They give us (unmarried males in particular) intense guilt training on par with religion’s original sin. (Females get a different but equally if not more loathsome version, unpaid caregivers.)
Essentially we are trained to believe that our life has no intrinsic value, and that all our worth is achieved (“earned”) as opposed to ascribed (human rights.)
By default men are told they are parasitic children and hateful thugs with a legacy of tyranny and atrocity to feel guilty for. Surprise surprise the only social absolution is hard labor and profitability. It is this mentality that drives homeless male suicide. (And our grim silent acceptance of a 9 to 1 workplace fatality gender ratio.)
Put simply before you can get a man to break himself on a barge or oil platform or suffocate himself in a coal mine you need to convince him he’s worthless otherwise.
Every male in my family older than me got profoundly worse versions of this training. Males younger than me get a creepy new one that has a more 90s office dystopia feel.
But don’t buy it man.
Say it with me: “I’m a human being God Dammit! MY LIFE HAS VALUE!” (Network, 1976)
Science as a human organizational category is completely devoid of public relations understanding, and I think this is because of selective brain drain. Any scientists that actually start to approach real persuasion understanding are quickly scooped up by the existing persuasion for hire industry.
A purely rational definition of science is inherently psychopathic and fortunately not accurate. The vast majority of scientists deploy science either in line with their ethics or because of their ethics. The best, in terms of good done per hour invested, are driven by those ethics. Norman Borlaug screams to mind.
But what I don’t see are scientists who approach problems like demagoguery or political corruption the way they would approach something like a plague. (Epidemiology is closest.) And it’s a shame because we’re facing problems right now that could really use that sort of response. Climate change for one.
Game it out: Science concludes huge problem is in progress, but problem can’t be solved until a more human problem is solved. Climate change and political corruption respectively.
Arguably war itself is a bigger problem than climate change that science could have started to tackle, but never really did. Persuasion study should be job one for science, yet it doesn’t appear to be on the job stack at all in the way that I mean. Imagine if science mastered diplomacy to the degree they mastered physics.
Science is mostly unified and yet they don’t lean that unification in any persuasive direction. That’s extremely weird to me. Humanity doesn’t war over things like the atomic weight of tungsten. Science has mastered internal agreement, at least in so far as avoiding war goes.
And the answer to why produces little more than confused scoffery and snarks about education when absolutely cornered and forced to look at it. But that’s just an evasion, since education could be parsed itself as little more than persuasion aimed only at social subordinate castes. (Children, the poor, any deemed in need of “education” or “rehabilitation” etc.)
Again, I think it’s selective brain drain. The persuasion industry prunes this line of thought out of public science like a well tended bonsai. Threats and checks being the sheers.
TLDR: The spreading belief in the flat earth model, where it occurs in good faith, is a side effect of those in power taking steps to ensure public relations stays effective.
Full text: In my opinion the flat earth thing is a hybrid of trolling, entrepreneurship, and engineered vulnerability. The first two are clear, that last one needs some explanation.
Long story short the people that run earth do so via engineering various beliefs in others which are favorable to them. An easy example of that is someone promoting a faith they don’t share and then exploiting the faithful.
That has become a literal science, social psychology. what one could call applied social psychology is generally know as public relations, or propaganda. I would loosely define it as the science of using communications tactics to alter brain processes. Usually, but not limited to, emotions that lead to profitable behaviors in the target audience. Such as buying a product or service.
Now, this is a huge industry to put it mildly. I don’t want this to turn into a general post on public relations but that background is important. Just search Edward Bernays. I’ve written about him before and I comment about him constantly because he’s a great entry point to the subject.
In order for the fruits of that endeavor to persist, (and it is in the interests of the established leaders of society than they do) a certain fertility in the minds of average people must be cultivated. Efforts to maintain a spectrum of conditions under which public relations works best have I think inadvertently created a soil in which flat earth belief can flourish.
To combat it would require combating vulnerability to applied social psychology itself. So I predict it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
Everything is saying something, no matter how trivial. Because statements, fictional or not, have logical and ideological consequences. Pretending that isn’t true is itself an ideological and political statement. If you keep backing out of the fight you’re surrendering the field to those who don’t back out and that’s why things are as they are. You’re burying your head in the sand of fandom. Some of us like to be entertained, and lord knows I understand escapism and filter bubbles, but I also realize what’s at stake. It is coming to a head but it’s MUCH larger than comic movie fandom. Society is about to convulse because technology and demographics are changing the very nature of what it means to be a human citizen.
Transhumanism, automation, climate change. Get ready.
