Steven Pinker is a famous Harvard psychology professor (and before that he was head of neurosciences at MIT), one more of these celebrity professors buttressing the very wealthy elite, with lenifying discourses to put us all asleep. Unsurprisingly, Pinker is great friend with plutocrat Bill Gates, who is not just wealthy and control not only Microsoft and his huge Gates Foundation, but was also, among other things, a close adviser for Midas-touch Obama and his ilk (at some point the Gates were put in charge of much of education by Obama, just in case the Gates’ glorious influence was not great enough).
Influence is power, and major plutocrats’ influence extends far beyond their apparent financial power, as they are constantly “advising” elected politicians. (I wrote “advising”, to sound middle-of-the-road. But I meant “bribing”, and the middle ground is the road to hell!)
Harvard and other plutocratic universities are full of these celebrities with agendas serving the truth of the elite, and even the mood which makes us feel good about the rule of the elite… whereas Bill Gates added in the New York Times, Trump has created a bad mood: “There haven’t been that many anti-elitists, anti-internationalists elected president. But we have one now”. Famous examples of intellectual serving the plutocracy are Huntington, Ferguson, and the galaxy of economists who mis-advised president Yeltsin deliberately in the 1990s (with the aim of turning Russia into a plutocracy, and profiting from it, as they did; the enraged, enraging and most cynical uber-plutocrat Putin came out of that process).
Before lengthy quotes of Gates, to cut to the chase, let me paste my comment, which Bill Gates had the courtesy to put on his site (“Gates Notes”)… Yes, in exchange I will bend over, backwards, being nice in turn, in a cute example of micro-corruption…
“We can grab that whole world, and shove it!” “Really, Master, I love you!” Gates and Pinker love-in…
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Viewing The World Through Rose Colored Glasses Is Pinker’s Business Model:
That human lives have gotten better, is Steven Pinker’s big sing-song, his core marketing tool. Yet, that the lives of human beings got better, according to some parameters, is obvious. In the biggest scheme of things, progress is actually why, and how, humanity evolved!
Bill Gates proclaims Pinker’s books “the best of all times”. However, “progress”, progress towards heavens, progress towards hell, and often both at the same time, are a given. Humanity is the progress species, mixing will, technology, and evolutionary biology in a relentless drive towards ever more progress, however of a mixed bag progress may be.
For example, Nazism was a spectacular, horrendous regression in many ways, but then Nazism passed excellent laws in ecology and animal welfare, which Germany kept and the world adopted; even more disturbing, those laws served as cover for their malevolence, so goodness can cover-up the worst! So one can’t just make a list of the good stuff, as Pinker does. One has to evaluate the values and compare them. The present world is violating the MOST major values. And increasingly so. And increasingly so. This is what people are, rightly, getting ever angrier about (see below: Pinker and Gates are clueless about it, of course…)
Gates flaunts Pinker’s “meticulosity“. Yet, it is only mildly interesting to have some of these parameters of optimism in “meticulous” detail. Meticulosity is actually often a covering-up mechanism. All the time spent splitting hair is as much time not envisioning, let alone worrying about, the really big problems. Being obsessively meticulous in the details enables to focus on the insignificant. Steven Pinker misses the big picture, because he is too busy scrutinizing the bark of a tree with pink colored glasses to contemplate the dying forest beyond, let alone smell the raging inferno coming his way! This is why plutocrats love him so much!
For example Pinker makes a big deal that the probability of dying from lightning is 1/37 of what it was a century ago. Yeah, well, what about the probability of dying from pollution now? It’s obviously many times, dozens of times, greater now, and it affects every body: death by lightning was always rare (although, as an alpinist I was in great lightning danger many times, and saw strikes from a few meters away).
While brandishing silly facts, Pinker loves broad generalizations. He claims that “intellectuals hate progress”. That’s a typical over-generalization: some intellectuals do hate progress, all too many do. But all intellectuals? No. Not at all. After all, thinking is greatly motivated by progress, with many individuals. Much of the time, people think because they want to improve matters.
