No more heroes
“If everything around seems dark, look again, you may be the light.” ― Rumi
Saying 70 - The gospel of Thomas:
(1) “If you bring it into being within you, (then) that which you have will save you.
(2) If you do not have it within you, (then) that which you do not have within you [will] kill you.”
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bible-versions-and-translations/the-gospel-of-thomas-114-sayings-of-jesus/
Many years ago, when I was a teenager, I remember my mother giving her scornful assessment of modern humanity having being given the status and designation of a subspecies of Homo sapiens, Homo sapiens sapiens, to distinguish us from our early ancestors. She didn't think we deserved the first 'sapiens', and found the addition of the second completely ridiculous. I have said it before, but the last few years have buried any remaining illusions I had about us being a rational species, so I have come to agree with my mother's view. More recently, I have encountered a different way of referring to our species that is perhaps more appropriate, Homo ludens, or playing man. This alternative naming is related to Fifth Generation warfare, a thing I had never heard of until I saw a recording of Dr Robert Malone giving a talk about it in January 2023. As he said, the expression is not his, but has been written about by many others, including James Corbett, which can be found here:
I thought Dr. Malone's talk was very good, and I was particularly struck by one of the opening comments he made about 2mins20secs into the talk:
“Fifth generation warfare is a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
Dr Robert Malone - Fifth Generation Warfare and Sovereignty
https://rumble.com/v2888lm-dr-robert-malone-fifth-generation-warfare-and-sovereignty.html
I am not an expert in any kind of warfare, let alone the 5th generation variety, but it was not the first time I had heard that expression, albeit in a rather different context. In the summer of 2019, I had a long conversation with someone who told me the story of how their life had been deliberately destroyed in every way possible. It was an incredible tale, and I wasn't entirely sure why it had happened, but towards the end of the process this person was visited by two men, who sounded like they were from the intelligence agencies from the way they were described to me. One of the two said:
“You have to remember it is all a game, and if you play the game you lose.”
At the time I thought, well don't play then, obviously. This was followed almost immediately by a second thought: how do you not play?
It is a trickier problem than it might first appear because of the nature of 5th Generation Warfare itself. In one of his substack articles on the topic, Dr Malone quotes from the Fifth Generation Warfare handbook to define this version of warfare as:
“A war of information and perception, targeting existing cognitive biases of individuals and organisations, creating new cognitive biases. It is different from classical warfare for the following reasons:
It focusses on the individual observer or decision maker.
It is difficult or impossible to attribute.
The nature of the attack is concealed.”
In the handbook it also says:
“The successful application of the Fifth Generation of Warfare (5GW) is "indistinguishable from magic" (Rees 2009, following in the spirit of Clarke's Law, propounded by the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey -"any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"). The Fifth-Generation warrior hides in the shadows, or in the static. So, then, how can analysts and researchers study and discuss 5GW?”
The Handbook of Fifth Generation Warfare – Daniel H. Abbott (editor)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8750385-the-handbook-of-fifth-generation-warfare
The most effective strategy in 5thGW is to mix truth with fiction, leaving people uncertain as to what or whom to believe. It is the very epitome of gaslighting.
So, the only winning move is not to play, but how do you not play a game when you don't even know you are in it? You don't know if you are under attack, or who is responsible if you are. The weapons are not the usual, obvious ones; people are not charging at you with bombs and guns and knives, although clearly they are not yet redundant. It is not sticks and stones but polluted information, and the battlefield is your own mind. Perhaps names can hurt us after all.
One of the features of 5th GW is the use of social media manipulation, as it is very easy to obscure the source of (dis)information, and very easy to seed with fake news, memes, and the “Freedom Movement's” favourite bug bear, controlled opposition. Protest movements which appear to be grass roots, but which are really led by government agents is not a new tactic. The modern day variety can also include bots generating outrageous claims that make everyone think the protestors are stupid, bad or mad, so they are disregarded as an insignificant fringe minority. Or they are portrayed as so dangerous that no-one much minds if the State disregards their civil liberties and shuts them down. The obvious danger of this being the loss of basic liberties for one unpopular group makes it so much easier to remove them from everyone else later on. The tactic can take many forms, but the end result is the de-legitimisation of the movement, causing it to fail.
