As a continuum of the Singularity thread. It's a dialectic of extreemes, an either or. Though interestingly enough the way the world is going that increasingly seems to be the case. Another framing of it could be that of Technological Optimists vs. Neo-Malthusians.
Here's some of the best content I've found on the topic. Feel free to add anything to do with it, it just recently interested me.
Havn't read all of it yet. These sections were especially interesting though.
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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MODERN LEFTISM
6. Almost everyone will agree that we live in a deeply troubled society. One of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world is leftism, so a discussion of the psychology of leftism can serve as an introduction to the discussion of the problems of modern society in general.
7. But what is leftism? During the first half of the 20th century leftism could have been practically identified with socialism. Today the movement is fragmented and it is not clear who can properly be called a leftist. When we speak of leftists in this article we have in mind mainly socialists, collectivists, "politically correct" types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like. But not everyone who is associated with one of these movements is a leftist. What we are trying to get at in discussing leftism is not so much a movement or an ideology as a psychological type, or rather a collection of related types. Thus, what we mean by "leftism" will emerge more clearly in the course of our discussion of leftist psychology (Also, see paragraphs 227-230.)
8. Even so, our conception of leftism will remain a good deal less clear than we would wish, but there doesn't seem to be any remedy for this. All we are trying to do is indicate in a rough and approximate way the two psychological tendencies that we believe are the main driving force of modern leftism. We by no means claim to be telling the WHOLE truth about leftist psychology. Also, our discussion is meant to apply to modern leftism only. We leave open the question of the extent to which our discussion could be applied to the leftists of the 19th and early 20th century.
9. The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call "feelings of inferiority" and "oversocialization." Feelings of inferiority are characteristic of modern leftism as a whole, while oversocialization is characteristic only of a certain segment of modern leftism; but this segment is highly influential.
FEELINGS OF INFERIORITY
10. By "feelings of inferiority" we mean not only inferiority feelings in the strictest sense but a whole spectrum of related traits: low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt, self-hatred, etc. We argue that modern leftists tend to have such feelings (possibly more or less repressed) and that these feelings are decisive in determining the direction of modern leftism.
11. When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said about him (or about groups with whom he identifies) we conclude that he has inferiority feelings or low self-esteem. This tendency is pronounced among minority rights advocates, whether or not they belong to the minority groups whose rights they defend. They are hypersensitive about the words used to designate minorities. The terms "negro," "oriental," "handicapped" or "chick" for an African, an Asian, a disabled person or a woman originally had no derogatory connotation. "Broad" and "chick" were merely the feminine equivalents of "guy," "dude" or "fellow." The negative connotations have been attached to these terms by the activists themselves. Some animal rights advocates have gone so far as to reject the word "pet" and insist on its replacement by "animal companion." Leftist anthropologists go to great lengths to avoid saying anything about primitive peoples that could conceivably be interpreted as negative. They want to replace the word "primitive" by "nonliterate." They seem almost paranoid about anything that might suggest that any primitive culture is inferior to our own. (We do not mean to imply that primitive cultures ARE inferior to ours. We merely point out the hypersensitivity of leftish anthropologists.)
12. Those who are most sensitive about "politically incorrect" terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any "oppressed" group but come from privileged strata of society. Political correctness has its stronghold among university professors, who have secure employment with comfortable salaries, and the majority of whom are heterosexual, white males from middle-class families.
13. Many leftists have an intense identification with the problems of groups that have an image of being weak (women), defeated (American Indians), repellent (homosexuals), or otherwise inferior. The leftists themselves feel that these groups are inferior. They would never admit it to themselves that they have such feelings, but it is precisely because they do see these groups as inferior that they identify with their problems. (We do not suggest that women, Indians, etc., ARE inferior; we are only making a point about leftist psychology).
14. Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men.
15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist's real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.
16. Words like "self-confidence," "self-reliance," "initiative", "enterprise," "optimism," etc. play little role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary. The leftist is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve everyone's needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his own ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.
17. Art forms that appeal to modern leftist intellectuals tend to focus on sordidness, defeat and despair, or else they take an orgiastic tone, throwing off rational control as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation and all that was left was to immerse oneself in the sensations of the moment.
18. Modern leftist philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative. It is true that one can ask serious questions about the foundations of scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that modern leftist philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts because of their own psychological needs. For one thing, their attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the extent that it is successful, it satisfies the drive for power. More importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e. failed, inferior). The leftist's feelings of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to genetic explanations of human abilities or behavior because such explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for an individual's ability or lack of it. Thus if a person is "inferior" it is not his fault, but society's, because he has not been brought up properly.
19. The leftist is not typically the kind of person whose feelings of inferiority make him a braggart, an egotist, a bully, a self-promoter, a ruthless competitor. This kind of person has not wholly lost faith in himself. He has a deficit in his sense of power and self-worth, but he can still conceive of himself as having the capacity to be strong, and his efforts to make himself strong produce his unpleasant behavior. [1] But the leftist is too far gone for that. His feelings of inferiority are so ingrained that he cannot conceive of himself as individually strong and valuable. Hence the collectivism of the leftist. He can feel strong only as a member of a large organization or a mass movement with which he identifies himself.
20. Notice the masochistic tendency of leftist tactics. Leftists protest by lying down in front of vehicles, they intentionally provoke police or racists to abuse them, etc. These tactics may often be effective, but many leftists use them not as a means to an end but because they PREFER masochistic tactics. Self-hatred is a leftist trait.
21. Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principle, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them. But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists' hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred.
22. If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.
23. We emphasize that the foregoing does not pretend to be an accurate description of everyone who might be considered a leftist. It is only a rough indication of a general tendency of leftism.
OVERSOCIALIZATION
24. Psychologists use the term "socialization" to designate the process by which children are trained to think and act as society demands. A person is said to be well socialized if he believes in and obeys the moral code of his society and fits in well as a functioning part of that society. It may seem senseless to say that many leftists are over-socialized, since the leftist is perceived as a rebel. Nevertheless, the position can be defended. Many leftists are not such rebels as they seem.
25. The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way. For example, we are not supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he admits it to himself or not. Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a non-moral origin. We use the term "oversocialized" to describe such people. [2]
26. Oversocialization can lead to low self-esteem, a sense of powerlessness, defeatism, guilt, etc. One of the most important means by which our society socializes children is by making them feel ashamed of behavior or speech that is contrary to society's expectations. If this is overdone, or if a particular child is especially susceptible to such feelings, he ends by feeling ashamed of HIMSELF. Moreover the thought and the behavior of the oversocialized person are more restricted by society's expectations than are those of the lightly socialized person. The majority of people engage in a significant amount of naughty behavior. They lie, they commit petty thefts, they break traffic laws, they goof off at work, they hate someone, they say spiteful things or they use some underhanded trick to get ahead of the other guy. The oversocialized person cannot do these things, or if he does do them he generates in himself a sense of shame and self-hatred. The oversocialized person cannot even experience, without guilt, thoughts or feelings that are contrary to the accepted morality; he cannot think "unclean" thoughts. And socialization is not just a matter of morality; we are socialized to confirm to many norms of behavior that do not fall under the heading of morality. Thus the oversocialized person is kept on a psychological leash and spends his life running on rails that society has laid down for him. In many oversocialized people this results in a sense of constraint and powerlessness that can be a severe hardship. We suggest that oversocialization is among the more serious cruelties that human beings inflict on one another.
27. We argue that a very important and influential segment of the modern left is oversocialized and that their oversocialization is of great importance in determining the direction of modern leftism. Leftists of the oversocialized type tend to be intellectuals or members of the upper-middle class. Notice that university intellectuals (3) constitute the most highly socialized segment of our society and also the most left-wing segment.
28. The leftist of the oversocialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today's leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle. Examples: racial equality, equality of the sexes, helping poor people, peace as opposed to war, nonviolence generally, freedom of expression, kindness to animals. More fundamentally, the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of society to take care of the individual. All these have been deeply rooted values of our society (or at least of its middle and upper classes (4) for a long time. These values are explicitly or implicitly expressed or presupposed in most of the material presented to us by the mainstream communications media and the educational system. Leftists, especially those of the oversocialized type, usually do not rebel against these principles but justify their hostility to society by claiming (with some degree of truth) that society is not living up to these principles.
29. Here is an illustration of the way in which the oversocialized leftist shows his real attachment to the conventional attitudes of our society while pretending to be in rebellion against it. Many leftists push for affirmative action, for moving black people into high-prestige jobs, for improved education in black schools and more money for such schools; the way of life of the black "underclass" they regard as a social disgrace. They want to integrate the black man into the system, make him a business executive, a lawyer, a scientist just like upper-middle-class white people. The leftists will reply that the last thing they want is to make the black man into a copy of the white man; instead, they want to preserve African American culture. But in what does this preservation of African American culture consist? It can hardly consist in anything more than eating black-style food, listening to black-style music, wearing black-style clothing and going to a black-style church or mosque. In other words, it can express itself only in superficial matters. In all ESSENTIAL respects more leftists of the oversocialized type want to make the black man conform to white, middle-class ideals. They want to make him study technical subjects, become an executive or a scientist, spend his life climbing the status ladder to prove that black people are as good as white. They want to make black fathers "responsible." they want black gangs to become nonviolent, etc. But these are exactly the values of the industrial-technological system. The system couldn't care less what kind of music a man listens to, what kind of clothes he wears or what religion he believes in as long as he studies in school, holds a respectable job, climbs the status ladder, is a "responsible" parent, is nonviolent and so forth. In effect, however much he may deny it, the oversocialized leftist wants to integrate the black man into the system and make him adopt its values.
30. We certainly do not claim that leftists, even of the oversocialized type, NEVER rebel against the fundamental values of our society. Clearly they sometimes do. Some oversocialized leftists have gone so far as to rebel against one of modern society's most important principles by engaging in physical violence. By their own account, violence is for them a form of "liberation." In other words, by committing violence they break through the psychological restraints that have been trained into them. Because they are oversocialized these restraints have been more confining for them than for others; hence their need to break free of them. But they usually justify their rebellion in terms of mainstream values. If they engage in violence they claim to be fighting against racism or the like.
31. We realize that many objections could be raised to the foregoing thumb-nail sketch of leftist psychology. The real situation is complex, and anything like a complete description of it would take several volumes even if the necessary data were available. We claim only to have indicated very roughly the two most important tendencies in the psychology of modern leftism.
32. The problems of the leftist are indicative of the problems of our society as a whole. Low self-esteem, depressive tendencies and defeatism are not restricted to the left. Though they are especially noticeable in the left, they are widespread in our society. And today's society tries to socialize us to a greater extent than any previous society. We are even told by experts how to eat, how to exercise, how to make love, how to raise our kids and so forth.
