My last post dealt with how history has been manipulated by a “critical” scholarship to downplay any issues of class and replace those with issues of identity; whether it be race, sex, sexual orientation, gender orientation etc.
On target. You've hit on the essential problem in opposing the madness. Anything, and I mean anything, will be amplified that 1)causes disunity, and 2)does not link our problems to the economic system. When one digs deep into CIA ops--I mean first person accounts from former operatives--one understands how absolutely pervasively this is used to destabilize target nations, movements, ideologies, individuals and organizations. Larges swathes of the Left and Right are funded, albeit obliquely, by the CIA simply to serve the purposes of division. Our contemporary culture wars are amplified by the deep state and those in its employ. I could give a thousand examples. I will cite just one good source, "Who Paid the Piper?" by Frances Stonor Saunders, subtitled "The CIA and the Cultural Cold War", an exegesis of the cultivation of the "compatible Left" weaponized against communism. In our current confused and poisoned state, it is virtually impossible to build a disciplined, coherent mass opposition.
The bottom line is we have stopped thinking like mature citizens of Nations that try to work with other ones but as some mixed up global village with no clear agenda which has allowed pollution of religion social norms and conflicting ideologies to infect the base national spirit of most western nations.
The choice is go back to some reasonable state of a nation by deglobalizing back inside realistic trade blocs and clean out the extremes or just allow a total global melting pot that will not end well.
Could. not agree more, sovereignty including economic sovereignty needs to be greatly reasserted. The very thing that the internationalist US capitalist ruling class is dead set against and what China and now Russia are supporting.
The main issues have been weak western national governments that allowed uncontrolled globalizing, followed by woke thinking feeding on unsubstantiated western guilt, and panic climate emergency thinking that threatens prosperity. Only way out is more national minded governments, and agreed with the power of the elites, it’s a challenge, but that where we are at,
Three choices..
let the slow road of middle democracies try to fix it.. maybe.
A far right populist leadership. Eg Trump…… probably
I find this article difficult to digest, not because of your writing but because of the topic. I think the subject straddles large 'objective' social issues - media courtiers serving the elites etc. - with very personal dynamics. The Trump phenomenon, for example, is largely symptomatic of large swathes of the population feeling like foreigners in their own country. This comes out in all sorts of confusing story lines but the emotions driving them are all too real. This is somewhat true for the Christian / Christian Nationalist issue part of which, and where it seems I disagree with one of your takes therein, involves the widespread feeling amongst many Western Christian that there is a secular, or 'cultural Marxist' movement determined to undermine their lives and culture. People have strong feelings about this which again may not make for clear arguments but are not without good reason.
Although not a Christian myself, I don't think the statement that the elites are anti-Christian is wrong. They are materialist so anti-transcendent and anti traditional values even before they are specifically anti-Christian. Then they are anti religion in general preferring people to worship secular reality and respect the authority of the state via the education and media the state essentially curates. And they are also anti people forming groups which might develop dissident views about the secular materialist culture they are pushing, which is why they work to fragment society into no end of mutually conflicted enclaves.
I think Tucker is an interesting person (like Trump) in that his being itself embodies many of these cross-currents and conflicts. I don't think he is merely a servant of the elites. I think he was, and it sounds like sincerely so rather than performatively so, but over time he has matured and now formed a more nuanced, indeed even cynical view, regarding much that he used to take for granted. His view is a work in progress. His opinions are in flux and sometimes muddled. Some of his interviews are fascinating, others are unhinged (like the one above). In this way he reflects his nation well. (I find Trump, though a very different character, quite similar in that he embodies so many contradictions and, too, is partly a lackey for the powers that be and partly a thorn in their side because he is not without sincerity).
I suspect the West is going to go through extremely confusing times - well, we already are, it's just going to get much worse. And millions may die in the process as was the case in 1920's Russia....
Thanks for another good piece. I appreciate the work, thought and research you put into them.
The ruling class is not against Christianity or religion, as long as such groups are aligned with the capitalist status quo. Kevin M. Kruse wrote an excellent book on how the US elite created the religious right in the post-WW2 period "One Nation Under God". Here is a lecture of his on that topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAQNzoiMI7s.
The ruling class has also worked well with the Catholic Church over the years, even facilitating its survival from the pedophilia crisis. When Liberation Theology emerged in Latin America, both the ruling class and the conservative elements of catholicism worked together to crush it.