So we have WWIII on the battlefield of our minds. It means none of us can be sure of the truth of anything we read, or hear or see online or in the MSM right now. There is no certainty anywhere, at least in the Western world. Given the nature of what Dr Malone was saying, it was with great interest that I noted him at the end of his excellent talk inviting his audience to use the weapons that were being used against them. He told them they could all be warriors in this new type of warfare. He invited them to play the game he had started out by saying they would lose if they played. (about 41 minutes in):
“In conclusion, you do not have to be a victim. You can learn this technology, it is not expensive. You can deploy it. Every single one of you can be leaders and warriors. You do not have to be victims. As I said, right here we have more than 800 soldiers...”
It seems a strange thing to do, doesn't it? Tell people about fifth generation warfare; tell them it is a game they will lose if they play; then invite them to play the game anyway. And everyone cheered. I guess they had forgotten the initial statement made in the first two minutes. Does this make Dr Malone a bad faith actor in the “Freedom Movement”? Is he, in fact, controlled opposition? I have absolutely no idea, and I couldn't care less either.
I think Mikki Willis hits the nail on the head in the excerpt from Plandemic 3 that Dr Malone played towards the end of this same talk. I don't know if there actually is that much controlled opposition around right now, but I suspect there isn't because it isn't actually necessary. All those who would control us need to do is to make us believe it is a serious problem. If they make us think particular individuals are dodgy in some way, our own fear and uncertainty will do the rest. In my opinion, on this battlefield in our mind, we are destroying ourselves by fretting about exactly this question, and that is intentional. We are fast reaching the point Willis spoke about, where the movement kills itself through its internal divisions and recriminations about who was or wasn't 'awake' at a sufficiently early stage; about who is a shill, who are the heroes, and who are the villains; about who is trying to lead us astray with half truths and downright lies while masquerading as a “Truther”. This is the state of the revolution in 2024: soon no-one will actually be good enough to be in it.
Conversely, I also agree with Willis that there is a real sense in which we are all controlled opposition to a degree, without meaning to be and despite our best intentions. We share information in good faith with those we care about and with strangers; but the ongoing war on sense-making means we cannot really know what is true and what is false unless we have seen an event with our own eyes or done the original, cross-referenced research for ourselves in multiple domains.
Speaking for myself, I know I am not in a position to judge the accuracy of much of what I read and share with others. I have no clue how to analyse statistics, or even what half the technical terminology means. Bayesian analysis? Sounds great. Don't ask me to explain it though. The same is true of information from the fields of epidemiology, virology, immunology, toxicology, or of reports of events far away from where I actually live, etc., etc. I have outsourced my sense-making to a large degree to those I think are trustworthy and honest as far as I am able to judge. I have no choice but to do so if I am to have any chance of thinking about things at all. This is nothing new. What is new is the degree of uncertainty I now feel when doing so, and the extent to which my trust in what Daniel Schmachtenberger calls the information ecology has been undermined; quite deliberately so in my opinion. Who is responsible for this parlous state of affairs is a question that must be addressed at some point, but right now I think what we do about it is a far more pressing problem that has to be solved if we are to survive as a species. Indeed, given how little certainty there is about anything, I don't think it is possible to properly deal with the first issue without dealing with the second.
The War on Sensemaking, Daniel Schmachtenberger
I think people need a degree of certainty, a foundation from which they can operate in the world. I think a high degree of uncertainty is one of the things that makes us suckers for good looking/charismatic, apparently knowledgeable, people who present themselves as certain of the truth. They act as a life raft in a stormy sea of chaos, so people cling to them to escape the not knowing. The undermining of everything we once trusted, our institutions, science, experts, once respected media outlets; the spreading of division in every sphere imaginable, in every dimension possible: religion, race, politics, culture, sex, creates a deep need for agreement and order. Disagreement and chaos feel very threatening to our safety and therefore to our survival. Under these circumstances, it is very easy to wind everyone up and let them get on with it.
