Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

Tagtotalitarianism

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Post-Human Dystopia - A Cybernetic Future in Neon

Jacques Ellul and the Technocratic Society

Unhappy is the society dominated by "technique"

Jacques Ellul was a twentieth-century writer and philosopher who left us an abundance of riches on the impact of technology on our modern world, or what he called the “technological society.” I’ve been working through his book The Technological Society for a while now. It’s dense, slow reading, but is jam packed with insights. Aside from merely the proliferation and growth of technology in the West over the last century, Ellul notes that we’ve become a culture obsessed with “technique,” performing tasks for efficiency instead of intrinsic purpose, and training ourselves to relate to other people in like manner. What matters under technique’s domination is not morals or human dignity but about outcome and “results,” being bigger, better, and faster. Read More ›

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A man on the background of a gloomy city

Science, Safety, & Slavery to the State

Revisiting a 2022 conversation between Paul Kingsnorth and Jonathan Pageau

Paul Kingsnorth is a writer and novelist living in Ireland who operates a Substack account called the Abbey of Misrule. For years his work has focused on the many forms of civilizational control that human beings seek to exert over their fellow man and how such power, whether it be technological, governmental, or corporate, diminishes our humanity and freedom. He is also a newly converted Christian, and he wrote his conversion story for First Things last summer, which you can find here. In April, Kingsnorth joined Jonathan Pageau on his YouTube channel. Pageau is an Eastern Orthodox iconographer from Canada. In their discussion, Kingsnorth uses the word “Machine” to describe the massive technological control that’s now not so subtly creeping up on many western countries. From Read More ›

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Big brother

How Orwell’s 1984 Can Be Seen As an Argument for God’s Existence

Atheism is not only fundamental to the power of the Party in 1984 but is also its central weakness

University of Nebraska political science prof Carson Holloway (pictured) asks, “Does discrediting the existence of God promote enlightened thinking or a lack of objective reality?” Unpacking the social structure in George Orwell’s classic totalitarian dystopia, 1984 (1949), he observes that not only does the Party have the power of life and death but the atheistic Party faithful fear death as utter annihilation: Atheism is the moral basis of the Party’s unlimited hold on its own members because it makes them terrified of death as absolute nonexistence. Like any government, the Party in 1984 has the power to kill disobedient subjects. Party members, however, view death not just as the end of bodily life, but as a complete erasure of their Read More ›

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Propaganda and brainwashing of the influential mass media concept. Vintage TV set with hypnotic spiral on the screen.

Contradictory Beliefs Are a Feature, Not Bug, of Critical Theory

As a historian of totalitarianism has pointed out, “The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”

“Intersectionality” is the claim by critical theorists that various kinds of oppression against victim groups intersect, in the sense that all oppression ultimately has the same source — you. In an essay at Substack titled “Intersectionality Has Hit the Stop Sign,” Tom Knighton argues, too optimistically in my view, that intersectionality is falling victim to its own contradictions. I believe he misunderstands the nature of the problem. Let me explain why. He cites the example of women’s rights vs. trans rights. A major victory for women’s rights is all-female sports, which allow women to compete without having to overcome the natural physical advantages of men. A major victory for trans rights is to allow men who identify as women to Read More ›

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Futuristic Science Fiction Bedroom Interior with Planet Earth View in Space Station, 3D Rendering

When Science Fiction Comes to Life…

Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it sometimes grows out of it

A senior editor at Wired told us a while back that science fiction writer H. G. Wells’s 1914 tale, The World Set Free, formed part of the inspiration for the atomic bomb, exploded over Hiroshima in 1945. … in the novel Wells imagines a new kind of bomb, based on a nuclear chain reaction. In this science fiction story Wells imagines that atomic energy would be discovered in 1933 (20 years in his future), and that the bomb would first explode in 1956. Wikipedia notes, “As fate or coincidence would have it, in reality the physicist Leó Szilárd read the book in 1932, conceived of the idea of nuclear chain reaction in 1933, and filed for patents on it in Read More ›

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Incognito warrior in iron helmet and red cloak.

What would Plato Say About Antifa? Or Darwin?

A careful reading of Plato and Arendt goes a long way toward explaining the current scene—but it is unsettling reading

In college, I hated Plato. We read his Republic, and, as a patriot and an idealistic young (small “d”) democrat, I was appalled at the hegemony of the Guardians and at Plato’s disdain for democracy. It seemed to me that his Guardians were the archetypal totalitarians, and that it was a fundamental human right — enshrined in the Constitution — to be ruled only by consent of the governed. In my dotage, I am more sympathetic to Plato — it’s remarkable how much smarter the old philosopher has gotten in the past 40 years! I am still uncomfortable with Guardians, at least of the secular sort. But I think John Adams got it right when he observed that “our Constitution Read More ›

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Breaking Through Concept

Michael Egnor: Denying Free Will Is Totalitarian

Specifically, “The denial of free will is the cornerstone of totalitarian systems.” That’s what he told podcaster Lucas Skrobot in the second of two podcast discussions: Dr. Michael Egnor | Free Will and Totalitarian Ideologies (Part 2 of 2) [E152] Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor has written a fair bit on free will for Mind Matters News. Here are some selections to consider: No free will means no justice: “Free will is the cornerstone of all human rights and the cornerstone of our Constitutional rights. The denial of free will is, literally, the denial of human freedom. Without free will, we are livestock, without the presumption of innocence, without actual innocence, and without rights. A justice system that has no respect for Read More ›

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Can a Totalitarian State Advance AI?

China vs. Hong Kong provides a test case

George Orwell identified two characteristics of a totalitarian state that offer insight into its central intellectual weaknesses.

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AI is indeed a threat to democracy

But not in quite the way historian Yuval Noah Harari thinks
Rapid, wide dissemination of ideas we don’t understand is the prime threat AI poses to humanity. It is an existential threat to human dignity and flourishing. And this threat is made graver, not less grave, by our democracy, which, as Plato understood, is the necessary soil of tyranny. Read More ›