As for Tucker, he does the job of ruling class courtier extremely well.
There is not one monolithic ruling class, though, as most marxist commentary presupposes. I think Meyers is onto something with his four big conspiracies theory: Empire (which is the one you are referencing), which likes to put one over all others and which segued from UK to US after the war but really involves all old European money power going back centuries; Globalist: this is newer, and wants to abolish nation states in favour of one overall system controlled by a small tight-knit technocratic elite; Zionist: various power networks working to have Jewish interests ruling a world order similar to Globalist; Trotskyoid: permanent revolution destroying the old civilizations and class relations in order to create something entirely modern, egalitarian and pure. We never get to see the purity - unless you count Russia in the 1920's, or the Chinese Cultural Revolution as examples - but generally they just work on fragmenting existing societies. These guys ARE against Christianity; their forebears were during Russian and Chinese communist times, decidedly, and their offspring feel the same today, hence pushing drag queens in school.
The many Christians in the Middle East and Europe and America who feel under attack are not entirely paranoid. Modernism regards their view as quaint, anachronistic, childish, superstitious and also somehow dangerous. They in turn are feeling increasingly under siege and hardening their view of 'progressives' who wish them to no longer exist. You may feel they are deluded to feel this way, but that doesn't change how they feel.
It is so important to not mistake the tools of the ruling class for the beliefs and constitution of the ruling class. Zionism was, and always will be, a tool of the US Empire (and the British and French before that) to divide and conquer the Middle East (as also with Wahabism and the Muslim Brotherhood etc.). The Zionists will ally/work with whomever backs their Israeli project. After WW2 and McCarthy, US Jews learnt the lesson that they would be persecuted if they remained communist/left leaning so went hard right and worked with the US ruling class.
The Soviet Union was Leninist, not Trotsykist (as Trotsky was banished and his clique disbanded by Stalin), and China is also Leninist/Stalinist (Mao broke with the USSR when Khrushchev rejected Stalinism). Neither nation pushed for global revolution, in fact Stalin reigned in the Western communists. Trotskyism, through its purity fetish, is the very opposite of real revolution and Western Trotskyist parties have been thoroughly undermined by the Western security states.
We must keep our focus on the ball, the US capitalist ruling class and its fight with all which would attempt to reduce its power both from within and without. That class will continuously throw out propaganda to obfuscate its real composition and to de-legitimize its critics.
The Chinese Communist Party is nationalist, having never had plans to invade other nations and occupy/subjugate/colonize them, but do recognize that they need to be part of an alternative alliance structure to combat a West that would otherwise crush China. Both China and Russia have much more been invaded/subjugated by others than the other way round. Of course Russia is now more a mixed political economy. In both China and Russia any religion is allowed to flourish as long as it does not directly challenge the state, the latter most definitely being the case with Falun Gong. We must remember that the Boxer Rebellion, and earlier rebellions, was heavily driven by Western attempts to force Christianity upon the Chinese people to destroy four millennia of Chinese culture.
Where is Christianity in the Middle East under attack? Both Syria and Iraq were secular societies where Christians lived freely, before being destroyed by Western and Saudi funded and armed Wahabi extremists - including the rape and murder of Christians. In Lebanon the Christian militias have sided with the Zionists against the Muslim population (e.g. the Sabra and Shatila massacres). You are repeating the same "war of civilizations" tropes as Huntington, a great way to take the focus off the capitalist ruling class. Who keeps the door wide open to immigration? Both sides of the US political class, and also the British (no change with Brexit!), French and German. Cheap workers to undermine the power of Labour and overcome declining birth rates (much due to the immiseration of domestic workers) are just too good a thing for the ruling class.
Your position imho is closer to the underlying reality; anyone who’s followed Tucker even in a cursory fashion can see his positions are evolving.— unfortunately Roger seems to be yet another who would make the good the enemy of the perfect.
Of course, nihilism has been a respectable philosophical position for over a century, and the failure to recognize and rally around a seemingly sincere and articulate (not to speak of influential) pundit such as Tucker is a telling indication of how triumphant the victory is for the elites. Not “appears to be”, but “is”.
This topic is like the story of the three blind men and the elephant. Looking at it from different POVs gives different answers.
While I agree with Richard V that TPTB are behind setting up and running all these divisive propaganda shops, I think that the propaganda gets traction because of an even higher-level TPTB operation - namely the destruction of non-economic relationships in society.
