INNOCENCE FROM IGNORANCE: An Old Trick Used By Religions To Make Themselves Popular From The Hate They Enable

Following Socrates it’s assumed that ignorant people are (basically) innocent, even while committing evil: ignorance made them do it (exonorating evildoers from Mens Rea). Yes, sure… but what when people make themselves deliberately ignorant with the aim of committing evil? Remember that in the Nazi state, ignorance was rampant. Ignorance was a system. Remember the Mafia, and omerta (the code of obedience to the leader and silence about the organization and its business)…

The thesis that ignorance makes good is self-serving: to a great extent Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were culprit of not liking very much (Socrates), or detesting (Plato), or even lethally hating (Aristotle) Athenian democracy. At Nuremberg, the Nazis used the Socrates defense: we had no idea that these things were happening. When Adolf Eichmann was tried in Jerusalem, instead of using Socrates, pleading ignorance, something he couldn’t do as he visited Auschwitz, and literally tried to barter the lives of one million Jews with the Allies, Eichmann used Kant, who had taught him superior morality came from obeying orders…

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I didn’t know the house was going to burn down, arsonists often say… “We knew nothing” (Nazi leaders full throttle chorus at Nuremberg).

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Pleading innocence from ignorance is one of the oldest trick (I just shot my poisoned arrow into that bush for target practice, said Neanderthal, and my enemy was hiding there, now he is dead, I didn’t know, sorry). What if the gory religions which govern the minds of billions were designed to organize ignorance and justify evil?

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Happy go goody “new age” pseudo-thinkers, gurus and their ilk, love to insist that most people fail to realize that memorizing religious beliefs does not replace authentic investigations. Pseudo-thinkers, gurus and their ilk, love to think highly of common people, so that common people will keep the donations coming. The worst possibility is the opposite: that most people do not fail to realize that memorizing deleterious beliefs does not replace authentic investigations. And they have very good reasons, or so they feel, for that: I actually know personally white slightly colored supporters of Hamas who see in supporting Hamas a way to advance their future career (hate for Israel being the way to a nice income and comfortable power)… We are “friends”… even family… I observe them calmly, silently, like hawks do with mice… 

The ecstasy of hate, a deep and most rewarding human instinct, as one discovers once neurohormonally engaged in it, comes first…

And then comes the fake belief in some pathological horror that comes in handy to justify said hate… 

Do really fundamentalist Muslims believe, in this day and age, that all and any Jew must be killed so that the Final Judgment can occur… as some famous Hadiths say, and as repeated in Hamas Charter, article 7? No. The scriptures order to kill all the Jews come in handy to justify the primitivism.and delight of threatening enemies with death.

Fateful Hadiths: “There Is A Jew… So Kill Him!” 

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Why so much attraction to pain and mayhem? If one does so, one forgets one is only a human being, soon to die as a mosquito. Instead, one feels like God. … A God who loves to inflict pain. Being a predator beats being a prey, so the suicidal attacker march gaily to their fate… Another very deep human instinct closely related to hate, which made life in the savannah possible. Once lions and their ilk understood that humans were that crazy, they tried to avoid them…

So Hamas is nut, but the haters inside know that, and love it. Same in Russia. People deep down know Putin is nuts, but they love it, and feel his madness is an adventure worth sharing. That helps them forget how messed up they are… Having a giant empire and calling it… Russia!

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In general, anger is the best way to forget suffering, as anger leads to fight and lethal fight is made possible, evolutionary speaking, by ignoring pain.

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So we see that there is a whole entangled architecture to pain, hate, suffering, beliefs in lethal metaphysics, lack of rationality, and feeling like a god. Average people are happy to use religion as a conduit and cover-up to conduct hate operations.

This is why all too many people love to have religions to hate Ukraine and Israel…. And why no doubt Chrsitians and Muslims put churches and mosques on top of the Jewish temple in the capital of Israel.

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Simplicius: Would you then say that some people carefully nurture their ignorance from the desire of engaging in hateful activities?

PA: Absolutely! And this is why those who foster the truth are themselves such a hateful inconvenience…

Simplicius: But you also said new thinking was hated because it caused even sympathetic and wilful students to spend a lot of energy demolishing their old thought system and building new one? 

PA: Absolutely! 

Simplicius: So you have two different causes for hating thinkers like you?

PA: There are even more! But those are the two reasons which are major, the deepest and hard to escape: the hate of wasting energy, and the love of hate.

Simplicius: I find you rather disagreeable…

PA: Absolutely!

