A post by Francis Berger brought into focus a common propaganda tactic to which I must invent a term "abstracting isolation".
The basic idea is that some-Thing harmful being introduced, some new and bad policy, or some strategic plan of evil... is explained-away...
Is talked into neutrality or insignificance - and this is achieved by the tactic of drawing a line around it: thereby abstracting it from the actual situation and process in which it is encountered.
I have repeatedly seen this at every level of life.
In the University workplace, management (on instruction from government) would introduce some bureaucratic change that Always took power from academics and transferred it to management. yet another in the unending stream of schemes for monitoring and control of academics and students...
The latest step in a successful strategy pursued over many years, a strategy of of incremental managerial bureaucratic takeover.
But; this latest change was always abstracted from the strategy and from the big picture. In effect, a line was drawn around the new task or policy. We were made to consider the change as if it was an isolated entity - coming from nowhere except the earnest desire for functional improvement that we all know characterizes management; and going nowhere in particular - and especially not any kind of power-grab!
(Only a delusional nut-job could imagine such a ludicrous notion as a planned government-management take-over.)
As such the New Thing always seemed neutral, trivial - nothing to get "upset" about, nothing to make a fuss about (unless you are neurotic, or paranoid?)...
And yet at the same time this neutral, trivial, nothing was also - somehow - essential, important, and (bottom line) mandatory: we had to do it... or else.
And because we had to do it or else; then we "might as well" make the best of it: indeed, we might as well pretend that this is A Good Thing...
Or, at least, a Thing with great potential for Good, if only people would stop wasting their time complaining about the inevitable; and instead take a positive and constructive attitude about using The Thing (whatever it happened to be) in the best possible way.
At the end of this line of rhetoric; the trivial, isolated, neutral policy or technology, has become a boon - with the help of well-motivated staff who (instead of moaning and dragging their feet) will rise to the challenge of this new opportunity...
Who will, by their optimistic attitudes and hard work, ensure that the best possible outcomes will happen, and any problems will be solved.
If only people would give This Thing the benefit of the doubt; then it could become a great gift, a tool with vast potential for those with goodwill to use in generating all kinds of positive possibilities.
Whew!
All this from an abstractly-isolated neutral technological tool! All this "merely" from its being implemented by people of goodwill and positive intent to do good - as we can, of course, assume it will be implemented - the leadership positions of the world being almost exclusively inhabited by such Saints.
Luckily, we almost never see technologies actually, in the real world, mega-exploited almost exclusively for their worst capabilities - so we needn't concern ourselves with that sort of difficulty!
This with "AI"; what is actually emanating as an incremental change from a top-down, tera-dollar-funded, decades-long globalist totalitarian strategy; aiming at bureaucratic omni-surveillance and micro-control of mass thought and behaviour; aiming at the imposition of a materialist perspective and assuming the irrelevance and insignificance of God, Jesus Christ and the spiritual...
By a simple act of abstracting-isolation "AI" has been transformed into a vital tool that shall be used (mostly) for the betterment of humankind and this world - to stand in the path of which outcome, is both futile and misguided (if not worse).
The spiritual harm of "AI" is this pretending, and convincing oneself, that purposive evil is good, and indeed ought-to-be regarded as good simply because we cannot (or will not) resist it...
If you really Think About It: Evil can be Good!... If only we regard it with a calm, reasonable, properly-informed, and nuanced attitude.
Such is one of the greatest and most effective Big Lies of our era. And, like all effective lies, it contains an element of truth...
Which is that within a vast strategy for generic-evil, there is indeed potential to go against the current (to some extent, and for a while but not permanently) - and do some particular-Good.
True. But that truth does not affect the purposively evil nature of the general strategy.
Discernment is vital for Christians; to know evil in order that we may affiliate to Good.
It is all quite simple to know, difficult/impossible to do in the material world, but always possible to hold-fast-onto as our spiritual intention:
Our possibilities for doing Good despite evil, should never lead us to choosing allegiance with the strategies of evil.
Baby formula came to mind here: sure it was invented specifically to remove nature (God) from the process of early parenting and to keep women in factories while undermining family cohesion, but only a monster would *oppose* it because *some* women don’t have enough milk and really *need* the formula.
