Article 43
Spiritual Diversions
Wednesday, November 08, 2023
Surviving Suicide
Fear, anger, shame, sadness. These are just some of the emotions I experienced in the immediate aftermath of my SUICIDE ATTEMPT. The days, weeks, months and even years following an attempt can look so very different for everyone. This is just a small window into one survivor’s personal experience.
- A Suicide Survivor’s Story
[P]eople who went through “post-traumatic growth” after life-events such as serious illness, divorce or the loss of a job, as well as near-death experiences. Initially, most of them experienced a DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL, where their previous values were thrown into question, and life ceased to have any meaning. After this, they went through a phase of spiritual searching, trying to make sense of what had happened to them, and find new values. And finally, once they had found new spiritual principles to live by, they entered a phase of “spiritual integration,” when they applied these new principles.
- Psychological Healing
When my mother fell to her knees crying SIX YEARS AGO after I told her I can’t afford a plane ticket to visit her anymore - I went in the garage, hooked up a hose to the car’s tailpipe, sat in the front seat with it, turned on the engine, shut it off a few seconds later, and chickened out.
- Lost All Hope
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I’m with the JAPANESE. Suicide is a morally honorable way to step away from a lousy, miserable life that turned south. After awhile the pain can get get so bad, that even your loved ones find it hard to deal with, and you wind up pulling them with you.
Because of CATALYTIC COVERTERS, inhaling car exhaust may not produce enough carbon monoxide to guaranty death. Maybe LAYING DOWN ON TRAIN TRACKS is a better idea.
How many things can be more painful than a failed suicide attempt without a NADIR EXPERIENCE, epiphany or some other TRANSFORMATIVE EVENT after?
The article below makes it seems not too many. Are they serious?
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Surviving a Suicide Attempt
By the Psychology Today Staff
Suicide attempts are significantly more common than completed suicides. In 2019, for example, the CDC REPORTED that in the U.S., there were 47,500 completed suicides compared to 1.4 million attempts - and while both of these numbers are likely underreported, they suggest that less than 5 percent of suicide attempts are fatal.
Those who attempt suicide and survive often require significant support afterward, and should seek mental healthcare if they are able. But the good news is that while some who have attempted suicide continue to struggle with suicidal thoughts, the majority of those who attempt suicide will not attempt suicide again; overall, the CDC reports that more than 90 percent of those who survive a suicide attempt will not go on to die by suicide.
The Aftermath of Attempted Suicide
Most suicide attempts are non-fatal, and most people who attempt suicide do not go on to attempt again. But that doesn’t mean that surviving a suicide attempt will immediately solve the issues that first drove the person to make an attempt on their own life. Understanding the potential emotional aftermath of an attempt - and being aware that anyone who attempted suicide once may still be at risk - is necessary for helping survivors get mentally well and protecting them from future harm.
How do survivors usually feel after a suicide attempt?
The emotions that follow a suicide attempt can vary widely - from relief and hopefulness to sadness, anger, or regret. Some suicide survivors report feeling immediate second thoughts after the attempt, followed by an intense feeling of relief when they realized they’d survived. Some feel as if they’ve been given a new lease on life, and are able to return to their lives with a greater sense of purpose and gratitude; others report feeling as if a burden has been lifted - especially if they had been keeping their mental health challenges or suicidal thoughts secret from their loved ones - or as if they’ve been “snapped out” of their despair.
But sadly, such feelings aren’t universal. Some who survive a suicide attempt report feeling disappointed, ashamed, empty, or even more depressed than they were before. Although some evidence suggests that such negative feelings will dissipate for the majority of suicide attempt survivors, they should be heeded if present, as they may indicate that the individual is still at risk of suicidal thoughts or future suicidal behaviors. While anyone who has attempted suicide should seek mental healthcare in the immediate aftermath, it is especially imperative for those who continue to feel predominantly negative or who are having thoughts of a future attempt.
Are people who survived a suicide attempt still at risk?
They can be. While many people who attempted suicide go on to live happy, fulfilling lives, previous suicide attempts are known RISK FACTORS for future attempts. Thus, its important for anyone who has attempted suicide in the past, and their loved ones, to pay attention to their mental well-being and seek immediate help when thoughts of suicide resurface.
How many suicide attempt survivors attempt suicide again at a later time?
Most people who attempt suicide - approximately 70 percent, according to some studies - will never attempt suicide again. Of those who do attempt suicide again, most will survive. Studies have estimated that anywhere from 5 to 13 percent of those who attempt suicide will later go on to die by it.
What can be done to better the lives of suicide attempt survivors?
Despite the relative prevalence of non-fatal suicide attempts, survivors are often left out of conversations around suicide, and their well-being post-attempt has not been the subject of a significant amount of research. In order to IMPROVE THE LIFE OF SUICIDE ATTEMPT SURVIVORS and to reduce their risk of later death by suicide, researchers suggest an increased focus on their mental state after an attempt - with a particular focus on identifying the factors that promote well-being and resilience.
Important, too, is a better understanding of what differentiates those who go on to attempt again and those who don’t, along with the emotional and social strategies that can best help individuals cope. Psychological flexibility, for example, is theorized to help survivors move forward after the attempt, rather than ruminating on it. If such theories are held up in research, treatment approaches that foster psychological flexibility - both before and after an attempt - may be valuable to explore.
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Monday, August 14, 2023
Sagan and Star Trek
We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements - transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
- The Dumbing Down of America
My brothers and sisters, if anyone is detected in a transgression, you who have received the Spirit should restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness. Take care that you yourselves are not tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. For if those who are nothing think they are something, they deceive themselves. All must test their own work; then that work, rather than their neighbors work, will become a cause for pride. For all must carry their own loads.