What is the point of singing the obvious progress on some parameters from every rooftop? All the more as everything indicates that a geological sized catastrophe is looming. On the face of it, we are engaged in a combination of the greatest human population explosion ever, and the greatest mass extinction in at least 65 million years, accompanied by the greatest climate shock ever. What could go wrong? Pinker can’t figure it out. He is clueless.
Bill Gates is not any better, as he says in the New York Times (“The Mind Meld Of Bill Gates And Steven Pinker“): “I was stunned by Pinker’s “Better Angels” because I was coming around to the same view: That “things getting better” is the greatest story that no one knows.”
I guess, indeed, that the few thousands plutocrats who rule the world, that’s, indeed, no one… (A human being, in full is much more than greed and the unquenchable thirst of power…)
Considering the extremely dismal perspective (and we didn’t consider the headache Artificial Intelligence is starting to bring) Pinker’s singing from rooftops looks like a distraction. It is distraction, like a bird singing about life, when a force 5 hurricane looms on the horizon.
No doubt Pinker’s song of optimism and “meticulosity” pleases the powers that be. Indeed Pinker tells the elite it, the plutocracy, has made an excellent gift to all of us, the rest of humanity, with all this progress it provided us with… a progress which is burying the biosphere under a tsunami of pollution…
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What Gates and Pinker don’t want to hear, but Hannah Arendt wanted us to hear: Optimism kills, all too often, while pessimism, properly managed, saves lives:
Yet Pinker is dismissive of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s pessimism. This is beyond bizarre: Nietzsche was frighteningly correct about the abominable mentality, militaristic, hyper-nationalistic and racist, which was seizing Germany, and warned about it in the most strident way. Nietzsche saw the anti-Judaism, he saw the furious militarism, the insane nationalism, and the inferiority of the gross German mind at the time, ever more base (Einstein and others had similar critiques later).
If Germany had listened to Nietzsche instead of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Hitler, the massive regression of the 1914-1945 war would not have happened. In other words, no enough pessimism can lead to Nazism and its ilk.
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Steal a pizza, life in prison! Progress? Progress according to Pinker!
Anybody who thinks a bit can only be alarmed by the peril the biosphere finds itself in… all the more as remedies are not obvious. Pinker lauds the decrease of violent crime in the US “from 1992 to 2015”. It doesn’t dawn on him that the mass incarceration campaign under Clinton, arguably the world greatest, this side of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, has something to do with it. It’s clear that, if one imprison for life someone who steal a pizza slice, violent crime will go down.
Another price for this sort of “progress” will be paid, though. All what Pinker sees is that Harvard is getting safer. And he, and the plutocratic class doesn’t understand that the dozens of millions of American whose employment has degraded would logically deduce that the US, and the world, is heading in the wrong direction: isn’t Harvard getting better? Isn’t the finances of the elite Pinker swims in, getting ever wealthier?
(Not surprisingly, the Chinese population, which has seen real, tremendous progress, is very optimistic, polls show… Yet, China could explode, because dictating to the masses in the age of intelligence is not smart…)
The elite tells us we live in the best of all possible worlds, and Pinker adds that it’s getting ever better. When Voltaire sneered, correctly, about this, making fun with professor “Pangloss”, an early version of Pinker, Voltaire’s friend, king Louis XV, replied:”After me, the deluge!”.
Well, clearly, a flood is coming for real. Prior to the hurricane which ravaged Houston, sea level had gone up six inches. Over a year, a single year: six inches!
Yes, birds should sing, that’s nice, so let Pinker sing, that’s nice. But it’s not really intelligent to feel that’s the best that can be done, as Bill Gates pretends it is.
So Pinker cozied up with Gates in Seattle. Gates’ personal wealth is more than 90 billion dollars, and he controls at least 30 billion dollars through his Foundation. Gates is all in love with Pinker, let’s read him a bit, for fun:
“Optimist prime
My new favorite book of all time. By Bill Gates, January 26, 2018
For years, I’ve been saying Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature was the best book I’d read in a decade. If I could recommend just one book for anyone to pick up, that was it. Pinker uses meticulous research to argue that we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. I’d never seen such a clear explanation of progress.
I’m going to stop talking up Better Angels so much, because Pinker has managed to top himself. His new book, Enlightenment Now, is even better.”
