The human existence from the evolutionary stance appears to have landed on an ambiguous juncture where only a few can claim to have some vague idea of the future course of happenings. After millions of years of evolution and supposedly superior consciousness, one must argue that man-made systems governing almost all the facets of our lives should have evolved to perfection. Even at the least, they should have been in a better shape than they are as of now. This article is aimed at debating on our systemic errors from a philosophical perspective, their causes, effects and possible implications. It also touches upon the possible future outcomes if we continue to march with unscathed systems, like we are doing now,with utmost subjectivity.
Drawing from Plato and Richard Rorty, we see that a kind of contradiction, which can become antagonistic, between justice and liberty. The daunting notion of ‘terror’ intervenes exactly at the point where the universality that is supposed to be at work behind the political truth enters into a violent conflict with the particularity of interests. Subjectively, the great revolutionaries of the period translate this conflict by saying that where virtue fails, terror is inevitable. But what is virtue? It is the political will, or what Saint-Just calls ‘public consciousness’, which unflinchingly puts ‘equality above purely individual liberty’, and ‘the universality of principles above the interests of particulars’.
This debate is by no means outdated. What, indeed, is our situation today? The price to be paid for our cherished liberty is that of a monstrous inequality, first within our own countries but then, above all, abroad. From a philosophical point of view, there exists no justice whatsoever in the contemporary world. From this point of view, we are entirely without virtue in the sense given to this word by our great ancestors. But we also flatter ourselves for not being terrorists either. Now, again, Saint-Just also asked: ‘What do the people want who want neither virtue nor terror?’
And his answer to this question was: they want corruption. By ‘corruption’ I mean, above all, the mental corruption which leads to a world that, while being so evidently devoid of any principle, presents itself as, and is assumed by the majority of those who benefit from it to be, the best of all possible worlds. This reaches the point where, in the name of this corrupt world, people tolerate the waging of wars against those who would revolt against such disgusting self-satisfaction – and, within our borders, our persecution of those who are badly ‘integrated’, all those who, having arrived from elsewhere, do not unconditionally profess the self-proclaimed superiority of capital -parliamentarianism.
For this second tendency, philosophy is not necessarily a subject-matter belonging to the school, to pedagogy or to the professors. It is a free address of someone sent to someone else. Like Socrates addressing the youth in the streets of Athens, like Descartes writing letters to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau writing his Confessions; or like the poems of Nietzsche, the novels and plays of Jean-Paul Sartre. In other words, we can conceive of philosophy, to speak like Lacan, as a form of the discourse of the University, an affair for philosophers and students in reasonable institutions. This is the perennially scholastic vision of Aristotle. Or else we can conceive of philosophy as the most radical form of the discourse of the Master, an affair of personal commitment in which the combative affirmation comes first (above all against the sophists and against the doubts of the sages who honor the University). In this second view of things, philosophy is no more knowledge than it is knowledge of knowledge. It is an action. We could say that what identifies philosophy are not the rules of a discourse but the singularity of an act. It is this act that the enemies of Socrates designated as ‘corrupting the youth’ that finally led to his execution.
‘To corrupt the youth’ is, after all, a very apt name to designate the philosophical act, provided that we understand the meaning of ‘corruption’. To corrupt here means to teach the possibility of refusing all blind submission to established opinions. To corrupt means to give the youth certain means to change their opinion with regard to social norms, to substitute debate and rational critique for imitation and approval, and even, if the question is a matter of principle, to substitute revolt for obedience. But this revolt is neither spontaneous nor aggressive, to the extent that it is the consequence of principles and of a critique offered for the discussion of all.
Quoting Badiou, there is something like a paradoxical relationship between three terms: Democracy, Politics and Philosophy. We must pass from democracy to philosophy. In fact, such is the road followed in the creation of philosophy among ancient Greeks. The birth of philosophy is evidently dependent on the invention by the Greeks of the first form of democratic power.
The three terms – politics, democracy and philosophy – are, finally, linked by the question of truth. The obscure knot is in fact determined by the obscurity that is proper to the category of truth. The problem then becomes: What is a democratic conception of truth? What is, in opposition to relativism and scepticism, the democratic universality? What is a political rule that applies to all, but without the constraint of transcendence?
Philosophy has two fundamental characteristics. On the one hand, it is a discourse independent of the place occupied by the one who speaks. If you prefer: philosophy is the discourse of neither king nor priest, of neither prophet nor god. There is no guarantee for the philosophical discourse on the side of transcendence, power or sacred function. Philosophy assumes that the search for truth is open to all. The philosopher can be anyone. What the philosopher says is validated (or not) not by the speaker’s position, but solely by the spoken content. Or, more technically, the philosophical evaluation is not concerned with the subjective enunciation, but solely with the objectively enunciated. Philosophy is a discourse whose legitimacy stems only from itself.
Therein lies a clearly democratic feature. Philosophy is completely indifferent to the social, cultural or religious position of the one who speaks or thinks. It accepts that it can come from anyone. And philosophy is exposed to approval or critique, without any prior selection of those who approve or object. It consents to be for anyone whatsoever. We can thus conclude that it belongs to the essence of philosophy to be democratic. But we ought not to forget that philosophy, which consents to be totally universal in its origin as well as in its address, could not consent to be democratic in the same sense as far as its objectives, or its destination, are concerned. Anyone can be a philosopher, or the interlocutor of a philosopher. But it is not true that any opinion is worth as much as any other opinion. The axiom of the equality of intelligences is far from constituting an axiom of the equality of opinions.
Since the beginning of philosophy, we must follow Plato in distinguishing, first, between correct and mistaken opinions, and, secondly, between opinion and truth. To the extent that the ultimate aim of philosophy is thoroughly to clarify the distinction between truth and opinion, evidently there can be no genuine philosophical interpretation of the great democratic principle of the freedom of opinion. Philosophy opposes ‘the unity and universality of truth’ to ‘the plurality and relativity of opinions’. There is another factor that limits the democratic tendency of philosophy. Philosophy is certainly exposed to critical judgment. But this exposure implies the acceptance of a common rule for discussion. We must recognize the validity of the arguments. And finally we must accept the existence of a universal logic as the formal condition of the axiom of the equality of intelligences. Metaphorically speaking, this is the ‘mathematical’ dimension of philosophy: there exists a freedom of address, but there is also the need for a strict rule for discussion.
Like mathematics, philosophy is valid from all and for all, and knows no specific language. But there is a strict rule that applies to the consequences. Thus, when philosophy examines politics it cannot do so according to a line of pure liberty or freedom, much less according to the principle of the freedom of opinion; it treats of the question of what a political truth can be. Or again: it treats of the question of what politics is when it obeys the following two principles:
1. Compatibility with the philosophical principle of the equality of intelligences.
2. Compatibility with the philosophical principle of the subordination of the variety of opinions to the universality of truth.
We can say simply that equality and universality are the characteristics of a valid politics in the field of philosophy. The classical name for this is justice. Justice means examining any situation from the point of view of an egalitarian norm vindicated as universal.
One will note that, in the idea of justice, equality is far more important than liberty, and universality far more important than particularity, identity or individuality. This is because there is a problem with the current definition of democracy as representative of individual liberties.
It already feels like we can’t escape from digital technology. Take smartphones. It is estimated that more than 90 percent of us keep our phones within 3 feet of our bodies twenty-four hours a day. Sixty-three percent of Americans check their device every hour. Nearly 10 percent check every five minutes. It is hard to believe they’ve only been with us for a decade or so. Yet the quantity of digital technology in the world is set to grow massively in the next few decades. Tens of billions and eventually trillions of everyday objects from clothing to household appliances, will be endowed with computing power, equipped with sensors and connected to the internet. These smart devices will be able to make their own decisions by gathering, processing and acting on the information they absorb from the world around them. As design improves, we may stop noticing that digital objects are even ‘technology’. David Rose describes a world of ‘enchanted objects’ – ‘ordinary things made extraordinary’. This phenomenon, or variants of it, has been variously called ‘the internet of things’, ‘ubiquitous computing’, ‘distributed computing’, ‘ambient intelligence’, ‘augmented things’, and perhaps most elegantly, ‘everyware’. There are five underlying trends. Digital technology is becoming more pervasive, more connective, more sensitive, more constitutive, and more immersive.