Emotional contagion can occur at political rallies, in combat zones, in mass protests and revolutions, at public killings, or in ecstatic religious rites. Within families, emotional contagion can set the tenor of a household. A sensitive child may absorb a mother’s non-verbally expressed depression or a father’s pent-up anger and feel it as their own.
- Transforming Empathy into Compassion, Psychology Today
Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow. If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh, but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit. So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up. So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all and especially for those of the family of faith.
- Galatians 6: 1-10
Emptiness and compassion go hand in hand. Compassion as transaction - me over here, being compassionate to you over there - is simply too clunky and difficult. If I am going to be responsible to receive your suffering and do something about it, and if I am going to make this kind of compassion the cornerstone of my religious life, I will soon be exhausted. But if I see the boundarylessness of me and you, and recognize that my suffering and your suffering are one suffering, and that that suffering is empty of any separation, weightiness, or ultimate tragedy, then I can do it. I can be boundlessly compassionate and loving, without limit. To be sure, living this teaching takes time and effort, and maybe we never entirely arrive at it. But its a joyful, heartfelt path worth treading.
- Thich Nhat Hanh---
Cosmos 1980
Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group.
Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations.
We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as super-powers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together - surely a humanizing and character building experience.
If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth.
Many of those who run the nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nation-states will have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different context, is clearly thoe universe or nothing.
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The Radical Politics of Star Trek
By Simon Tyrie
Tribune UK
August 14, 2023
Star Trek envisioned a world beyond capitalism, racism and oppression where technology is harnessed to end all forms of exploitation and injustice - its lessons remain as relevant as ever.
It’s the year 2364 and a tatty old space shuttle containing former Wall Street capitalist Ralph Offenhouse, who was cryogenically frozen in 1994, has just been discovered floating through space by a starship called the Enterprise-D. Upon waking, Offenhouse discovers that, although science has found a cure for his previously terminal illness, his bank accounts and investments have all gone. To his horror, not even his beloved The Wall Street Journal has survived the ravages of time.
A lot has changed in the past three hundred years, the ships captain Jean-Luc Picard tells him. ‘People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.’
It’s particularly striking that in a genre that trends towards bleak, dystopian futures, Star Trek is an outlier in science fiction for offering an optimistic vision for humanitys future. In fact, while it may be overly simplistic to say that Star Trek depicts a socialist society, its utopianism owes much to the ideas of Marx in that it imagines a future where collectivism triumphs, money is obsolete, and every material need is met.
Beyond Capitalism
Spaceship and its crew whose enduring mission is to ‘boldly go where no one has gone before’. But as Captain Picard explains in First Contact (1996), ‘The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.’
Instead of working just to live, humans are free to spend their time exploring the cosmos, or inventing, or making art - and sometimes doing all three. This optimistic view of human nature is in stark contrast to films such as Pixar’s WALL-E, which follows the right-wing line of thinking that achieving a post-scarcity society (solving what Keynes calls the economic problem) would lead to sloth and hedonism, and ultimately the demise of humanity.
In Star Trek, geopolitics is a thing of the past. Instead, there’s the United Federation of Planets, a United Nations-inspired organisation founded on the principles of liberty, equality, justice, progress, and peaceful co-existence, which is dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and the universal enfranchisement of sentient life. It is a world in which economic conditions allow each person to contribute to society according to their ability and consume according to their needs.
Its worth noting here that Star Trek is a product of a political era that preceded the post-Fordist, neoliberal conditions, when different futures were not only imagined but contested. The Original Series aired between 1966 and 1969җa fertile period for the political imagination in spite of great unrest.
Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek’s creator, certainly subscribed to this optimism. He believed that humanity, rather than being doomed to self-destruct, was destined to evolve out of our political myopia. It was thanks to Roddenberry that The Original Series, though dated by today’s standards, was ahead of its time with its multinational, multi-ethnic, and multi-gender crew. Famously, the show televised the worlds first interracial kiss (in an episode banned by the BBC), and Martin Luther King once said that Star Trek was ‘the only show I and my wife Coretta will allow our three little children to stay up and watch.’
Today, Roddenberry’s flaws and hypocrisies are well documented. According to his last wife, Magel Barrett, he identified as a communist. But we know from the many accounts of his unethical business practices that he was also obsessed with making money. He preached peace and love but was infamously difficult to get along with. And he flew the flag for feminism while being a notorious womaniser.
Rather than focus on Roddenberry the man, I find it more interesting to evaluate Roddenberry the salesman. When the show aired, there was widespread unrest; the US was being torn apart by race riots and anti-war protests; and the then very new and horrifying threat of nuclear Armageddon loomed large on the horizon. But rather than offer an extrapolation or exacerbationђ of these conditions, as culture is prone to do, Roddenberry saw the appeal of a brighter future.
Perhaps he recognised this appeal because he knew better than most HOW AWFUL humans could be.
When the show was rebooted in the 1980s, the political horizon was narrowing. Yet it was in this decade, just two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, that Star Trek became most notably Marxian. This was all thanks to the introduction of the \replicator’, a futuristic 3D printer that can create anything out of recycled matter, thus solving the problem of scarcity. So far, so science-fiction.
But in Star Trek, technology alone doesn’t bring about utopia. As we learn through the introduction of the Ferengi - an alien race whose culture centres around greed and profiteering - the socialisation of the replicator is a political choice. The Ferengi’s replicators are privatised, whereas replicators in the Federation are publicly owned.
While concepts such as warp-speed propulsion and teleportation remain firmly in the realm of science fiction, many of Star Treks technological predictions have materialised or are coming to pass - including the concept of 3D printing at the molecular level and the increasingly EXPLOITATIVE APPLICATIONS of ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. What capitalism renders unthinkable is the politics behind technology: that developments in technology might benefit us rather than USHER IN further alienation.