Aurelian's current post, The Coming of Neo-Tribalism ( https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/the-coming-of-neo-tribalism ) tries to give a view of the elephant. Although, Aurelian is a difficult and verbose read. His point is (AFAICT) classic Liberalism has triumphed completely over the last thirty years, and the result has been the destruction of all kinds of communities. Lack of community gives rise to tribalism, with all the attendent faults because human beings have a need to belong to groups.
<BEGIN QUOTE>
From the identification with the city of one’s birth (think of Dante’s desperate longing to return to Florence) through loyalty to regions, to rulers and ultimately to ethnic groups and nation-states, people have always tried to find some group above and beyond themselves to identify with.
Liberalism has spent the last two hundred years trying to destroy all this, and now it has largely succeed
Effectively, the last few decades have seen the re-creation of tribes, as a desperate expedient to somehow produce groups to identify with...Others, though, are ascriptive neo-tribes which try to assign people to identities and oblige them to follow rules... these neo-tribes display several of the same characteristics as traditional tribes do. The first is a tendency to internecine warfare if there is no common external enemy...Increasing tribalism is thus the essential motor behind the progressive disaggregation of society, and the move away from universal to highly particular interests...
in the absence of any interior or exterior reference point, religion, tradition or ideology for group solidarity. Society then continuously splinters into smaller and smaller fragments—the neo-tribes I have mentioned—each defining itself primarily against others. The best-known case is the luxuriant profusion of minority sexual orientations and preferences, too many now to list easily. Obeying the logic of tribalism, and in the absence of any group solidarity, such groups spilt into smaller and smaller units. Whilst they may in theory have a single overarching enemy (the heterosexual community, I suppose) that enemy is at too high and too general level to be of much practical use. And of course they have to compete viciously, not just with each other, but with other self-identified or ascriptive groups as well, not violently as would have been the case before, but for victim status, and thus for power.
<END QUOTE>
I need to re-read Aurelian's piece, but it seemed germane to this topic.
Aurelian's work is utterly devoid of political economy and severely suffers from it, for example mistaking the courtiers (e.g. the PMC) for the ruling class and not understanding the political economic base of philosophy. Dominic Losurdo did this so elegantly with respect to Liberalism in his "Liberalism A Counter History" and followed on with his excellent "Democracy Or Bonapartism". We must also remember that prior to industrialization all written philosophy (i.e. the stuff that survives) was written by and in the service of the tiny political, economic and religious elite - as Parenti so well pointed out in his book on Caeser.
Without a materialist base, philosophy rapidly degrades into metaphysics - as with the current extremes of post-modernism and non-materialist "critical" theory and much of what passes for Western philosophy. You cannot fully understand Nietzsche, Freud, Tocqueville, Bentham, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Dante, Plato, Socrates, Marx, Gramsci etc. without understanding their class position and their views of the "little people". This is the fundamental problem with the study of philosophy in the West.
Much of what you describe as "neo-tribes" are really hegemonic cultural creations for divide and rule. In the 1950s the Middle East was rapidly moving toward secular rule in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Iran until the West intervened to overthrow/assassinate nationalist and socialist leaders. The same even for Afghanistan in the 1970s. The actors on the stage are simply tools of those that own the theatre.
Needless to say, I see Carlson, Reiner, Darling, etc. as nothing more than tribal leaders jostling for power by acquiring followers and promoting divisiveness (shismatogenesis).
I agree with this assessment. At some point would not the waning ability of a humanities discernment, the cognitive dissonance, the surrender of the responsibility of that discernment to the expert *class* have a direct effect on evolutionary trajectory? The digital technocratic version of a speciation event?
More interesting to me would be a discussion of whether or not the creative free will of mankind can hold off the inevitable truth of the second law long enough to save the planet or for the planet to save itself? Right up your alley Roger!
I’m afraid I find the second paragraph simply another example of intellectual puffery which vanishes into nothingness when examined closely (nothing personal intended because Yiu speak for many). From the “view from nowhere”, who determines whether the planet should be “saved” or not?