Patrice Ayme

Soul mates… Beware of Brown Men! Brown Man tries to seduce White Man to go down, come down to Earth, while White Man wants to fly up, like a bird, so,light his spirit is… although he has no wings!

GENETICS FROM TECHNOLOGY… Transhumanism For Millions Of Years Already! Humans Are The Technological Species: Homo Technologicus? Therein Morality?

Abstract: Technology Drove Genetics! Genetics can change at the rate of ecology. If one gives it some thought, that was a necessary meta-adaptation which life had to evolve. And this is now demonstrated, at least in flies.

But why would it be different in humans? The underlying physics, biology and evolutionary pressures are the same. However, technology modifies human ecology. Homo Technologicus is 3 million years old, influencing our ecology. This is probably why humans changed so much in the last three milion years, in a virtuous spiral of a rising genetico-technological spiral! The genetico-technological singularity started millions of years ago. The consequences of this perspective to all aspects of what we call humanity are enormous.

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Everywhere We Look, Technology:

Not even poetry would exist, without technology. This is why only humans have poetry: because only humans have technology. Wherever we look, we humans see and are surrounded by technology, and have been for three million years, 150,000 generations… Plenty of time to co-evolve: technologies are us… Our big brains may be our first technology… the fruit of our technological efforts! Let me explain… 

Stones, cut and pointed to be sharp, cutting, penetrating or smashing… is technology. Our ancestors elaborated them before our brains grew at a rate proportional to their capabilities… Clothing is technology: no temperate area would have been colonized without clothing (and Africa was not excluded as genes went back and forth between Asia and Africa, for two million years, with Homo Ergaster!) Fire and cooking are technologies (Neanderthals cooked vegetables). Without fire, the megafauna would have been difficult to keep away from increasingly precise and subtle, but then weak and delicious humans… humans who could become ever more brainy and less brawny, as technology protected and leveraged them… ever more.

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GENETICS CAN GO AT THE SPEED OF ECOLOGY:

Recent studies have shown that genetic, inheritable variability in response to the environment can happen within three or four generations… ….”evolution is acting so fast that ecology and evolution are operating at the same timescale.” This is not surprising, as, naturally and frequently, the ecology can evolve very fast and then durably: contemplate the three Dryas episodes, when Europe fell back into glacial ages, all of a sudden, in a few years, and stayed there for a millennium, or more (the causes of the Dryas are still partly mysterious). 

An exponential rate of growth grows proportionally to itself. Now humans have long created their own ecology… Thus humans learned to exponentiate themselves… through technology. Maybe humans didn’t learn it culturally as much as genetically, but, as a species, they learned. That makes humans in some sense, if not masters, at least the cause, of their own evolution… And there always has been a genetic advantage to accelerate human genetico-technological evolution: contemplate the war in Ukraine, where drones are dominating the battlefield. 

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Dogs play, but they can’t do poetry: they don’t have the technology to record, nor the capabilities to make a recording: no hands, not much of a subtle voice.

My dog can vocalize grunts meaning yes, and others meaning no, and he is very good at pointing toward what he wants, or using body language, like walking away, after I make a suggestion he does not appreciate, or squealing enthusiastically after I bring food from the store. It seems that only humans can transmit culture without being physically present (wolves howling and lions roaring are the most primitive culture, through warnings…). 

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Bergson evoked “Homo Faber” The Homo who fabricates, to label us. But that’s not specific enough, we are more special than that. Lots of animals make and use tools. For example humpback whales use bubble cages to herd fish, and some crow species can devise extracting tools (as do chimps). Dogs would use tools, too if they had hands. These claws frustrate my dog so much.

Humans have been using tools and weapons which they fabricated, for millions of years. And then fire was mastered, maybe 1.5 million years ago (say Chinese archeologists).

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Technology is science and vice versa: 

Technology is too important a concept to be left as the exclusive province of the elite, billionaires and other plutocrats. Technology took part in the creation of our species. 

Technology is everywhere, and has been, for millions of years, to the point it helped evolve the human species. Books, clothing, weapons and pots are technology (of “hardware” type). Writing, speaking, fire making, sculpting, botany, ethology is technology (of software type). Techno-logy: Specialized discourse…. All of culture is actually technology. Making fire in a wet forest with just sticks is technology (and one modern people don’t know).