THE POWER PROCESS
33. Human beings have a need (probably based in biology) for something that we will call the "power process." This is closely related to the need for power (which is widely recognized) but is not quite the same thing. The power process has four elements. The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort and attainment of goal. (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.) The fourth element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone. We call it autonomy and will discuss it later (paragraphs 42-44).
34. Consider the hypothetical case of a man who can have anything he wants just by wishing for it. Such a man has power, but he will develop serious psychological problems. At first he will have a lot of fun, but by and by he will become acutely bored and demoralized. Eventually he may become clinically depressed. History shows that leisured aristocracies tend to become decadent. This is not true of fighting aristocracies that have to struggle to maintain their power. But leisured, secure aristocracies that have no need to exert themselves usually become bored, hedonistic and demoralized, even though they have power. This shows that power is not enough. One must have goals toward which to exercise one's power.
35. Everyone has goals; if nothing else, to obtain the physical necessities of life: food, water and whatever clothing and shelter are made necessary by the climate. But the leisured aristocrat obtains these things without effort. Hence his boredom and demoralization.
36. Nonattainment of important goals results in death if the goals are physical necessities, and in frustration if nonattainment of the goals is compatible with survival. Consistent failure to attain goals throughout life results in defeatism, low self-esteem or depression.
37. Thus, in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals.
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THE FUTURE
171. But suppose now that industrial society does survive the next several decade and that the bugs do eventually get worked out of the system, so that it functions smoothly. What kind of system will it be? We will consider several possibilities.
172. First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better that human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.
173. If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decision for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better result than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
174. On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car of his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite -- just as it is today, but with two difference. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless the may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consist of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone's physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes "treatment" to cure his "problem." Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or to make them "sublimate" their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.
175. But suppose now that the computer scientists do not succeed in developing artificial intelligence, so that human work remains necessary. Even so, machines will take care of more and more of the simpler tasks so that there will be an increasing surplus of human workers at the lower levels of ability. (We see this happening already. There are many people who find it difficult or impossible to get work, because for intellectual or psychological reasons they cannot acquire the level of training necessary to make themselves useful in the present system.) On those who are employed, ever-increasing demands will be placed; They will need more and m ore training, more and more ability, and will have to be ever more reliable, conforming and docile, because they will be more and more like cells of a giant organism. Their tasks will be increasingly specialized so that their work will be, in a sense, out of touch with the real world, being concentrated on one tiny slice of reality. The system will have to use any means that I can, whether psychological or biological, to engineer people to be docile, to have the abilities that the system requires and to "sublimate" their drive for power into some specialized task. But the statement that the people of such a society will have to be docile may require qualification. The society may find competitiveness useful, provided that ways are found of directing competitiveness into channels that serve that needs of the system. We can imagine into channels that serve the needs of the system. We can imagine a future society in which there is endless competition for positions of prestige an power. But no more than a very few people will ever reach the top, where the only real power is (see end of paragraph 163). Very repellent is a society in which a person can satisfy his needs for power only by pushing large numbers of other people out of the way and depriving them of THEIR opportunity for power.
176. Once can envision scenarios that incorporate aspects of more than one of the possibilities that we have just discussed. For instance, it may be that machines will take over most of the work that is of real, practical importance, but that human beings will be kept busy by being given relatively unimportant work. It has been suggested, for example, that a great development of the service of industries might provide work for human beings. Thus people will would spend their time shinning each others shoes, driving each other around inn taxicab, making handicrafts for one another, waiting on each other's tables, etc. This seems to us a thoroughly contemptible way for the human race to end up, and we doubt that many people would find fulfilling lives in such pointless busy-work. They would seek other, dangerous outlets (drugs, , crime, "cults," hate groups) unless they were biological or psychologically engineered to adapt them to such a way of life.
177. Needless to day, the scenarios outlined above do not exhaust all the possibilities. They only indicate the kinds of outcomes that seem to us mots likely. But wee can envision no plausible scenarios that are any more palatable that the ones we've just described. It is overwhelmingly probable that if the industrial-technological system survives the next 40 to 100 years, it will by that time have developed certain general characteristics: Individuals (at least those of the "bourgeois" type, who are integrated into the system and make it run, and who therefore have all the power) will be more dependent than ever on large organizations; they will be more "socialized" that ever and their physical and mental qualities to a significant extent (possibly to a very great extent ) will be those that are engineered into them rather than being the results of chance (or of God's will, or whatever); and whatever may be left of wild nature will be reduced to remnants preserved for scientific study and kept under the supervision and management of scientists (hence it will no longer be truly wild). In the long run (say a few centuries from now) it is it is likely that neither the human race nor any other important organisms will exist as we know them today, because once you start modifying organisms through genetic engineering there is no reason to stop at any particular point, so that the modifications will probably continue until man and other organisms have been utterly transformed.
178. Whatever else may be the case, it is certain that technology is creating for human begins a new physical and social environment radically different from the spectrum of environments to which natural selection has adapted the human race physically and psychological. If man is not adjust to this new environment by being artificially re-engineered, then he will be adapted to it through a long an painful process of natural selection. The former is far more likely that the latter.
179. It would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the consequences.
Scandinavia, Canada & Russia as the most probable locations of future human development.
