What is the value of the State?

[Steve Kinney]

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On 05/03/2017 03:27 PM, juan wrote:

> what's actually going on is that people with the same twisted 
> desire for 'order' like you are embarked in the destruction or 
> 'assimilation' of human invidivuals into some sort of 'meta 
> organism'. Or perhaps the majority of people will be killed off 
> when they can be replaced with machines and artificial 
> 'intelligence'.
> 
> I would have disregard that sort of cheap sci-fi scenario a couple
> of years ago, but now it's starting to look a lot more real...

The global Superstate scenario is "real" in the sense that many people
actually seem to believe in it, approve of it and want to make it
happen.  Such is the power of propaganda in the age of ubiquitous
broadcast communications, moving whole societies into fantasy worlds
designed to facilitate economic growth under a top-down command
hierarchy.

The Superstate scenario is "real" in the metaphorical sense that the
Internet, trans-national corporations and high speed long distance
transport of materials and consumer goods have already turned Homo Sap
into a meta-organism that behaves like a colonial fungus bent on
consuming the world's resources as quickly and completely as possible.

But the prospect of world peace and prosperity under a benevolent
global State is "not real at all" in the sense that the global
industrial economy is locked into self-destructive feedback loops
driven by perverse incentives.  Any Utopian plan that does not take
the context of a global economic collapse and human population crash
into account is a futile exercise in abstract speculation.

We are now inside the historical singularity:  A system where the
exponential growth rate of change in human affairs (new discoveries,
technologies, etc.) has advanced too far to permit reliable long range
projections of future developments.  The rate of ongoing change is too
high, creating too many hidden variables and too much turbulence.
Under these conditions, even brute force solutions that seek to
/impose/ predictable order via murder and terrorism on global scale
will not yield reliable results.

The only things we can predict with much confidence today are that the
better established laws of physics will remain intact, and that macro
scale human motives and behaviors that have not changed over the last
few thousand years will likely change slowly if at all.  Given these
baseline factors, we /can/ predict, with some confidence, that we will
be dropping out of the singularity soon:  Macro scale human demand for
basic material commodities (including food) now exceeds the planet's
carrying capacity; that demand is still growing, while the rate of
resource exhaustion and human habitat destruction continues to accelerat
e.

The Scientician faith and its Corporate Capitalist patrons tell us
that technological "quick fix" solutions will be created when and as
needed to keep the world as we know it intact.  Like all respectable
apocalyptic prophesies, those of the Scienticians are likely to be
reasonably accurate right up to the point where the Heavens open up
and Bog and all his Holy Angels come down and fix everything for us:
That part never happens.

I do not advise people to "give up" on anything but the status quo,
and I do not predict the extinction of the human species.  We are the
toughest weeds Nature ever made, capable of living on pack ice and
hard rock desert using only Neolithic technology - and loving it.  I
do suggest that those who are able to do so get to work devising
practical solutions for survival and recovery to the best available
New Normal.  The world's present rulers are hard at work on those
problems right now, but their objectives center on worst case
scenarios where retaining their present level of power is the primary
objective, and everyone but themselves is expendable.  Pardon my
language, but fuck those people.

:o)







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