Science and knowledge, in this general sense, have much in common with technology. (If one knows one is hungry, or in love, or afraid, that’s not technological, right; but Quantum Physics can be viewed as technology, or engineering, as it’s a method, or more generally an art to make predictions of fundamental processes in some spaces; in general Qunatum Physics can’t make precise predictions, the problems are just too complex, one can solve completely only a couple of them, and the physics community hopes that Quantum Computers will help with Quantum Physics!)

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Etymology Of Technology: the fabrication of discourses:

“Technology” is the Latinized form of Greek tekhnologia “systematic treatment of an art, craft, or technique,” originally referring to grammar, from tekhno-, combining form of tekhnē “art, skill, craft in work; method, system, an art, a system or method of making or doing,” from PIE *teks-na- “craft” (of weaving or fabricating), from suffixed form of root *teks- “to weave,” also “to fabricate.” 

Logy: Medieval Latin -logia, French -logie, and Logy: directly from Greek -logia, from -log-, combining form of legein “to speak, tell;” thus, “the character or deportment of one who speaks or treats of (a certain subject);” from PIE root *leg- (1) “to collect, gather,” with derivatives meaning “to speak (to ‘pick out words’).”

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What is the point of being technology aware? Understanding our world enough not to be enslaved by it. As AI becomes ever more important, it’s crucial to realize it’s not magic from a world of sorcerers and witches. Because, should we adopt the point of view of tech as magic, pretty soon we will be dominated by demons [1], and ruled by the likes of Harry Potter and other witches.

Technology made us genetically, so pondering technology is pondering what made us, our creator. Differently from Aztec gods, we can get to know that creator. While the prospects of war everywhere keep on going up, many have wondered what the roots of morality were. If the preceding is true, and it is, or close to it, our morality can’t be separated from our genetics and our technology.

The connection between ourselves and tech are as old as ourselves: transhumanism is what we do, and have been doing for millions of years. By the way, this answers the burning question of why there was a serpent in the garden of Eden… Technology was not created in the first place to smell the roses… But to master the flesh, and not just the flesh of apples… The will, the will to power, is also the will to technological power, and the power of the exponential. The exponential species, indeed!

Patrice Ayme

No tech, no art! A beautiful painting or music is not just a bunch of forms, but also technology in action. Only technology enables us to appreciate the beauty of the ocean in full. Up to a very recent time, seeing such a beautiful nonlinear wave action, could not have been poetically appreciated, because we would have been submerged, with the prospect of imminent death… technology makes even aesthetic appreciation possible:

[1] Life, increasingly enormously complicated self-replicating carbon based chemistry, appeared on Earth more than four billion years ago. Life is immoral, because morality assumes consciously embracing self-replicating ways… Something life couldn’t do without consciousness… and consciousness required brains, which evolved in the last half a billion years… However, to self-replicate, the essence of morality, humans need to embrace tech… as they co-evolved with it. 

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P/S 1: Famous philosophers have talked about tech, even before Heraclitus and Democritus (to whom Aristotle refer). Nazi Heidegger, a frequent reference among the pedants, was thoroughly confused (he stupidly thought technology started 2 centuries after math!) and hopelessly shallow, sploshing through his own turd… I mention Heidegger because Nazis-in-denial always mention Heidegger…

P/S 2: It goes without saying that the approach above is new, and radical…

We Are Lions

I have walked to lions resting below trees in the shade, in the wild, in Africa, as a child. When healthy, lions consider such a situation, and out of caution and careful respect for humans, rise up to the occasion… and walk away. The exhibition of respect has to be mutual for this to work well. One never forgets half a dozen lionesses slowly rising and ambling away as disarmed human child approaches.

Lions used to be ubiquitous, during millions of years of human evolution in the savannah park, because lions live off big game but also smaller game, all the way down to rabbits. So lions influenced a lot of what became human psychobiology.

However, during the neolithic, the last 15,000 years or so, lions were replaced by massive quantities of human cattle and sheep, changing the composition of the atmosphere, with an abundance of methane which may have prevented serious planetary cooling.

Yet, lions stayed a symbol of … human power…. Because humans dominated lions, and lions had to be dominated, for life to get to space. Now we have to care for lions directly, and be grateful.

Because, deep down inside, we humans, to subdue lions as we had to, we became ourselves, to some extent, lions...