Why to change something that worked so well? Gates wants to prove we have the best of all possible progresses (no doubt because his mother was a director of IBM, which launched Gates…):
“Enlightenment Now takes the approach he uses in Better Angels to track violence throughout history and applies it to 15 different measures of progress (like quality of life, knowledge, and safety). The result is a holistic picture of how and why the world is getting better. It’s like Better Angels on steroids…
It opens with an argument in favor of returning to the ideals of the Enlightenment—an era when reason, science, and humanism were touted as the highest virtues.”
Here are five of my favorite facts from the book that show how the world is improving:
- You’re 37 times less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning than you were at the turn of the century—and that’s not because there are fewer thunderstorms today. It’s because we have better weather prediction capabilities, improved safety education, and more people living in cities.
- Time spent doing laundry fell from 11.5 hours a week in 1920 to an hour and a half in 2014.This might sound trivial in the grand scheme of progress. But the rise of the washing machine has improved quality of life by freeing up time for people—mostly women—to enjoy other pursuits. That time represents nearly half a day every week that could be used for everything from binge-watching Ozark or reading a book to starting a new business.
- You’re way less likely to die on the job. Every year, 5,000 people die from occupational accidents in the U.S. But in 1929—when our population was less than two-fifths the size it is today—20,000 people died on the job. People back then viewed deadly workplace accidents as part of the cost of doing business. Today, we know better, and we’ve engineered ways to build things without putting nearly as many lives at risk.
- The global average IQ score is rising by about 3 IQ points every decade. Kids’ brains are developing more fully thanks to improved nutrition and a cleaner environment. Pinker also credits more analytical thinking in and out of the classroom. Think about how many symbols you interpret every time you check your phone’s home screen or look at a subway map. Our world today encourages abstract thought from a young age, and it’s making us smarter.
- War is illegal. This idea seems obvious. But before the creation of the United Nations in 1945, no institution had the power to stop countries from going to war with each other. Although there have been some exceptions, the threat of international sanctions and intervention has proven to be an effective deterrent to wars between nations.
Gates really believes war is illegal… While the USA has systematically refused, for decades, to be part of the International Court Of Justice, precisely set-up to make war illegal…
That “war is illegal” is an amusing notion, oft seen in history. We will see how long that will last, now that the North Korean cannibalistic dictator owns at least SIXTY NUCLEAR BOMBS…(If Russian and China kept on supporting North Korea if and when the West has to defang it, nuclear war will spread, and the world population will collapse even faster than the Jewish population in Europe from 1941 to 1945… The latter case was a decrease of ⅔, proportionally meaning nearly six billion dead now.)
That the creation of the United Nations was progress is not doubtful (the idea was initially proposed in France in 1916, and then ephemerally adopted by the US, before the US rejected it, and France and Britain tried to implement it as the SDN, in a vain attempt to block the return of German racist fascism; didn’t work… World War Two happened, 100 million people died, about 5% of the world population, and the USA, with few losses, while coming into command and control of 90% of the planet, in 1945, became immensely rich, and ever since led the world, even giving half of Europe to Stalin on the way, just because Europe was best, divided,..).
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To Explain Doom & Gloom, Consider That Inequality Is Insufferable to Primates: (Something Steven Pinker & Bill Gates don’t seem to be aware of!)
Bill Gates asks: “Pinker also tackles the disconnect between actual progress and the perception of progress—something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. People all over the world are living longer, healthier, and happier lives, so why do so many think things are getting worse? Why do we gloss over positive news stories and fixate on the negative ones? He does a good job explaining why we’re drawn to pessimism and how that instinct influences our approach to the world, although I wish he went more in-depth about the psychology (especially since he’s a psychologist by training).”
The glib, yet fundamental answer is that really bad stuff kills you, while really good stuff doesn’t. The more subtle answer to this is simple: inequality, inequity, have been skyrocketing. Primates can’t stand inequality and unfairness. This was demonstrated in the laboratory, even with new world primates as simple as Marmosets.
If they have to choose between eating and screaming their anger about injustice, Marmosets will often go for the latter, and attack the scientists setting up unfair experiments!