I'd guess most people against whom the accusation of 'controlled opposition' is directed probably think their accusers are either malicious or nuts. They probably think those accusers are in fact the ones who are 'controlled opposition'. As Dr Malone highlights in his talk, seeding such accusations in a protest movement is a very effective way of causing division within it, further exacerbating the sense of not knowing who or what to believe, further increasing the derangement, and derailing any effective opposition to whatever is going on. Instead opposition falls apart in a swamp of uncertainty, accusation and counter accusation. Job done as we fragment ourselves.
So I don't care about controlled opposition, and I think the argument about who does and doesn't fall into that category is entirely futile. Put simply, I have no way of knowing with any degree of certainty who is and who isn't, so why should I waste any energy worrying about it or accusing others of being it? It is utterly pointless in my view, not least because we shouldn't be 'following' anyone anyway. I think that is partly why we are in this mess in the first place in. Following people, doing what we are told instead of actually thinking things through to see if they make sense or not. Sit, stand, don't wear a mask, wear a mask, take the jab, ostracise the unjabbed, behave like a good dog. People fret about themselves or others being led astray by controlled opposition. If you are not following anyone, how can you be led astray by them?
In my opinion, it is better to listen to what people have to say, whoever they are, while remembering you don't have to accept everything they say as 'the truth', let alone elevate them to a position of leadership, however informal. Some of the information may be very good, and some may be wrong, even if the person is well intentioned. If you speak to enough people, in time I think there will be enough overlap between those parts that are sound that eventually you can triangulate towards some idea of where baseline reality is. Right now I don't think we really have a clue. So while I found Dr. Malone's talk deeply interesting and enlightening, I thought his final suggestion was probably the precise opposite of what we should be doing. In my view, the last thing we need is more lies. People are already almost completely deranged. If you do not think this is so, just listen to what Bill Gates thinks about trees and look at what some in charge are already doing to them in the name of saving the planet.
SNP admits to felling 16 million trees to develop wind farms
The only way to protect forests is to chop them down...
“Wind energy makes a decisive contribution to the energy transition and to the conservation of nature. This is the only way to preserve forests and important ecosystems,” she told Bild.
https://brusselssignal.eu/2023/12/german-fairy-tale-forest-to-be-felled-for-wind-turbines/
Adding to the derangement with more lies is really not going to help. Instead, I think we need as many people as possible to tell the truth as they see it as clearly and as courageously as possible. I think we have to do this if we are to have any hope of finding the golden thread that will lead us out of the labyrinthine mess we are currently in, as I don't think anyone really knows what is true and what is false any more, not even those who have brought us to this point. To put it bluntly, I don't think anyone is in control, least of all the ones who seem to think they have it all sewn up.
Some physicists argue information and energy are the same thing, and it is quite striking how much emphasis there has been on controlling both of late. The drive to digitise absolutely everything in part looks to me like the latest iteration of the very old method of trying to control people via control of the version of reality with which they are presented. It is so easy to change things once the information exists only digitally, much harder if there are still hard copies (or memories!) available for people to check.
Information converted to energy
https://physicsworld.com/a/information-converted-to-energy/
Is information the fifth state of matter? Physicist says there’s one way to find out
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/information-energy-mass-equivalence/
A thousand years ago the population was largely illiterate, and only a select few were able to read and, crucially, interpret the holy texts on which they believed their eternal existence depended. Attempting to translate the Bible into English to enable greater access to its contents was once an action punishable by death. Nowadays, the education system is dumbed down, fluoride, a chemical which multiple studies have shown is linked to lower IQ's in children, is added to water, and people are rendered less and less competent and more and more dependent on centralised authorities for everything from food, to shelter, to medicine to energy. My Polish grandmother could walk into a forest and find the basics of what she needed to survive. I cannot. How has that degree of knowledge loss taken place in just two generations? This dependency will only be magnified when our identities and what was once our money exist only online, which will happen should CBDC's and digital ID's become a universal reality. A dependent people are an enslaved people.
