Explanation has lost its grip. In part due to the realization that understanding, or believing we understand – which is truthfully as close as we ever come to understanding – is insuficient. It may be just another aspect of the lure of expecting linear cause & effect. In the end, I just don’t know more than that the events and revelations of these past few years have made it clear that understanding how, even why, something is happening just does not lead to being able to do something meaningful about a situation.
This could very well be my running into the limits of what I can allow myself to see. We are inundated daily by evidence of how easily denial and willful blindness defeats what was once known as common sense, common decency. None of us are immune to such limits and it is only to be expected that in extreme times this would be a widespread phenomenon.
There could also be an inherent limitaion in the form of an essay. Is an essay always an explanation? How can a missive be anything else?
I started Horizons of Significance in 2009 as a chronicle of an internal inquiry. Writing was both a way to discover “what I was thinking” and a place for those observations on an ongoing timeline where anyone could refer to it. An attempt to join a long tradition of leaving a trace. As both a recognition of how valuable it had been for me to have access to what others had left for me to read and wishing to further this endeavor as best I cxould.
There was, in those years, an anticipation that there were so many things at the edge of awareness that needed to come out. That there were clear benefits to illumination, perhaps even enlightenment, that might break the terrible cycles leading us down such a dangerously self-destructive path.
At this point every trend shows how unwilling we all are to shift our expectations to match events unfolding and likely to arise. “Public life” has become a pitiful procession of the putatively “best & brightest” among us. Repeatedly and increasingly making it impossible to ignore their gross refusal to defend any of their so-called ideals employed to justify their positions and power.
“Are we the baddies?”
Is my inability to follow a train of thought and expand my awareness beyond the forms I’m accustomed to just a sign that, being who I am and living where and when I do I simply cannot digest the depths of my own complicity?
What’s also becoming clear is that every aspect of our lives is mired in a system of propaganda and imposed, totalitarian control that has been weaponized by LLMs, “Data Centers,” and “AI.”
None of this effort has been undertaken for any other, less malevolent reason. It’s being installed to be able to monitor, steal, and subvert any voices that might counter the sole motivation behind the current state of our Predicament.
“AI” could be seen as an Apotheosis of The Edifice of Thought. An attempt to enforce Thought’s dominion over us by moving its center out of what the Technologists call “Wet Ware” and putting into a grand machine. When we’ve all lost the capacity to even recognize reality and communicate with each other without the fear that we are being drawn into conversation with a machine; or that everything we do, say, or write in any electronic realm will become part of the furtherance of this evil program; we are left defenseless against Thought.
I am personally already seeing a new and deeply disturbing excalation of this automation of indoctrination. Maybe you’ve found something similar. Learning guitar I’ve come to rely on Youtube tutorials, lessons, podcasts. Recently I’ve seen a raft of suggested videos that purport to be by writers I’ve noted here and on my other sites over the years. These videos, “by” Gabor Maté or “on” the writings of Carl Jung, at first seem straightforward enough. They seem presciently focused on matters that I’m deply concerned about. It doesn’t take long to begin to recognize that the voice-over is a facsimile of the thinker’s voices “reading” a text that soon begins to sound like a Chatbot “harvest” of their words. The imgages are a caleidoscopic, intentionally mesmerizing AI slop. For all this, the on-point nature of what’s being “said;” its relevance to my personal situation is uncanny and overcomes any resistance to reject the whole thing outright and move on.
I must confess I ended up watching more than half a dozen of these. Even after it was clear they were forgeries and had no connection with the people they supposedly “represented.” It took a while to process this ucanny divide. What’s becoming appparent is that this is likely just one of the many new ways AI has weaponized indoctrination. If they are doing this to me they are likely doing this to everyone on-line. If they can overcome my hyper-vigilance enough to draw me in; what are they able to do to naive “consumers?”
We’ve gotten accustomed to the existence of Bot-farms. Images of walls covered in cell-phones being manipulated by the equivalent of military drones operators infesting every social media network. This kind of thing takes the whole effort to another level. None of the alleged “promise” of AI will ever bring anyone any real benefit; but from the perspective of the Psycopaths in Power it will be doing exactly what benefits their agenda. As perverse and delusionally Omni-destructive as it is.
There is one other method of mental destruction going on. Its the most obvius one. The bluntest of instruments. Nothing new. It’s always been trotted out by every despotic regime. Inundating our attention with violence and cruelty undertaken for its own sake. We are frightened by it. We keep getting tripped up by a residual expectation of fair-dealing and “rational consistency,” expecting “justice” and only finding hypocrisy and barely veiled, even blatant, corruption everywhere we look. When actual humanity strives to break out anywhere it is crushed and overwhelmed. Or, sidelined and brushed aside as the indoctrination engines ramp up against it.
Every expectation that some part of the power structure might “grow a spine,” or “act as a check & balance,” is met with a Vichey-level of duplicity, feigned ignorance and powerlessness. And not just in this country.
