Transcript:
Technological Slavery pdfhttps://app.podscribe.ai/episode/58824685Speaker 0 (0s): <inaudible>
Speaker 1 (19s): Welcome back, everybody let's jump right back in to Technological Slavery writing's of the Unabomber Human Race at a Crossroads we have gotten ahead of our story. It is one thing to develop in the laboratory, a series of psychological or biological techniques from manipulating human behavior and quite another to integrate these techniques into a functioning social system.
This to me brings to mind the Stanley Milgram experiments. For those of you on aware of the Stanley Milgram experiments, look up a Stanford prison experiment and Stanley Milgrim. I think you'll find it amazing. The latter problem is the more difficult of the two. For example, while the techniques of educational psychology doubtless works quite well in the lab schools, where they are developed, it is not necessarily easy to apply them effectively.
Throughout our educational system. We all know that many of our schools are alike. The teachers are too busy as of 1995, taking knives and guns away from the kids to subject them to the latest techniques for making them into computer nerds. Thus, in spite of all its technical advances relating to human behavior, the system to date has not been impressively successful in controlling human beings.
The people whose behavior is fairly well under the control of the system are those have the type that might be called booyah, but there are growing numbers of people who were in one way or another are rebels against the system. Welfare leeches, youth gangs, Colt, a Satanist Nazis, radical environmentalist's militiamen, et cetera. The system is currently engaged in a desperate struggle to overcome certain problems that threaten its survival among which the problems of human behavior are the most important.
If the system succeeds in acquiring sufficient control over human behavior quickly enough, it will probably survive. Otherwise it will break down. We think the issue will most likely be resolved within the next several decades, say 40 to a hundred years. Suppose the system survives the crisis of the next several decades. By that time, it will have to have solved or at least brought under control.
The principle problems that confront it in particular that have socializing human beings that is making people sufficiently docile so that their behavior no longer threatens the system that being accomplished. It does not appear that there would be any further obstacle to the development of technology. And it would presumably advanced toward its logical conclusion, which has complete control over everything on earth, including human beings and all other important organisms.
The system may become a unitary monolithic organization, or it may be more or less fragmented and consist of a number of organizations coexisting in a relationship that includes elements of both cooperation and competition just as today, the government, the corporations, and other large organizations, both cooperate and compete with one another human freedom mostly will have vanished because individuals and small groups will be impotent.
Vis-a-vis large organizations armed with super technology and an arsenal of advanced, psychological and biological tools for manipulating human beings, besides instruments of the surveillance and physical coercion. That's like the trifecta. You have technology over everyone. You have advanced psychological and biological tools.
Some say at the beginning of those biological tools, our in fact, this new vaccine coming your way only a small number of people will have any real power. And even these probably we'll have only very limited freedom because there are behavior too will be regulated just as today. Our politicians and our corporation executives can retain their positions of power. Only as long as their behavior remains within certain fairly narrow limits.
Don't imagine that the system will stop developing further techniques for controlling human beings and nature. Once the crisis of this next few decades is over and increasing control is no longer necessary for the system survival. On the contrary, once the hard times all Rover the system will increase its control over people and nature more rapidly because it will no longer be hampered by difficulties of the kind that it is currently experiencing.
Survival is not the principal motive for extending control. As we explained earlier, technicians and scientists carry on their work largely as a surrogate activity, that is they satisfy their need for power by solving technical problems. They will continue to do this with unabated enthusiasm and among the most interesting and challenging problems for them to solve will be those have understanding the humans, body and mind and intervening in their development for the quote unquote good of humanity, of course.
But suppose on the other hand that the stresses of the coming decades proved to be too much for the system. If the system breaks down, there may be a period of chaos, a time of troubles, such as those that history has recorded at various epochs in the past, it is impossible to predict what would emerge from such a time of troubles, but at any rate, the human race would be given a new chance.
The greatest danger is that industrial society may begin to reconstitute itself within the first few years after the breakdown. Certainly there will be many people, power hungry types, especially who we'll be anxious to get the factories running again. Therefore two tasks confront those who hate the servitude too, which the industrial system is reducing the human behavior.
First we must work to heighten the social stresses within the system. So as to increase the likelihood that it will break down or be weakened sufficiently so that a revolution against it becomes possible. Second, it is necessary to develop and propagate an ideology that opposes technology and the industrial system such an ideology can become the basis for a revolution against industrial society.
