“In the eyes of dialectical philosophy, nothing is established for all times, nothing is absolute or sacred.”
-Marx
We live in the midst of a dangerously false dialectic, funneled into choosing between alternatives that are in fact fundamentally undifferentiated, such that no negation of the premise that human existence is fatalistic and static ever genuinely transpires.
What masquerades as distinction at all, and therefore as the ability to choose between various distinctions, is in fact, still two faces of fatalistic materialism. Clinging to these institutions which project this false dialectic is nihilistic and cynical.
On one hand, the use of AI for infinite recursive propagandizing will emerge as a primary tool to yoke Man back into a kind of de-populated, de-industrialized, climate-safe feudalism promulgated by Modern Statism. This modern statism which constitutes the new atheistic religion has a penchant for deranging the base layer sense of meaning by which Mankind lives. It’s disciples themselves deny the existence of meaning and Beauty. Each technological evolution in history has been commandeered to wipe away this central essence of Man’s faculties for the sake of greater complicity and change-averse conformism.
Cynically, the very recursive repetitiveness of AI is at the center of what is believed to facilitate so-called “transhumanism,” a surpassing of human nature into some kind of collectivized obedience marching toward a regressive reversion to (a modernistic, rebranded version of) feudal statism. This also implies that Man’s basic nature is best understood as repetitive aping. But then this so-called transhumanism is hardly transhuman at all. Not only does it fail to acknowledge the spiritual and creative nature of Man, its physics-based, fatalistic determinism outright denies the possibility of free will.
On the other hand, we are presented with a Luddite, anti-technology, orthodox traditionalism which clings to the ancestral. But for most of history, religion has been synonymous with the statism of the day. This Ancestral Statism espoused by most Western conservatives by and large represents the worship of the archetypal progenitors of Modern Statism: Yahweh, Zeus, Confucius, Allah, etc. They are merely factions of the same political party working to purge each other.
You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.
–Exodus 20:5
The false dialectic is that Modern and Ancestral Statism are distinct, and that we choose between them. But freedom (Freiheit) is an inimical, radical adversary to both Modern and Ancestral Statism. It was Epimetheus, the forgetful brother of Prometheus, who gave the animals their undifferentiated nature of unconsidered mass consciousness. So-called transhumanism in artificial intelligence is Epimetheus in digital code, automating away the Epimethean individuals among us. However, it was Prometheus who gave Man his nature as meaning maker, as a being who lives for Beauty, for forethought, vision, originality, for the arts and for technological science. It is these traits which imbue Man with free will.
It is also these traits which require societies based on the acknowledgement of free-will, private property, self-ownership, etc. which support the sovereign purpose of Man: the pursuit of happiness. In other words, Western societies. The transhumanist worldview is that humans are merely high-latency artifacts of recursive repetition.
The illegal saturation of western societies with hundreds of millions of foreign Ancestral Statists in order to confound elections is done under the premise that western societies value democracy more than human purpose. The tribalism of the false dialectic as a nightly television program has viewers gawking at which faction purged whom. Yet both factions seek the ultimate repeal of democracy. It is not enough to rig the 2020 and many other elections, it must do away with elections per se. By ensconcing new-amnesty recipients which have no history freedom-centered moral institutions into western societies, the goal of Modern Statism is to in fact engineer populations of high-latency artifacts of recursive repetition which can then be automated away. All while in the meantime creating the democratic pretext for syphoning away the creative energies of the West to finance the reversion back to de-industrialized, zero-change, non-dynamic feudalism.
If You’re Not Unique, You Will Be Automated
Yet, whether we like it or not, we live in a world driven by the Promethean archetype. This is the archetype which apprehends deeply that change is both nonlinear, not regressive, and that this progressive, Beauty and meaning-driven change is gloriously desirable. He is by nature the adversary. This false dialectical choice is pablum to capture as many unthinking disciples into statism as possible. Yet the engine of Man’s world, especially in the 5,000 history of the West, has been the archetypal “daemonic” motivation, the underlying propelling force, of creative individualism which cannot be destroyed without both cultural and genetic destruction.
