The fear and reverence of the absolutes
A few more thoughts on AGI and other scams
Thinking. understanding and even truth are just processes. After I replied to the first comment to my last post, I kept thinking about it. I felt that it may be perceived as somewhat dismissive of the point, when nothing can be further from the truth. The switch to AI from the climate hustle is like switching to a new horse when the old one has been flogged to death.
I also reread my post with my morning coffee, I fixed a couple of mistakes and found a missing point.
A point that can be best illustrated by the saying of the Yellow kid Joseph Weil who said:
"I never cheated an honest man. They wanted something for nothing, I gave them nothing for something"
This is the essence of the scams.
It takes two to tango. People love to be afraid and they love to believe in absolutes. They buy into the scams because they want to able to trust and believe in something greater than themselves. The point of absolutes is the illusion of certainty. When you believe in absolutes, you don’t have to think about them any more. People want the certainty of faith and the safety of groupthink. They want to live in a world where safety means buying into the BS and professing faith in it with some holier-than-thou virtue signaling. All they need to do is obeying the dictates of those who can interpret the absolutes and provide instructions of the correct behaviour facing them.
The people who buy into the scams find strength in their faith and in virtue signaling.
The scammers’ benefits are power and resources that the believers willingly give up.
If the number of the believers is big enough, and/or if they can use the power of the state to enforce compliance, that the critical mass needed for success does not even have to be the majority.
Totalitarians always need a boogieman to protect us from. The devil, the evil capitalists, the thunder and any other natural calamities, you name it.
Any time I see a scam, I can see the totalitarian drive behind it. They all make me feel like Cassandra.
I call them out and watch as people fall for them anyway.
It seems that we can never be free from the division that the conflict between reason and faith creates.
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Fwiw I didn’t think of your reply as dismissive at all. I’m just inclined to look at things from a cash flow perspective. The obverse is looking for the ‚god-shaped hole‘ in people‘s thinking, as you do here, and that’s equally potent in explanatory power.
" Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." (Hebrews 11:1). So what are the defining elements between "good" faith and "bad" faith? Crowds or group-think operate on high emotions and cannot and will not be reasoned with in their excited state to which they are stirred up to action. One of the lines I remembered from the anti-federalist papers was that "men do not express the truth as it is, but rather as they want it to be; (projecting). If we want to practice slavery and trafficking in humans, we simply change labeling to suit our particular interest and unleash the specter of "Child Abuse" to gloss over corporal punishment for example or in the case of obstinate parents who insist on being authentic natural parents, we will re cast them as criminals, and the survivors of mob rule (group think) are atomized, marginalized and relegated to the "mentally ill" and consigned to the memory holes of history.
"It is repugnant to reason, to the universal order of things, to all examples from former ages, to
suppose that this continent can long remain subject to any external power. The most sanguine
[optimistic] in Britain does not think so. The utmost stretch of human wisdom cannot, at this time,
compass a plan, short of separation, which can promise the continent even a year’s security.
Reconciliation is now a fallacious dream. Nature hath deserted the connection, and Art cannot
supply her place. For, as Milton wisely expresses, “never can true reconcilement grow where
wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep.” Thomas Paine --Common Sense--
The spirit of a man will sustain his infirmity; but a wounded spirit who can bear? (Proverbs 18:14).
The shuffling of the stacked decks of human interest, the constant breaches of clearly defined fiduciary contracts, and the betrayal of the crowds woeful ignorance leave the individual in a world of hurt for opposing the latest "religion" as established by would be rulers and wanna be gods. The "Blue line" of silence is deafening when it comes to truth and facts.