Let’s look at each in turn.
First, technology is becoming increasingly pervasive. Although estimates vary, it’s predicted that by 2020 there will be somewhere between 25 and 50 billion devices connected to the internet.
Almost inconceivably, the Internet Business Solutions Group at Cisco Systems estimates that 99 per cent of the physical objects in the world will eventually be connected to a network. In such a world, processing power would be so ubiquitous that what we think of as ‘computers’ would effectively disappear.” At home, refrigerators will monitor what you eat and replenish your online shopping basket; ovens and washing machine will respond to voice commands.
Although they’re not to everyone’s taste, most consumers plan to buy wearable technologies. By 2020, we will have sensors on a Ralph Lauren ‘PoloTech’ shirt and it will monitor your heart rate, and breathing intensity—providing you with personalized performance feedback. Snapchat Spectacles and similar early accoutrements, already on the market, can capture what you see in shareable ten-second clips. In the future, more sophisticated products will supersede the first generation of Nike Fuelbands, Jawbone fitness trackers, Fitbit wristbands, and Apple watches. ‘Epiderm electronics’- small stretchy patches worn on the skin, will be able to record your sun exposure, heart rate, and blood oxygenation. Meanwhile, when you toss a ball around the garden, the pigskinitself will record the distance, velocity, spin rate, spiral, and catch rate for post-game analysis.
In public, smart waste bins will know when they are full, highways will know when they are cracked, and supermarket shelveswill know when they are empty. Each will feed information back to the persons (or machines) responsible for fixing the problem. Smart signs, streetlamps, and traffic lights will interact withdriverless cars that pass by.
Facebook now boasts more than 2 billion active users. Twitter has more than 313 million, four-fifths of whom, access it on mobile technology. YouTube has more than 1 billion active users. Digital technologies have also changed the nature of human connectivity as well as its extent. Perhaps the most profound change is the growth of decentralized modes of producing and distributing information, culture, and knowledge. Wikipedia is the most famous example. Together, tens of thousands of contributors from around the world have produced the greatest repository of human knowledge ever assembled, working cooperatively, not for profit, outside the market system, and not under the command of the state.
Similarly, file-sharing websites like Tor are increasingly popular, and in 2015 there were more than 1 billion uses of Creative Commons, acollaboration-friendly copyright system that encourages the use adaptation of content by others without further permission by originator, As Yochai Benkler argues in The Wealth of Networks and The Penguin and the Leviathan (2011), it’s not that human nature has changed in the last twenty years to make us more cooperative. Rather, it’s that this scale of cooperative behavior would have been impossible in the past.
Last few years have seen the emergence of another technology with potentially far reaching implications for connectivity and cooperation. This is ‘blockchain’, invented by the mysterious pioneer(s)Satoshi Nakamoto. It’s best known as the system underpinning the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. The workings of blockchain are technically complex but the basic premise can be described simply. Imagine a giant ledger (or spreadsheet) of the kind we would have previously put on paper. This ledger contains a record of every transaction that has taken place between its users. Every few minutes, it is updated with a new ‘block’ of information containing all of the last ten minutes’ transactions. Every new block refers back to the previous block, creating an unbroken chain of custody of all assets reaching back to their inception. The ledger is not stored in a single place. Instead, it is stored (‘distributed’) simultaneously across thousands of computers around the world. For security, it can only be added to, and not changed; it is public and can be scrutinized; and most importantly, transactions are secured by powerful ‘public key’ cryptography.Blockchain’s social significance is that it enables secure transactions between strangers without the help of a trusted third-party intermediary like a bank, credit card company, or the state. It, purports to solve a longstanding problem in computer science (and politics), which is how to create ‘trust’, or something like it, between people with no other personal connection. Digital currency is perhapsthe most obvious use for blockchain technology, but in theory can be used to record almost anything, from birth and death certificates to marriage licenses.It could also provide solutions to other problems of digital life, such as how to produce and control over secure digital ‘wallets’ or IDs.Looking further it’s plausible to imagine ‘smart’ assets managing themselves by combining AI and blockchain: ‘Spare bedrooms, empty apartment or vacant conference rooms could rent themselves out;autonomous agents could manage our homes and office buildings.
Blockchain also offers a potential means of regulating more complex legal and social relations beyond simple rights of property or usage. A ‘smart contract’, for instance, is a piece of blockchain software that executes itself automatically under pre-agreed circumstances like a purchase agreement which automatically transfers the ownership title of a car to a customer once all loan payments have been made. There are early ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organizations’(DAOs) that seek to solve problems of collective action without a centralized power structure. Imagine services like Uber or Airbnb but without any formal organization at the center pulling the strings. The developers of the Ethereum blockchain, among others, have said they want to replace the state altogether. Blockchain still presents serious challenges of scale, governance,and even security, which are yet to be overcome. Yet for a youthful technology it is already delivering some interesting results. Thegovernments of Honduras, Georgia, and Sweden are trialing the use of blockchain to handle land titles and the government of Estonia to record more than 1 million patient health records. In the US, the Advanced Defence Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is looking into using blockchain technology to protect its militarynetworks and communications.
Looking further ahead, developments in hardware could yield new and astonishing ways of communicating. In 2014, a person using -an electroencephalogram (a recording of brain activity, known asan EEG) headset successfully sent a ‘thought’ to another personwearing a similar device in France, who was able to understand the message. This was the first scientific instance of ‘mind-to-mind’communication, also known as telepathy. You can already buybasic brainwave-reading devices, such as the Muse headband, which aims to aid meditation by providing real-time feedback on brain activity. Companies such as NeuroSky sell headsets that allowto operate apps and play games on your smartphone using thoughts. The US army has (apparently not very well) flown a helicopter using this kind of technology. Brain-computer interface has been the subject of a great deal of attention in Silicon Valley.
The city of Santander in Spain has distributed 12,000 sensors in urban areas to monitor noise, temperature, ambient light levels, carbon monoxide concentration and the availability of parking spaces. Following its mission in Afghanistan, the US military left 1500 ‘unattended ground sensors’ to monitor Afghan and Pakistani population movement. Researchers at the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are working on a cheap package of sensors to be put on top of street lights, which would make it possible to measurenoise and pollution ‘almost house by house in real time’
In the field of machine vision, AI systems are increasingly able to find the most important part of an image and generate a verbal caption of what they ‘see’ (e.g. ‘people shopping in an outdoor market’), and computerized face recognition is now so advancethat it is routinely used for security purposes at border crossings inEurope and Australia. Less loftily, face recognition technology is usedby the toilet paper dispensers in machines at Beijing’s Temple of Heavenpark to make sure that no individual takes more than their fair share.
Increasingly sensitive technology will prompt a change in howwe urge machines to do our bidding. We are currently in the era of the ‘glass slab’- smartphones and tablet computers that respondmainly to our touch, and other stimuli such as voice commands.
Soon, machines will respond to other forms of command, such aseye movements or gesture. Some interfaces will beof an entirely new kind, like the ‘temporary tattoos’ developed byMIT which can be used to control your smartphone, or the Electric spray-paint that ‘turns any object into a sensor’ capable of reading finger presses like a touchscreen. In 2015, workers atEpicenter hub in Stockholm implanted microchips in their hands, enabling them to open secure doors and operate copiers by waving over a sensor.