Coat of arms of Edward III, king of England, grandson of the iron king of France Philipp IV Le Bel… and thus Edward III was king of France, all the sons of Philipp The Fair, and his other grandson, having died in quick succession, in the real game of thrones... Some of them may have been helped by poison thanks to the famous Countess of Artois who had stolen that County from her even more formidable nephew who in turn incited Edward III to go get his due, the kingdom of France (so that he himself could recover his own County; his habit of leading battle in a scarlet outfit may have led to his death on the battlefield)… In any case this Franco-French quarrel,, the “100 year war” started around 1330 CE and lasted until 1815…

The three lions represent England, Normandy and Aquitania. The flowers of Lys represent the kingdom of France (actually technically an empire from the Tenth Century partition) . All over Europe, lions represented power. European lions went extinct less than 24 centuries ago…

Patrice Ayme

Nature Is The Ultimate Teacher

WILDERNESS IS NOT JUST NICE, IT’S REAL. A TEACHER. GET LOST TO FIND HOME.

Nothing beats being lost in the wilderness as a formative experience. John Muir did this a lot. He loved a good storm shaking the tree where he elected to reside at night, just to experience the power of nature. Who needs the god of books, when the goddess of reality shakes your tree? (Muir, and several of his friends and followers, including the hyper plutocrat rail magnate Harriman, father of the Democratic Party controlling Harriman brothers, proceeded to save enormous swathes of US wilderness, from Alaska to Florida…)

I have practiced that exquisite, most captivating activity myself, getting lost in the wilderness, on 5 continents, since early childhood. In my search for truth and wisdom, I was attracted by that teacher, reality in full. As found in nature, from nature, by nature. It’s not just a question of allure, or thrill, or adrenaline, or of the hyper concentration it requires to not sprain an ankle, not crash into a tree, not catch a root, not go fly head first, not falling into a hole…

It’s not a question just of keeping a sense of orientation. It’s not just a question of listening to the sounds of possible predators, or looking scary enough to keep them at bay, even if one doesn’t see them, and have only a vague idea of where they potentially lurk. It’s not just a question of continually analyzing the ominous silence indicative of predators, bears, lions, hungry canids, and the discrete high pitch sound signaling wasps or African bees… while keeping an eye for snakes, spiders, thorns and pointed branches.

I used to worry about panthers in Africa (one visited me at night when I was ten years old, sleeping in a national park in a tent, leaving a definitive impression)… Now I worry about mountain lions (once I saw tow at dusk in half an hour, and I was running…) Leopards may have evolved to attack not just primates, but specifically, humans.

Baboons have canines to help lions think. We have stones, to help all beasts think, and learn how to measure distance. As a human child, I fought stone battles with full grown baboons. So much about pacifist beasts. Because we are superior tree climbers (more than even baboons), the human shoulder can throw stones more powerfully and further than baboons.

Getting lost in the wilderness and surviving it is not just a question of exerting judgment to choose in a timely manner whether to turn left or right, go up or down, or which direction to bushwhack. It’s not just a question of finding strength when has not had water, food, or rest for hours, or ignoring pain in one’s feet, and general exhaustion, or of seeing in the dark, or surviving hail, or of continually moving enough to fight the otherwise paralysing, deadly cold, not just a question of judging the depth and nature of the snow, or of the swift water, or of navigating by the stars.

Bears know stones, and they fear and hate them (because they have been injured by them). So, when bears and other beasts meet a stone master, a human, they are instilled with respect, especially if they are reminded of reality with a little stone play. The stone master can make a demonstration, for this wild audience, and, if that’s not enough, can actually connect with the recalcitrant ursid… (Something I have done, because I had to do it; law enforcement killed that particular bear, three weeks later… After he injured gravely a grandmother…)

Getting lost in the wilderness is all this, and more, all of it in one day, especially when crossing mountain ranges. This is when we get lost in the universe, in which our astounding brains can be all they are, and love to become wiser for it by visiting what is inaccessible otherwise: nature itself, raw, greatest trip of all, astounding in power, awesome beyond anything human…

Nature, embracing the wilds, reveal how humanity shines the most, finding its real home, which is not just its comfort range, but the entire universe we need to make us whole.

We need to get lost, to find where home is.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: The preceding essay was inspired by “Lost and Found in Hemingway’s Spain
Of fear and thankfulness. The white elephants of eternity are always out there.” by Roger Cohen, NYT, Nov 30, 2019 (he published my comment). Roger got lost in a national park in central Spain, and was helicoptered out… (I myself was the object of 3 mountain rescues I neither asked for, not needed… But I have been in dire straights, many times… As I generally engage best when the epic factor is significant and  potentially dramatic… Nietzsche used to do solo climbing on a glaciated mountain, with crampons, a mountain I have skied on, of course… Nietzsche had guessed much of what was above, and that’s easy to do, as, if one tries to get lost in the wilderness, the subsequent enlightenment and drugging aspect is so strong, one will be back… if one can…)

Here is from Cohen’s essay, as it’s pretty typical of the lost-by-accident syndrome:

“Earlier this year, I got lost while hiking in the Sierra de Guadarrama, which rises to almost 8,000 feet in central Spain. It had been a grueling day under the September sun. The trail, scattered with boulders, was longer and steeper than expected. What had been described as a gentle glide along a ridge after a tough initial ascent proved unrelenting.

