Prototyping Life
Or Democracy versus Corpo-Monarchy
When we are born there is no handbook. There is no blueprint or instruction manual. We are ripped from the dark and thrust into the light, kicking and screaming as we are toweled down and cut from our Source. This is not a Myth, but Nature. Every single one of us has the same exact starting experience. Our endings are all different…but our beginnings are all the same. Then it really begins as we find ourselves launching from whatever platform we arrived on: rich or poor, landlocked or seaside, religious or atheist. Language and ideology begin to shape our world view and we begin to take on texts presented to us via whatever institutions associated with the structure within which we are articulated. In America we are told that the great experiment of democracy allows us the freedom of choice along with the mobility to shift within what would be a static existence if we were in a monarchy or caste system. Essentially we can prototype our life through education and experiences, allowing us to stress test out what we might want our lives to look like.
As time has passed since the founding of this country, there have been a lot of restructurings in attempts to promote equality for the many. Conflict has always driven growth, whether internal or external, as has the profit connected to it. In the current iteration of power there are prototypes for new corporations in control being tested in enclaves around the globe. This begs the question: are we returning to a new type of concentrated mono-focused power built by a small collective driven by their technological worship? Monarchy was originally powered by a monotheistic world view. The King derived their power from God. This was directly aligned with the worldview at the time, focusing on a spiritual ascension from the material world. Those that were buried in the daily grind looked to their god-king for guidance, whether it was the next Crusade or some other way to fill the Crown’s coffers.
In theory, there are a lot of ideas that could make sense on paper. For one, it becomes much easier to make unilateral decisions when you are only focused on making life beneficial for a small few. These experiments seem to work quite well when they are built in bubbles as Thiel and his consortium have been doing lately. But they are not scalable. This is the key to any corporation. Scalability is the only way to create profit and when it is only focused on productivity it misses a key element that was crucial to the monarchy: spirituality. There is a reason why the Heritage Foundation has been tapped for this purpose but even that group has truly lost any sense of what spirituality actually means besides branding. This is why it will all ultimately fail. These big ideas being pushed by the technocracy will crash and burn far more quickly than they can stand them up. One key reason is due to the technology itself. We are in a time of compression, and with that prototyping happens far more quickly as does pivoting.
Thiel and company are not evolved in the way they would like to position themselves. Their mindset is very narrow and it lacks what is key to understanding humanity: empathy. Even the greatest gangsters understood this. Take for instance Pablo Escobar. His reign was empowered by his ability to directly connect with the people he represented. He ruled with his iron fist along with the saying “Plata o Plomo,” or “silver or lead.” This was a two-headed coin that flipped when needed and both sides benefitted Escobar. But he understood his people. He was connected at the source. This is where Thiel and the technocrats will ultimately fail. The belief that technology itself is the god that will be worshipped while providing a benevolent leadership is a fairy tale. Monarchy failed as it lost touch with the people, creating a fertile ground for the Enlightenment. Every form of government has its benefits as well as its failures, but maintaining a populace through peace and stability is the key factor to achieving any visionary goal.
AI as a fear-factor will also be a nail in their coffin as the hope on its reliance and guidance will be for naught. AI is the mirror to humanity as a closed-loop to our own achievements and failures. It is not a pill that will fix everything. The current course of leadership is being helmed by those that came up on psychiatry, not psychology. Drugs as a solution pervades the current mindset. There is a pill for that. Want to live longer? Take this pill or shoot these peptides? Lose weight? We have a GLP-1 for that. And the list goes on. Science without spirituality is a hammer with no nail. Nothing will be built that lasts using this mentality. Yet this is the pervading mentality at hand. Whether it’s Mencius Moldbug’s sophomoric musings while spinning away in his grimy tower or the current think tanks spawned from Dialog, there is a fundamental flaw in the structure. There is no northeast cornerstone in this building, only a murky bog that was once a swampland. You can’t build on swamplands. Everyone knows this. Interestingly enough, Miami is literally this in a nutshell. It is a place where billionaires flock to a facade that makes them feel infallible. It is also the “looksmaxxing” capital of the world which is right in line with the focus being on the trappings, not the foundation let alone the solidity of the structure.
The above video is a really fascinating breakdown of this disconnect between reality and fantasy. It is powered by new money and the idea that you can fake it until you make it. What it’s actually powered by is debt along with the projection of a reality that hopes the dream will catch up to the desire. It is this same disconnect that the current group of “visionaries” have latched onto without fully grasping what a society actually is and how it operates. Those who have never labored by the square are building an unsound superstructure. Without truth at the core and a value set that measures morality by way of empathy, there will not be a sustainable nor scalable future.
It’s an exhausting time to be alive since there is so much potential for good to be done and individual agency to be attained while orchestrating towards a unified tomorrow. Yet it is the fear-mongering that I wrote about last week which is further dividing us into ideological bubbles. This is another measure that will bring the same prototyping which might work in think tanks to a tremendous collective collapse. I have no doubt that we will witness this event in our lifetime. The train has left the station. The group that has come together with their shared vision along with their empowered network and net worth have decided that they understand what humanity needs…and how to get it there. But it’s this blind hubris as well as complete reliance on that which is built on no foundation that will be the undoing of the grand plan. Bits and pieces will stick and from it there will be a new Enlightenment, not the one dubbed by Yarvin and his kin as the Dark Enlightenment. Because when we have lived in blindness for so long the one thing that we desire more than anything else is light.
I recently played through the Ghost Recon: Breakpoint game which set up a story around a character not unlike an Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, albeit a far more hopeful version. The entirety of the narrative centers around a fictional island that is entirely run by AI and drones. In playing the story you find yourself embroiled in two different visions: one by the completely disconnected libertarian techno-dreamer and the other by the in-the-trenches former spec ops warrior. The dreamer sees a future empowered by AI and robotics that can push towards a utopia for the few. The spec ops contractor realizes that humans are inherently flawed and when soldiers go to war for disconnected oligarchs, death on the battlefield is meaningless. It is somewhere in-between these two pillars that the correct path shows itself. Your character in the game attempts to walk this middle path as the spec ops “traitor” is actually your brother-in-arms while the techno-oligarch is a bit of a sniveling geek who’s finally realizing that actions have consequences.
As I observe this from both the inside and outside, I realize that a collapse is imminent. But from the collapse a future society will be built that has the potential to make it through the turbulent times that have us craving a spiritual meaning in the face of great technological upheaval. Here in America we are rounding the 250th year of this nation. It has had its up and downs and currently is in a very transitional phase. In planetary terms it takes the Earth and Pluto 250 years to meet each time. That meeting is coming up, and as Pluto represents Death and the Underworld, so must we face this darkness before we can be brought through to again see the light. Stay the course and don’t lose your soul in the process. It’s quite easy to lose your truth when fear is the currency peddled by those who wish to control you in order to profit from your loss of agency.
This is so well written. I love reading your work! Don’t you have a workshop coming up?