The most intimately sensitive technologies will gather data directly from our bodies. Proteus Biomedical and Novartis have developed a ‘smart pill’ that can tell your smartphone how your body is responding to medication. In a survey of 800 executives conducted for the World Economic Forum, 82% expected that the first implantable smartphone would be commercially available by 2025. By then, smartphones will have truly bewhat US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts called ‘an important feature of human anatomy'.
Machines are becoming sensitive in a further importantin that they are increasingly able to detect human emotions. This is the field of affective computing. By looking at a human face, these systems can tell in real time whether that person is happy, confused, surprised, or disgusted. Open source variants of such technologies are at the disposal of a common man to use with just a camera and a laptop.Computers can now outperform most people in distinguishing social smiles from those triggered by spontaneous joy, and in differentiatingbetween faked pain and genuine pain. They can determine if a patientis depressed. They can register expressions so fleeting that they areunknown even to the person making them.
Machines are well places to use these signals. For instance, it’s possible to use the vocal pitch rhythm and intensity of a conversation between the woman and a child to determine whether the woman is the child’s mother.
By bouncing ordinary Wi-Fi signals off the human body, researchers at MIT claim to be able to determine about 70% of the time, the ‘emotional state’ of a person ‘they have never studied before’. The rate improves with people known to the system. Another biometric is human gait (manner of walking) which AI systems can use to identify a known person from afar, or even to recognize suspicious behavior in strangers.
Nanotechnology, the field for which the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded, is another burgeoning area of research. It involves the construction of devices so small that they measured in ‘nanometers’(one-billionth of a meter). A red blood cell, by comparison, is 7000 nanometers wide. The possibilities of nanotechnology are mind-boggling: nanobots can already swim through ourbodies, relaying images, delivering targeted drugs, and attackingparticular cells with a precision that makes even the finest of surgeons’ blades look blunt. There are nanobots that can releasedrugs in response to human thought, potentially enabling them todetect and prevent an attack of epilepsy at the precise moment itoccurs. Another less salubrious application of the same technologywould be to ‘keep you at the perfect pitch of drunkenness, activatedon demand’. Nanotechnology also has implications for datastorage. Researchers at Delft University in the Netherlands havecreated an ‘atomic hard drive’ capable of storing 500 terabits ofinformation in a single square inch.
“The first and most basic rule is to consider social facts asthings... To treat phenomena as things is to treat themas data, and this constitutes the starting point for science”
- Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (1895)
In the digital lifeworld, a growing amount of social activity is being captured and recorded as data then sorted, stored, and processed by digital systems. More and more of our actions, utterances, movements, relationships, emotions, and beliefs are leaving a permanent or semi-permanent digital mark. With chronicling human life,data will increasingly be gathered on the natural world, the activity of machines, and the built environment. All this data, in turn, will beused for commercial purposes, to train machine learning AI systems and to predict and control human behavior.
The history recounted thus far is the history of institutions that have become saturated with psychopaths, who began to act ruthlessly on their desires to control and manipulate others. The process is called Ponerology, a term coined by Polish psychologist Andrjez Lobaczewski, who studied how the governments of the Soviet bloc became increasingly evil. The term comes from the Greek word poneria, meaning lawlessness. Lobaczewski published his work in a book titled Political Ponerology.
Lobaczewski had tremendous difficulty in publishing his book. At one point the manuscript was thrown in the furnace shortly before a raid by the secret police, and later the publication was blocked by none other than Zbigniew Brzezinski himself. He had hopes that by sending his manuscript to the Vatican, the word about Pathocracy would be heard on a global level. The manuscript was never returned. When he came to the United States, he figured that the freer society would be more accepting of his thesis; again, publication was blocked and his work was marginalized.
What was so revolutionary about Lobaczewski’s work that it was repressed by the elite worldwide? It is impossible to come to any conclusion from his work except that the development of Pathocracy is inevitable as long as the general population is ignorant about the psychopathic other. Psychopaths have always existed, and they view the world of normal people, those with morality and conscience, as something to be looked down upon and exploited. Perhaps the most shocking revelation of his work is that psychopaths learn to recognize each other, even at a young age.
The natural result is a network of psychopaths, a subset of the population that recognize their differences and feel not only contempt for the rest of society, but the need to control and manipulate them as well. Over time they become experts in our weaknesses and follies, watching from a distance with curiosity and amusement.
The idea that Psychopaths can recognize each other is central to the Pathocracy. Imagine for millennia the process of evolution of a psychopathic cabal growing in power and numbers, increasingly manipulating society. This process of ponerization has happened to the major centers of covert powers in our world. All the global defence and financial elite down to local police departments have become ponerized institutions. Understanding the condition and development of ponerized networks is not just important, it is perhaps the most important information that society can have. It is the next step in evolution of society, the next grand paradigm shift.
This is the context under which the Pathocracy operates. A system of government hidden from the public view and operated by a psychologically distinct subset of the population whom do not feel empathy, have no conscience, and derive pleasure from the manipulation and abuse of the mass of the population they view as inferior. When we read accounts of horrific extreme abuse perpetrated against children, understand that the psychopathic others enjoy this abuse. They derive pleasure from torture and murder.
These psychopaths recognize each other and over time they come to be key holders of power wherever it exists in an unadulterated form. Seemingly antagonistic institutions such as competing banks are actually operated by the same psychopathic cabal behind the scenes. In the same way that you and I naturally exclude social deviants from our social groups, psychopaths do with normal people.
The result is a web of mutual conditioning of evil. Through a vast propaganda matrix, the Pathocracy is slowly conditioning humanity to conform to their sick standards resulting in a large portion of the population displaying ‘secondary psychopathic’ tendencies. This is the group that has subverted democracy first in the United States and later around the world, and are currently manipulating all major world events behind the scenes.
*Here it’s a good time to clarify that the words used in this article represent a broad spectrum of ideas and not what they literally stand for and it is assumed that the reader has the right context in mind while building up his/her perception. Due to the complexities of the subjects involved, it is neither possible nor desirable to use the exact word to representthe thought in context. Readers are expected not to takewords in their conventional notion rather take the holistic view into account to frame the idea.
While the pathocrats ruling the earth is a common discussion in the intellectual circles, people too often accept it to be a reality in sync with their own realties of sadness and that they can do nothing about it. For the people who disagree, whose number is fewer than imaginable, the evolution continues to be an unfair game.
The current state of earth has evidently stemmed from a morally weak humanity. This life-system appears to be an infinite helical climb and every subject and controller should assume themselves as Sisyphuses rolling stones on a helical incline in this evolutionary paradigm which will eventually roll back down the very next morning. This realization also makes the present evolution cold and sterile with accidental constructive outcomes laden with mounds of grief and torment.
“Anything born out of thought is impure because thought itself is impure”
- J. Krishnamurthy
Deliberately manufactured circumstances are an attempt to make it impossible to validate the facts, without understanding that those living in reality can point out at the perceivable differences. Our perception of reality is a mere ‘depiction of ideas’ which sustained in the evolutionary paradigm. Moreover, theyare inconsiderate on the very basics required for sustainability of life on this planet. While our ego may provoke us to believe the contrary,most of us can see the end of life on earth as we know it in very, very near future. At this juncture, two very important points emerge. The first one is‘the set of ideologies that have landed us here’ and the second, ‘a better ideology’ that will ensure the sustenance of life on this planet and our evolutionary paradigm.
Taking up the second point first, there have been attempts to understand the evolutionary process from time immemorial. When in crises, men, almost always, have resort to stars for the answers and it can’t be denied that some of them with the most daunting courage have got them too! Researchers at CERN have been successfully unearthing facts and data on theories propounded earlier and it’s not far when we will successfully decode the secrets of the universe. But I would stretch out to proclaim that all this research is not going to do any good other than satisfying the intellectual and egoistic desire to understand the universe for we, with our primitive problems and inconsistencies, are incapable as a race to contribute in any way to the galactic fraternity, if one exists. One might call me regressive but I find no place for advanced scientific discoveries in a society where a major population still suffers without the basics of food and shelter.