Fresh water will be the big one. I personally know of three families who have/are moving back to Scandinavia from third-world countries. All bought farms, obvious sense of future unrest in various locations. Not living in this vacuum makes it easier to recognize.
Kaarlo Pentti Linkola (born 7 December 1932) is a radical Finnish deep ecologist,[1] polemicist and fisherman. He has written widely about his ideas and is a prominent thinker in Finland,[2][3] but, at the same time, is also an extremely controversial figure. He lives a simple and austere life. Linkola was a year-round fisherman from 1959 to 1995. He has fished on Keitele, Päijänne, Gulf of Finland and from 1978 he fishes on Vanajavesi. Nowadays Pentti Linkola receives an old-age government pension and fishes only during the winter.
Linkola blames humans for the continuous degradation of the environment. He promotes rapid population decline[4] in order to combat the problems commonly attributed to overpopulation. He is also strongly in favour of deindustrialization and opposes democracy, which he calls the "Religion of Death,"[5] believing it to be an agent of wasteful capitalism and consumerism. He considers the proponents of economic growth to be ignorant of the destructive effects which free market policies have had over the past two centuries.
In the essay collection Unelmat paremmasta maailmasta (Dreams about a Better World) (1971) he explained for the first time his ecological attitudes. He has continued to speak against the modern Western way of life and the overconsumption of natural resources. His latest books Johdatus 1990-luvun ajatteluun (Introduction to the Thinking of the 1990s) (1989) and Voisiko elämä voittaa? (Could Life Prevail?) (2004), translated in 2009 into English as Can Life Prevail? are collections of his writings that have been published in various Finnish newspapers and magazines.
As a philosopher Linkola can be described as a biocentric empiricist. He demands that man return to a smaller ecological niche and abandon modern technology and what he describes as the almost-religious pursuit of economic growth. Linkola considers human population growth the biggest threat to life on Earth.
Linkola's first political publication was the pamphlet Isänmaan ja ihmisen puolesta (For Fatherland and Man) (1960), in which he spoke strongly for pacifism and encouraged conscientious objection. In contrast, in 2004 he derided those he considers to be "sanctimonious in their opposition to violence," when the earth is suffering from severe human overpopulation.[6]
He advocates eugenics, genocide, and abortion as possible means to combat overpopulation. He describes the Stalinist and Nazi massacres, as "massive thinning operations," but which have "not overturned our ethical norms".[7] He has suggested that big cities should be attacked by "some trans-national body like the UN", with nuclear weapons or with "bacteriological and chemical attacks".[8] Linkola has described humans as a cancer of the earth, and he desires that the human population "be reduced to about ten percent of what it is now."[9]
Linkola often expresses his admiration for forests and nature in general. He is known for his deep love of birds. He considers education to be the "most precious aspect of society," and advocates for universities to be maintained regardless of the cost.[10] In a 2004 interview given at the international bookfair at Turku[11] Linkola describes the origins of his bitterness towards humankind. In his essay, Women as Protectors of Life,[12] he opines that the "soul of a man, beneath its rough surface, is paradoxically more sensitive, fragile and weak than that of a woman."
In May 1994 Linkola was featured on the front page of The Wall Street Journal Europe.[13] He said he was for a radical reduction in the world population and was quoted as saying about a future world war, "If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself without hesitating, if it meant millions of people would die."[14]
In 1995 Linkola founded the Finnish Nature Heritage Foundation (Luonnonperintösäätiö). It concentrates on preserving the few ancient forests still left in southern Finland and other nature conservation. The forests are donated to the foundation.
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"What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship's axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides."
"The composition of the Greens seems to be the same as that of the population in general — mainly pieces of drifting wood, people who never think."
"A minority can never have any other effective means to influence the course of matters but through the use of violence."
"Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent dictator, that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. Best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and government would prevent any economical growth."
"The most central and irrational faith among people is the faith in technology and economical growth. Its priests believe until their death that material prosperity bring enjoyment and happiness - even though all the proofs in history have shown that only lack and attempt cause a life worth living, that the material prosperity doesn't bring anything else than despair. These priests believe in technology still when they choke in their gas masks."
"That there are billions of people over 60kg weight on this planet is recklessness."
"Alternative movements and groups are a welcome relief and a present for the society of economic growth."
"We will have to...learn from the history of revolutionary movements — the national socialists, the Finnish Stalinists, from the many stages of the Russian revolution, from the methods of the Red Brigades — and forget our narcissistic selves."
"Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed."
"A fundamental, devastating error is to set up a political system based on desire. Society and life are been organized on basis of what an individual wants, not on what is good for him or her...Just as only one out of 100,000 has the talent to be an engineer or an acrobat, only a few are those truly capable of managing the matters of a nation or mankind as a whole...In this time and this part of the World we are headlessly hanging on democracy and parliamentary system, even though these are the most mindless and desperate experiments of the mankind...In democratic coutries the destruction of nature and sum of ecological disasters has accumulated most...Our only hope lies in strong central government and uncompromizing control of the individual citizen."