We were given the Promethean capacity of creative individualism in order to re-integrate it for the sake of human flourishing, so that we could determine our own destiny. Precisely to reject that we be instrumentalized in some kind of static, hyper-networked hive mind divested of humanity.
Sergey Erwin Sokovbild
It is extremely late to show up to this fight. We’ve been lulled by entitlements and seemingly endless ability for debts to go unpaid through a ponzi racket in the currency. The gift of AI before us calls to us that we must retrieve the poetic power of the Prometheus myth and recapture an understanding that technological science is a tool to empower our evolution and metamorphosis in ways which dispense with and make obsolete the comforts of statism. It is critical that we re-appropriate the lesson of Prometheus and become more self-conscious of its “daemonic” motivation, conscientiously design how to channel it for creative achievement and peace, for liberation and enlightenment.
The fire of the Promethean forge is not just technology. It is the Fountainhead of the arts. We must acknowledge that our human instinct is to use and create technology in poetic ways, ways which do not instrumentalize each other, but which are instead liberating and ennobling. Anything that expands the creative capacity of humanity, as artificial intelligence replaces repetitive tasks, will allow Man to be more artful, perhaps than ever before.
Long gone is the idea that you can just be a law-abiding citizen in a country and do your job and be OK. Transhumanism and Ancestral Statism both encourage us to roll over in the face difficulty, as though difficulty can be outsourced to the ideology itself, rather than born individually. The true juxtaposition of opposites, however, is still unforgiving: all the bad things have to happen in order to be the man who triumphs. The chains of Mount Ararat, the ordeal of Zeus, of the cannibalizing stagnation, must occur. He who does not suffer through the things which AI cannot automate away will be left behind. If AI can genuinely solve your problems, you aren’t human enough.
Courage and originality cannot be automated. Beauty and meaning cannot be automated. Our place is among these things and we can’t shirk them. Doing so is reneging on our own nature. Man’s place is in the dynamic change, in the metamorphosis. The movement from microcosm to macrocosm. From shallow veritas to deeper alethea. To be otherwise is to be a humanity denier, a denialist of nature and its nobility.
The Instinct for Beauty and Meaning is the Nucleotide of Human Action
Beauty is found in morphogenesis, how our building blocks give rise to form. Decision making, computation and the search for meta-meaning are all embodied in the substrate of our physical beings in profound ways.
Artificial intelligence will never replace the capacity to create things through deep self-knowledge, ethical and moral principles, expansive curiosity and reasoning for ourselves. All that which constitutes Man. But AI helps remove the psychological barriers to procrastination by allowing independent generation of kernels of value concurrent with one’s own work. Such is the potential amplifier of AI to our creativity.
The danger posed by AI is more acutely the danger posed to a metastasis in statism. If one is programmed, or doesn’t think for themselves, they are in many ways merely the pretense of a human being. A contrived word puzzle stitched together who sacrifices humanity for the sake of convenience. These individuals must be replaced with automation.
The Essence of Human Nature is the Refusal to Outsource Thought to Propaganda
The essence of the Promethean building blocks of human nature, the original, non-contingent, “Zeroth” principal, is individuation through acts of creative integrity, acts of Freiheit or the pursuit of happiness. All who are programmed will be replaced by that which is programmable. AI itself is the pretense of thought: the grand language model stitched together by the greatest mass programmer, mass man himself. Those with no wisdom and only slogans will be unmasked by AI. This sophist AI may be able to outsmart the ignorant, but not all of humanity.