According to one side of this discussion we can only examine the position or the momentum of a *particle* but never both in the same instant. The view from nowhere is just a probability bound in the wave equation. Point me in the direction where this puffery vanishes into nothingness. 😊
On target. You've hit on the essential problem in opposing the madness. Anything, and I mean anything, will be amplified that 1)causes disunity, and 2)does not link our problems to the economic system. When one digs deep into CIA ops--I mean first person accounts from former operatives--one understands how absolutely pervasively this is used to destabilize target nations, movements, ideologies, individuals and organizations. Larges swathes of the Left and Right are funded, albeit obliquely, by the CIA simply to serve the purposes of division. Our contemporary culture wars are amplified by the deep state and those in its employ. I could give a thousand examples. I will cite just one good source, "Who Paid the Piper?" by Frances Stonor Saunders, subtitled "The CIA and the Cultural Cold War", an exegesis of the cultivation of the "compatible Left" weaponized against communism. In our current confused and poisoned state, it is virtually impossible to build a disciplined, coherent mass opposition.
The bottom line is we have stopped thinking like mature citizens of Nations that try to work with other ones but as some mixed up global village with no clear agenda which has allowed pollution of religion social norms and conflicting ideologies to infect the base national spirit of most western nations.
The choice is go back to some reasonable state of a nation by deglobalizing back inside realistic trade blocs and clean out the extremes or just allow a total global melting pot that will not end well.
I’m afraid that “choice” is not on the menu of the elites.
Could. not agree more, sovereignty including economic sovereignty needs to be greatly reasserted. The very thing that the internationalist US capitalist ruling class is dead set against and what China and now Russia are supporting.
The main issues have been weak western national governments that allowed uncontrolled globalizing, followed by woke thinking feeding on unsubstantiated western guilt, and panic climate emergency thinking that threatens prosperity. Only way out is more national minded governments, and agreed with the power of the elites, it’s a challenge, but that where we are at,
Three choices..
let the slow road of middle democracies try to fix it.. maybe.
A far right populist leadership. Eg Trump…… probably
A bloody revolution.. could be.
More at : Take Back Manufacturing - Take Back Manufacturing - Home page (takebackmanufacturingnigelsouthway.com)
I find this article difficult to digest, not because of your writing but because of the topic. I think the subject straddles large 'objective' social issues - media courtiers serving the elites etc. - with very personal dynamics. The Trump phenomenon, for example, is largely symptomatic of large swathes of the population feeling like foreigners in their own country. This comes out in all sorts of confusing story lines but the emotions driving them are all too real. This is somewhat true for the Christian / Christian Nationalist issue part of which, and where it seems I disagree with one of your takes therein, involves the widespread feeling amongst many Western Christian that there is a secular, or 'cultural Marxist' movement determined to undermine their lives and culture. People have strong feelings about this which again may not make for clear arguments but are not without good reason.
Although not a Christian myself, I don't think the statement that the elites are anti-Christian is wrong. They are materialist so anti-transcendent and anti traditional values even before they are specifically anti-Christian. Then they are anti religion in general preferring people to worship secular reality and respect the authority of the state via the education and media the state essentially curates. And they are also anti people forming groups which might develop dissident views about the secular materialist culture they are pushing, which is why they work to fragment society into no end of mutually conflicted enclaves.
I think Tucker is an interesting person (like Trump) in that his being itself embodies many of these cross-currents and conflicts. I don't think he is merely a servant of the elites. I think he was, and it sounds like sincerely so rather than performatively so, but over time he has matured and now formed a more nuanced, indeed even cynical view, regarding much that he used to take for granted. His view is a work in progress. His opinions are in flux and sometimes muddled. Some of his interviews are fascinating, others are unhinged (like the one above). In this way he reflects his nation well. (I find Trump, though a very different character, quite similar in that he embodies so many contradictions and, too, is partly a lackey for the powers that be and partly a thorn in their side because he is not without sincerity).
I suspect the West is going to go through extremely confusing times - well, we already are, it's just going to get much worse. And millions may die in the process as was the case in 1920's Russia....
Thanks for another good piece. I appreciate the work, thought and research you put into them.
PS: another interview by Tucker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHayOkXe5ig entitled "How does the Government of Israel treat Christians?"
The ruling class is not against Christianity or religion, as long as such groups are aligned with the capitalist status quo. Kevin M. Kruse wrote an excellent book on how the US elite created the religious right in the post-WW2 period "One Nation Under God". Here is a lecture of his on that topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAQNzoiMI7s.
The ruling class has also worked well with the Catholic Church over the years, even facilitating its survival from the pedophilia crisis. When Liberation Theology emerged in Latin America, both the ruling class and the conservative elements of catholicism worked together to crush it.