Star Trek provides an antithesis to how capitalism predisposes us to view technology, allowing us to imagine what society might look like if technology were used purely for improving our quality of life. Instead of following this path, the morsels of convenience we’ve received through technological advancements are only enough to numb us to the realisation that weve become locked into a cycle of consumerism and surveillance capitalism.
Constructing Utopia
Another utopian aspect of Star Trek is its depiction of solidarity. Roddenberry had many ‘rules’ he insisted upon the show following, but his most infamous is what’s become known as ‘Roddenberry’s principle’: a mandate that conflict must never be between the main characters, only with external forces.
Roddenberrys argument was that, for the utopian conditions of Star Trek to be believable, the characters must represent the best of humanity. In the episode ґRemember Me, the ship;s doctor Beverly Crusher notes that crewmembers are disappearing. But each time a person disappears, they become forgotten by everyone else; to the rest of the crew, they never existed.
In a typical drama, this would be whats called a ґCassandra Truth plotline: the hero discovers a conspiracy, nobody else believes them, and so the hero has no choice but to solve the mystery alone. But in Star Trek, rather than treat the doctor as though she has lost her mind, the possibility that people are being erased from existence is taken seriously and investigated by her colleagues.
Instead of the showҒs drama revolving around interpersonal conflict, problems are overcome through teamwork, and very rarely as the result of one persons heroism. ItҒs one of the most unique aspects of the show; as viewers, weve come to expect conflict between characters to be one of the most fundamental aspects of drama.
There’s comfort in knowing that no matter the scale of the problem, you can trust the characters to communicate their thoughts and feelings, weigh the situation objectively, and work together. But more than comfort, Star Trek continuously offers examples of cooperation, conflict resolution, kindness and empathy that are in short supply in most modern dramas.
To me, this is perhaps the most radical element of Star Trek. In simply showing the possibilities of cooperation, the show offers something for us to all strive towards - and solidarity is no doubt the first building block required for constructing utopia.
Sci-Fi Optimism
When the time comes for the twentieth-century capitalist Ralph Offenhouse to return to twenty-fourth-century Earth, he’s at a loss. ‘What will I do? How will I live?’ he asks. ‘Whats the challenge?’ The problem is, Offenhouse has never allowed himself to imagine an alternative to capitalism. And to someone that has lived his whole life in a prison, there is nothing more daunting than being set free. Like the prisoner in PLATO’S CAVE, the instinct is to return to the darkness that hes accustomed to.
In a sense, we are all Offenhouse. We might not all suffer from his peculiar strain of capitalist Stockholm syndrome, but we all, naturally, struggle to imagine an alternative way of living. We all live under the same political system that snuffs out any threats to its existence by design, and it becomes harder to imagine an alternative each day that this system entrenches itself deeper into our lives.
Here lies the power of Star Trek. It’s easy to dismiss utopian science-fiction as escapist, as though capitalist escapism is a lower form of art realism, but what good does the constant reminder that everything is bad do for society? Negativity is hardly inspiring. And besides, as Gene Roddenberry recognised (politicians take note), optimism sells.
About the author: Simon Tyrie is a musician and activist from Luton.
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Sunday, June 11, 2023
The Kids Are Not Allright III
Mak, 31, grew up in Westchester, graduated from the University of Chicago and toiled in publishing in New York during his 20s before moving to Baltimore last year with a meager part-time blogging job and prospects for little else. About half of his friends in Baltimore have been getting food stamps since the economy toppled, so he decided to give it a try; to his delight, he qualified for $200 a month.
- Hipsters on Food Stamps, 2012
CONSERVATIVES are forever preaching about family values, but their job-destroying, anti-worker policies have made it harder and harder for young people to put down roots and reach the level of stability required for long-term relationships and children.
- Layoff, Love and Insecurity, 2012
Day-to-day, the single-most intimidating OBSTACLE I face is not the unemployment rate or another round of hapless job interviews, but ATTACHING AN IDENTITY to THE MAN I make eye contact with each morning in the vanity mirror.
- Trials of a Stay-at-Home Boyfriend, 2012
White, non-urban, non-college educated men have the slowest wage growth in every demographic category…
- Inequality 2020
· Men account for over 75 percent of suicides, and the rate of male suicide has risen in recent decades.
· The statistics suggest that existing approaches to male suicide are deficient.
· New, male-friendly suicide prevention measures must be adopted to help halt the crisis.
- The Silent Crisis of Male Suicide, Psychology Today, 2021---
The Boys Of America Are Suffering - How Can We Help Them?
By John Mac Ghlionn
The Epoch Times
June 6, 2023
Contrary to POPULAR BELIEF, the patriarchy doesn’t rule with an iron fist. Nevertheless, for some perverse reason, the myth of male privilege still persists. Today, only a fool could LOOK AROUND and honestly say that we live in a man’s world. Every 13.7 MINUTES, somewhere in the United States, a man takes his own life. For every female that commits suicide, there are four men ending their own lives. Millions of boys and men lead lives of quiet desperation, rotting away inside SELF-IMPOSED PRISON CELLS.
What should these men do? See a medical doctor, perhaps? Maybe visit a psychologist?
As I’ve noted before, the fields of MEDICINEand PSYCHOLOGY are, like the men of America, also in crisis. This isnҒt to say that all doctors and all psychologists offer nothing of value, of course. This is to say that the institutions creating the doctors and psychologists of tomorrow are, for lack of a better word, damaged.