If and when the system becomes sufficiently weakened and in such an ideology will help to ensure that if and when industrial society breaks down, it's remanence will be smashed beyond repair so that the system cannot be reconstituted. The factories should be destroyed. Technical books, Bern,
Speaker 2 (8m 57s): You know, it brings me to a interesting point. Whenever someone brings up the burning burning books, the concept of history, if you look at the etymology of that word, his story history, his story, I think it's pretty profound history. His story, our written by the people who won the war.
When you win the war, you win the right to fundamentally record what happened, his story. Let's take it one step further. Everybody remembers hearing his story history about the burning of the library of Alexandria. On one hand, we have people who believe it was a tragedy.
It was a travesty to burn all the information collected and such a vast library. And there's no doubt on some level. It was that. However, I've always wondered. Why, why would they burn that down? Why would they burn books? People would burn books. 'cause they don't want that information in book's being out.
What if, what if is it possible that maybe in previous times the structure of society was a lot like the same day
Speaker 1 (10m 53s): It being proposed for our future. If there was a small class of people
Speaker 2 (10m 58s): Who have all the information,
Speaker 1 (11m 1s): What if only a small subset of your life,
Speaker 2 (11m 3s): The people were allowed to go in to the library at Belle Alexandria, what goes on?
Speaker 1 (11m 7s): Good. How does all that information? What good does all of those books do? If only a small subset of people can even understand.
Speaker 2 (11m 16s): And it seems to me that would be a reason for the mobs of people to go and burn down that library. Let's keep moving forward. Human suffering
Speaker 1 (11m 35s): Industrial system will not break down purely as a result of revolutionary action. It will not be vulnerable to revolutionary attack unless its own internal problems of development, lead it into very serious difficulties. So if system breaks down, it will do so either spontaneously or through a process that is in part spontaneous, but helped along by revolutionaries.
If the breakdown is sudden, many people will die since the world has become so grossly overpopulated and it can not even feed itself any longer without advanced techniques.
Speaker 3 (12m 23s): I want to make a quick note.
Speaker 1 (12m 26s): I think it was Buckminster fuller who thought the carrying capacity of the planet
Speaker 3 (12m 33s): Is way higher than it is today.
Speaker 1 (12m 39s): I haven't read a lot of his work, but I think it's important to know that when we talk about overpopulation, even if the breakdown is gradual enough, so that reduction of the population can occur more through lowering of the birth rate than through elevation of the death rate. Let's spend a second. There. One needs only look at bill Gates, Ted talks, or modern day science
Speaker 3 (13m 8s): To realize
Speaker 1 (13m 11s): The threat of overpopulation. And let's think about the two ways being mentioned to deal with overpopulation. One is a decreased birth rate.
Speaker 3 (13m 28s): So one is an increased death rate.
Speaker 1 (13m 33s): One of them is a decreased birth rate.
Speaker 3 (13m 36s): Wait, one of them is an increased death rate
Speaker 1 (13m 43s): When it comes to a decreased birth rate. Think about GMO foods. Think about housing, being expensive. Think about women being told not to have kids until later in life. These are all examples of a decreased birth rate. There's clear, right?
Speaker 3 (14m 5s): Clearly,
Speaker 1 (14m 7s): And agenda set forth to stop women from having kids. Now, I'm not saying that women should be having children at a younger age. I think women should have a choice to have a family whenever they want. However, society makes it almost impossible to have multiple kids and play at the highest level.
Speaker 3 (14m 29s): And that's for a reason, that's for a reason,
Speaker 1 (14m 34s): Let's look at increased death rate.
Speaker 3 (14m 37s): What do you think
Speaker 1 (14m 43s): Was the agenda of testing vaccines in Africa? If you look at the bill and Melinda Gates foundation, I think if you really dig in there, you can see that the majority of their vaccines are being tested in Sub-Saharan Africa, in Africa as a whole, on a certain type, on a certain race of people.
Speaker 3 (15m 5s): What do you think they do with those findings? Right.
Speaker 1 (15m 8s): Do you think that they find, Oh, well this particular vaccine works well on this particular Race do you think that they just make that a double blind placebo controlled study? Or do you think that they write down every possible outcome? You think that they may be monitored? Wow. This particular vaccine works really well on this color people. It seems to me it is plausible that COVID-19 could be some sort of a eugenics process.