Ancient scriptures of all cultures talk of a cyclical creation where we evolve, reach a crest and are destroyed. This makes me wonder, isn’t this evolution futile, inefficient and hence non-ideal? For if we really evolve, we should’ve overshot the threshold sustainably at the point where the evolution tends to destroy us but we seem to lack the very understanding. One must see destruction as a state of complete disharmony, which one can observe right now around them. This point in time becomes even more important when we take into context, our rate of consumption of resources. The way we have exploited mother earth, we have literally stripped it bare naked and this leaves me with no hope for any future civilization that may evolve out of our ruins, for they will lack the bare minimum resources indispensable to reach the crescendo we are at. Without the building blocks at their disposal, they too will be destined to doom with absolutely no possibility of contributing to anything, anywhere, ever.
Returning to the first point-‘the ideas that have landed us here’, it needs a more articulate approach to filter out the noise and reach out to the real signals, then decode it and present it in a form concise enough to be absorbed in graspable gulps.
All of humanities problems, in their purest form, can be said to stem from conflicting ideologies.Given the right set of abilities, conditions, experiences, knowledge and desire, a personality can be molded. It is important to mention that continued illusion keeps the subjects at bay as they are not in a position to derive something concrete, despite being certain of their ideas all the while. And while revolving in this possible endless loop, one recognizes the presence of the shadow realities. This never ending loop of aforementioned illusion forces the subject to morph into something so malleable that it develops a multi-faceted personality, trying to grab the issue from both the ends simultaneously. This subject is now empowered to churn out the best possible solutions out of the existing scenario. It is in this state that the idealism of evolution and it being non-ideal at the same time acquires a meaning and makes sense.
Connecting the dots between the use of hypnosis, drugs, wide spread entrapment and abuse of children, a dark picture begins to emerge. One link that ties together many of these cases is the creation of multiple personality disorder, now known as dissociative identity disorder, in the victims of extreme abuse.
Indeed, Multiple Personality Disorder is a big part of the picture. The current understanding of the disorder is that its onset begins at a very young age, after a child suffers from horrific abuse, often sexual in nature, that in a very real sense ‘shatters’ the child's mind into a collection of coexisting personalities to deal with the abuse they have received.As many as 98% to 99% of individuals who develop dissociative disorders have recognized personal histories of recurring, overpowering, and often life-threatening disturbances at a sensitive developmental stage of childhood. The brain apparently dissociates exceptionally well: researchers have found that sufferers of Dissociative Identity Disorder will often have no memories of abuse they endured, and go as far as to vehemently deny their past experiences, despite extensive documentation by hospitals and courts of the abuse at the time it happened, and in addition, lifelong physical scars and symptoms that had arisen from the abuse. However, when an ‘alter’ was present as the dominant psyche, detailed memories of the abuse were present. The same study found that the ‘alters’ would have completely distinct personalities, with different handwriting, and often, different genders.
It is very likely that the possibility of deliberately creating multiple personalities in a child was understood at least as early as the medical experiments undertaken during World War II by the Third Reich. A cursory reading of the available data regarding the work of certain doctors such as the notorious ‘Angel of Death’ Dr. Mengele shows that much of the research undertaken at concentration camps had to do with inflicting trauma and recording its various effects. A logical conclusion is that these psychopathic doctors attempted to understand and then exploit the condition.The extension of this research is known as “trauma-based mind control”. The general idea is to subject children to horrific and unthinkable abuse at a sensitive age of development with the purpose of deliberately creating multiple personalities. The alternate personalities would then be programmed, through the use of hypnosis, drugs and further trauma, sometimes to store sensitive information, sometimes to create spies, assassins, sex slaves and more.The victim's primary personality would be completely unaware not only that they had programmed alternate personalities, but that they had been a victim of extreme abuse in the first place. Due to the associated trauma, the programming would be stored in a different part of the brain than normal memories, increasing both the power of the memory and the difficulty of recall. Using hypnotic suggestion, any designated person with the proper information, such as a code word or a gesture, would be able to access a victims alternate personality and exploit the programming.
The Kantian insistence that ‘moral action should always be done out of the motive not of personal happiness but out of duty’, coupled with Kant’s equal insistence that ‘we could also not be expected to renounce our happiness and become moral drudges’, led to a series of conceptual knots that ‘morality’ on its own seemed unable to untie. In particular, so Hegel rather contentiously argues, it led to a kind of moralistic dissembling about what one’s real motives are, and the postulation of all kinds of extraneous matters to make the otherwise self-contradictory moralistic system work. Inevitably, such a monological point of view leads- so Hegel equally contentiously argues - to a kind of ethics of conviction, where it is always ultimately the individual’s own judgement call as to what his or her conscience requires, and the monadic and the monological conception of ‘self-conscious’ life inevitably point in the direction of an ever more contracted sense of subjectivity and what it really implies.
The end point of that logic is the Romantic version of an older idea of ‘beautiful souls’, those whose inward purity and rigor contrasts sharply with messiness of the world around it. Rather than being at a high point of post-revolutionary life, however, the arrival of the beautiful soul on the sense signals its complete breakdown. An inner life so radically cutoff from others, it might think of itself as indeed beautiful and pure, but ultimately there is nothing to it, and left to itself, its initial glow quickly dies like burning ember, it fades out like a bell rung only once, and finally evaporates into thin air. It is alone, friendless and without justice.
In his staging of the breakdown of the ‘beautiful soul’ as a way of living, Hegel imagines a confrontation between two beautiful souls, with each accusing the other of hypocrisy (of not being in reality so pure) and even of radical evil, since it accuses the other of putting self-love in place of the moral law. One of them comes to understand this about both of them, and he confesses, avowing his own radical evil, but the other stiff necked and rigorist, refuses to conciliate. “This is an impossible position”, Hegel says, and“such a stance either consumes itself in its own absorption, or eventually its own isolated life is too much to bear, its hard heart breaks, and then the two reconcile”. With that, the purely monological, monadic form collapses, and the I/You dyadic form is recaptured. Intriguely, Hegel then asserts that “in such a two-in-one of forgiveness and reconciliation, God appears in their midst”.
We have an elaborate list of issues to deal with as citizens of the New World Order. To begin with, a global currency, decentralized economy, agriculture, sustainable and non-toxic fuel and a fully conceptualized local participative governance system should be a priority. Isolated groups around the globe are working on the same.
The problem of the Pathocracy seems to be so vast and complex; it is certainly intimidating. We are fortunate that the solutions are relatively simple. It begins with education and non-participation. Ignorance is the key tool that keeps the Pathocracy afloat. It’s truly this easy. An awake populace can collectively choose to stop holding the pyramid above their shoulders by refusing to oil the gears of the machine. We need to collectively move our money out of big banks, support local enterprise over multinational corporations, and be courageously vocal about the truth.
I wish I could lay out a comprehensive metaphysical thesis here but the truth is, I simply don't know what the truth is. What I do know is that at the very bottom of the conspiracy rabbit hole, each and every one of us is a powerful spiritual being. We have a part of us that is eternal and perfect, hidden behind layers of ego. Some have more layers than others, and that is perfectly fine. Share experiences and feelings, feel the communion. Not everyone began their journey at the same time but eventually we will all finish it.
There is a series of paradoxes: the present we are experiencing is but a blink of an eye along the path of evolution for our souls, yet simultaneously the road ahead of us is of the utmost importance. There is an infinite amount of life not only in this universe but each one that exists beyond it, that has existed before it and will exist after it. Yet, each and every one among us is special. This is the nature of infinity. We are not insignificant.
I believe that true significance of life lies in knowing that our collective understanding of reality is vastly incomplete and largely incorrect.The ‘Consciousness’ gives meaning to our existence and to the struggles we will face as we confront the global elite.As we move forward, we must base our thoughts and actions not in hate and anger but with love and respect towards one another. This is not only the best means of confronting the problems we face but it is simply the right thing to do. It is time to search deep inside ourselves and hold on tightly to our inner light, develop it and share it with others. Be a catalyst for the beautiful renaissance that is in our future.