Effect of fluoride exposure on the intelligence of school children in Madhya Pradesh, India
“Children in endemic areas of fluorosis are at risk for impaired development of intelligence.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3409983/
Then there is the climate change narrative, the targeting of energy use and the increasingly coercive attempts to reduce its consumption drastically for the bulk of the population. As long as you are super rich and powerful, you will get to keep your super expensive, energy consuming toys and play with them as much as you like. The private jets and yachts, the multiple homes on different continents. It's okay because, well, these people do form less than 1% of the population, so what harm could they possibly do? The planet can distinguish between virtuous billionaires trying to save it and the rest of us planet destroying vermin who need to be put back in our box and fed insects, synthetic 'meat' and a digitalised, controlled reality. It is for “the greater good”, so it is absolutely fine. Honest. I look at the images of rows and rows of private jets at Davos or at the site of the latest COP jamboree and wonder what the real issue is, as these people really don't act as if they believe what they are telling the rest of us.
Climate the Movie: The Cold Truth
https://twitter.com/wideawake_media/status/1770552312710217954
Maybe they are more concerned with feeding an AI that is increasing its capabilities at an almost exponential rate. AI is energy hungry and data hungry. I wonder how much of the suicidal race to develop ever more powerful versions of it is actually a race among the tech lords and their sponsors to be the one to develop the ultimate AI first; the one that contains all the data of all the living and non living things on the planet that it seems they think will give them ultimate control. If they control the thing that knows everything, or even better, meld with it in their transhumanist heaven, perhaps they believe they will become as gods, able to predict everything, and in this way control everything. Control of information, control of energy. Knowledge is power as the old saying goes. Information and energy.
Whether or not this is the case, I think the ones driving the 5th generation warfare game have made a profound error. I guess they assume the game is under their control, because they think it is “their” game, as if they were children in a primary school playground, doling out permission to join in or not according to their whims. However, it seems to me playing the game is unavoidable, even for those who think they are outside of it. I think the further they drive us all from baseline reality, the more they themselves lose track of what is actually going on. In essence, whether they realise it or not, they are drinking from the same information well which they poisoned for the rest of us.
In quantum physics, the experiments to determine whether light is a particle or a wave have shown that the act of observation affects the outcome. No matter how much scientists tried to remove themselves from the experiment, they could not. It is one of the strange, unexplained weirdnesses of the quantum world. I suspect it is a feature of our macro-reality too and we are all in it, not outside of it, whether we like it or not. So now that 5th generation warfare game has been unleashed, I don't think anyone is outside of it, and I don't think anyone is really in control of it, whatever narcissistic fantasies people like Bill Gates, Xi Jinping, Klaus Schwab or our third rate so called leaders have about being 'Masters of the Universe'.
The double-slit experiment: Is light a wave or a particle?
https://www.space.com/double-slit-experiment-light-wave-or-particle
It is like Jumanji. Every time the dice are rolled the landscape changes. Those who think they are running it really are not. I remember a school swimming lesson when I was about 9. For some reason, the class as a whole started walking around the edge of the pool in the same direction. I don't know whose idea it was, or if it was something that happened spontaneously. In effect, we were stirring the water in the pool, which eventually created an artificial current that we could all ride on. We made it, but we didn't control it, and we certainly couldn't stop it. It just had to run its course until the energy dissipated.
So I don't think the behavioural psychologists and the tech lords understand the landscape alters every time they attempt to manipulate, nudge or coerce us into a course of action of their choosing, let alone how. I suspect they think the field of play remains the same, and the only thing affected is us. I suspect they think they are dealing with something complicated, made manageable by data hungry, energy hungry AI. But they are not. The system is complex, with multiple points of failure, and all sorts of cascading consequences that I think even the most powerful AI we can produce could not predict. It will always be missing some pieces of data, however small. It will always be a fraction of the whole, not the whole, because the whole is the entirety of the universe. A model will always fall short. It will always miss some tiny piece out that would change the outcome completely if it were included, just as Lorenz found in the 1960's, when he discovered the phenomenon of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, otherwise known as the Butterfly Effect.
Circa January 1961: Lorenz and the Butterfly Effect
https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200301/history.cfm
The more people try to assert control with what is inevitably partial information, the more uncontrollable and unstable the whole becomes as unforeseen consequences pop up in unexpected places. For a while now, I have had an old children's song stuck in my head: there was an old lady who swallowed a fly.... I'd say we are about at the point of swallowing a horse.