And when I say eugenics, I mean,
Speaker 3 (15m 45s): And lowering
Speaker 1 (15m 50s): The birth rate, increasing the death rate for some subsets of people think about it.
Speaker 3 (15m 60s): Okay. Let me know what you think.
Speaker 1 (16m 3s): The process of de industrialization probably we'll be very chaotic and involve much suffering. It is naive to think it is naive to think it likely that technology can be phased out in a smoothly managed orderly way, especially since the technocrats will fight stubbornly at every step. Is it therefore cruel to work for the breakdown of the system maybe, but maybe not in the first place, revolutionaries will not be able to break the system down unless it has already in enough trouble so that there would be a good chance of its eventually breaking down by itself
Speaker 3 (16m 49s): Anyway. And the
Speaker 1 (16m 51s): Bigger the system grows, the more disastrous the consequences of its breakdown will be. So it may be that revolutionaries by hastening, the onset of the breakdown will be reducing the extent of the disaster. That's something to think about. And I'm sure most of you are aware, but I just want to drive this particular point home that says for every bit of comfort for every, for every bonus, that technology gives us, it also takes something away.
Most of you know that, but I'm sure there are some of you that don't. And for this particular point, I want to remind all of my awesome listeners out there
Speaker 3 (17m 42s): About
Speaker 1 (17m 42s): The judgment of famous. Do you remember that? Let me refresh your memory. If you don't In Plato's Phaedra's a story about the famous, the King of a great city of upper Egypt for people such as ourselves who are inclined in throes phase to be tool's of our tools.
Speaker 2 (18m 7s): Few legends
Speaker 1 (18m 8s): Are more instructive than this. The story as Socrates tells it to his friend, Phaedra's unfolds in the following way, famous once entertain the God Fouth who was the inventor of many things,
Speaker 2 (18m 25s): Including number calculation, geometry, astronomy, and writing
Speaker 1 (18m 30s): <inaudible> exhibited his inventions to King famous claiming that they do
Speaker 2 (18m 35s): It should be made widely known and available
Speaker 1 (18m 38s): To Egyptians. Socrates continues famous inquired into the use of each of them. And as we went through them expressed approval or disapproval, according as he judged, thank you
Speaker 2 (18m 54s): Claims to be Well or ill founded. It would take to do
Speaker 1 (18m 58s): Too long to go through all that famous is reported to have said for and against each of three-eighths inventions. But when it came to writing, throuth declared here is that the accomplishment, my Lord, the King,
Speaker 2 (19m 17s): Which will improve both wisdom and the memory of the Egyptians. I have discovered a shore receipt for memory and wisdom to this famous replied to my Paragon of inventors. The discover of an art is not the best judge of a good or harm, which one
Speaker 1 (19m 41s): Crew to those who practice it.
Speaker 2 (19m 46s): I think that parallel is nice with our modern day technocrat overlords. They are not in a position to say what or judge the good or harm, which will accrue to those who you are. So it is in this, you who are the father of writing out a fondness for your offspring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function.
Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful. They will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead have their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory and ask for wisdom, your pupils we'll have the reputation for it. Without the reality, they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction.
And in consequence, be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom, instead of real wisdom, they will be a burden to society. That's what I mean. When I say that technology for everything it gives you, it takes something away. I think we should be very careful. I think we should remember our past so we can understand our future back to the book in the second place.
One has to balance, struggle and death against the loss of freedom and dignity. Too. Many of us freedom and dignity are more important than a long life or avoidance of physical pain. Besides we all have to die some time and it may be better to die fighting for survival or for a Cause than to live a long But empty and purposeless live in the third place. It is not at all.
Certain that survival of the system will lead to less suffering than the breakdown of the system would. The system has already caused and is continuing to cause immense suffering all over the world. Ancient cultures that for hundreds or thousands of years gave people a satisfactory relationship with each other and with their environment have been shattered by contact with industrial society. And the result has been a whole catalog of economic, environmental, social, and psychological problems.
One of the effects of the intrusion of industrial society has been that over much of the world, traditional controls on population have been thrown out of balance hints, the population explosion with all
Speaker 1 (22m 52s): That, that implies. Then there is the psychological suffering that is widespread throughout the supposedly fortunate countries of the West. No one knows as of 1995, what will happen as a result of ozone depletion, the greenhouse effect and other environmental problems that cannot yet be for scene. And as for nuclear proliferation has shown new technology cannot be kept out of the hands of dictators and your responsible third world nations.