References:-
1. Hegel, G. (2018). The Phenomenology of Spirit. Cambridge University Press.
2. Žižek, Slavoj (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso.
3. Susskind, J. (2020). Future Politics. Oxford University Press.
4. Badiou, A. and Bosteels, B. (2012). Philosophy for militants. Verso.
About the author - Surya Kant Singh is a voracious reader and an auto-addict, pursuing his Masters degree in Statistics. He works as an Analytics Consultant and has published columns on Public Policy, Governance, Economics and Philosophy among other disciplines.
He is ever so mesmerised by '70s rock music and pro-people conversations! You can reach him at surya@columnist.com
Drawing from Plato and Richard Rorty, we see that a kind of contradiction, which can become antagonistic, between justice and liberty. The daunting notion of ‘terror’ intervenes exactly at the point where the universality that is supposed to be at work behind the political truth enters into a violent conflict with the particularity of interests. Subjectively, the great revolutionaries of the period translate this conflict by saying that where virtue fails, terror is inevitable. But what is virtue? It is the political will, or what Saint-Just calls ‘public consciousness’, which unflinchingly puts ‘equality above purely individual liberty’, and ‘the universality of principles above the interests of particulars’.
This debate is by no means outdated. What, indeed, is our situation today? The price to be paid for our cherished liberty is that of a monstrous inequality, first within our own countries but then, above all, abroad. From a philosophical point of view, there exists no justice whatsoever in the contemporary world. From this point of view, we are entirely without virtue in the sense given to this word by our great ancestors. But we also flatter ourselves for not being terrorists either. Now, again, Saint-Just also asked: ‘What do the people want who want neither virtue nor terror?’
And his answer to this question was: they want corruption. By ‘corruption’ I mean, above all, the mental corruption which leads to a world that, while being so evidently devoid of any principle, presents itself as, and is assumed by the majority of those who benefit from it to be, the best of all possible worlds. This reaches the point where, in the name of this corrupt world, people tolerate the waging of wars against those who would revolt against such disgusting self-satisfaction – and, within our borders, our persecution of those who are badly ‘integrated’, all those who, having arrived from elsewhere, do not unconditionally profess the self-proclaimed superiority of capital -parliamentarianism.
Why Philosophy?
This question obviously brings us back to the old discussion on the true nature of philosophy. Roughly, we can distinguish two tendencies in this debate. For the first tendency, philosophy is essentially a reflexive mode of knowledge: the knowledge of truth in the theoretical domain, the knowledge of values in the practical domain. And we must organize the process whereby these two fundamental forms of knowledge are acquired and transmitted. Thus, the form that is appropriate for philosophy is that of the school. The philosopher then is a professor like Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger and so many others. The philosopher organizes the reasoned transmission and discussion of questions concerning truth and values. Indeed, it belongs to philosophy to have invented the form of the school, since at least the Greeks. The second possibility holds that philosophy is not really a form of knowledge, whether theoretical or practical. Rather, it consists in the direct transformation of a subject, being a radical conversion of sorts – a complete upheaval of existence. Consequently, philosophy comes very close to religion, even though its means are exclusively rational; it comes very close to love, but without the violent support of desire; very close to political commitment, but without the constraint of a centralized organization; very close to artistic creation, but without the sensible means of art; very close to scientific knowledge, but without the formalism of mathematics or the empirical and technical means of physics.
‘To corrupt the youth’ is, after all, a very apt name to designate the philosophical act, provided that we understand the meaning of ‘corruption’. To corrupt here means to teach the possibility of refusing all blind submission to established opinions. To corrupt means to give the youth certain means to change their opinion with regard to social norms, to substitute debate and rational critique for imitation and approval, and even, if the question is a matter of principle, to substitute revolt for obedience. But this revolt is neither spontaneous nor aggressive, to the extent that it is the consequence of principles and of a critique offered for the discussion of all.
Quoting Badiou, there is something like a paradoxical relationship between three terms: Democracy, Politics and Philosophy. We must pass from democracy to philosophy. In fact, such is the road followed in the creation of philosophy among ancient Greeks. The birth of philosophy is evidently dependent on the invention by the Greeks of the first form of democratic power.
The three terms – politics, democracy and philosophy – are, finally, linked by the question of truth. The obscure knot is in fact determined by the obscurity that is proper to the category of truth. The problem then becomes: What is a democratic conception of truth? What is, in opposition to relativism and scepticism, the democratic universality? What is a political rule that applies to all, but without the constraint of transcendence?
Philosophy has two fundamental characteristics. On the one hand, it is a discourse independent of the place occupied by the one who speaks. If you prefer: philosophy is the discourse of neither king nor priest, of neither prophet nor god. There is no guarantee for the philosophical discourse on the side of transcendence, power or sacred function. Philosophy assumes that the search for truth is open to all. The philosopher can be anyone. What the philosopher says is validated (or not) not by the speaker’s position, but solely by the spoken content. Or, more technically, the philosophical evaluation is not concerned with the subjective enunciation, but solely with the objectively enunciated. Philosophy is a discourse whose legitimacy stems only from itself.
Therein lies a clearly democratic feature. Philosophy is completely indifferent to the social, cultural or religious position of the one who speaks or thinks. It accepts that it can come from anyone. And philosophy is exposed to approval or critique, without any prior selection of those who approve or object. It consents to be for anyone whatsoever. We can thus conclude that it belongs to the essence of philosophy to be democratic. But we ought not to forget that philosophy, which consents to be totally universal in its origin as well as in its address, could not consent to be democratic in the same sense as far as its objectives, or its destination, are concerned. Anyone can be a philosopher, or the interlocutor of a philosopher. But it is not true that any opinion is worth as much as any other opinion. The axiom of the equality of intelligences is far from constituting an axiom of the equality of opinions.
Since the beginning of philosophy, we must follow Plato in distinguishing, first, between correct and mistaken opinions, and, secondly, between opinion and truth. To the extent that the ultimate aim of philosophy is thoroughly to clarify the distinction between truth and opinion, evidently there can be no genuine philosophical interpretation of the great democratic principle of the freedom of opinion. Philosophy opposes ‘the unity and universality of truth’ to ‘the plurality and relativity of opinions’. There is another factor that limits the democratic tendency of philosophy. Philosophy is certainly exposed to critical judgment. But this exposure implies the acceptance of a common rule for discussion. We must recognize the validity of the arguments. And finally we must accept the existence of a universal logic as the formal condition of the axiom of the equality of intelligences. Metaphorically speaking, this is the ‘mathematical’ dimension of philosophy: there exists a freedom of address, but there is also the need for a strict rule for discussion.
Like mathematics, philosophy is valid from all and for all, and knows no specific language. But there is a strict rule that applies to the consequences. Thus, when philosophy examines politics it cannot do so according to a line of pure liberty or freedom, much less according to the principle of the freedom of opinion; it treats of the question of what a political truth can be. Or again: it treats of the question of what politics is when it obeys the following two principles:
1. Compatibility with the philosophical principle of the equality of intelligences.
2. Compatibility with the philosophical principle of the subordination of the variety of opinions to the universality of truth.
We can say simply that equality and universality are the characteristics of a valid politics in the field of philosophy. The classical name for this is justice. Justice means examining any situation from the point of view of an egalitarian norm vindicated as universal.
One will note that, in the idea of justice, equality is far more important than liberty, and universality far more important than particularity, identity or individuality. This is because there is a problem with the current definition of democracy as representative of individual liberties.
State of things
The subjective idea that can be derived from the circumstances is that we are perhaps at the most important point in time and going through an unprecedented transition. In the digital lifeworld, technology will permeate our world, inseparable from our daily experience and embedded in physical structures and objects that we never regarded previously as ‘technology’. Our lives play out in a teeming network of connected people and smart things, with little meaningful distinction between human and machine, online and offline, virtual and physical, or as the author William Gibson puts it, between ‘cyberspace’ and ‘meatspace’.