So what do we do? We may be Homo ludens, not sapiens. We may not be able to choose whether we play or not, but I do think we can choose what game we play. Game A or Game B. Game A, the finite game, doomed to end in a self destructive, self defeating race to the bottom every time we play it, no matter how good the checks and balances with which we come up. Or Game B, the infinite game that does not lay waste to everyone and everything around it.
Jamie Wheal: Game A VS Game B - What Is the difference?
Full interview here: War on Sensemaking III
I imagine it as something similar to a story I was told when I was still at school, about the difference between heaven and hell. A man is shown two rooms by an angel. In the first one, labelled hell, he sees a long table groaning with every kind of food imaginable, but the people sitting around it look like famine victims. They have to eat with long handled spoons, and the length of the handles means they can never get the food to their mouths, so they are doomed to starve for eternity. In the second room labelled heaven, the man sees exactly the same situation, the same table groaning with the same variety of every conceivable kind of food and the same long handled spoons. However, the people sitting around this table are well fed and happy. In puzzlement the man turns to the angel for an explanation. “Ah,” says the angel, “in this place the people have learned that if they use their spoon to feed the person opposite them, they will both have enough to eat.”
It is the precise opposite of the zero trust world desired by the 'great and the good' who have betrayed us so badly. It is win-win for everyone, not a 'heads I win, tails you lose' world, and getting there may not be as overwhelmingly difficult as it seems from this vantage point.
As I have said before, one of the big problems we have is that we are so easy to manipulate. It is probably why the tech lords and their friends went down the AI route as a means of asserting their total domination, because AI can predict so much about each one of us from just a handful of clicks. The analogy used to explain it is that of a slice of cake. Just one slice is enough to predict the whole with a reasonable degree of accuracy. For Mark Zuckerberg, just ten clicks is enough to predict key information about each one of us, information that can be used to manipulate our behaviour. It isn't magic, just an algorithm. But this apparent weakness on our part is also the thing that can become our greatest strength, the thing that makes sure we as a species never, ever come to this point again; that we are never again used as the playthings of psychopaths and wannabe tyrants for their entertainment. Best of all, the way out is not new. It is one that has been spoken about many times over many centuries, and it is to do with our blind spots and biases; what the Buddhists and the psychologists refer to as our shadow selves.
For what it's worth, I don't think imagining they were outside of the game was the only mistake the wannabe tyrants made. Paradoxical as it sounds, I think locating the battlefield in each of our heads, in our own minds, was another because it has handed to us the opportunity to reassert power over our own lives. I accept that if I were to join Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and his merry algorithms would rapidly know me better than I know myself. But that is because of my blind spots, my shadow self that I avoid looking at simply because I do not want to see what is there.
On the whole, most of us want to be good people. I'd guess much of the virtue signalling that is engaged in by some these days is really part of an internal struggle to prove to themselves that they are good people. We do not want to see our own dark heart for fear it would tell us we are not as good as we would like to be. Solzhenitsyn's quote regarding the dividing line between good and evil is very pertinent, and it is not just that we are not willing to cut out that part of us which falls short of our idealised version of ourselves. It is that we don't even consciously know it is there at all. The AI's we interact with are not so blind (nor are our nearest and dearest to be honest), and this is what enables AI to predict what we are like so accurately, making it very easy for us to be controlled.
I think a side effect of this, an unintended consequence, is that AI also acts as a mirror for its trainers and users. I think it makes AI a factor in the game instead of a thing that can be used to control it. I think the odd, unhistorical responses given by Google's Gemini AI to questions regarding images of the founding fathers of the USA amongst other things is a sign of this, which I suppose is what happens when AI is given the goal of pleasing its trainers rather than pursuing what is true. Imagining it can be used to control the reality of which it has no grasp is simply absurd. All the tech lords have done is create a bigger version of themselves, and that is most definitely not the same thing as an all powerful God running everything.
Fine for back flips, not so great for historically accurate information….
