In this day and age normal war of country versus country makes no sense. War today is the war of the political leaders waged on their own people.
What seemed to be progress pushed us closer to enabling sociopaths and other emotionally empty or unstable, but charismatic, people to seize power in an unchallenged manner.
Technology may bring about illumination of mankind, and it may also be the great leap into our collective shared abundance future, but at the very same time technology on its own is neither good nor bad and many, too many, technologists have radical extremist opinions, which they now conflate with valid political views.
For example the deep currents swirling in technologist circles imbuing everyone with promised land kind of prophecies about Mars, seasteading or separating California from the U.S. This is dangerous because these radical views, these exit strategies, create a void filled by crazy sociopaths who either help scission or they fight it to the death.
Neither is progress.
Progress is only towards one, global, united, happy, healthy, safe humanity. Progress is only towards humanity being greater than nations. Progress is solely about eradicating everything and anything which makes the pursuit of happiness hard.
But I digress.
The modern war is happening between elected or unelected pyramid tops and the people who support that pyramid, a war between a nation with itself. From Trump and his racial and religious war of purifying the american nation, through Putin and his autocratic war of enslaving his people, passing by Erdogan’s self inflicted war of decapitating the turkish nation, all the way to Bashar Al Assad’s violent civilian war. Even the European leaders, emancipated as they are, they are effectively waging smaller wars on their nations through elitism, euro scepticism, autistic responses to emotional shocks or overzealous rages about imaginary problems.
Modern war is autoimmune.
There is very little reason to invade. Land domination, not that it disappeared as a threat, is not economically viable anymore, so, with the exception of radically inspired zealots, there is very little political will for invasion and war declarations in the old fashioned way, that is between the heavily armed countries. Paradoxically, smaller countries, less armed countries, are much more virulent in their plans to conquer and destroy enemy civilizations.
The big players are colluding on taking on full control. And that is terribly scary, it is as if the enemy wins the war without a single bomb being launched, without you even knowing you are being conquered.
Because the modern enemy has no country. The enemy of today is ideology and caste based power. We have had this before but the difference is now we have the technology to create transnational cooperation for ideological enforcement. People tend to think revolutions are always about the good guys, but they’re not, they are simply a definition about ideological shifts, a ground up departure from the old way.
In a sense, Trump and his team are revolutionaries.
It is very easy to see why Trump and Putin appear to be “friends”: they have common ideological inspiration all based on a the foundation of complete and utter disregard for fundamental humanistic values. They don’t care, they are the honey badgers of world politics.
But you might wonder, how is this war possible, don’t people see it? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s the media that both covers and wages it.
Legitimised propagandistic media outlets, with national, and some international, coverage and captive audiences are the stealth armored tanks of the modern warfare.
They lie. They call misinformation what is actually flagrant disinformation, intentional deceit. They call opinion what are direct and eloquent attacks. They call hate speech free speech. They run non stop mystifications on all available channels: TV, radio, internet, paper.
You see there is nothing really and fundamentally new. Propagandistic media outlets have been around since forever. What is happening today is the phenomenon of captive audiences. What we have today is pervasive access to intimate details about mass behavior, individual decision making neuronal processes, personal data, excruciatingly detailed demographic parameter measurements, refined communicators with roots stuck deep into behavioral psychology. This helps the media wage the war.
And, what we have today and didn’t have in the past, is the corrupt legitimised media, outlets which people historically trust, media which has been independent and it has grown partisan, media who are employing decent folk and uses moral corruption tactics to tie them in and turn them into battery powered talking automatons, media who covers equally legit subjects and fabricated subjects, a huge machine of fabricating thought leaders by using the image and energy of real thought leaders. This helps the media cover the war.
There is a war going on. If it will be using weapons, I don’t know. If it will continue, I am sure of it. Will we lose: we will unless we become aware of what is under attack: humanity, universal values, basic rights, personal safety, privacy and free thought.
Technology with its huge adoption rate, sharp societal penetration and fast adaptive power is a terrible weapon to use if captured.
Do you notice how the founders of big tech companies, which have clear visions about humanity, hold control on their companies? Not all of them do it, only those who have an ingrained deep feeling of personal mission, and most of the time this mission is not to solve a human problem, but to “solve” humanity at large. What is the political place they’re in?
Would people vote someone who promises to fix the world? I hardly think so. People vote for tomorrow, for their current life. Nobody even hopes to ever see the world fixed, there is actually popular wisdom advising against even trying. Yet, some of the future’s most powerful men and women want to fix the world, and they know they need political action to do it.
Does it become a bit clearer why Peter is friends with Donald?
Anyway.
The weather is terrible.
power collusion floods drowning democracy, general discontent tsunamis blowing away meritocracy, technology fueled social earthquakes displacing civilisation itself.
What is there to be done? I think this:
First: power is in numbers. Second: proactive defence. Third: reactive offence.
I will continue in a future story about each of the above, in a personal attempt to figure out a way to break through as an open minded human in a world that is becoming more and more closed, extreme and pressurized.
In the meantime, what do you think?