Let’s look at each in turn.
First, technology is becoming increasingly pervasive. Although estimates vary, it’s predicted that by 2020 there will be somewhere between 25 and 50 billion devices connected to the internet.
Almost inconceivably, the Internet Business Solutions Group at Cisco Systems estimates that 99 per cent of the physical objects in the world will eventually be connected to a network. In such a world, processing power would be so ubiquitous that what we think of as ‘computers’ would effectively disappear.” At home, refrigerators will monitor what you eat and replenish your online shopping basket; ovens and washing machine will respond to voice commands.
Although they’re not to everyone’s taste, most consumers plan to buy wearable technologies. By 2020, we will have sensors on a Ralph Lauren ‘PoloTech’ shirt and it will monitor your heart rate, and breathing intensity—providing you with personalized performance feedback. Snapchat Spectacles and similar early accoutrements, already on the market, can capture what you see in shareable ten-second clips. In the future, more sophisticated products will supersede the first generation of Nike Fuelbands, Jawbone fitness trackers, Fitbit wristbands, and Apple watches. ‘Epiderm electronics’- small stretchy patches worn on the skin, will be able to record your sun exposure, heart rate, and blood oxygenation. Meanwhile, when you toss a ball around the garden, the pigskinitself will record the distance, velocity, spin rate, spiral, and catch rate for post-game analysis.
In public, smart waste bins will know when they are full, highways will know when they are cracked, and supermarket shelveswill know when they are empty. Each will feed information back to the persons (or machines) responsible for fixing the problem. Smart signs, streetlamps, and traffic lights will interact withdriverless cars that pass by.
Facebook now boasts more than 2 billion active users. Twitter has more than 313 million, four-fifths of whom, access it on mobile technology. YouTube has more than 1 billion active users. Digital technologies have also changed the nature of human connectivity as well as its extent. Perhaps the most profound change is the growth of decentralized modes of producing and distributing information, culture, and knowledge. Wikipedia is the most famous example. Together, tens of thousands of contributors from around the world have produced the greatest repository of human knowledge ever assembled, working cooperatively, not for profit, outside the market system, and not under the command of the state.
Similarly, file-sharing websites like Tor are increasingly popular, and in 2015 there were more than 1 billion uses of Creative Commons, acollaboration-friendly copyright system that encourages the use adaptation of content by others without further permission by originator, As Yochai Benkler argues in The Wealth of Networks and The Penguin and the Leviathan (2011), it’s not that human nature has changed in the last twenty years to make us more cooperative. Rather, it’s that this scale of cooperative behavior would have been impossible in the past.
Last few years have seen the emergence of another technology with potentially far reaching implications for connectivity and cooperation. This is ‘blockchain’, invented by the mysterious pioneer(s)Satoshi Nakamoto. It’s best known as the system underpinning the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. The workings of blockchain are technically complex but the basic premise can be described simply. Imagine a giant ledger (or spreadsheet) of the kind we would have previously put on paper. This ledger contains a record of every transaction that has taken place between its users. Every few minutes, it is updated with a new ‘block’ of information containing all of the last ten minutes’ transactions. Every new block refers back to the previous block, creating an unbroken chain of custody of all assets reaching back to their inception. The ledger is not stored in a single place. Instead, it is stored (‘distributed’) simultaneously across thousands of computers around the world. For security, it can only be added to, and not changed; it is public and can be scrutinized; and most importantly, transactions are secured by powerful ‘public key’ cryptography.Blockchain’s social significance is that it enables secure transactions between strangers without the help of a trusted third-party intermediary like a bank, credit card company, or the state. It, purports to solve a longstanding problem in computer science (and politics), which is how to create ‘trust’, or something like it, between people with no other personal connection. Digital currency is perhapsthe most obvious use for blockchain technology, but in theory can be used to record almost anything, from birth and death certificates to marriage licenses.It could also provide solutions to other problems of digital life, such as how to produce and control over secure digital ‘wallets’ or IDs.Looking further it’s plausible to imagine ‘smart’ assets managing themselves by combining AI and blockchain: ‘Spare bedrooms, empty apartment or vacant conference rooms could rent themselves out;autonomous agents could manage our homes and office buildings.
Blockchain also offers a potential means of regulating more complex legal and social relations beyond simple rights of property or usage. A ‘smart contract’, for instance, is a piece of blockchain software that executes itself automatically under pre-agreed circumstances like a purchase agreement which automatically transfers the ownership title of a car to a customer once all loan payments have been made. There are early ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organizations’(DAOs) that seek to solve problems of collective action without a centralized power structure. Imagine services like Uber or Airbnb but without any formal organization at the center pulling the strings. The developers of the Ethereum blockchain, among others, have said they want to replace the state altogether. Blockchain still presents serious challenges of scale, governance,and even security, which are yet to be overcome. Yet for a youthful technology it is already delivering some interesting results. Thegovernments of Honduras, Georgia, and Sweden are trialing the use of blockchain to handle land titles and the government of Estonia to record more than 1 million patient health records. In the US, the Advanced Defence Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is looking into using blockchain technology to protect its militarynetworks and communications.
Looking further ahead, developments in hardware could yield new and astonishing ways of communicating. In 2014, a person using -an electroencephalogram (a recording of brain activity, known asan EEG) headset successfully sent a ‘thought’ to another personwearing a similar device in France, who was able to understand the message. This was the first scientific instance of ‘mind-to-mind’communication, also known as telepathy. You can already buybasic brainwave-reading devices, such as the Muse headband, which aims to aid meditation by providing real-time feedback on brain activity. Companies such as NeuroSky sell headsets that allowto operate apps and play games on your smartphone using thoughts. The US army has (apparently not very well) flown a helicopter using this kind of technology. Brain-computer interface has been the subject of a great deal of attention in Silicon Valley.
The city of Santander in Spain has distributed 12,000 sensors in urban areas to monitor noise, temperature, ambient light levels, carbon monoxide concentration and the availability of parking spaces. Following its mission in Afghanistan, the US military left 1500 ‘unattended ground sensors’ to monitor Afghan and Pakistani population movement. Researchers at the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are working on a cheap package of sensors to be put on top of street lights, which would make it possible to measurenoise and pollution ‘almost house by house in real time’
In the field of machine vision, AI systems are increasingly able to find the most important part of an image and generate a verbal caption of what they ‘see’ (e.g. ‘people shopping in an outdoor market’), and computerized face recognition is now so advancethat it is routinely used for security purposes at border crossings inEurope and Australia. Less loftily, face recognition technology is usedby the toilet paper dispensers in machines at Beijing’s Temple of Heavenpark to make sure that no individual takes more than their fair share.
Increasingly sensitive technology will prompt a change in howwe urge machines to do our bidding. We are currently in the era of the ‘glass slab’- smartphones and tablet computers that respondmainly to our touch, and other stimuli such as voice commands.
Soon, machines will respond to other forms of command, such aseye movements or gesture. Some interfaces will beof an entirely new kind, like the ‘temporary tattoos’ developed byMIT which can be used to control your smartphone, or the Electric spray-paint that ‘turns any object into a sensor’ capable of reading finger presses like a touchscreen. In 2015, workers atEpicenter hub in Stockholm implanted microchips in their hands, enabling them to open secure doors and operate copiers by waving over a sensor.
The most intimately sensitive technologies will gather data directly from our bodies. Proteus Biomedical and Novartis have developed a ‘smart pill’ that can tell your smartphone how your body is responding to medication. In a survey of 800 executives conducted for the World Economic Forum, 82% expected that the first implantable smartphone would be commercially available by 2025. By then, smartphones will have truly bewhat US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts called ‘an important feature of human anatomy'.