Attempting to out-propagandize the Great Skynet of sophistry is the recipe for failure. Just like the Titanomachea – the war between Titans and Olympians – showed that one can’t use violence to overthrow violence itself, wisdom cannot be outsourced to propaganda. This is why Soviet, leftist, and other communist mumbo-jumbo always succumbs to murderous paroxysm. It is not wisdom to repeat socially acceptable slogans and call oneself good. How does a sloganeer outsmart a slogan machine with 10 billion parameters? All versions of that which lacks originality will not survive economically. This is not easy.
Maxfield Parrish
The retrieval and recapturing of our creative Promethean humanity is hard-fought. Nonetheless must we hold on to the most essential aspect of our being: the generative, the original, the creative, the “over the horizon“, thoughtful, and wise, we must mythologize it and breathe life into more deliberately. Man reclaims himself and his destiny by automating away the profitability of politics, of sloganeering, and of the pretense of virtue. AI automates the activities of the left hemisphere of the brain as they pertain to social interactions, the way our totalitarian, grasping, or linearizing, rationalistic, attack-oriented attention is built to function. But it cannot automate the right hemisphere-style attention geared to synthesizing greater and greater arcs of the Beautiful for the sake of expansion outside of current paradigms.
And just like the way in which the damage done to humanity through the institutionalization of counterfeit currency creates the greatest rewards for innovation and technology development in the zone of currency, so does sloganeering, propaganda, and political fraud open the opportunity for the greatest returns through AI innovation, relegating the phony to automation. Man triumphs by imagining something and building it in the world. Not by manipulating language or moving around paper covered with words. AI subsumes the rest. AI culls the herd. And burning the chaff away, the Zeroth principle of Man, the natural unfolding of the seminal architecture of his building blocks, can flourish.
If AI Were So Creative, Why Didn’t It Invent Itself?
AI has uncovered that most of what humans do (including yours truly) is not all that intelligent. Furthermore, intelligence should be understood as imaginative power. Not linear algebra. Using AI to label ourselves intelligent by proxy is absurdist.
Most of what we do is mental convenience seeking. Day after day, throwing away our imaginative power for the sake of convenience and compliance with our prior regressive patterns. In this case, artificial intelligence does exactly what we do. But we are so underperforming in this way that when someone says something new or comes to us with an opportunity, we call them a grifter, a dilettante or an attention hog. We’ll even sacrifice bedrock principles for the sake of fetishizing our meager boxes of convenience.
In culling the herd, artificial intelligence extinguishes the value of professions built on convenience seeking. Repetition is obsolete and originality is our destiny and moral obligation once again.
Jeff Klina
Education must be completely re-engineered. AI destroys the value of repetitive behavior which young people are taught is their highest value activity. Teaching children how to succeed through repetition puts them in the crosshairs of something a computer does 1000 times better.
Originality. Beauty. Creativity. Vision. Craftsmanship. Meaning, the traits of Prometheus the deep unifier, are the only things left to humanity. The daemon of Prometheus, ruthlessly animating the fire of our creative fervor, has forever chased man up the value chain. He breaks catholicisms and orthodoxies, commonly held suppositions built to conceal truth, and the repetitive convenience seeking in which we seek to cheat our nature. It is a Promethean triumph to create the Epimetheus Machine, to force man back into integrity, character and deservingness.
AI Demands We Take Our Own Genius Seriously
In a world where repetitiveness is finally understood as a weakness not a strength, and where infinite velocity, fully-collateralized money is available to you no matter where you live, underneath both labor and capital markets is a tectonic shift that requires us to return to our most precious originality, vision and forethought.
In a sense what emerges is a state where there is no longer a conflict between capital and labor. The Socialism of parasitically beggaring labor for the sake of capital of insiders is made obsolete. And vice versa. Governments which have plied their trade on bribing citizens with welfare are obsolete. The purpose of governments which remain adapts. Those governments which best encourage and induce the triumph of Man’s genius are those which garner the greatest worldwide subscribership.