The first step is understanding how much space and matter we have to work with. It’s hard to do that in a qualitative way but my favorite is realizing that every human on earth could have a house with a yard and all fit in texas. And that’s just expanding basically in two dimensions. Obviously a dense city that size could hold one or two orders of magnitude more per square mile.
The second steps is realizing that farming is just a chemical process. Exporting entropy, and directing processes in beneficial directions. Adding energy to dirt (via sunlight and chemicals) and extracting a portion of that energy out as chemical batteries which we consume. (Food.) It’s currently driven by the sun, but it could also be driven by fission, and far more efficiently in terms of anthropocentric concerns.
I’m thinking city sized grow boxes powered by fission reactors ran by robots that import raw materials and export foods of our choosing. We’re soon to be growing meat in vats and skipping the animal phase. I think eventually we’ll do the same for plants as well. What better way to avoid pathogens than completely enclosing the farm?
Think about an apple tree. We don’t care about the tree, we want the apples. All the rest is waste from the perspective of our needs. We’ve already altered all our crops via selective breeding towards a form that is at one infinitely more suitable for our needs and unrecognizably distant from their original forms. The tree can get away that waste because of the super abundance of energy we are all saturated by. That amount in turn is dwarfed by what we could produce ourselves. Did you know that gasoline has the same caloric density as olive oil? That’s carbon bonds. Chemical power. Now compare that to fission… a gram of uranium has approximately the same energy (assuming crude 2% efficient LWR style extraction process) as two million grams of oil. That’s 4,409 pounds. A farm converts electricity into food basically. We can do the same. We can literally eat the dirt.
And we’ll run out of yellow sun (it’ll go red and then eat earth) before we run out of fissile fuel. The ocean thanks to tectonic activity (vents) is an endless supply of fission power. (Like, literally, the sun would run out of hydrogen first before we ever ran out of fissile uranium alone, let alone thorium.)
Power is literally being delivered to every coast line on earth. We just have to decide to act in our own interests with compassion and wisdom. It’s that simple.
What makes this special is a specific combination of factors.
Firstly, obviously, the hardware. Power to weight ratios and storage capacity. Stated as an anti-matter reactor, which would be the most efficient store of energy possible without violating entropy.
Secondly, slightly less obvious, the movements. The actual kinetic, geometric deployment of that power. Parsed in the fiction as a fighting style. But it’s really a translation and direction engine. Translating current into force shapes and positions. Separation, impact, attachment, transfer, etc.
The hidden one is the interface layer between the mind and the apparatus. That one is more impressive and a little harder to explain. Imagine an amateur faking kung fu or trying to drive. They know what they are going for, and the hardware is fine, but they don’t know how to issue the commands yet.
In the fiction this is solved by “training” but that’s just a narrative trick. She didn’t train for the cyber sport. She’s sending an intent command, and some software layer is translating those intentions into body geometry. Moravec’s paradox. That can’t be cheated or hand-waved away, it can only be hidden. Even in fiction unless it’s text, choreography has to be done.
The film makers even with complete control of the universe she was in had to expend enormous processing power deciding her “movements.” In the real world such combat is unilateral. Adding that feedback response combat loop intensifies the processing power needed exponentially. That’s the most extreme thing happening in the screenshot above in a quasi-literal sense. (The metaphor is arguably even more intense, see below.)
She knew what she wanted to do, show off balance and strength, in a specific sort of way. Making that actually work, in gravity and under the constraints she specified, would indeed be staggering, and it was to me. The above scene impressed me more than anything else later shown. It’s the most energy dense moment in the entire film. It screams “liberation.” I am Free she says with a five second kata.
But also, reality sets in. Plot contrivance is the only thing keeping her alive. Power asymmetry like that never lasts. That’s a double edged sword of history. The society she’s in by her very existence is now as precariously balanced as she is on the palm of her hand. Leaning in any direction forces a massive reconfiguration at minimum to avoid collapse.
Imagine it’s 1985 and somehow you have a phone from 2019. Just game that out in your head. Setting aside the time travel aspect, just imagine what it would mean for your life, your town, your country, your planet, having that lump of smart sand. How long do you think it would stay in your possession? What are your options really?
That’s the case for Alita as well. She IS that phone from the future. She’s now the MacGuffin for every high level player in her world. Her world is going to tear itself apart trying to tear Her apart.
Personally I would go into hiding but start using myself as a solution book for current problems. I would reverse engineer myself and then open source my findings, very carefully. What I share, and how would demand considerable thought. You don’t just hand children a propane tank and walk away.
So much in a single image. This is why so much overwhelms me. I see like this when I look at things. It doesn’t do me any good. Typically, I find, the best option is just, stealth. And a sturdy filter bubble.
