Voici un thread de l'un d'entre eux :
Basically. It’s all sincere, and premised on uncritical and largely unspoken metaphysical premises about the ontological status of models, axioms, simulations, rationality, etc.
This has been my fundamental starting point for the last couple of years. That systems analysis, cybernetics, world planning, technocracy, bureaucratic rationalization, industrial consolidation, hyper-financialization are all rooted in hypostasis of reason’s cosmological idea
It is natural and necessary for Reason to seek the unconditioned. But this is also the source or the vicious infinite regress of transcendental illusion which builds endlessly seeking its ground and thereby is trapped in a state of perpetual implosion forever
The “elite” dont possess self-consciously “evil” aims mostly, but are engaged in a deeply compromised enterprise where simulations and models and abstractions like “the global economy” are falsely endowed with a constitutive “magical” status and placed over and above everything
They come to think their eternally incomplete rational model of “the world” is the world, and that people and resources and beliefs can all be tweaked and managed and optimized and min/maxed through the manipulation of the model itself on a technocratic global managerial level
The “elites” pursued globalism not because of any simplistic evil design, but because they believed the world wars were caused by insufficient international political and financial coordination leading to the collapse of global trade and the great depression etc.
They genuinely were trying to prevent that from happening ever again. That’s literally what the IMF was created to do. That’s what the Bank for International Settlements was created to do. To prevent monetary destabilization and exchange rate collapse. Is this “evil”?
John D Rockefeller was an “evil” businessman? Unlike the fictional portrait of him in There Will Be Blood though, he was no atheist, but a devout Baptist. And was he a scrupleless capitalist? Or did he actually save the oil industry from totally collapsing in its first decade?
The many people who he put out of business were speculators who were responsible for reckless environmental destruction, ruining many of America’s oil fields forever, rapid and crazed boom and busting of the industry that ruined millions of amateur investors etc etc
Rockefeller was you could argue a virtuous businessman who kept strict financial discipline and funded his own growth without ever using outside financing or debt. He made the oil industry respectable, stable, dependable. He bought out speculators. He bought the dip! Thats all
Where is the evil? He used railway coupons his competitors thought were unfair? He kept a modest and respectable and godly way or life and loved his wife and created singlehandedly the most important industry to modern society. Evil?
His son, John D Rockefeller Jr. followed. Divesting the fortune from oil and financing literally an uncountable number of philanthropic organizations that inarguably purely positive endeavors to fight cancer, advance mathematics, and provide the public with beautiful parks
He built an incredible park i walk my dog in literally every day, the center of which is an unbelievable composite medieval monastery and museum that’s free for everyone in the city to go to. My wife went on a hike literally right across the river in another giant park he made
The Rockefeller brothers? I mean was Laurance Rockefeller “evil” in financing Douglass Aircraft, or Vitro Uranium? Yes? How about Evans & Sutherland, Adobe, or Apple? He was working to maintain private-public scientific partnership from WWII literally everyone saw as essential
Not to belabor the point, but you see. These people aren't just cartoon villains. They believe in an ordered world, protected by force if necessary, which ensures peaceful and stable economic growth which they believe will engender democracy and international unity
Is this some hidden plot they dare not explain? No. It’s all totally explicit and most people believe that this vision is largely good. This is literally what all of right wing twitter believes implicitly in their opposition to China. This is our society’s fundamental worldview
The problem isn't that this otherwise good plan is subverted by satanic elites who hate America and are secret communists. It’s that the pursuit of this kind of control and order is untenable on much deeper level and spirals out into an endless nightmare of compromises
The problem becomes one of insufficient control. Groups whose understanding of the projected order differs from our own become dangerous enemies we must contain and prepare for war against. Paranoia. Immanent collapse. The fear of subversion from every quarter results
More control is required. The simulations are extended. More data is needed. Surveillance is expanded. US farmers must be sacrificed as tariffs protecting them impede our free trade commitments. Formosa will fall without a 300,000 troop nuclear weapon supported invasion of China
It’s all completely and inexorably rational, in a nice, fully conditioned chain, step by step. There’s no escape. The game theorists said we need bigger nukes to penetrate the new hardened concrete Soviet silos. Politician X opposes the bill? Somebody stop that madman!!
Eventually you reach a point where the people, and towns, and families, and jobs, and country all this was supposed to protect, have all been sacrificed to the models and simulations, to preserve in the abstract the ideals they believed you were pursuing on their behalf.
At what point did good become evil here? When was the plan secretly changed? The evil plot of the dastardly elites is what we’ve supported the entire time. They’re one in the same. We’re all complicit. Conspiracies about evil satanic elites is an exercise in self-absolution
So what “solution” is there? What if we make America great again and do a trade war with China? Or how about we empower new bureaucracies to engage in more finely tuned corrective social justice intervention in our communities and relationships? We need a “new plan”!
But then you loop around, the new plan fuels the old plan, and the idealist reformers and anti-elite populists find themselves consulting the models and simulations and concluding their control is insufficient. That they need more data. That group x, y, z is an obstacle to order
The solution isn't another plan. But a critical revolution in consciousness. Of the way we see plans. Of our desire for order. Of our quest of the unconditioned. Of our pursuit of the fully conditioned chain of rationalization to its nightmare conclusion. That begins with you.
Sur ThreadReader
Suivez le sur twitter : @KBULTRA0
Lisez le sur Medium
Ecoutez ses Podcasts
