Wednesday, January 10, 2018

The Horror of Hubris

A frequent strategy, for example, is to present the delusion as recondite and counterintuitive, and the truth as simplistic and wrong. This "emperor's new clothes" strategy is a proven recipe for defeating Occam's razor. Who, for example, really understand the Trinity? But if you don't understand the Trinity, aren't you just stupid? Through internal competition, this counterintuitive delusion generates a revolutionary elite deeply steeped in Trinitology. The harder it is to understand the delusion, the more dedicated your cadre will be.


If I were to somehow remove the crunchy reactionary coating from my psyche, the next layer down in the great chain of my mental being would fall under the 'futurist' subheading. Ironic, no? I have a bit of a fetish for theoretically practical space travel. The credit to my fascination with outer space goes to my dear mother, who bought me a telescope when I was young. We'd spend hours looking at fuzzy images of the planets and gazing at the craters on the moon. Funny enough, there's a crater on our dusty satellite that bears my mother's maiden name.

Few people who gaze on the full breadth and majesty of the Milky Way walk away from the experience feeling anything other than small. It is remarkable then, knowing what we know about just how big the universe is (whatever fraction that we can actually see) that the end of history memeplex has taken root. For instance, it wasn't until the 1920s that we finally realized that the Milky Way wasn't the universe, but only one galaxy in the universe. Perhaps we can be forgiven of that because the technology to produce high quality telescopes that can bring you the stars in a decent resolution is not the sort of thing a civilization without advanced, precision manufacturing has any hope of creating. Then again, back closer to home, it wasn't until well after WWII that plate tectonics gained widespread support among geologists. Nothing about that is to say that civilizations without x y or z technological marvel should be castigated for not knowing a b or c fundamental principle of (modern) science that coincidentally enough requires x y or z technology. But there is a curious, and very serious, incongruity in both knowing that only a few lives of men in the past we were astonishingly less knowledgeable while triumphantly proclaiming your generations political soup du jour as the be all end all of all of history ever. Because that is what progressive idealism is. As triumphalist as it is stupid and vacuous. Behold! We have conquered the wild and uncovered the secrets of the universe, and the purpose of life is... bitching about racism and the virtues of universal healthcare. Blink blink. Blink.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. It has become increasingly clear that none of this is going to end well. Perhaps a last, tiny enclave of Wypipo will grumble among themselves that Camp of the Saints was not supposed to be an instruction manual, the way that Libertarians (lol) once tut tutted about 1984. Some dream of a rising tide of Right-Wing violence that will quickly, quietly, and efficiently sweep away the cancer of the modern world. The merits of those thoughts aside (indeed it is hard to resist when you can't get away from the screeching), my nightmare scenario is that the coming conflict, born up to unimaginable heights and tension by the runaway dysgenic effect of modern medicine, modern farming, modern energy and modern comfort, will leave the remnant that survives unable to resume the course of technological progression. It isn't that the oil is all dried up, its that a hard reboot of civilization and technology means that we would be in a catch-22 situation regarding energy: The technology required to reach the oil that remains is paradoxically out of reach because easy access to oil is required to start an industrial revolution which will eventually give you the technological refinement to reach the harder to access oil which you cannot reach because our civilization imploded and no one can reach the information on a hard drive because the power went out one day and never when back on and...

We'd be fucked. And we're serious teetering towards that. The suspicion that this is our last, best and only chance to get off this rock adds a certain sense of urgency to the mission of revitalizing our civilization. The fear is compounded by the aggravation associated with knowing that a deeply unnatural philosophy has come to power and is cheerfully driving us off the edge while it's adherents preach that they are the pinnacle of philosophy, science and the human condition. Blink. Who the hell looks at a handful of billion years of things eating each other and comes to the conclusion that the most sensible method of organization is expending insane amounts of energy and resources coddling those who cant? You are telling me, with a straight face, that doing the exact opposite of the selection method that powered an ecosystem for 3.8 billion years through trillions upon trillions of organisms perishing before they could reproduce and pass on their genes and contribute another generation to the tree of life... will somehow not have serious negative consequences. Oh! The solution to our problems is sooo easy! Just give people stuff! Who the fuck seriously sits down and looks at that and says brilliant! At this point, the answer is either people who are intentionally tricked into a believing something that is degrading in exchange for cheap virtue points - or people who have unintentionally tricked themselves into believing something degrading in exchange for cheap virtue points. The difference between one explanation and the other is the difference between Mike Enoch and Mencius Moldbug. Try this the next time you're at a fashionable party in the city: Tell everyone you know that you hate Trump and count the number of pats on the back that you harvest. For a moment, it feels good, yes? Suddenly people seem very interested in talking to you, yes? Tempted, yes?

And into the abyss we go.

Oil, of course, does not power spacecraft, and human ingenuity is perhaps the only thing comparable to human stupidity in its pervasiveness and tendency to surprise you. The idea that this is the end is probably overwrought, but I cannot help but think, when looking from these heights, that a fall from up here might actually kill us.

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