Elephants have five billion neurons in their frontal cortex. They too, hate injustice, and they don’t forget it. They can exact vengeance years later.
Why do intelligent animals combat inequity? Because intelligent social animals survive from their intelligence, most of which is culturally induced. For cultural intelligence to be as high as possible, all brains work in parallel, and not with just one on top, dictating its truth!
Thus evolution has made sure that we are not inclined to intellectual fascism (following mechanically the author of unique thought). We get sad, angry, infuriated and gloomy when we are forced to comply to think as the leader. All the more that the fascist instinct induces us to do that, only in times of combat (then following the leader, acting as one, is crucial). So our deep psychobiology assumes we are at war, or in combat, when we are forced to think as one.
Rebellion and revolution is how evolution into Homo Sapiens and civilization were created. Over millions of years, plenty of times to turn advantage into most human instincts, and all the more human, that no other species has it. We are professional revolutionaries, and those who want to put us to sleep, are the enemies of what made our species what it is.
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Pinker Flaunts Jewish Smarts, While Exhibiting Holocaust Conducive Stupidity:
Steven Pinker, is a shining blue eyed self-declared Jew, flaunts the GENETIC “intelligence” of Jews: “Jews make up 50% of the 200 top intellectuals, 40% of the Nobel Laureates…”
By dismissing the pessimism which led Nietzsche to give his strident warnings, Steven Pinker dismisses what could have saved the six million Jews who were assassinated by the Nazis. Interestingly, Pinker really seems to believe in the genetic superiority of Jews… So Pinker concedes to the Nazis, and other racists, the fundamental idea of the Nazis, and other racists: namely that there are genetic differences between population with STRIKING consequences in matter of intelligence. Using fancy phrases like “highly endogamous” (namely inbreeding) doesn’t make Pinker’s racism any less outrageous
(Pinker defines himself as Semitic, although he has blue eyes, just as piercing and blue as those of Adolf Hitler (couldn’t resist…) meaning his ancestors mixed it up with European stock… Violating the “highly endogamous” concept which is how he explains Jewish intelligence. Actually many European Jews, we know from historiography, were originally Catholics who converted to Judaism, as this was legal in the Frankish empire (and got the pesky Catholic church, with its anti-intellectual bias, off their backs). That works particularly well for Ashkenazi Jews who, it is known, moved into Eastern Europe from Germany, as testified by the fact Yiddish evolved from German…)
The evidence is then that Steven Pinker is not that smart, just playing one on TV. As a psychologist he doesn’t realize that tribal effects make it easier to raise, or lower, intelligence. Hence the colossal difference of IQ between Ashkenazi Jews and Australian aborigines. And then tribal effect explain why discoveries such as mass = energy are attributed to a Jew (Einstein) instead of the one who really established it (Jules Henri Poincaré; who divulged E = mcc publicly in 1899, at the Sorbonne, in physics journal in 1900, and in all generality, 1905… and also Poincaré discovered gravitational waves, relativistic version).
Calling Jews smarter and being very optimistic, the way Pinker is, while flaunting his Jewish status, is bizarre. a provocation bordering on the macabre: the population of Jews was around 17 millions in 1930. Now it’s 11 millions. How is that, for smarts? They were so smart, they didn’t see Nazism coming, They were so smart, much of the herd got eaten, and now they taunt the lions (Hadiths have orders, supposedly from God, to kill all Jews; antelopes taunting predators are a common view on the savannah…).
And the collapse, this holocaust, is not all the work of the Nazis, they got some help, and not just from the Vichy putschists, and other Jew haters around Europe: as Hannah Arendt pounded, Jewish leadership collaborated crucially too much with the Nazis. In particular, Pinker flaunts the “59% of 50 top grossing movie producers who are Jewish” could have heated up US public opinion (and German public opinion!) in the 1930s. That was a major intellectual failure, and a failure to see the problems, the huge problems, incoming.
We don’t need a power obsequious, racist optimistic mentality a la Pinker around. Only the plutocracy needs it. So Mr. Pinker will keep on doing well for himself, and the Gates of the world, especially the Gates of Hell, will keep on applauding…
Patrice Aymé
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