areas (brain parallelism) and consciousness? I did not say that. Dennett identifies consciousness and parallelism. That’s wrong. But that does not mean that consciousness did not evolve to make arbitrage between all these little areas, being the conductor of that otherwise discordant orchestra.

So Dennett confuses one evolutionary advantages of consciousness and the nature of consciousness. That nature probably has to do with the nature of the Quantum, and the difference between vegetal and animal. “Animal” comes from anima (soul in Latin). The soul is Quantum, this is what the Schrödinger(-Einstein) Cat thought experiment says.

Why the allusion to the “Many Worlds” Interpretation of Quantum Physics in the title? It is more than an allusion. The Many Worlds interpretation of the Quantum consists into sweeping the difficulty of how one goes from many possible outcomes to just a single one, under the rug of formalism. Instead of figuring out what is really going on, Many Worlders of physics say basically that everything and anything goes (all outcomes are ‘real’). One can say that Many World physicists shrug and answer the way Valley Girls do:”Whatever!“. Dennett does just the same. And this is not just a meta-analogy. If I am correct, and consciousness is intrinsically Quantum, the reason is exactly the same: evading a serious attempt at a deeper explanation… of the same phenomenon.

I don’t really expect celebrity physicists and celebrity philosophers to acknowledge that their cute little reasonings are shallow cope-outs, and popular, precisely because they are shallow and cute. However, the last nail in their coffins consist in pointing out that they offer an endearing, yet really terrible example of superficiality to the rest of debating society. Civilization rots by its head.

Patrice Ayme’