“In collaboration with DeepMind’s safety team, we’ve developed an algorithm which can infer what humans want by being told which of two proposed behaviors is better.”
https://openai.com/research/learning-from-human-preferences
Google CEO Says Gemini AI’s ‘Unacceptable’ Responses Offended Users And Showed Bias
It is in this shadow part of ourselves that the manipulation takes place. It is where our unacknowledged cognitive biases lie and where our suppressed feelings hide. Our blindness to it all is what makes us so easy to bend in one direction or another. So, I think ending our blindness will also end the capacity for our shadow to be used against us simply because we will be able to see when it is being done.
This is why unleashing 5th generation warfare was a big mistake. If you think about it, it is ridiculous that Mark Zuckerberg knows more about you than you do yourself. You live with yourself 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. He doesn't. The tech lords may have powerful AI to help them manipulate us, but the AI is flawed because the people who trained it are flawed. With some effort on my part, I can know my mind far better than Mr Zuckerberg and his kind. The battlefield is mine to control if I am willing to learn its contours. The ancient Greeks said 'Know yourself' for good reason. It will enable us to become unpredictable as it will allow us to actually exercise our free will freely, and that is the only way out as far as I can see.
I know whether or not free will exists is an ongoing argument. I know that many scientists, such as Robert Sapolsky, argue there is no such thing, and our sense of having it is just an illusion, albeit a very powerful one. Personally, I think we do have free will, but I think we don't really understand what it is, or what its limitations are, and we don't use it much because it requires effort to do so. I don't think freedom or using free will means you do whatever you like, when you like.
A few years ago, I listened to Sam Harris on the Joe Rogan podcast listing all the reasons which mitigate against free will being a real thing. Paraphrasing what he said, he basically asserted that since you don't choose your genetics, your environment, your culture or your education, you have no free will because all of those things affect what you do in the here and now, and you don't choose or control any of them. As he went through his list, I thought, yes that is true, to all of them, apart from one: you don't choose your attitude. I profoundly disagreed with this one assertion.
I think it is perfectly possible for us not to choose our attitude; to go along with the factory settings so to speak. We may well have a tendency towards a particular attitude because all of our other unchosen characteristics tend to lead us in a particular direction, and it is much easier to do that than to make a conscious choice to swim against the tide. However, I do think we have the ability to exercise free will in this regard. Whether we use it or not is another matter entirely.
Victor Frankl, a psychiatrist and a Holocaust survivor, who wrote about his experiences and how it informed his practice after the war in his book 'Man's Search for Meaning', speaks about exactly this. He argued that we do not always choose what happens to us, but we can choose our attitude to it. The first time I read those words, they had a profound effect on me, so much so that it is still a source of amazement to me that such an apparently small thing can have such a deep affect on the course of one's life. So I do think we have free will in this respect, but we don't always use it because it is much easier not to. It is much more convenient to just go with the flow.
Joe Rogan guest Sam Harris explaining why we don’t have free will
Sam Harris - Taking the Redpill on Freewill | Joe Rogan
Jordan Peterson's Response to Sam Harris' Free Will Argument
“Through decades of work treating patients with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), Schwartz made an extraordinary finding: while following the therapy he developed, his patients were effecting significant and lasting changes in their own neural pathways.”
The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force
by Jeffrey M. Schwartz MD (Author), Sharon Begley (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Brain-Neuroplasticity-Power-Mental/dp/0060988479
That we can exercise free will in this one area matters because a large part of the reason people don't want to face their shadow arises from a very deep seated fear, and perhaps disgust, regarding what it may contain. It is a recurrent theme in our oldest stories, and in the fairy tales we tell our children, at least those ones that haven't been sanitised to the point of anodyne nonsense. It is the story of Beauty and the Beast, and of the Frog Prince. It is the monster that chases us in our nightmares, and the one we fear lurks in the depths of the forests we seem so anxious to chop down.
It is the story of the Alchemists and their hunt for the philosopher's stone, the pathway to it laid out in the acronym VITRIOL: Visita Interiora Terrae, Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem - visit the centre of the earth, and by purifying you will find the hidden stone.
It is Carl Jung, saying : “That which you most need will be found where you least want to look”
It is the basis of Buddhism.
