The real-life monsters in charge of your civilization
What happens when a philosophical idea shapes the whole culture into soulless robots
A Substack that I enjoy wrote the following about the medical-scientific complex a few days ago:
these people are NOT like most of us. 99% of humans would be unable to perform that experiment terrorizing monkeys whose brains were damaged to intensify fear. that is not a normal capability, much less an inclination.
and this makes granting vast social power to people such as these an incredibly bad idea.
they have about as much humanity as the viruses they study.
it’s why you should be terrified of technocracy, especially bio-technocracy.
ask yourself one simple question:
“are these the people you want deciding if your kids get to hug grandma?”
He shares my distaste for the medical establishment and the morally bankrupt culture of science fetishism... which means that he has excellent judgment.
The fake vampires that we've engineered while getting rid of all the magic in the world are worse than most any horror the human imagination cooked up in the Age of Mythology.
When I've written about the tyranny of the healthocrats, it might seem like these are simply misguided do-gooders.
They really believe all the things they say about "creating a better world" and "building back better". They're sincere when they say that they care about people and want to make our lives better and shepherd us all into this glorious future where everyone's happy.
The mistake is in the means to that end. The end itself is fine. We certainly wouldn't question the purity of the motivation.
Turns out that maybe that's not a good assumption.
The scientific world draws in those outcasts and weirdos, true enough. The cat's point is that this goes beyond social awkwardness.
Modern techno-science crosses that line into amoral psychopathy.
We're Beyond Good and Evil now... morality, like not torturing puppies or experimenting on children to find out if an untested medical therapy "works" on them, is an obstacle to scientific progress.
Rabid anti-modern Aristotelian philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once wrote that the major issue in our culture today is that...
There's no principled difference between a manipulative and a non-manipulative action.
The bureaucrat, the scientist, the doctor, the surgeon, the policy analyst cannot and do not tell the difference between acting in your best interest because you are an individual person, and acting to secure his own interest.
They might mouth words like "the greater good" as a nod to righteousness. Can you tell the difference between a genuinely well-meaning person concerned for your welfare, and a person who cynically wants to use you to realize his own goals?
This is a concept we call "lying". Politicians do it all the time. They also operate by the same logic. We do what gets the results we want.
It's not just that the institutions are full of psychopaths (though they are).
It's that the institutions themselves organize around the premise of psychopathic action. Cogs in the machine have every incentive to make decisions without concern for the people they affect.
If you resist, if you show signs of independent thought, you're shown the door.
Which is how these places continue to select for the most ruthless, callous, amoral, conscience-free human beings.
If the end is clear, any means can be applied and justified.
That's a utilitarian maxim. But the key idea runs well beyond utilitarian moral theories.
It's seeped into the culture.
It's the way we relate ourselves to other people, how our institutions work, what incentivizes our social interactions.
No action has meaning unless it advances a pragmatic interest.
Actions which take into account the human interest, which avoid forms of cruelty and wickedness, need not qualify.
Our civilization is psychopathic.
Some even call it satanic.
Horror movies have the advantage of being fictional stories. This is the post-cyberpunk reality we live in.
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