In the field of psychology, as the science writer Rolf Degen RECENTLY NOTED, approximately 1 in every 10 citations “across leading psychology journals is completely inaccurate, misrepresenting or even contradicting the cited findings.” Still reeling from the effects of the much-discussed REPLICATION CRISIS, psychology now has a crisis of reputation to wrestle with. To compound matters, the American Psychological Association (APA), the main accreditor for professional education and training in psychology, has, for years, DEMONIZED MASCULINITY, labeling admirable qualities such as stoicism and competitiveness “psychologically harmful.”
As the psychologist Christopher J. Ferguson, a man who has been VERY CRITICAL of the APA in the past, told me, the APA’s “controversial position on men and masculinity is part of a larger problem of ideological capture for the APA, as it increasingly parrots far-left talking points, rather than educating people on the often messy and nuanced science.”
Sadly, he added, the APA “really stopped functioning as a science organization a long time ago, and its current disparagement of traditional men, in the absence of good data, should properly be viewed as prejudicial and unethical.”
Strong words. Ferguson, one of the few psychologists brave enough to stand up and speak out against the psychological establishment, knows that psychology, in its current form, isn’t fit for purpose.
If the men and boys of America can’t rely on doctors and psychologists for support, what should they do?
As Jordan Peterson’s success has shown us, many men, particularly young men, are looking to individuals rather than institutions for answers. However, as Peterson goes from being a public intellectual to a modern-day superhero intent on defeating the BAD GUYS IN DAVOS, young men are looking for new role models.
Enter Richard Reeves, an academic whose research focuses on issues pertaining to INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL MOBILITY. For years, Reeves has been held up as a “rational” voice, a strong representative for the boys and men of America. However, Reeves, who seems like a very decent man, is affiliated with the BROOKINGS INSTITUTION, a research group that The New York Times GLOWINGLY REFERS TO as “a pillar of Washington’s liberal establishment” and a “prestigious, left-leaning institution.” In other words, Reeves, like so many other researchers and commentators, is a slave to the liberal machine, the very same machine that has steamrolled over men for years.
In his latest book, OF BOYS AND MEN, Reeves goes to great lengths to praise FEMINISM and the feminist framework of intersectionality. More concerningly, Reeves appears to be rather fond of using the term “cis heterosexual,” instead of using a normal term like “straight.” Is a man who uses such terminology really capable of helping normal, everyday boys who are struggling to find meaning in their lives?
There’s also Matt Pinkett, the author of the brand new book, provocatively titled BOYS DO CRY. According to the British teacher and author, schools should provide “lessons in bromance” to address the mental health crisis among boys. However, like Reeves, Pinkett goes to great lengths to smuggle in trans-friendly jargon, even dedicating AN ENTIRE CHAPTER to the many ways in which masculinity overlaps with LGBTQ+ issues. Also, like Reeves, Pinkett places great emphasis on encouraging boys to be more vulnerable, to embrace the tears, and to cry with pride.
Although the two authors correctly identify the problems facing boys, their prescriptions leave a lot to be desired. ADAM LANE SMITH, a psychotherapist who has been commenting on the MASCULINITY CRISIS for years, told me that “the current education system is built to operate in a way counter to how most boys learn and thrive.”
“The research is clear,” he said, with “an increasing number of boys being diagnosed by teachers and school staff with attention issues.” “These teachers and staff, “added Smith, “then pressure parents to find a doctor to corroborate that diagnosis and immediately medicate the boy, or else he will be expelled.”
Even boys without violent tendencies are being pressured into medication or else they face expulsion, Smith told me. Part of this is due to the feminization of schools. In the United States, roughly 75 PERCENT of teachers are female. Many of these teachers, noted Smith, are overworked and “lack the mental energy required to deal with 30+ children for so many hours in a day; the boys will often stick out due to their higher testosterone behaviors.”
“Many of these female teachers also appear to struggle to engage with male students and consistently grade female students higher to encourage them,” said the specialist.
Smith appears to be right. Girls perform better when they’re taught by a female teacher; the same, however, isn’t true for boys.
As STUDIES SHOW, single-sex schooling and especially more hands-on school approaches prove that supposedly “problematic” boys can thrive in environments suitable to their mental functioning. Most teachers learn how to “deal” with boys through various training sessions and workshops. As Smith noted, “many of these sessions and workshops have, in recent times, shifted to encourage teachers to view natural boy behaviors and energy levels as problematic to the profession.”
“Boys," he contends, are now a liability to be managed and pushed through the system as the teachers focus their energies on uplifting and empowering the girls.”
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Tuesday, May 02, 2023
NWO - Free Will In The New Order
The fact of the matter is that no volume of evidence, no matter how overwhelming, will ever be convincing enough if you are dead set in your presupposition that there is no divine source for the unimaginable complexity we observe in all living systems. As the Bible accurately states, “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 53:1).
- Evolutionary Crisis And The Third Way, 2016
The story [BETTER THAN US] takes place in 2029, in a world where androids serve humans in various positions, even replacing them in many MENIAL JOBS. An advanced robot named Arisa is imported to Russia from China discreetly, within the CRONOS corporation. Arisa accidentally kills a man who tries to use her as a sex robot, and then flees. Her ability to kill humans shows she does not abide by Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. Instead, she is designed to protect her family (which includes herself) by all means possible. She encounters a little girl (Sonia) and automatically bonds with her, making herself the child’s guardian.
- Better Than Us, 2018
What can possibly happen with the human species when the GOVERNMENT and BIG PHARMA are in charge?… Government intervention involving eugenicist practices in the past had suboptimal outcomes. If one looks to American, they can bear witness to the atrocities that resulted from nearly complete government control of practices like sterilization as thousands of citizens were sterilized because the state deemed them unfit to reproduce.