Machines are becoming sensitive in a further importantin that they are increasingly able to detect human emotions. This is the field of affective computing. By looking at a human face, these systems can tell in real time whether that person is happy, confused, surprised, or disgusted. Open source variants of such technologies are at the disposal of a common man to use with just a camera and a laptop.Computers can now outperform most people in distinguishing social smiles from those triggered by spontaneous joy, and in differentiatingbetween faked pain and genuine pain. They can determine if a patientis depressed. They can register expressions so fleeting that they areunknown even to the person making them.
Machines are well places to use these signals. For instance, it’s possible to use the vocal pitch rhythm and intensity of a conversation between the woman and a child to determine whether the woman is the child’s mother.
By bouncing ordinary Wi-Fi signals off the human body, researchers at MIT claim to be able to determine about 70% of the time, the ‘emotional state’ of a person ‘they have never studied before’. The rate improves with people known to the system. Another biometric is human gait (manner of walking) which AI systems can use to identify a known person from afar, or even to recognize suspicious behavior in strangers.
Nanotechnology, the field for which the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded, is another burgeoning area of research. It involves the construction of devices so small that they measured in ‘nanometers’(one-billionth of a meter). A red blood cell, by comparison, is 7000 nanometers wide. The possibilities of nanotechnology are mind-boggling: nanobots can already swim through ourbodies, relaying images, delivering targeted drugs, and attackingparticular cells with a precision that makes even the finest of surgeons’ blades look blunt. There are nanobots that can releasedrugs in response to human thought, potentially enabling them todetect and prevent an attack of epilepsy at the precise moment itoccurs. Another less salubrious application of the same technologywould be to ‘keep you at the perfect pitch of drunkenness, activatedon demand’. Nanotechnology also has implications for datastorage. Researchers at Delft University in the Netherlands havecreated an ‘atomic hard drive’ capable of storing 500 terabits ofinformation in a single square inch.
“The first and most basic rule is to consider social facts asthings... To treat phenomena as things is to treat themas data, and this constitutes the starting point for science”
- Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (1895)
In the digital lifeworld, a growing amount of social activity is being captured and recorded as data then sorted, stored, and processed by digital systems. More and more of our actions, utterances, movements, relationships, emotions, and beliefs are leaving a permanent or semi-permanent digital mark. With chronicling human life,data will increasingly be gathered on the natural world, the activity of machines, and the built environment. All this data, in turn, will beused for commercial purposes, to train machine learning AI systems and to predict and control human behavior.
The Problem
Lobaczewski had tremendous difficulty in publishing his book. At one point the manuscript was thrown in the furnace shortly before a raid by the secret police, and later the publication was blocked by none other than Zbigniew Brzezinski himself. He had hopes that by sending his manuscript to the Vatican, the word about Pathocracy would be heard on a global level. The manuscript was never returned. When he came to the United States, he figured that the freer society would be more accepting of his thesis; again, publication was blocked and his work was marginalized.
What was so revolutionary about Lobaczewski’s work that it was repressed by the elite worldwide? It is impossible to come to any conclusion from his work except that the development of Pathocracy is inevitable as long as the general population is ignorant about the psychopathic other. Psychopaths have always existed, and they view the world of normal people, those with morality and conscience, as something to be looked down upon and exploited. Perhaps the most shocking revelation of his work is that psychopaths learn to recognize each other, even at a young age.
The natural result is a network of psychopaths, a subset of the population that recognize their differences and feel not only contempt for the rest of society, but the need to control and manipulate them as well. Over time they become experts in our weaknesses and follies, watching from a distance with curiosity and amusement.
The idea that Psychopaths can recognize each other is central to the Pathocracy. Imagine for millennia the process of evolution of a psychopathic cabal growing in power and numbers, increasingly manipulating society. This process of ponerization has happened to the major centers of covert powers in our world. All the global defence and financial elite down to local police departments have become ponerized institutions. Understanding the condition and development of ponerized networks is not just important, it is perhaps the most important information that society can have. It is the next step in evolution of society, the next grand paradigm shift.
This is the context under which the Pathocracy operates. A system of government hidden from the public view and operated by a psychologically distinct subset of the population whom do not feel empathy, have no conscience, and derive pleasure from the manipulation and abuse of the mass of the population they view as inferior. When we read accounts of horrific extreme abuse perpetrated against children, understand that the psychopathic others enjoy this abuse. They derive pleasure from torture and murder.
These psychopaths recognize each other and over time they come to be key holders of power wherever it exists in an unadulterated form. Seemingly antagonistic institutions such as competing banks are actually operated by the same psychopathic cabal behind the scenes. In the same way that you and I naturally exclude social deviants from our social groups, psychopaths do with normal people.
The result is a web of mutual conditioning of evil. Through a vast propaganda matrix, the Pathocracy is slowly conditioning humanity to conform to their sick standards resulting in a large portion of the population displaying ‘secondary psychopathic’ tendencies. This is the group that has subverted democracy first in the United States and later around the world, and are currently manipulating all major world events behind the scenes.
*Here it’s a good time to clarify that the words used in this article represent a broad spectrum of ideas and not what they literally stand for and it is assumed that the reader has the right context in mind while building up his/her perception. Due to the complexities of the subjects involved, it is neither possible nor desirable to use the exact word to representthe thought in context. Readers are expected not to takewords in their conventional notion rather take the holistic view into account to frame the idea.
While the pathocrats ruling the earth is a common discussion in the intellectual circles, people too often accept it to be a reality in sync with their own realties of sadness and that they can do nothing about it. For the people who disagree, whose number is fewer than imaginable, the evolution continues to be an unfair game.
The current state of earth has evidently stemmed from a morally weak humanity. This life-system appears to be an infinite helical climb and every subject and controller should assume themselves as Sisyphuses rolling stones on a helical incline in this evolutionary paradigm which will eventually roll back down the very next morning. This realization also makes the present evolution cold and sterile with accidental constructive outcomes laden with mounds of grief and torment.
“Anything born out of thought is impure because thought itself is impure”
- J. Krishnamurthy
Deliberately manufactured circumstances are an attempt to make it impossible to validate the facts, without understanding that those living in reality can point out at the perceivable differences. Our perception of reality is a mere ‘depiction of ideas’ which sustained in the evolutionary paradigm. Moreover, theyare inconsiderate on the very basics required for sustainability of life on this planet. While our ego may provoke us to believe the contrary,most of us can see the end of life on earth as we know it in very, very near future. At this juncture, two very important points emerge. The first one is‘the set of ideologies that have landed us here’ and the second, ‘a better ideology’ that will ensure the sustenance of life on this planet and our evolutionary paradigm.
Taking up the second point first, there have been attempts to understand the evolutionary process from time immemorial. When in crises, men, almost always, have resort to stars for the answers and it can’t be denied that some of them with the most daunting courage have got them too! Researchers at CERN have been successfully unearthing facts and data on theories propounded earlier and it’s not far when we will successfully decode the secrets of the universe. But I would stretch out to proclaim that all this research is not going to do any good other than satisfying the intellectual and egoistic desire to understand the universe for we, with our primitive problems and inconsistencies, are incapable as a race to contribute in any way to the galactic fraternity, if one exists. One might call me regressive but I find no place for advanced scientific discoveries in a society where a major population still suffers without the basics of food and shelter.
Ancient scriptures of all cultures talk of a cyclical creation where we evolve, reach a crest and are destroyed. This makes me wonder, isn’t this evolution futile, inefficient and hence non-ideal? For if we really evolve, we should’ve overshot the threshold sustainably at the point where the evolution tends to destroy us but we seem to lack the very understanding. One must see destruction as a state of complete disharmony, which one can observe right now around them. This point in time becomes even more important when we take into context, our rate of consumption of resources. The way we have exploited mother earth, we have literally stripped it bare naked and this leaves me with no hope for any future civilization that may evolve out of our ruins, for they will lack the bare minimum resources indispensable to reach the crescendo we are at. Without the building blocks at their disposal, they too will be destined to doom with absolutely no possibility of contributing to anything, anywhere, ever.