ReplyDeleteI’ve long wondered if guns or weapons generally have been a Trojan horse for this type of thinking. Pacifism is *so* evil, I sympathize with the reaction against it, but it’s equally silly to for instance say that guns make “us” (humanity overall) safer because now women (or children even) can more easily kill men (the “great equalizer argument”). The fact that in the marginal case a specific woman or child now stands a better chance in a fight doesn’t change the general case that modern Samson kills orders of magnitude more people. Every technology is like this: early adopters have a temporary advantage possibly but long-term we return to the prior level of effort and live primarily with the negative effects of the tech, e.g., a farmer with a tractor works just as many hours, he just produces more during that time while the person who is no longer needed in farm labor now works those same hours in retail. It’s not clear to me historically that leisure ever genuinely increases broadly in a population. We’re going to work regardless, so it seems we should pay a lot more attention to what sort of work is actually good for us, spiritually.
"It’s not clear to me historically that leisure ever genuinely increases broadly in a population."
DeleteIt is true that the so-called "digital economy" or high tech usually just shuffles people from one type of job to another, but doesn't really increase general leisure time. Possibly the opposite, in fact.
Funnily enough, the promise of "IA" and robots since the concept first appeared in science fiction stories in the 1950s or 1960s was that they would free humans to have more leisure time and to be more creative and artistic. No one is talking about that anymore...
Instead, the "art" (such as it is considered today) is increasingly done by "IA", and people either have to work in subemployment or have no job at all. That does not mean that they become more "artistic" or "creative" -- sadly, I believe most people have little interest in art of creativity, and the fact that most of them are happy to delegate artistic or creative tasks to "IA" sort of proves it -- and they also do not have more leisure time, as most of them will have no money or clear means of subsistence, and the "elite" is openly planning what to do with such "useless people" -- whether to give them a "Universal Basic Income" or just get rid of them altogether. With the fertility crash there's less and less people in the world, so I guess half the work is done...
@Mia and Zeno - Interestingly I did have a pretty leisured working life - which was possible if you looked for it and made the necessary sacrifices up until 15-20 years ago. (I needed to live, pretty much as Thoreau said he needed to: life with a "broad margin"). I did this by choosing academia rather than medicine - half the salary for half the scheduled work. Aside from scheduled stuff, like teaching and exams; I did plenty of academic "work" but at times I chose; and I worked quickly - so I had a fair bit of unstructured time, which was necessary fro the kind of theoretical science I was engaged in. By the time I retired this had become impossible, and the academic/ scientific job had become just another branch of the state bureaucracy - filled-up with harmful and functionless make-work.
ReplyDeleteMy point is that there was a time, a few decades ago, and for a few decades, where it was possible to live a leisured and also comfortable existence, and to use the time to pursue something that you regarded as a higher aspiration - but *extremely* few people made use of this historically rare possibility. Nearly all the people I knew in academic worked hard to make their jobs as busy as possible doing things that other people wanted them to do, and then complained of having no time.
(Of course, others were lazy or exploitative, and did as little as possible of anything - or else treated academia/ teaching/ scholarship as a sinecure and worked another job to get more money/ comfort/ convenience/ status/ power etc. This became the norm for "successful" British academics from the 1990s)
YES!! This is so true. Honestly, I don't recognize it so much with AI, as I do with various social changes. The rhetoric is always: "This isn't part of some culture war, this has to be analysed on its own merits, let's not get carried away with hysterical narratives or dragging in things that it's really not about..." And always with the (horribly potent) suggestion: "You're an embarrassing and childish person if you get hysterical about this"...
ReplyDelete@Mal - Well, you've been working in a university over recent decades, so you know exactly what I mean.
ReplyDeleteIn the first place there was zero resistance to managerial takeover, even when, in the early days, resistance was cost free - and simply entailed not cooperating.
But much worse (spiritually) is that the attitude of centuries of scholarship was willingly abandoned, and replaced with an "idealism" of the academic life as careerism within generic-bureaucracy.
All this happened because so few people had or have any higher or longer-term ideals in their own lives - than comfort, convenience, money, and status.