- Resurrecting The Snake, September 2022
The September 12, 2022 White House EXECUTIVE ORDER pledges R&D funds to the biotech industry to enable it “to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers.” We may be glad of this implied admission that the biotech industry currently cannot “predictably program biology” nor effectively “write circuitry for cells,” as demonstrated by the ABJECT FAILURE of the COVID-19 INJECTIONS. But we may also be concerned that technocrats - who believe that such advances will be possible once they “unlock the power of biological data, including through computing tools and artificial intelligence” - will, therefore, continue to use us as lab monkeys as they pursue impossible goals.
- The Perils of Coding Humanity: A Response to Transhumanism, October 2022
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WEF Transhumanists will fail to hack humans because of the complexities of human nature such as free will
By Rhonda Wilson
Expose News
December 23, 2022
Transhumanists believe “humans are hackable animals” therefore democracy is impossible and we need to be hacked for our own good. But their ignorance is their Achilles’ Heel and they are certain to fail.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) Transhumanist movement is more or less open about the fact that they want to trade our self-governed and representative democracies in for AI-managed surveillance systems that will ration resources and keep tabs on individual performances. And from the various promotional videos and speeches made by the WEF, we can gather that an Internet of Things and Internet of Bodies is slated to replace the functions of community and social and political structures.
But, in the essay below V. N. Alexander argues that WEF members have simplistic views of, not only human nature but also of ecosystems and societies.
One of the complexities that WEF members have failed to grasp is free will. Yuval Noah Harari, for example, seems to think free will is merely an output of what has been input into the machine - the machine is us. There is nothing in the machine to transform what is input. Instead, there is an algorithm in the machine that can be decrypted and reprogrammed = that can be hacked. How wrong they are.
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“Liberalism tells us that the voter knows best, that the customer is always right, and that we should think for ourselves and follow our hearts. Unfortunately, ‘free will’ isn’t a scientific reality. It is a myth inherited from Christian theology. Theologians developed the idea of “free will” to explain why God is right to punish sinners for their bad choices and reward saints for their good choices.” - Yuval Noah Harari
Although World Economic Forum (WEF) transhumanists may not have a unified ideology per se, we may look to Yuval Noah Harari, a WEF member who is a prolific writer and voluble frontman, to get a general sense of the assumptions held by that coterie of financial elites who think they can alter the course of human civilization, human evolution, and re-codify human rights. While their grandiose narcissism verges on the cartoonish-ness of the comic book villain seeking world domination, we must, nevertheless, take their words and their plans seriously because their claims to ownership and/or control of monetary systems, communication infrastructure and natural resources do, unfortunately, lend them quite a bit of power over us - at the moment.
What is the WEF Transhumanist movement? Although their stated objectives are cloaked in tones of benevolent concern, they are more or less open about the fact that they want to trade our self-governed and representative democracies in for AI-managed surveillance systems that will ration resources and keep tabs on individual performances. The proposed tools for this include, Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), Social Impact Investing, and gamified software for education, health monitoring, welfare recipient monitoring, and job skills training. As HARARI argues in an ESSAY in The Guardian, liberal democracy and the belief in free will are “dangerous, because governments and corporations that have access to everyone’s digital histories will soon “know you better than you know yourself” and they will be able to “hack” you, put ideas in your head, get you to buy bad things and vote for bad people. Without supplying a rationale, he adds, the easiest people to manipulate will be those who believe in free will.”
In contrast, the ones who know they can’t think for themselves, Harari further argues, will be saved by their personalised AI babysitters. In Hararis future world, there will be no God dangling the carrot or brandishing the stick, but there will be an all-seeing AI that does. What “we need,” he goes on, is “an antivirus for the brain. Your AI sidekick will learn by experience that you have a particular weakness - and would block [it] on your behalf. The obvious alternative solution, fully protecting privacy and making data collection by governments and corporations illegal without full informed consent, [1] seems not to have occurred to Professor Harari.
From the various promotional videos and speeches made by the WEF, we can gather that an Internet of Things and of Bodies is slated to replace the functions of community and social and political structures. In the future, researchers will develop Brain-Machine-Interfaces (BMI) that will monitor, and eventually help cause, our thoughts and actions as well as diagnose and treat any mental health conditions. We will be ushered into Smart Cities (think luxury Borg condos). While the countryside is left to re-wild (for the pleasure of oligarchs on safari), agriculture will move into laboratories, and we will be fed synthetic chicken, wormburgers and LED-grown medicated lettuce in exchange for doing some kind of work that will probably involve operating mining robots or drones using Virtual Reality (VR) headsets. I wish I were exaggerating for comic effect, but these are the kinds of programs being promoted by the WEF and in Klaus Schwab’s book, THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION.
Despite the Transhumanists’ claim that they strive to augment human abilities with new technologies, the kinds of hacks they’ve offered so far are mostly negative. It’s relatively easy to maim, disable, block, traumatise, and propagandise; it will be a little difficult to figure out how to use a BMI to make us smarter or to read our thoughts so we don’t have to type or speak. As Neuralink’s recent “show and tell” revealed, the company’s progress is so far underwhelming. As HUMAN TRIALS NEAR, the infection risk associated with implanting a device into a paraplegics brain to help him operate a smartphone does not seem justified to me. Why go through all the trouble (and brain surgery!) to detect brain activity of motor control (e.g., moving the eyes), then to use AI to pick out the signal from the noise, and then turn the signal into clicks on a screen, when the person could more easily operate a computer interface with voice commands?
It may be that the architects of the Transhumanist revolution actually believe that AI-augmented and AI-managed society will be a big improvement, more efficient, more objective, equitable and inclusive, free from the biases and prejudices that plague the human species. But it’s worth noting that these kinds of plans have never turned out well in any of our culture’s science fiction explorations. Perhaps none of the WEF members have ever read MARY SHELLY or ORWELL and have never seen a BLACK MIRROR episode.