Would you like to speculate about what Iraq or North Korea will do with genetic engineering? Oh say the technocrats science is going to fix all of that. We will conquer famine. We will eliminate psychological. We we'll make everyone healthy and happy. Yeah, right. That's what they said. 200 years ago, the industrial revolution was supposed to eliminate poverty, make everyone happy, et cetera.
The actual result has been quite different. The technocrats are hopelessly naive or self deceiving in their understanding of social issues. They are unaware of or choose to ignore the fact that when a large changes, even seemingly beneficial ones are introduced into a society, they lead to a long sequence of other changes. Most of which are impossible to predict the result is disruption of the society.
So it is very probable that in their attempts to in poverty disease, engineered, docile, happy personalities and so forth, the technocrats will create social systems that are terribly troubled, even more so than the present. One, for example, the scientists boasts that they will inform and by creating new genetically engineered food, but this will allow the human population to keep expanding indefinitely. And it is a well-known that crowding lead to increase stress and aggression.
So this is merely one example of the predictable problems that will arise. We emphasize that as past experience has shown technical progress, we'll lead to other new problems that cannot be predicted in advance. In fact, ever since the industrial revolution technology has been creating new problems for society far more rapidly than it has been solving old ones.
Thus, it will take a long and difficult period of trial and error for the technocrats to work the bugs out of the brain,
Speaker 3 (25m 49s): A new world. If they ever do
Speaker 1 (25m 54s): In the meantime, there will be great suffering. So it is not at all clear that the survival of industrial society would involve less suffering than the breakdown of this society would technology has gotten the human race into a fixed firm, which there is not likely to be any easier
Speaker 3 (26m 14s): Escape
Speaker 1 (26m 17s): The future suppose. Now that industrial society does survive the next several decades. And that's the books do eventually get worked out of this system so that it functions smoothly. What kind of system would it be? We will consider several possibilities. First, let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing machines
Speaker 4 (26m 44s): That can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case, presumably all work we'll be done by a fast, highly organized systems of machines. And no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight or else human control over the machines might be retained.
If the machines are permitted to make all of their own decisions, we can't make any conjecture as to the results because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all power to machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines, nor that the machines would willfully seize power.
What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines, that it would have no practical choice, but to accept all of the machine's decisions as a society and the problems that face it become more and more complex. And as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them.
Simply because machine made decisions will bring better results than manmade ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex. The human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage to the machines will be ineffective control people. Won't be able to just turn the machines off 'cause they will be so dependent upon them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
On the other hand, it is possible that the human control over the machines may be retained. In that case. The average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer. However, control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite just as it is today. But with two major differences do to improve techniques.
The elite we'll have greater control over to the masses and because Human work will no longer necessary, the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system, useless eaters. That's a term used in the eugenics literature. If the elite is ruthless, they may simply decide to exterminate the massive humanity. If they are humane, they may use propaganda.
They may use psychological. They may use biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct leaving the world to the elite, or if the elite consist of soft hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone's physical needs are satisfied that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy.
And that anyone who may become dissatisfied, undergoes quote unquote treatment to cure his quote unquote problem, of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or to make them sublimate their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings, maybe happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free.
They will have been reduced to the status of domestic
Speaker 0 (31m 23s): And <inaudible>
Speaker 4 (31m 33s): Great pets. We we'll make great pets, but suppose now that the computer scientists do not succeed, developing strong artificial intelligence so that Human work remains necessary, even. So machines will take care of more and more of the simpler tasks so that there will be an increasing surplus of human workers at the lower levels of ability. We are already seeing this happen.
