[georgia_peach]

As an ordinary person, who thinks democracy is mostly a sham to pacify the people with an illusion of agency, I am very interested in the answer to "What will they do next?", because the answers hint at how I can protect the people I care about. That being said, I don't think they are lawless. I believe they are operating by a code, and that the Roe reversal strongly hints at it, at least in part.

With the "engineering problem," I'm dubious of the whole enterprise. The combinatorics are well beyond even the best minds at this point. It's just high iq verbal wranglers making terrible messes, then using a barrage of re-definitions, convenient omissions, misdirections, PR campaigns, and jargon to cover their tracks. And they refuse to even scratch the surface on things like consciousness or the soul. The operating theory seems to be: "Turn everyone into a "last man" who wants for nothing, and it will all work out!" They get very angry and insulting when you quibble with this.

I'm fairly confident that, at the higher levels (tha one puh-cent! [in reality, a portion many orders of magnitude smaller]), the micromanagement is in service of a goal far more ambitious than any utopianism. They would like to reach for His throne. Mankind must be re-configured if they are to have any chance at this: the race, assembled into a synthetic divine being; the man, reduced to a cell. Judging by the present trend, this will probably be an existence of pure suffering.

5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.

6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

[__B_B__]

Sure. Reverse engineering the fall of man basically. But again to the question of why. Why be so nihilistic about life and the world that you want to do it over? Why believe that such a thing is achievable through some technological mechanism?

Well, maybe because you've seen some other technological mechanism facilitate something you thought was unachievable, like adherence to severe and rigid religious regimen facilitating group perpetuation in many disparate circumstances, and so you're just superimposing that experience onto a different circumstance and pursuing the belief of a similar outcome irrationally, which is where the shirking of feedback you mention comes in.

[georgia_peach]

> Why be so nihilistic about life and the world that you want to do it over?

The technical caste, for the most part, believes in emergence rather than creation. If this has all come about through pure chance, why wouldn't someone think that our own minds, limited as they are, can eventually do a better job?

As for the true rulers of this world--the bank accounts behind the paychecks, whose memos set a thousand wheels into motion--I suspect that they take the Old Testament very seriously--if only to play for the other team; to reform the creation of a deity they deem malevolent. They don't have to believe it's achievable. They already know. The highest authority said so. Think along the lines of the masonic temple legend, or of gnosticism--with all of its offshoots & predecessors...

> like adherence to severe and rigid religious regimen

This is an insightful connection, which is no doubt true in many cases. Some inherit religion in their tribal identity package--never delving too deeply into its substance, yet ready to kill and die for words carelessly read. Others come to it earnestly--being late to understand sin, and too filled with trembling over their own sins to punish others harshly. The same can be written for science/engineering, with its wide gate for careerists and its strait gate for Teslas & Newtons.

[__B_B__]

What's knowledge? "Justified, true belief"? Belief me and my friends really, really believe in, with some trial and error mixed in? How self serving and unsatisfying and prone to disaster, given critical mass.

I'm not really sure where to take this from here. What do you think the antidote to nihilism is?

[georgia_peach]

I'd need to know how you define nihilism. From where I sit, I see very little of it. The people aren't sceptical about knowledge or reality; they think they have monopolies on it. The people haven't rejected religious and moral principles; they have multiplied them. Harari is a case-in-point; the Martin Luther of the WEF religion, posting his theses against the enlightenment-era doctrines of the great Western normie.

If you mean nihilism in the Übermensch sense--of tearing down to build anew--I think the only antidote to that is extinction, and who would want that?

[__B_B__]

I don't think anyone wants extinction, but they'll get it anyway and that's what makes Harari, all the multiplications and the imagined monopolies delusional. I think people are in fact full of dejection, disappointment and skepticism, including at themselves. I can only truly speak for myself though. I feel that way and I'm very much more like these people than I would like to admit, but I have to believe I can build anew beyond that in such a way that doesn't necessitate me tearing down everyone else first.

I've never been very compromising and even normal conversations with me feel like battle, often. I just try to have a good time and speak my mind. When I get harassed by police or tricked or screwed around in whatever way at least I can then believe it's not my nihilism being expressed.