Silicon Valley and the Nazi
These rump rangers of the left hemisphere are riding rough over the right hemisphere. So did the Nazis. Cooperation with AI is gnostic complicity.
The occult and UFOs: the religions of our overlords, slathered on with a thick slab of AI and spiced with psylocibin.
Seeking solutions, seeking money, maybe even seeking immortality.
It's Thomas Sowell's unconstrained vision on psychedelics.
Grasping for certainty like a Nag Hammadi gnostic, scribbling out one of his maps of the universe, complete with layers, archons, the demiurge, and other reference points that give him a firm structure from which to master reality.
The only problem is: the map is bullshit. It's worse than bullshit. At least people know bullshit is worthless. The gnostic thinks his maps are gold.
It's more important to the left-hemispheric gnostic to have certainty than truth. Certainty is crisp; truth is messy. To the gnostic, truth is bullshit: worthless.
But give the gnostic insight? Tools? A competitive advantage? Those are something else entirely.
But are they true? Who gives a rat's ass? They give success, solutions, and sex. "The nerds can sit around and jack-off about truth," says our gnostic overlords, "We're providing answers and snorting cocaine off a hot girl's ass. On top of that, I'm running rings around you with AI and, using your AI queries, I'll eventually tighten those rings until my ass is suffocating you."
The occult gives answers. We're hearing more and more that Silicon Valley is deeper into the occult than a Trappist is into silence.
UFOs seem to be delivering a new consciousness or inter-dimensional answers. Silicon Valley is putting on rabbit ear antennae.
Psychedelics provide a glimpse at the other side of that door? Silicon Valley gets out the blotter paper and prepares to jot notes on a ledger.
The Nazis were into the occult and psychedelics. They were also masters of gaining the competitive advantage and coming up with solutions, including one big Final Solution.
After the smoke and dust of WWII and the Holocaust cleared away, philosophers asked how an entire nation could buy into evil like the Germans did.
The best answer came from Hannah Arendt, who reported on Adolf Eichmann's trail after Mossad ripped him off a Buenos Aires street corner in 1960 and shipped him back to Israel for a reckoning.
Arendt was struck by the mediocrity of it all. In Eichmann, she didn't see evil incarnate. She saw a bland, mundane, unimaginative human being who, in her words, was “neither perverted nor sadistic… but terribly and terrifyingly normal”
Eichmann defended himself by saying he was just a loyal official, serving a machine that had been lawfully established. Arendt portrayed Eichmann as a mere ‘joiner’ – a shallow and clueless bureaucrat who had drifted into the Nazi Party “as a leaf in the whirlwind of time.”
Evil, in Arendt's formulation, was merely banal: the everyday in a culture that had become toxic.
The tribunal hearing Eichmann's trial didn't care, rightly concluding that corroboration with evil is guilt. They hung him.
So now here we sit, similar left-hemispheric tentacles coming across the land, creating a toxic culture that we whiff every day, wafting over the land from both sides, Silicon Valley and the Beltway.
Will we be complicit, banally going along, enjoying AI and otherwise letting ourselves breathe in the foul air?
If so, we're complicit. We might feel like we're doing nothing wrong, but neither did Eichmann.