If we are willing to enter into transactional negotiations with the participants and beneficiaries of a totally corrupt system we can imagine that getting rid of “X” – remember when that letter was a mathematical symbol for an unknown factor? Now it’s been literalized into a streamlined updated Swastica. – That getting rid of an individual leader, a party, restoring “balance,” would “put things right again?”
It feels cruel to dampen enthusiasm for incremental “improvements.” It is important that people are doing what they can and risking their lives to counter these truly evil forces. Every iota of misery that is lessened by their efforts is worth it!
They are contributing what they can. All I ask is that I get to contribute what I can. And, that has mostly been a pursuit of root causes and shining a light on the depths of our total predicament which, as I’ve been able to understand it is best approached on the level of investigating the limits and dangers of Thought as Krsihnamurti & Bohm laid them out.
If this langauge is new and confusing to you please dip into what I’ve been writing on the matter over the last decade or more. There are sections here in the main menu leading to all of my on-line writing as well as my art and boat-related efforts. Rest assured the AI harvesting bots have already done so!
The entirety of Modern – since the concept of Modernity was invented in the Eighteenth Century – and everything that falls under the category of Wetiko going back much much further, has been a culmination of the overtrow of humanity by Thought.
Again, if you’re not familiar with the concept, Thought refers to an entire structure of habit, reaction, division, and reduction to binaries. It’s not “thinking.” Part of it is the whole bundle of assumptions we call “being rational….”
None of this can be “defeated.” None of it will be “overcome” by any of the habits Thought has saturated us with.
If there is a benefit to be found in the depths of our current situation it is that the Revelations we are being forced to notice and take-in may bring about a broadly experienced disillusionment that gains sufficient momentum to counter the active brutality we are under. This, nothing, will save us from the consequences of having had the Edifice of Thought bring us to this point. But it may be possible for a re-awakening of a turn towards Life and away from feeding demented self-destruction barely cloaked by this craven pursuit of power. There is much that can be done even in extremis that can be done to minimize misery and reduce suffering. Just look inside Gaza, for example, at how people hold onto their humanity, their creature-hood, in the face of almost total annihilation.
The dots are lining up. It’s increasingly diffcult not to see how this has been a model, a dress-rehersal a-la the Spanish Civil War, for what these monsters have in store for all of us.
Do what we can. Also, allow the recognition to sink in that there are no “answers” to our Predicament. It’s only through the erosion of all of our assumptions and reaching the depths of dissillusionment in their false-securities and assurances that we can reach what I’ve long called a condition of Joyful Dissillusionment. When the pressures of self-censorship and delusion are lifted by an acceptance of what is truly at stake we have done all that can be done to break the spell. It’s only after this that we can expect any clarity, any relief.
I will continue to attend to a responsibility to present what comes to me in whatever means I have available. For now this might still be here and “on-line” in general. I must say though that I am deeply concerned that there cannot be any real counter to the machine arrived at through continuing to rely on that same machine.
To return to the questions that instigated this post, I am struggling with the depths of my comlicity and the ways in which my whole way of life is mired and tangled-up in the artifacts and technologies of The Edifice of Thought.
It’s not clear that any organism can actually jump out of its lived environment and land in a better one….
Greetings, my friend. One could point you to the direct experience of nonviolence - in reality and truth beyond the trap of identity. A mind-identified world is lost in suffering. Yet, all knowledge is insufficient for the fundamental illusions of separate selves. What is reality? Do other worlds exist - where nonviolence is seen?
Another coincidence here is that I've just been having a conversation (and writing a few essays) on the very same things, including, "my complicity" 'and "is an essay necessarily an explanation?"
The only reason I'm still writing is because I don't think that's the only thing an essay can do. Whether this is true or not can be left suspended. But I approach essays as if there were another potential that can be unfolded. One that is neither a description nor an explanation, although some of that may be involved in writing an essay.
The hard part is that there's no way to see essays as something more than an explanation or a description (positive assertions) unless the potential for a negative force in essays is held in suspension, as an hypothesis. Because explanations and descriptions will be part of this other force. It won't be the absence of such things; so people can easily find explanations and descriptions and presume that it's the same old thing, and thereby miss the negative impact of an essay.
In miniature, an example would be the old saw: "the emperor has no clothes." It can be read as a mere description or yet another posited theory. But rather than reading it as a description of reality itself (the emperor), it also functions as a mirror to Thought and/or thinking itself, exposing not the emperor, but all the courtiers who are lying to themselves about reality (including the complicit author). And this mirror form of essay writing (or negational writing) is proprioceptive. This negative function neither describes nor explains, but triggers a new relationship by default, in the absence of old positive forms. It triggers the death of Thought as an edifice, restores active thinking, or even something more subtle.
And this notes is explanatory, but its effect could be a trigger over and above that, by altering our Thought that essays can only be explanatory. It could delete that certainty and allow us to read and write with activation in mind, not explanation. At least that's the posited theory through which we have to look without certainty.