About seven hours in, I fell behind my two friends. I was following stone mounds, or cairns, not the clearest indicators in this case. False guides, they pulled me deeper into the mountains.

This was not a sudden realization but a growing unease that culminated in an admission: lost. Lost as in every human being has vanished. Lost as in I have to slow my heartbeat. Lost as in there are perhaps two more hours of daylight, my lips are dry and I’m out of water. Lost and small in a sierra suddenly vast and threatening.

The stupidest decisions can seem natural enough. For the three of us to separate, for our remaining water to be with my friends, even to undertake this trail without adequate information, was lunacy. Yet it seemed like harmless lunacy — until the mountains rebuked me with their immensity.

I had no water but did have a faint bar of reception on my dying cellphone. All I managed to communicate to my friend was two words — “I’m lost” — before we lost each other again.”

Saved by technology unthinkable three decades ago…

“I looked around. I’d been descending, several hundred feet. I needed to climb again, get around the rocky outcrop above me, to be more visible. In the direction I’d been heading lay only wild terrain and jagged peaks.

Adrenalin is the most exhausting form of energy. Fear is a survival instinct as long as panic does not supplant it. I climbed without feeling the effort, leaping from boulder to boulder, but growing more parched. Far below me the switchbacks of a forest track appeared. No visible way to reach it.

Don’t fall or twist an ankle. Don’t trust that rock with your weight, misjudge the depth of the juniper thicket, or turn in circles. How and at what point does extreme thirst affect the mind? Don’t panic. Think.“

This is the paradox of Getting Lost In the Wilderness: contrarily to repute from stuffed academics and drugged out pseudo-philosophers, the wilderness is a place to learn to THINK and CONTROL emotions (because one doesn’t want to move in haphazard directions… That could mean death, and right away…)  One should even say that the wilderness is THE place to learn to think and emote correctly, because, not only it contains the universe in full, but it’s the ultimate disciplinarian… And Roger to have a bird experience. The bird experience is indicative of the ripe state of an epic. It happened to me even in California with two condors, at the night was coming (the only time I ever saw California condors).

“Then I saw the birds, two of them. They were looking at me. Hulking and black, they were perched side by side on a rock like bloated chess pieces. No, they were not looking at me, they were eyeing me.”

Europe has Black Vultures. The Black Vulture, not just a vulture, is the largest bird of prey. It will attack wounded hiker. A French woman with an injured leg in the Pyrenees was left by her companion who went for rescue (there are no phone coverage in most mountain range yet, this side of Elon Musk…). When the rescuers came back, Black Vultures, who had killed her, were disposing of her remains. They will attack cows. Europe has also the magnificent Gypaete, the only bird known to have killed a (Greek) philosopher. Last year I was doing a high altitude rock climb, off season, the snow was everywhere, the sun was getting low, and these four Gypaeti came to study us very carefully, to see if we were going to make it. They used the updraft of the formidable, slightly overhanging limestone peak to make alluring acrobatics, eyeing us with yellow eyes… When they decided we were too vigorous, they left…

But dogs can be the worst: like leopards, they can be hard to impress: A pregnant woman was killed by dogs in a forest in France as a hunt took place nearby, investigators have said.

“The body of the 29-year-old woman, who was walking her own dogs at the time of the attack, was found in the forest of Retz outside the northeastern village of Saint-Pierre Aigle on Saturday.

An autopsy revealed that the woman had died of “bleeding from several dog bites to the upper and lower limbs as well as to the head,” prosecutor Frederic Trinh said in a statement Wednesday.”

https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/20/europe/woman-killed-dogs-hunt-france-intl-scli/index.html

Once French geologists in Iran (a place where I confronted an angry bear), were attacked by five wild dogs, intent to eat them. So persistent were the ferocious animals, they had to kill every single dog with their geological hammers (the story, which is old, will not be on the Internet, I knew them…)

Nature is not nice. It’s real. A teacher.