As for Tucker, he does the job of ruling class courtier extremely well.
There is not one monolithic ruling class, though, as most marxist commentary presupposes. I think Meyers is onto something with his four big conspiracies theory: Empire (which is the one you are referencing), which likes to put one over all others and which segued from UK to US after the war but really involves all old European money power going back centuries; Globalist: this is newer, and wants to abolish nation states in favour of one overall system controlled by a small tight-knit technocratic elite; Zionist: various power networks working to have Jewish interests ruling a world order similar to Globalist; Trotskyoid: permanent revolution destroying the old civilizations and class relations in order to create something entirely modern, egalitarian and pure. We never get to see the purity - unless you count Russia in the 1920's, or the Chinese Cultural Revolution as examples - but generally they just work on fragmenting existing societies. These guys ARE against Christianity; their forebears were during Russian and Chinese communist times, decidedly, and their offspring feel the same today, hence pushing drag queens in school.
The many Christians in the Middle East and Europe and America who feel under attack are not entirely paranoid. Modernism regards their view as quaint, anachronistic, childish, superstitious and also somehow dangerous. They in turn are feeling increasingly under siege and hardening their view of 'progressives' who wish them to no longer exist. You may feel they are deluded to feel this way, but that doesn't change how they feel.
It is so important to not mistake the tools of the ruling class for the beliefs and constitution of the ruling class. Zionism was, and always will be, a tool of the US Empire (and the British and French before that) to divide and conquer the Middle East (as also with Wahabism and the Muslim Brotherhood etc.). The Zionists will ally/work with whomever backs their Israeli project. After WW2 and McCarthy, US Jews learnt the lesson that they would be persecuted if they remained communist/left leaning so went hard right and worked with the US ruling class.
The Soviet Union was Leninist, not Trotsykist (as Trotsky was banished and his clique disbanded by Stalin), and China is also Leninist/Stalinist (Mao broke with the USSR when Khrushchev rejected Stalinism). Neither nation pushed for global revolution, in fact Stalin reigned in the Western communists. Trotskyism, through its purity fetish, is the very opposite of real revolution and Western Trotskyist parties have been thoroughly undermined by the Western security states.
We must keep our focus on the ball, the US capitalist ruling class and its fight with all which would attempt to reduce its power both from within and without. That class will continuously throw out propaganda to obfuscate its real composition and to de-legitimize its critics.
The Chinese Communist Party is nationalist, having never had plans to invade other nations and occupy/subjugate/colonize them, but do recognize that they need to be part of an alternative alliance structure to combat a West that would otherwise crush China. Both China and Russia have much more been invaded/subjugated by others than the other way round. Of course Russia is now more a mixed political economy. In both China and Russia any religion is allowed to flourish as long as it does not directly challenge the state, the latter most definitely being the case with Falun Gong. We must remember that the Boxer Rebellion, and earlier rebellions, was heavily driven by Western attempts to force Christianity upon the Chinese people to destroy four millennia of Chinese culture.
Where is Christianity in the Middle East under attack? Both Syria and Iraq were secular societies where Christians lived freely, before being destroyed by Western and Saudi funded and armed Wahabi extremists - including the rape and murder of Christians. In Lebanon the Christian militias have sided with the Zionists against the Muslim population (e.g. the Sabra and Shatila massacres). You are repeating the same "war of civilizations" tropes as Huntington, a great way to take the focus off the capitalist ruling class. Who keeps the door wide open to immigration? Both sides of the US political class, and also the British (no change with Brexit!), French and German. Cheap workers to undermine the power of Labour and overcome declining birth rates (much due to the immiseration of domestic workers) are just too good a thing for the ruling class.
Ugh... 1920s Russia.
Your position imho is closer to the underlying reality; anyone who’s followed Tucker even in a cursory fashion can see his positions are evolving.— unfortunately Roger seems to be yet another who would make the good the enemy of the perfect.
Of course, nihilism has been a respectable philosophical position for over a century, and the failure to recognize and rally around a seemingly sincere and articulate (not to speak of influential) pundit such as Tucker is a telling indication of how triumphant the victory is for the elites. Not “appears to be”, but “is”.
This topic is like the story of the three blind men and the elephant. Looking at it from different POVs gives different answers.
While I agree with Richard V that TPTB are behind setting up and running all these divisive propaganda shops, I think that the propaganda gets traction because of an even higher-level TPTB operation - namely the destruction of non-economic relationships in society.