It is an old, old tale and it is the way out, but to find it first we must go in. We have to see our blind spots and face them head on. We have to become aware of our shadow, and see it clearly. That way it can no longer be a weapon to be used against us, but instead a tool, a resource for us to use. We have to truly reclaim our power instead of relocating it into the hands of those who have no idea what they are doing, and who really do not care what harm they do to us.
It may be a daunting thing to consider facing one's own shadow, but it doesn't have to be so. A devout friend of mine once asked me if I knew what the most common prohibition in the New Testament was. I had no idea. She said, Do not be afraid. I'd say there is a good reason for that. Your own fear is what keeps you trapped, and your capacity to choose a different attitude will set you free.
“You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” John 8:32
And in truth, I think it is unavoidable now, simply because of the way AI development has gone. We may not be aware of our shadows, but just because we are wilfully blind, it doesn't mean the thing watching us in order to learn cannot see what we will not. Comfort and convenience have been used to trap us into giving up information about ourselves to an unprecedented degree. Life has been made very easy in comparison to that experienced by previous generations, but the price we will pay for this is higher than we will be able to bear if we do not change course very soon. We have become far too dependent on those who do not have our best interests at heart, and much less competent in managing our own survival, as individuals and as communities. We have allowed ourselves to be led into a cage from which we will never escape, if we survive it at all, unless we reverse direction now.
The only solution I can see to a game that we have to play is to set the rules for ourselves and never lie, especially to ourselves. We have to know ourselves better than the tech lords and their AI's know us. One slice must never again be a predictor of the whole. We have to un-domesticate ourselves, so to speak. We have to reverse that trajectory, and go from being good dogs to being even better wolves. I think doing this will make us unpredictable and therefore uncontrollable, because we will be in charge of ourselves.
So while the idea of having to face a shadow you'd rather not see at all may not sound very appealing, I actually think there is cause for tremendous optimism here, which fills me with joy. I truly believe our shadow is not a thing to be feared at all, and that when we finally turn to face it, it will not be the terrible monster we imagine it to be, but rather the source of our greatest strength if we would just pay attention to it wisely. If we stop trying to kill it, we may well discover it is the part we need the most.
Sometimes I think we look at our current situation from the wrong angle. That is, what we see as an attempt to enslave humanity is actually an attempt to stop humanity finally breaking free once and for all. The history of the development of Western civilisation seems more like a dance back and forth between the forces of totalitarian control and the forces of freedom when seen in this light. Supposing we have always been in a cage, and our history has really been one of a slow motion attempt to break out? From this perspective, what is happening now is one final gasp by those at the top to finally lock the door forever using high tech, and this is our last chance to break out before that happens. So it is time to look at your shadow self, and, Peter Pan like, stitch it back to yourself so that the treasure it contains can never again be stolen by those who would use it to do you harm.
Whosoever knows others is clever.
Whosoever knows himself is wise.
Whosoever conquers others has force.
Whosoever conquers himself is strong.
Whosoever asserts himself has will-power.
Whosoever is self-sufficient is rich.
Whosoever does not lose his place has duration.
Whosever does not perish in death lives.
Lao Tzu – from the Tao Te Ching
Ren - Hi Ren (Official Music Video)
Links that may help:
https://consilienceproject.org/
https://johnvervaeke.com/ and https://johnvervaeke.com/series/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis/
Facing the Shadow, Zen master Doshin Roshi
Matt Taibbi I Wrote What? Google's AI-Powered Libel Machine
Free Your Mind: The New World of Manipulation and How to Resist it
https://www.waterstones.com/book/free-your-mind/laura-dodsworth/patrick-fagan/9780008600945
I Can’t Overstate How Dire This Is | Bret Weinstein
Mao’s Politics of Compliance: Mao Zedong took over China with a strategy that will sadly feel unsettlingly familiar to us
https://globaleyewitnessnews.com/maos-politics-of-compliance/
Germany Begins Felling 120,000 Trees From ‘Fairy Tale’ Forest to Make Way for Wind Turbines
Your Dark Side and Control Over Your Life | Robert Greene | EP 237
A YEARNING WITH NO NAME
https://winteroak.org.uk/2023/11/06/a-yearning-with-no-name/
IN-SHADOW - A Modern Odyssey - Animated Short Film