"If the present amount of Earths population is preserved and is reduced only by the means of birth control, then:
Birthgiving must be licenced. To enhance population quality, genetically or socially unfit homes will be denied offspring, so that several birth licences can be allowed to families of quality. Energy production must be drastically reduced. Electricity is allowed only for the most necessary lighting and communications. Food: Hunting must be made more efficient. Human diet will include rats and invertebrate animals. Agriculture moves to small un-mechanized units. All human manure is used as fertilizer. Traffic is mostly done with bicycles and rowing boats. Private cars are confiscated. Long-distance travel is done with sparse mass transport. Trees will be planted on most roads. Foreign affairs: All mass immigration and most of import-export trade must stop. Cross-border travel is allowed only for small numbers of diplomats and correspondents. Business will mostly end. Manufacture is allowed only for well argumented needs. All major manufacturing capacity is state owned. Products will be durable and last for generations. Science and schooling: Education will concentrate on practical skills. All competition is rooted out. Technological research is reduced to extreme minimum. But every child will learn how to clean a fish in a way that only the big shiny bones are left over."
That man John Ebert has an accurate grasp of Kaczynki's anarco-primitivist philosophy along with Heidegger. Kaczynski took the liberal psychology and connected it with the cultural technological environment of how one develops an aberrant nihilistic state of mind. I agree with him on many of his positions, however, in the end he ultimately was more involved into the rosy idealism of revolution.
I believe if his brother hadn't turned informant and exposed him to the FBI leading to his capture, he may have accomplished important ideological influence of awareness to modern decadence.
Here are some books worth reading on the subject you should check out if you haven't already:
Neil Postman in Technopoly:
Quote :
In a Technopoly, precise knowledge is preferred to truthful knowledge but that in any case Technopoly, wished to solve, once and for all, the dilemma of subjectivity. In a culture in which the machine, with its impersonal and endlessly repeatable operations, is controlling metaphor and considered to be the instrument of progress, subjectivity becomes profoundly unacceptable. Diversity, complexity and ambiguity of human judgment are enemies of technique. They mock statistics and polls and standardized tests and bureaucracies. In Technopoly, it is not enough for social research to rediscover ancient truths or to comment on and criticize the moral behavior of people. In Technopoly, it is an insult to call someone a "moralizer". Nor is it sufficient for social research to put forward metaphors, images and ideas that can help people live with some measure of understanding and dignity. Such a program lacks the aura of certain knowledge that only science can provide. It becomes necessary, then, to transform psychology, sociology, and anthropology into "sciences", in which humanity itself becomes an object, much like plants, planets or ice cubes.
David Noble in The Religion of Technology:
Quote :
The body reflected mankind's "epistemological fallenness" rather than its divinity, and stands "opposed to reason." Impediments to pure thought, the body's senses and passions deceive and disturb the intellect. "The body is always a hindrance to the mind in its thinking" Descartes argued, which is "contradicted by the many preconceptions of our senses". In the wake of Copernicus and Galileo, Descartes was keenly aware that mere sense-perception could not provide a true scientific understanding of the universe and might indeed retard such understanding. Likewise, the passions ignited by the Reformation had distorted discourse beyond reason and generated confusion and doubt about reliable sources or religious authority and conviction.
Quote :
There is a powerful cultural affinity between technology and masculinity in Western society. For, if the religion of technology elevated the arts with spiritual significance and a distinctly transcendent meaning, the religion of technology provided a compelling and enduring mythological foundation for the cultural representation of technology as a uniquely masculine endeavor, evocative of masculinity and exclusively male. Insofar as the technological project was now aimed at the recovery of Adam's prelapsarian perfection, the image-likeness of man to God, it looked back to a primal masculine universe and forward to the renewal of the paradise in a masculine millennium.
Quote :
The biblical Judaic Adam signified the ideal of restored perfection, and that ideal was male. So too were the apostles of the religion of technology, the successive generations of monks, friars, explorers, magi, virtuosi, Masons and engineers. And so too are their ideological descendents who have designed the hallmark technologies of our own age and given the name "Adam" to the first manned spaceflight, the seed programs of Artificial Life and the composite human genome. Of course, women might participate, but only marginally at best, because, by definition, they never aspire to, much less hope to achieve, the ultimate transcendent goal.
Quote :
The ideological masculinization of the useful arts and the ideological elevation of the useful arts were two sides of the same coin, and both were the product of the belated association of the most humble and worldly of human activities with the other-worldly spirit of transcendence. For it was only when the arts came to be invested with spiritual significance that they became worthy of the attention of and identification with elite males, and the specific Adamic content of that spiritualization reinforced that identification.
Heisman's God hypothesis is based on the idea that technological progress intertwined with economic implosion, stimulates a gradual approach to the technological singularity. A long series of alterations combined with refinements means that the materialization of God is the only possible conclusion. This is why science and physics are becoming preoccupied with concepts like "dark matter".
Rene Guenon in Crisis of the Modern World:
Quote :
It is really an extraordinary epoch in which so many men can be made to believe that a people is being given happiness by being reduced to subjection, by being robbed of all that is most precious to it, that is to say of its own civilization, by being forced to adopt manners and institutions that were made for a different race, and by being constrained to the most distasteful kinds of work, in order to make it acquire things for which it has not the slightest use. For that is what is taking place: the modern West cannot tolerate that men should prefer to work less and be content to live on little; as it is only quantity that counts, and as everything that escapes the senses is held to be nonexistent, it is taken for granted that anyone who is not in a state of agitation and who does not produce much in a material way must be 'lazy'.