A Historical Perspective on the Idea of Free Will
Harari promotes himself as an innovative and modern thinker, working to free us from medieval superstitions.
Its 2022.
Medieval theology was revised with the de-centering discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo and that theology was adapted to fit Newton’s findings and that was adapted even to Darwinism (in New England Transcendentalism) and that to the Big Bang theory (Fiat lux!), and so forth, on down to the Vatican Observatory exploring the idea of divine quantum cosmology and etc., etc. Theologies are quite capable of adapting to every new scientific conception of determinism and chance that comes along. I am not religious, but I have respect for the many scholars who have grappled valiantly over the millennia with the difficult question of how we do seem to have free will even in a universe that is determined by either fate, God, physics, natural selection, or quantum foam.
Because Harari is still trying to debunk medieval theology, the closest conceptual relative to his notion of free will is found among 18th-century Enlightenment philosophes, who critiqued the medieval church and thought that free will is an illusion. I note that Harari rejects the liberalism birthed by the Enlightenment, mainly because he thinks technology has made their approach to safeguarding individual rights (e.g., elections, free markets) obsolete.
One of the most exemplary figures of that period is mathematician Pierre Laplace, who famously said that - I’m paraphrasing here - if we knew the position and velocity of every atom at the beginning of time, we could predict every event that follows, even human actions, which are just the outcomes of chemical interactions ruled by the laws of physics.
Echoing Denis Diderots fictional hero, JACQUES THE FATALIST, Harari tells us:
“Every choice depends on a lot of biological, social and personal conditions that you cannot determine for yourself. I can choose what to eat, whom to marry and whom to vote for, but these choices are determined in part by my genes, my biochemistry, my gender, my family background, my national culture, etc.”
Harari seems to be saying that a human body is like an instrument through which forces pass without being transformed by the organisational structure of the body. Input = output and nothing is interpreted by the “machinery” that is you. Harari seems to assume that living organisms are like computers and can be manipulated (hacked) in predictable ways. Repeatedly in talks, articles and books, he suggests that a personҒs cognitive program can be altered - by external forces, information, or chemistry - because there is nothing “inside” the person to counter or alter those forces. There is no ghost in the machine. Instead, there is an algorithm in the machine that can be decrypted and reprogrammed.
While Laplace lamented that a human consciousness did not exist that could calculate the mind-boggling number of interactions that would be necessary to predict human actions, today’s Transhumanists are hopeful that supercomputers - equipped with AI that is fed with mountains of Big Data on every digital move we’ve ever made - are now close to possessing the processing power to predict outcomes precisely. If those with access to such computers can predict what people will do, they can control them. (Cue the maniacal laughter sound effect.)
Maybe not.
In 1961, Edward Lorenz was using a computer to make predictions about the weather, and he found that if he made a tiny “insignificant” change to the input, the output changed drastically, all out of proportion to the small change. To model the weather is to try to model a complex system, whose dynamics are non-linear; your ability to predict such a system’s outcome does not improve in proportion to the amount of data you input. So Bigger and Bigger Data and faster and faster processing isn’t going to improve prediction and control as much as the Transhumanists hope. Biological systems are infinitely more complex than weather systems, so with Lorenz’s discovery of “deterministic chaos,” any hope that one would ever be able to accurately predict and thereby precisely control a human being’s actions had to be abandoned. In 1986, non-linear dynamic systems researchers, Crutchfield, et al. published a watershed ARTICLE entitled, “Chaos,” in Scientific American, in which they expanded on Lorenz’s findings, arguing that, even if the universe were entirely deterministic (and it most likely is not), complex biological processes are inherently unpredictable - due to the way they internally process information - and thus, ultimately, they are uncontrollable, except in trivial ways.
In the article, Crutchfield et al., like theologians before them, also grapple with the question of free will and how it relates to determinism and chance. They conclude:
“Innate creativity may have an underlying chaotic process that selectively amplifies small fluctuations and moulds them into macroscopic coherent mental states that are experienced as thoughts. In some cases, the thoughts may be decisions, or what are perceived to be the exercise of will. In this light, chaos provides a mechanism that allows for free will within a world governed by deterministic laws.”
There followed many decades of research investigating free will in the terms of self-organisation and complex systems science. As I have noted ELSEWHERE, many neuroscience researchers describe how chaotic attractors and/or emergent travelling waves provide the differentiation in spatial patterns that underlie working memory and attention. Such findings by no means settle the question of free will. Science is never settled. Arguments about the nature of free will will continue as long as humans are around.
Even as I claim that human beings very likely do have some kind of capacity for making their own idiosyncratic choices, I also note that it is painfully obvious that people can be manipulated. In the last couple of years, with horror, we vaccine apostates have LOST THE ABILITY TO THINK FOR THEMSELVES. [2] At a chemical level, what has probably happened to these traumatised people is that the vagus nerve, which was activated in a state of fear, triggered the release of norepinephrine, which FLOODED THE AMYGDALA AND LOCKED IN MEMORIES. Whatever kinds of associative memories are formed in such a situation, for example, the repeated claim that an experimental “vaccination is the only solution” to a virus with a relatively low fatality rate, will be a strong persistent memory, even if irrational. This process of strengthening memories associated with dangerous situations is a very useful tool of our evolved biology that has been hijacked (hacked) by those applying false information under a kind of torture. But the fact that people can be manipulated with something immaterial like false information just shows how people’s thoughts are not wholly determined by material reality. We can be deceived. We can also be physically forced into doing things we don’t want to do; we can be coerced, bribed or drugged. Our mental capacities can be damaged by illness. We can become addicted to our own habits. There are many ways in which our ability to think and act reasonably and for our own good can be compromised. This in no way means that free will has no scientific reality. It just means that we are part of the world we live in and we are affected by it.