Aurelian's current post, The Coming of Neo-Tribalism ( https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/the-coming-of-neo-tribalism ) tries to give a view of the elephant. Although, Aurelian is a difficult and verbose read. His point is (AFAICT) classic Liberalism has triumphed completely over the last thirty years, and the result has been the destruction of all kinds of communities. Lack of community gives rise to tribalism, with all the attendent faults because human beings have a need to belong to groups.
<BEGIN QUOTE>
From the identification with the city of one’s birth (think of Dante’s desperate longing to return to Florence) through loyalty to regions, to rulers and ultimately to ethnic groups and nation-states, people have always tried to find some group above and beyond themselves to identify with.
Liberalism has spent the last two hundred years trying to destroy all this, and now it has largely succeed
Effectively, the last few decades have seen the re-creation of tribes, as a desperate expedient to somehow produce groups to identify with...Others, though, are ascriptive neo-tribes which try to assign people to identities and oblige them to follow rules... these neo-tribes display several of the same characteristics as traditional tribes do. The first is a tendency to internecine warfare if there is no common external enemy...Increasing tribalism is thus the essential motor behind the progressive disaggregation of society, and the move away from universal to highly particular interests...
in the absence of any interior or exterior reference point, religion, tradition or ideology for group solidarity. Society then continuously splinters into smaller and smaller fragments—the neo-tribes I have mentioned—each defining itself primarily against others. The best-known case is the luxuriant profusion of minority sexual orientations and preferences, too many now to list easily. Obeying the logic of tribalism, and in the absence of any group solidarity, such groups spilt into smaller and smaller units. Whilst they may in theory have a single overarching enemy (the heterosexual community, I suppose) that enemy is at too high and too general level to be of much practical use. And of course they have to compete viciously, not just with each other, but with other self-identified or ascriptive groups as well, not violently as would have been the case before, but for victim status, and thus for power.
<END QUOTE>
I need to re-read Aurelian's piece, but it seemed germane to this topic.
Aurelian's work is utterly devoid of political economy and severely suffers from it, for example mistaking the courtiers (e.g. the PMC) for the ruling class and not understanding the political economic base of philosophy. Dominic Losurdo did this so elegantly with respect to Liberalism in his "Liberalism A Counter History" and followed on with his excellent "Democracy Or Bonapartism". We must also remember that prior to industrialization all written philosophy (i.e. the stuff that survives) was written by and in the service of the tiny political, economic and religious elite - as Parenti so well pointed out in his book on Caeser.
Without a materialist base, philosophy rapidly degrades into metaphysics - as with the current extremes of post-modernism and non-materialist "critical" theory and much of what passes for Western philosophy. You cannot fully understand Nietzsche, Freud, Tocqueville, Bentham, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Dante, Plato, Socrates, Marx, Gramsci etc. without understanding their class position and their views of the "little people". This is the fundamental problem with the study of philosophy in the West.
Much of what you describe as "neo-tribes" are really hegemonic cultural creations for divide and rule. In the 1950s the Middle East was rapidly moving toward secular rule in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Iran until the West intervened to overthrow/assassinate nationalist and socialist leaders. The same even for Afghanistan in the 1970s. The actors on the stage are simply tools of those that own the theatre.
Needless to say, I see Carlson, Reiner, Darling, etc. as nothing more than tribal leaders jostling for power by acquiring followers and promoting divisiveness (shismatogenesis).
Tools of the capitalist ruling class to help push the idea of such "tribes" when fundamental interests are geratly shared across such "tribes".
I agree with this assessment. At some point would not the waning ability of a humanities discernment, the cognitive dissonance, the surrender of the responsibility of that discernment to the expert *class* have a direct effect on evolutionary trajectory? The digital technocratic version of a speciation event?
More interesting to me would be a discussion of whether or not the creative free will of mankind can hold off the inevitable truth of the second law long enough to save the planet or for the planet to save itself? Right up your alley Roger!
I’m afraid I find the second paragraph simply another example of intellectual puffery which vanishes into nothingness when examined closely (nothing personal intended because Yiu speak for many). From the “view from nowhere”, who determines whether the planet should be “saved” or not?
According to one side of this discussion we can only examine the position or the momentum of a *particle* but never both in the same instant. The view from nowhere is just a probability bound in the wave equation. Point me in the direction where this puffery vanishes into nothingness. 😊
great stuff