Quote :
let us consider things for a moment from the standpoint of those whose ideal is material 'welfare', and who therefore rejoice at all the improvements to life furnished by modern 'progress'; are they quite sure they are not being duped? Is it true that, because they dispose of swifter means of communication and other things of the kind, and because of their more agitated and complicated manner of life, men are happier today than they were formerly? The very opposite seems to us to be true: disequilibrium cannot be a condition of real happiness. Moreover, the more needs a man has, the greater the likelihood that he will lack something, and thereby be unhappy; modern civilization aims at creating more and more artificial needs, and as we have already said, it will always create more needs than it can satisfy, for once one has started on this path, it is very hard to stop, and, indeed, there is no reason for stopping at any particular point. It was no hardship for men to do without things that did not exist and of which they had never dreamed; now, on the contrary, they are bound to suffer if they lack these things, since they have become accustomed to consider them as necessities, with the result that they have, in fact, really become necessary to them. Therefore men struggle in every possible way to obtain the means of procuring material satisfactions, the only ones that they are capable of appreciating: they are interested only in 'making money', because it is money that enables them to obtain these things, the more of which they have, the more they wish to have, as they go on discovering fresh needs; and this passion becomes for them the sole end in life. Hence the savage competition certain evolutionists have raised to the dignity of a scientific law under the name of 'the struggle for existence', whose logical consequence is that only the strongest, in the narrowly material sense of the word, have a right to exist. Hence also the envy and even hatred felt toward those who possess wealth by those who do not; how could men to whom egalitarian theories have been preached fail to revolt when they see all around them inequality in the most material order of things, the order to which they are bound to be the most sensitive?
Even physics takes on a divine ambition to account for--probably Einsteinian properties of gravity--undetected and unseen energies, similar to the singularity in black hole theory, which is one of the most fantastical.
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 36826 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
I consider technology/techniques as a compensation for man's physical/mental limitations. Because entropy is increasing man and his consciousness is falling behind, unable to make sense of the increasing randomness. The mind interprets this as darkness.
Technology is supposed to increase man's performance in dealing with entropy.
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OhFortunae
Gender : Posts : 2311 Join date : 2013-10-26 Age : 30 Location : Land of Dance and Song
Solar Roadways raised 2.2 million dollars in a crowd-funding campaign.
People believe in technology nowadays. You can con much more people with promising them a technological miracle than with supernatural phenomena. If it's not feasible today then it only takes a little more time for technology to advance. A little effort needs to be put into research, a little more money is going to make all wishes come true eventually. Progressivism and how to use that faith to make people believe anything.
Just as with supernatural phenomena, everything is possible no matter how improbable. To this is added the layer of the future which is used to obscure - 'If not today then tomorrow it will be so.'
Solar Roadways raised 2.2 million dollars in a crowd-funding campaign.
People believe in technology nowadays. You can con much more people with promising them a technological miracle than with supernatural phenomena. If it's not feasible today then it only takes a little more time for technology to advance. A little effort needs to be put into research, a little more money is going to make all wishes come true eventually. Progressivism and how to use that faith to make people believe anything.
Just as with supernatural phenomena, everything is possible no matter how improbable. To this is added the layer of the future which is used to obscure - 'If not today then tomorrow it will be so.'
Salient ideas, man. You're right: secular humanism/materialism is a modern "enlightenment" faith. The most recent I encountered was a bunch of egalitarians wallowing in how a few square miles of solar panels in North Africa would be suitable for providing the world with free energy. In effect, it would then give deserving and meritocratic poor Africans who would otherwise "migrate" (no, not immigrate, invade and replace preexisting cultures) to our Nations work. In other words, let's not only give them free shit there instead of free shit here, but also empower them with control over alternative energy sources. Their corollary: "Peace, development and dignity." I can't make this up.
It's not science and technology that're the problem, it's scientism and technocracy, that're the problem. Furthermore, it's not scientism and technocracy that're the problem, it's idealism, that's the problem. What is idealism? Idealism is the idea that ideas ought to comfort us, rather than aid us in our quest to know and understand reality.
Let's extrapolate idealism, for a moment, let's take idealism as far as we can. If comfort is our prime directive, as opposed to truth, what would be the supreme idea? It would go something like this - I am God, or God created me in its image, and has compassion for me, and when I die, it's going to take me to a place devoid of pain, suffering, death or decay. Now, people have different conceptions of heaven, the Vikings had theirs, which was like the Christian hell, and the Christians had theirs, which was like the Viking hell, but they all involve immortality, because we, many of us, don't want to die, especially people who don't understand how interwoven death is with life, how death defines life. Now, we have monotheism in the west and pantheism in the east.
Now, for whatever reasons, we in the west have gradually dispensed with such lies, we now no longer take the idea of God as seriously. Has this made us less idealistic? A little, but not much. We've merely transferred the hopes and dreams we once had in God, to ourselves, and thus, humanisms were born... but even in monotheism and pantheism, there's elements of humanism, in that we, among Gods creatures, were created in Gods image, or that we, among God, are more conscious of the fact that we, as in everyone and even everything in some schools of eastern thought, are one, divine, and that egoism is a sort of hallucination.
So we stopped believing in such fictions, which is not to say they, particularly the latter, don't contain crenels of truth, like any good story. We said to ourselves, if God doesn't exist, it's necessary to invent him, and that's what we've been doing for the previous 3-5 centuries. It's not just the left, the right have their delusions as well, elitism and elites can be just as delusional as egalitarians and common people, look at all the preposterous things Mussolini and Hitler believed about Atlantis, and race, and vril, fantastic things, about blonde haired, blue eyed folk, which is not to go the other extreme and say we're all one, either, neither Nazi science, nor liberal science is without bias. Pluralism, whether it be metaphysical or social, is just as relative and just as liable to error when taken at face value, as monism.