Returning to the first point-‘the ideas that have landed us here’, it needs a more articulate approach to filter out the noise and reach out to the real signals, then decode it and present it in a form concise enough to be absorbed in graspable gulps.
All of humanities problems, in their purest form, can be said to stem from conflicting ideologies.Given the right set of abilities, conditions, experiences, knowledge and desire, a personality can be molded. It is important to mention that continued illusion keeps the subjects at bay as they are not in a position to derive something concrete, despite being certain of their ideas all the while. And while revolving in this possible endless loop, one recognizes the presence of the shadow realities. This never ending loop of aforementioned illusion forces the subject to morph into something so malleable that it develops a multi-faceted personality, trying to grab the issue from both the ends simultaneously. This subject is now empowered to churn out the best possible solutions out of the existing scenario. It is in this state that the idealism of evolution and it being non-ideal at the same time acquires a meaning and makes sense.
Connecting the dots between the use of hypnosis, drugs, wide spread entrapment and abuse of children, a dark picture begins to emerge. One link that ties together many of these cases is the creation of multiple personality disorder, now known as dissociative identity disorder, in the victims of extreme abuse.
Indeed, Multiple Personality Disorder is a big part of the picture. The current understanding of the disorder is that its onset begins at a very young age, after a child suffers from horrific abuse, often sexual in nature, that in a very real sense ‘shatters’ the child's mind into a collection of coexisting personalities to deal with the abuse they have received.As many as 98% to 99% of individuals who develop dissociative disorders have recognized personal histories of recurring, overpowering, and often life-threatening disturbances at a sensitive developmental stage of childhood. The brain apparently dissociates exceptionally well: researchers have found that sufferers of Dissociative Identity Disorder will often have no memories of abuse they endured, and go as far as to vehemently deny their past experiences, despite extensive documentation by hospitals and courts of the abuse at the time it happened, and in addition, lifelong physical scars and symptoms that had arisen from the abuse. However, when an ‘alter’ was present as the dominant psyche, detailed memories of the abuse were present. The same study found that the ‘alters’ would have completely distinct personalities, with different handwriting, and often, different genders.
It is very likely that the possibility of deliberately creating multiple personalities in a child was understood at least as early as the medical experiments undertaken during World War II by the Third Reich. A cursory reading of the available data regarding the work of certain doctors such as the notorious ‘Angel of Death’ Dr. Mengele shows that much of the research undertaken at concentration camps had to do with inflicting trauma and recording its various effects. A logical conclusion is that these psychopathic doctors attempted to understand and then exploit the condition.The extension of this research is known as “trauma-based mind control”. The general idea is to subject children to horrific and unthinkable abuse at a sensitive age of development with the purpose of deliberately creating multiple personalities. The alternate personalities would then be programmed, through the use of hypnosis, drugs and further trauma, sometimes to store sensitive information, sometimes to create spies, assassins, sex slaves and more.The victim's primary personality would be completely unaware not only that they had programmed alternate personalities, but that they had been a victim of extreme abuse in the first place. Due to the associated trauma, the programming would be stored in a different part of the brain than normal memories, increasing both the power of the memory and the difficulty of recall. Using hypnotic suggestion, any designated person with the proper information, such as a code word or a gesture, would be able to access a victims alternate personality and exploit the programming.
The Kantian insistence that ‘moral action should always be done out of the motive not of personal happiness but out of duty’, coupled with Kant’s equal insistence that ‘we could also not be expected to renounce our happiness and become moral drudges’, led to a series of conceptual knots that ‘morality’ on its own seemed unable to untie. In particular, so Hegel rather contentiously argues, it led to a kind of moralistic dissembling about what one’s real motives are, and the postulation of all kinds of extraneous matters to make the otherwise self-contradictory moralistic system work. Inevitably, such a monological point of view leads- so Hegel equally contentiously argues - to a kind of ethics of conviction, where it is always ultimately the individual’s own judgement call as to what his or her conscience requires, and the monadic and the monological conception of ‘self-conscious’ life inevitably point in the direction of an ever more contracted sense of subjectivity and what it really implies.
The end point of that logic is the Romantic version of an older idea of ‘beautiful souls’, those whose inward purity and rigor contrasts sharply with messiness of the world around it. Rather than being at a high point of post-revolutionary life, however, the arrival of the beautiful soul on the sense signals its complete breakdown. An inner life so radically cutoff from others, it might think of itself as indeed beautiful and pure, but ultimately there is nothing to it, and left to itself, its initial glow quickly dies like burning ember, it fades out like a bell rung only once, and finally evaporates into thin air. It is alone, friendless and without justice.
In his staging of the breakdown of the ‘beautiful soul’ as a way of living, Hegel imagines a confrontation between two beautiful souls, with each accusing the other of hypocrisy (of not being in reality so pure) and even of radical evil, since it accuses the other of putting self-love in place of the moral law. One of them comes to understand this about both of them, and he confesses, avowing his own radical evil, but the other stiff necked and rigorist, refuses to conciliate. “This is an impossible position”, Hegel says, and“such a stance either consumes itself in its own absorption, or eventually its own isolated life is too much to bear, its hard heart breaks, and then the two reconcile”. With that, the purely monological, monadic form collapses, and the I/You dyadic form is recaptured. Intriguely, Hegel then asserts that “in such a two-in-one of forgiveness and reconciliation, God appears in their midst”.
The Solution
The problem of the Pathocracy seems to be so vast and complex; it is certainly intimidating. We are fortunate that the solutions are relatively simple. It begins with education and non-participation. Ignorance is the key tool that keeps the Pathocracy afloat. It’s truly this easy. An awake populace can collectively choose to stop holding the pyramid above their shoulders by refusing to oil the gears of the machine. We need to collectively move our money out of big banks, support local enterprise over multinational corporations, and be courageously vocal about the truth.
I wish I could lay out a comprehensive metaphysical thesis here but the truth is, I simply don't know what the truth is. What I do know is that at the very bottom of the conspiracy rabbit hole, each and every one of us is a powerful spiritual being. We have a part of us that is eternal and perfect, hidden behind layers of ego. Some have more layers than others, and that is perfectly fine. Share experiences and feelings, feel the communion. Not everyone began their journey at the same time but eventually we will all finish it.
There is a series of paradoxes: the present we are experiencing is but a blink of an eye along the path of evolution for our souls, yet simultaneously the road ahead of us is of the utmost importance. There is an infinite amount of life not only in this universe but each one that exists beyond it, that has existed before it and will exist after it. Yet, each and every one among us is special. This is the nature of infinity. We are not insignificant.
I believe that true significance of life lies in knowing that our collective understanding of reality is vastly incomplete and largely incorrect.The ‘Consciousness’ gives meaning to our existence and to the struggles we will face as we confront the global elite.As we move forward, we must base our thoughts and actions not in hate and anger but with love and respect towards one another. This is not only the best means of confronting the problems we face but it is simply the right thing to do. It is time to search deep inside ourselves and hold on tightly to our inner light, develop it and share it with others. Be a catalyst for the beautiful renaissance that is in our future.
References:-
1. Hegel, G. (2018). The Phenomenology of Spirit. Cambridge University Press.
2. Žižek, Slavoj (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso.
3. Susskind, J. (2020). Future Politics. Oxford University Press.
4. Badiou, A. and Bosteels, B. (2012). Philosophy for militants. Verso.
About the author - Surya Kant Singh is a voracious reader and an auto-addict, pursuing his Masters degree in Statistics. He works as an Analytics Consultant and has published columns on Public Policy, Governance, Economics and Philosophy among other disciplines.
He is ever so mesmerised by '70s rock music and pro-people conversations! You can reach him at surya@columnist.com
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