Free will is not about not having any constraints. FREE WILL IS MORE ABOUT BEING RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR ACTIONS. Being free is not an all-or-nothing property. It’s a constant negotiation. The term we want is really agency, not free will. Not thinking can even be part of how we exercise agency. Most of the time, during our daily activities we’re on autopilot. We can drive our cars without really thinking, even react intelligently in a split second by putting on the brakes when we see red lights ahead. Subconscious auto-thinking can also switch off when we encounter a new situation that we don’t have a mental habit for, which allows us to learn something new.
Maybe the tragedy that we are currently suffering through is due to the fact that too many people put themselves on autopilot, OUTSOURCING THE RESPONSIBILITY OF MAKING DECISIONS for themselves and their children to trusted authorities. Unfortunately, thinking for yourself requires a lot of work. And no one else can do it but you.
Whenever I find myself in a crowd of protesters who are all yelling, “freedom, freedom, freedom!” I yell, “responsibility!” My cry doesn’t work as well as a chant, but IMHO, it does work better as a description of what we probably all want. We don’t want the freedom to do whatever the hell we like, selfishly. We want the personal responsibility that comes with being free to question, research, discuss, decide and act. Likewise, we dont have the right to do with our children whatever we want; we have the responsibility to protect their health and wellbeing.
In a word, the phenomenon of free will is today understood as emergent from biological constraints, relations, and, what I would call, self-made luck. [3] Harari claims that the concept of free will has only ever been based on the notion of a pre-existing essentialist nature that is “independent of all physical and biological constraints.” Although Professor Harari is a historian, he has apparently only read the CLIFFSNOTES for AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO and Thomas Aquinas, and even less of complex systems science.
Conclusions
The objective of this essay is not to win a philosophical debate against Harari. In fact, it’s better for us if all the WEF members continue in their simplistic views of, not only human nature but also of ecosystems and societies. Their ignorance is their Achilles’ Heel. It allows them to believe it is possible to achieve top-down control over a complex system like the planet and all its inhabitants. They are certain to fail. The danger is, of course, that they will take us down with them. Catastrophic change is already underway with regard to our food supply and health systems. We have limited time to position ourselves to save as many people as possible. But we do have a chance.
A complex system like human society, interconnected in so many ways, maintains itself to a great degree automatically by self-organisation (and to a lesser degree by conspirators). The role of habit in maintaining the system and suppressing change cannot be overstated. To implement technocratic totalitarian rule, the Fourth Industrial Revolutionists won’t be able to just fine-tune the present system; they will have to take down the system that they have corrupted and abused to get to their positions of power. That will leave them vulnerable. If they want us to become dependent on their lab-grown food rations, they will have to sink shipping, lose food processing plants to suspicious fires, outlaw fossil fuel agriculture and slaughter the herds in factory farms. So many aspects of the economy and society hinge upon the present system that when it is disassembled, it will be a devastating shock. We can expect chaos. The outcome will be impossible for them to CONTROL, even with all their economic powers. During that time of chaos, we will have as much of an OPPORTUNITY as the WEF, if not more because there are so many more of us, to pivot to LOCAL food production, regenerative grazing and permaculture farming.
Many of us have already switched to local foods, decentralised education (like home schooling for kids and IPAK-EDU for adults) and have left the industrial-pharmaceutical-medical complex. The people’s revolution has already begun. Don’t look for any leaders to think for us or to tell us what to do.
Sign up for V. N. Alexander’s course at IPAK-EDU: THE PERILS OF CODING HUMANITY: A RESPONSE TO TRANSHUMANISM.
About the Author: VN ALEXANDER, PhD, works on the philosophy of creativity and art-science topics. She is a member of the distinguished group of researchers, the Third Way of Evolution. Her work on novelist Vladimir Nabokov’s contributions to the theory of insect mimicry has been widely recognised, and her award-winning literary fiction novels include, SMOKING HOPES (1996), NAKED SINGULARITY (2003), and LOCUS AMNUS(2015). Alexander is currently writing a political satire novel, COVID 1984, THE MUSICAL.
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Monday, May 01, 2023
Altrusim
In the fields of ecology and sociobiology, Hamilton’s Rules states that organisms evolve to support genetic success more than individual reproductive success. In other words, the survival of one’s own genes depends not only on how many offspring a parent produces but also upon the reproductive success of close relatives. Hamilton’s Rules helps explain the existence of family systems in nature.
- What does Hamilton’s Rule explain?
At Emory University a study revealed that helping others lit up the same part of the brain as receiving rewards or experiencing pleasure.
- The Helper’s High
Charity is really self-interest masquerading under the form of altruism.
- Anthony de Mello
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Origins of altruism: why Hamilton still rules 50 years on
By Ben Oldroyd, Madeleine Beekman, and Rob Brooks
The Conversation
July 3, 2014
Fifty years ago this month, evolutionary biologist William Donald Hamilton PUBLISHED a SOLUTION to one of biology’s most enduring mysteries: why does altruism exist?
Altruistic behaviours are those where an individual helps others at a personal cost. Altruism ALL AROUND US, yet biologists since Charles Darwin had stewed over how such behaviours could ever evolve in the dog-eat-dog world of natural selection.
Hamilton came up with an answer to this quandary, elegantly summarised in the mathematical formula now known as Hamilton’s rule.
So now seems a good time to ask: what did we actually learn from Hamilton, and are his ideas on altruism still relevant half a century on?
The trouble with social insects
The most extreme examples of altruism in nature come from SOCIAL INSECTS such as bees and ants, in which workers toil endlessly for their colony but don’t reproduce themselves.