So that's what we've been up to for previous several centuries, we've been inventing God, or becoming God, at least in our heads, and the various socio-economic and political enterprises have, by and large, been ways of bringing heaven, the ideal, down to earth, the real, and scientism, and technocracy, particularly mainstream science, is merely the physical branch of this enterprise, where as communism, capitalism, fascism and Nazism, among others, are the social branches. It's another form of idealism, if the cosmos isn't already good, or if the good doesn't lie beyond the grave, then we'll build heaven here on earth. So people have jumped on the bandwagon, consciously or not, and where as before, there was many competing idealisms, now there's only two or three sanctioned by the powers that be, it's narrowing down, but they're all merely variants of humanism and of progress, rather than offering something wholly differing.
So that's why, among others reasons, like conformism, people immediately purchase the latest gadget, because they have faith in science and technology, and that while nonlife may be descending, life, particularly homosapien, is ascending as a sort of counterbalance, growing in complexity and dynamism (see novelty theory), so they don't ask questions like, what're the costs, besides the monetary, of adopting such technologies, they just assume the benefits will outweigh the detriments, equating the latest with the greatest as if they were synonymous. Are these calculated decision individuals and humanity itself are making? No, they're not, it's faith, faith that the universe makes sense, faith that the universe isn't too complicated for the best and brightest to comprehend, and convert more of nature into artifice, something beneficial for humanity to use, so their religion has become the worship of technology, as if technology itself, was good, and could never be bad, or more trouble than it's worth, in the long run. The current elites, have grown wealthy off this paradigm, and so those who challenge it are branded as luddites, heretics, or conspiracy theorists, or whatever, and they're ostracized by them and their media.
If humanity adopted a more realistic, balanced narrative, where we were open to technology, but didn't worship it, and were more cynical and skeptical about it, then maybe we could avert catastrophe, because in many ways, our technology is destroying us and everything that we're dependent on. But, the vast majority are idealistic, as human emotion is more powerful than that of any other animal. That's right, not only is our reason more complex, but so too is our emotions, the latter often overwhelming the former. Our system runs on promoting particular and peculiar variant of humanistic idealism.
What we need is more cynicism and skepticism, and pragmatism. But some individuals are more adept at being pragmatic than others. Perhaps one day, if humanity doesn't annihilate itself, we'll wise up, after X messiah not returning for the thousandth time, or this product causing X, Y or Z detriment for the millionth time, but at this rate, things appear bleak. Can humanity learn to accept death, pain and suffering, as inevitable and even necessary parts of life on earth, and make do with what is? Or are we the supreme flaw in natures design? Perhaps thinking of ourselves as the supreme flaw is making to much of ourselves, a sort of reverse humanism, as life on planet earth will almost certainly outlast whatever humanity, in spite of what we get up to. Just as individuals can be diagnosed with bipolar, MPD/DID, narcissism and schizophrenia, societies should be diagnosed too. Clearly, our society is suffering from something like mass mental illness. Some individuals and races may be more susceptible than others. It might be good for the species if these individuals bred less. In time, maybe our species will change, culturally and even biologically. In many ways, we could still be in our early stages of development, a sort of haughty adolescence after the innocence of savagery.
Thing about realism, is you can make it into a sort of idealism too. Acknowledging our limitations may even mean, acknowledging we, some more than others, aren't prepared to acknowledge our limitations. Sometimes I wonder what the government gets up to, do we have colonies on the moon and mars? Given what they've revealed about cloning and genetic engineering, imagine what they could be keeping from us. Island of doctor Monroe, anyone? At some point, pride becomes arrogance, if left unchecked. We're suffering from a sort of collective narcissism. Paganism, particularly prior to the axial age, had a more acentric view of humanities place within the cosmos, as opposed to the solipsistic view we have. I think it's to this view, that we should return, where humanity was just another animal, where we didn't have a special role to play in anything.
It's not science and technology that're the problem, it's scientism and technocracy, that're the problem. Furthermore, it's not scientism and technocracy that're the problem, it's idealism, that's the problem. What is idealism? Idealism is the idea that ideas ought to comfort us, rather than aid us in our quest to know and understand reality.
Let's extrapolate idealism, for a moment, let's take idealism as far as we can. If comfort is our prime directive, as opposed to truth, what would be the supreme idea? It would go something like this - I am God, or God created me in its image, and has compassion for me, and when I die, it's going to take me to a place devoid of pain, suffering, death or decay. Now, people have different conceptions of heaven, the Vikings had theirs, which was like the Christian hell, and the Christians had theirs, which was like the Viking hell, but they all involve immortality, because we, many of us, don't want to die, especially people who don't understand how interwoven death is with life, how death defines life. Now, we have monotheism in the west and pantheism in the east.
Now, for whatever reasons, we in the west have gradually dispensed with such lies, we now no longer take the idea of God as seriously. Has this made us less idealistic? A little, but not much. We've merely transferred the hopes and dreams we once had in God, to ourselves, and thus, humanisms were born... but even in monotheism and pantheism, there's elements of humanism, in that we, among Gods creatures, were created in Gods image, or that we, among God, are more conscious of the fact that we, as in everyone and even everything in some schools of eastern thought, are one, divine, and that egoism is a sort of hallucination.