There are many people who find it difficult or impossible to get work because for intellectual or psychological reasons, they cannot acquire the level of training necessary to make themselves useful. In the present system on those who are employed, ever increasing demands will be placed. They will need more and more training, more and more ability, and we'll have to be ever more reliable conforming and docile 'cause they will more and more like cells have a giant
Speaker 2 (32m 41s): And organism. I would argue that we're seeing that right now for those of us. And I think it's the entire planet being infected by this COVID the workers or people who are not at work are being dubbed non essential. Does it in that kind of fit with the prior paragraph, talking about getting rid of the serpent superfluids people,
Speaker 4 (33m 18s): It doesn't that kind of fit with getting rid of people
Speaker 2 (33m 20s): Who are the useless eaters. And let's talk,
Speaker 4 (33m 24s): I talk about the people that are working, the essential workers, those people are already taking on much more responsibility. Those people that are already taken
Speaker 2 (33m 34s): You're on a more servitude set up before. And I'll say that again. It just seems so amazing. The foresight, this gentleman had people, sometimes people that are really fucking smart are really fucking scary,
Speaker 4 (34m 0s): And those who are employed, ever increasing demands,
Speaker 2 (34m 3s): I will be placed. They don't need more and more training, more and more ability, and we'll have to be ever more reliable conforming and docile 'cause. They will be more and more like cells have a giant organism there too
Speaker 4 (34m 21s): Last will be increasingly specialized so that there are work. We'll be in a sense out of touch with the real world being concentrated.
Speaker 2 (34m 29s): I mean, on one tiny slice of reality, the system we'll have to use any means.
Speaker 4 (34m 36s): Is that a Can whether a psychological or biological to engineering
Speaker 2 (34m 41s): Your people to be docile, right?
Speaker 4 (34m 44s): They have the ability is that the system requires and to sublimate their drive for power into some specialized task. But the statement that the people of such society will have to be docile, may require qualification. The society may find a competitive and this useful provided that ways are found of directing competitiveness into channels that serve the needs of the system. We can imagine a future society in which there is endless competition for positions of prestige and power, but no more than a very few people will ever reach the very top.
We're the only real power is very repellent is a society in which a person can satisfy his need for power only by pushing large numbers of other people of the way and depriving them of their opportunity for power. One can envision scenarios that incorporate aspects of more than one of the possibilities that we have just discussed. For instance, it may be that machines will take over most of the work that is of real practical importance, but that human beings will be kept busy by being given relatively unimportant work.
It has been suggested for example, that a great development of the service industries might provide work for human beings. Thus people would spend their time shining each other's cars, sharing each other's shoes, driving each other around in taxi cabs. Think Uber making handcrafts for one another, waiting on each other's tables, et cetera. This seems to us a thoroughly contemptible way for the human race to end up.
And we doubt that many people would find fulfilling lives in such pointless, busy word. They would seek other dangerous outlets, crime Colts, hate groups, unless they were biologically or psychologically engineered to adapt them to such a new way of life. Needless to say, the scenarios outlined above do not exhaust all the possibilities. They only indicate the kinds of outcomes that seemed to us most likely, but we can envision no plausible scenarios that are any more palatable than the ones we've just described and is overwhelmingly probable that if the industrial Technological system survive the next 40 to 100 years, it will, by that time have developed certain general characteristics.
individuals' at least those are the booze war type who are integrated into the system and make it run. And to therefor have all the power will be more dependent than ever on large organizations. They will be more socialized than ever and their physical and mental qualities to a significant extent, possibly to a very great extent will be those that are engineered into them rather than being the result of chance or have God's will or whatever.
And whatever may be left of wild nature will be reduced to remanence preserved for a scientific study and kept under the supervision of management of scientists, because it will no longer be truly wild in the long run, say a few centuries from now. It is likely that neither the human race nor any other important organisms exist as we know them today, 'cause once you start modifying organisms through a genetic engineering, there is no reason to stop at any particular point so that the modifications will probably continue until man and other organisms have been utterly transformed.
Whatever else may be the case is certain that the technology is creating for human beings, a new physical, and social environment, radically different from the spectrum of environment, to which nature, to which natural selection has adapted to human race physically and psychologically. If a man is then if I, if man is not adjusted to this new environment, by being artificially re-engineered, then he will be adapted to it to a long and painful process of natural selection.
The former is far more likely than the latter. It would be better to dump the whole system and take the consequences. Wow.
Speaker 3 (39m 45s): It is
Speaker 4 (39m 48s): It's it's disturbing. I mean, I can't think of a No more frightening future. I've heard some people say that, you know, what, if we could be engineered to be Philosophers and mathematicians and in, and have this world in which the pain is something that it is only experienced by artists who want to be able to describe it.
Speaker 3 (40m 30s): <inaudible>
Speaker 4 (40m 40s): Well, my friends all leave that for you to decide the end of freedom possible utopia. I think everybody knows where I stand, but that's what we have. Technological Slavery number seven. We will have number eight out shortly. I love you guys. Thank you for taking the time to listen a lot.