Their existence had long puzzled biologists. Darwin considered social insects a potentially ”INSUPERABLE DIFFICULTY” for his theory of natural selection. After all, how can selection work in individuals that are sterile?
Until Hamilton, explanations for the evolution of altruism and cooperation reverted to arguments that it benefited the species. It’s a line still used in third-rate nature documentaries today, and it makes evolutionary biologists cringe. Every single time.
Cooperation may well benefit the species, or even a group, but English biologist Ronald Fisher SHOWED IN THE 1930s that natural selection doesn’t work like that. When what’s good for the group contradicts what’s best for the individual, the interests of the individual almost always win out.
Nevertheless in the 1960s ideas about group selection were again surfacing, retreading all the old mistakes.
Then in July 1964 Hamilton lopped the wind from their sails with two groundbreaking JOURNAL OF THEORETICAL BIOLOGY articles. He described how genes imposing a fitness cost on some individuals (for example sterility in the workers of social insects) can spread, provided they enhance the fitness of relatives that share the same gene.
Hamilton coined the term “inclusive fitness”, which he defined in his own notoriously opaque way:
The social behaviour of a species evolves in such a way that in each distinct behaviour-evoking situation the individual will seem to value his neighbour’s fitness against his own according to the coefficients of relationship appropriate to that situation.
In other words, a worker ant may not have any sons or daughters, but can still produce thousands of brothers and sisters. And in Darwinian terms, that’s just as good as - or even better than - personal reproduction.
Kin selection
Hamilton’s ideas and their subsequent embellishments are now often referred to as “kin selection”, a term coined not by Hamilton but by British evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith in 1964.
Maynard Smith credited British biologist JBS Haldane as the first to have come up with the notion of kin selection. According to rumour, Haldane declared, in a pub, “I would lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins”, referring to the fact that our siblings on average share 50% of our genes and cousins 12.5%.
Hamilton contested the Haldane quip. In fact, one of the motivations for Hamilton’s work on inclusive fitness was that HALDANE’S WORK had failed to derive altruism from group selection.
The relationship between Hamilton and Maynard Smith - two of the most influential evolutionary biologists of the 20th century - sadly REMAINED STRAINED until Hamilton’s untimely death in March 2000.
So what exactly is Hamilton’s rule?
Hamilton’s rule specifies the conditions under which a gene causing altruism might enjoy an inclusive fitness advantage. This occurs when the benefits, b, to a related individual exceed the costs, c, to the altruist, discounted by the relatedness, r, between the two:
b > c/r
Evolutionary biologists consider this equation every bit as important as Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence equation (E=mc2).
Hamilton used the evolution of alarm calls in birds as an example. A bird that calls in response to danger risks attracting attention and thus losing its life, as opposed to a bird that remains quiet.
But, according to Hamilton’s rule, such self-sacrificing behaviour can evolve if the benefits to relatives who hear the squawk and gain advance warning (summed by the number of relatives and how closely related they are to the squawker) outweigh the risks to the squawker.
In the past 50 years Hamiltons rule has been used to explain a plethora of otherwise strange animal and human behaviours:
· why do we care for our children?
· why do lions form coalitions with their brothers?
· why do young birds hang around the nest rearing brothers and sisters rather than breeding themselves?
But does kin selection still hold up?
In 2010, a NATURE PAPER by Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita and Edward O. Wilson - the latter a once-staunch supporter of kin selection and a mentor to Hamilton - rejected kin selection outright.
Nowak and his co-authors claimed kin selection was simply an unnecessary reformulation of natural selection. They argued that altruistic genes can increase in frequency even when givers and receivers of altruism are unrelated, simply because individuals carrying altruism genes preferentially interact with each other.
They failed to note, however, that their “alternative” mechanism for the evolution of altruism had already been identified by Hamilton and IMMORTALIZED BY RICHARD DAWLKINS as the “greenbeard effect”.
Imagine a gene that causes its carrier to grow a green beard. Such a gene will spread if those that carry it preferentially show altruism to other individuals with a green beard.
Nowak, Tarnita and Wilson’s attack on Hamilton has been almost universally dismissed by evolutionary biologists. In 2011 more than 100 eminent scientists SIGNED A LETTER pointing out the conceptual errors in the paper and documenting the extraordinary predictive power of the kin selection paradigm.
A nicer world
Kin selection provides one of the two strong forces that bind all cooperative enterprise. The other is RECIPRICOCITY. Think of the first as “blood is thicker than water” and the second as “you scratch my back and Ill scratch yours”.
We rely so much on reciprocity in contemporary society, with reciprocation made liquid by money and other currencies. But kin selection still gives social life much of its shape.
Genetic relatedness infiltrates human affairs to their very root. From childcare to nepotistic corruption, when all else is equal we favour our relatives over those more distantly related.
It also explains FOOD-SHARING PRACTICES in traditional societies, the way INHERITANCES ARE PASSES DOWN in wills and WHICH GRANDPARENT children feel closest to.
The most compelling illustration of kin selection in humans is the work of Canadian evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, summarised in THEIR BOOK The Truth About Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love.
Just as fairytales warned children about the dangers of the stepmother, so modern data on childhood neglect and violence suggest that a parent’s new partner presents a high risk to the child. These are difficult facts to acknowledge because the vast majority of stepparents provide wonderfully supportive homes to children.
But the key here is what relatedness does to parents. Genetic relatedness more often persuades parents to persist with the hard work of child-rearing, prevents them from abandoning their kids and stays their hand from violent overreactions.
The roots for all these ideas were pioneered 50 years ago by Hamilton, whose work continues to illuminate the origins of our own behaviours.
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