Innovation always creeps in where there is the most societal damage. This is where the returns for disruption are the greatest. Today this is law and money and propaganda. Using automation and physics and ledgers bound permanently to the laws of thermodynamics overrides the opportunities for the malfeasant and undeserving to form their business models around institutionalized counterfeiting. AI supercharges the value of sound money. Not only would autonomous transactions made by AI platforms choose the soundest money, but that the economic creativity unlocked by AI will accrue to sound money holders in a more aggressive way than ever before.
Bitcoin is the Epicenter of an Automated Promethean Future
As the debt ceiling hits 32 trillion going on 50 trillion, every centavo evidence of a counterfeit, double spend and the inability to pay, why wouldn’t prior generations stand forward to repeal that system? The gerontocracy clings to a degrading system to hide the skeletons in the closet. A repeal is an admission of guilt.
Why then share a monetary system with those stuck in the rut of this false dialectic of Modern and Ancestral Statism and its global currency racket? The entire of the last generation was a period of stagnation, cannibalization flagging production. Instead, what existed already was mortgaged and re-mortgaged, and our world become more fragile and less able to tolerate precisely the kind of change the Promethean instinct fosters. The past 50 years has been marked by the clinging to stasis and the cultural refusal to bear the burden of originality and creative work. This has never happened before. In contrast, the period of 1900 to 1971 was equivalent to 10,000 years of technology growth and improvement in human well-being.
Artificial intelligence in large language models to automate rent seeking occupations paired with Bitcoin which prevents chronic double-spending makes this rejection of human nature impossible and obsolete. It’s for Millennials to lose.
The Conscience Cannot be Kept at Bay
Our triumphant humanity is constituted by that which nobly serves universal abstract moral virtue, which holds fast to the code and the vision, and the ever-widening circles of meaning yet unseen. All of these circles are united by a deeper spiritual movement within us, a union of spiritual and romantic love and a sense for what is irreducibly and preciously beautiful. Prometheus is the bringer of the aesthetic power of creation, not just technology and tools. To this end, we know instinctively when we have not been loyal to this most inward sense of Beauty. The flip side of this is that our conscience is an indestructible force within us. It is the aesthetic, poetic and mythic dimension of technology which must be retrieved in our epoch such that we no longer fall prey to dehumanizing cult of the ugly offered by the two factions of statism.
In our age we are suffering from a pandemic of beleaguered conscience. The beleaguered conscience is the outraged, murdered aspect of our humanity, that which we slaughter in the stampede for cheap animal thrills, for apelike materialism, for mimicry, for win-lose zero-sum dominance and submission, rent seeking, for becoming the errand boys for statism, and casting the leavings of our failures onto others. The soul, the part of ourselves architected around the original mineral of Beauty, lashes out at us. Our conscience hates us for failing the sacredness of our original nature. One’s reaction to the soul’s demands, to the beleaguered conscience, is merely their reaction to their own actions. The anger and avoidance are the reactions to the inescapability of the conscience. The addiction to debt and the global currency racket, narcotics, pornography, politics, welfare, racism, to ideologies which offer to switch out our burden of creative achievement, the false dialectics, are the numbing agents for the conscience.
We secretly fear we will become like Job, forced to renege on the virtues of mankind in order to placate Yahweh’s apelike, capricious demands, or else we may lose the comforts of statism altogether. We fear we will be forced to commit self-mortification by destroying the faculty of the conscience in order to conspire and self-inflict the wrongdoing previously inflicted on us, so we deliberately destroy the feedback on what wrongs we do. Just like that god, the shadowy, counterfeiting cabal who bribed the world can never allow the conscience to be strengthened. The statist factions want nothing more than a race of nihilistic second handers lining up for bizarre rituals which cannibalize the conscience.
Do we want to get our soul back? It is time to recapture the Beauty of Promethean originality. Like cunning Odysseus, unrepentantly marshal AI to elevate productive decision-making and erect the capacity to support sound money. A brilliant solar future of genius and Beauty is over the horizon.
-RC