So we stopped believing in such fictions, which is not to say they, particularly the latter, don't contain crenels of truth, like any good story. We said to ourselves, if God doesn't exist, it's necessary to invent him, and that's what we've been doing for the previous 3-5 centuries. It's not just the left, the right have their delusions as well, elitism and elites can be just as delusional as egalitarians and common people, look at all the preposterous things Mussolini and Hitler believed about Atlantis, and race, and vril, fantastic things, about blonde haired, blue eyed folk, which is not to go the other extreme and say we're all one, either, neither Nazi science, nor liberal science is without bias. Pluralism, whether it be metaphysical or social, is just as relative and just as liable to error when taken at face value, as monism.
So that's what we've been up to for previous several centuries, we've been inventing God, or becoming God, at least in our heads, and the various socio-economic and political enterprises have, by and large, been ways of bringing heaven, the ideal, down to earth, the real, and scientism, and technocracy, particularly mainstream science, is merely the physical branch of this enterprise, where as communism, capitalism, fascism and Nazism, among others, are the social branches. It's another form of idealism, if the cosmos isn't already good, or if the good doesn't lie beyond the grave, then we'll build heaven here on earth. So people have jumped on the bandwagon, consciously or not, and where as before, there was many competing idealisms, now there's only two or three sanctioned by the powers that be, it's narrowing down, but they're all merely variants of humanism and of progress, rather than offering something wholly differing.
So that's why, among others reasons, like conformism, people immediately purchase the latest gadget, because they have faith in science and technology, and that while nonlife may be descending, life, particularly homosapien, is ascending as a sort of counterbalance, growing in complexity and dynamism (see novelty theory), so they don't ask questions like, what're the costs, besides the monetary, of adopting such technologies, they just assume the benefits will outweigh the detriments, equating the latest with the greatest as if they were synonymous. Are these calculated decision individuals and humanity itself are making? No, they're not, it's faith, faith that the universe makes sense, faith that the universe isn't too complicated for the best and brightest to comprehend, and convert more of nature into artifice, something beneficial for humanity to use, so their religion has become the worship of technology, as if technology itself, was good, and could never be bad, or more trouble than it's worth, in the long run. The current elites, have grown wealthy off this paradigm, and so those who challenge it are branded as luddites, heretics, or conspiracy theorists, or whatever, and they're ostracized by them and their media.
If humanity adopted a more realistic, balanced narrative, where we were open to technology, but didn't worship it, and were more cynical and skeptical about it, then maybe we could avert catastrophe, because in many ways, our technology is destroying us and everything that we're dependent on. But, the vast majority are idealistic, as human emotion is more powerful than that of any other animal. That's right, not only is our reason more complex, but so too is our emotions, the latter often overwhelming the former. Our system runs on promoting particular and peculiar variant of humanistic idealism.
What we need is more cynicism and skepticism, and pragmatism. But some individuals are more adept at being pragmatic than others. Perhaps one day, if humanity doesn't annihilate itself, we'll wise up, after X messiah not returning for the thousandth time, or this product causing X, Y or Z detriment for the millionth time, but at this rate, things appear bleak. Can humanity learn to accept death, pain and suffering, as inevitable and even necessary parts of life on earth, and make do with what is? Or are we the supreme flaw in natures design? Perhaps thinking of ourselves as the supreme flaw is making to much of ourselves, a sort of reverse humanism, as life on planet earth will almost certainly outlast whatever humanity, in spite of what we get up to. Just as individuals can be diagnosed with bipolar, MPD/DID, narcissism and schizophrenia, societies should be diagnosed too. Clearly, our society is suffering from something like mass mental illness. Some individuals and races may be more susceptible than others. It might be good for the species if these individuals bred less. In time, maybe our species will change, culturally and even biologically. In many ways, we could still be in our early stages of development, a sort of haughty adolescence after the innocence of savagery.
Thing about realism, is you can make it into a sort of idealism too. Acknowledging our limitations may even mean, acknowledging we, some more than others, aren't prepared to acknowledge our limitations. Sometimes I wonder what the government gets up to, do we have colonies on the moon and mars? Given what they've revealed about cloning and genetic engineering, imagine what they could be keeping from us. Island of doctor Monroe, anyone? At some point, pride becomes arrogance, if left unchecked. We're suffering from a sort of collective narcissism. Paganism, particularly prior to the axial age, had a more acentric view of humanities place within the cosmos, as opposed to the solipsistic view we have. I think it's to this view, that we should return, where humanity was just another animal, where we didn't have a special role to play in anything.
Idealism is anything but comfort as it constantly strives for reaching a goal/truth. Suffering occurs through the unattainment of fulfilling such an ideal. When ideal is met, for instance, when understanding the preconditions of an event or phenomenon in Nature, then nothing more can be conferred.
Yeah, I'm talking idealism in a more, philosophical/metaphysical sense. I defined what I mean by idealism in the beginning of my post. I mean something approaching or equivalent to mass schizophrenia. When one begins to, idolize, ideas and ideals, as opposed to utilizing them pragmatically. Fantasizing, as opposed to setting realistic objectives and then attempting to attain them. We do this with science and technology as well as religion, we just assume, more is more, more sophisticated, newer is better, that change = progress, intrinsically, that sort of stupidity.