Category Archives: society

Why New Age failed

Posted on by
7

I was wondering why the New Age spirituality wave collapsed quite rapidly in the early-2000s.

Sure, part of it must have been the fact that it over-promised and under-delivered. What it promised was rapid spiritual evolution, ascension, positive transformation of life on Earth into a more spiritual octave. What it delivered was, basically, some ego-pampering, feel-good emotions that wore out after a while, and the basic New Age philosophy contained so many easily exposable weak points that the exponential growth of the Internet made most of it sound silly. But surely that couldn’t have been all, because I didn’t need Wikipedia and Google to find it silly even in the mid-1990s. Some of the theories that circulated included “spiritual people having 12-strand DNA instead of ordinary 2-strand”, and you need only the basic understanding of biochemistry to know that this is total horseshit. Also, if you listened to the New Age bullshitters, you’d think that everybody is full of alien implants, being abducted by aliens or at least having their dreams invaded by aliens, and that Jesus was an alien starfleet commander whose real name is Sananda Kumara and what not. I mean, it’s such horrid crap that it attracted only two main population groups: people who are total fucking idiots, gullible and uncritical to the point of serious mental illness, and people who had genuine spiritual experiences and reasons to believe in strange shit, and who somehow got stuck in this shitpile. To be sure, I was never popular in the New Age circles. In fact, I was very critical of things they considered certain beyond any possible doubt, and my approach of exhausting all reasonable explanations before trying all sorts of crazy shit seems to be the opposite of the New Age approach, which is to try all the crazy shit first and perceive reasonable explanations as some kind of a ballast weight that prevents you in your ascent to great spiritual heights. I don’t know, I’m the kind of guy who sees a rainbow and thinks of Newton and the angle at which sunlight hits those water droplets in the air; I don’t think of unicorn farts. I don’t think being crazy is a sign of spirituality. Spirituality is a difficult and treacherous enough subject without getting lost in bullshitful nonsense.

One of the most dangerous things I encountered in the New Age circles was insistence that they were using “cosmic energy” in their healing and spiritual practices, which went completely against my experience. In my experience, the entire concept of “channeling energy” is impossible. You always use your personal spiritual energy for all kinds of interventions, if it’s in fact something that actually works and has consequences. If it’s make-believe, you can pretend it’s unicorn tears for all the effect that it has. The stuff I did was always very taxing and I needed at least a full day to recover the depleted energy reserves. It’s not fun and games, by any means, and, having consulted other authentic spiritual people, it seems to be as taxing to them as it is to me. They usually pretend it’s nothing or it’s cosmic energy or channeling from this or that fictional source, but they do it because they want to lessen the sense of obligation and guilt in the recipient. This, however, is a horrible strategy, because it has a twofold result: the recipient doesn’t take the intervention as seriously as he should, and the force-wielder is chronically drained and can actually be profoundly spiritually harmed by the practice, to the point that requires another force-wielder’s love in order to recover. I pulled the term “force-wielder” from my ass just now because it strikes me as the most appropriate description of what’s going on; shaktipat-master or something similar is used, but it doesn’t really fit. You have a spiritually powerful being, whose soul is simply bigger, stronger, and wields greater influence over spiritual energies of a lesser magnitude. This being can influence others, but this comes at an expense to the wielder, it has negative karmic consequences if the recipient is undeserving or ungrateful, and the greater the power differential between the two, the less benefit there actually is to the receiver, and at a greater cost to the force-wielder.

As for the “cosmic energy” or “divine energy”, it sure sounds better and more poetic than what’s actually going on, and which would sound more like a kind wealthy person paying for someone’s debts and saying it was Santa Claus. The problem is, the recipient then figures he’s on good terms with Santa and gets into more trouble, since getting out of it appeared to be simple and free. The wealthy person can laugh it away and appear to have suffered no ill effects, but if this repeats long enough, eventually he or she ends up seriously drained and hurt, and the worst part is, at this point the force-wielder already painted himself into a corner, because his narrative was that it’s all God doing things, it’s a cosmic divine energy; he’s only a channel.

No, he’s not “only” a channel. He or she is a presence of God in the world. Being a Divine presence is expensive, it requires constant investment of effort and diligence, and praising God while dismissing the “conduit” actually turns the actual situation upside-down. The force-wielder is able to manifest God because, well, he or she is simply a spiritual being of higher magnitude. You can say that God is everywhere but God is everywhere in a form useless to anyone but those great souls who are able to feel God directly, and then perform spiritual transfusion of this higher spiritual energy into the lesser beings. This effect is expensive, taxing and temporary, and in the long-term, the force-wielder feels the negative consequences of the lack of recognition, feels used, exploited and unloved. The aggravating circumstance of all this in the New Age circles is when everybody and their dog are claiming to be doing some form of divine energy channeling, so the apparent value of the process goes to the basement, and 99.99% of the practitioners are total charlatans. As a result, those few who are actually wielding force are perceived not as Gods, but as run-of-the-mill bullshitters. And don’t get me wrong, in all that steaming pile that was New Age there were some very genuine spiritual powerhouses, who didn’t necessarily know what they were doing and how it’s all working, but they could do real things that have real consequences. From what I can see, the greatest evil of the New Age movement is that it exploited those people’s empathy and their genuine desire to spiritually uplift people at their own expense, and left them exhausted, drained and abused in all ways, essentially replacing them with some other toy after it stopped being interesting.

I’m not saying that those force-wielders who ended up wrecked didn’t participate in the entire process that was inherently harmful to both sides. They were often misguided, deluded and sometimes actually ignored the warning signs, because they didn’t like what the reality was telling them. What reality was telling them is that this shit isn’t working, and it’s not because they are doing something wrong on a good path, it’s not working because the entire approach of taking from the spiritually wealthy in order to give to the spiritually poor has the same chance of working as socialism, which is to say, none. The irony is, socialist rationalizations about what “should” be happening, and pretending that the state budget that pays for it all is some kind of an inexhaustible cosmic resource that is supposed to be tapped into for free, that it’s not blood, sweat and tears of actual living people that is being used to finance the whole thing, it all sounds exactly the same. We want free goodies, and we want it to be paid by pixie dust and divine cosmic energy because we are assholes.

Why the New Age collapsed? Well, it consisted of two main groups, those who were actually the genuine spiritual people (all five of them), and the stupid, unworthy parasites who were in it for the promise of free goodies. When Internet and social media provided a cheap and accessible source of ego-stimulation from buying shiny new gadgets and having your worthless shit liked on Facefuck, they simply followed this abundant new source of getting liked for free and being just as valuable as anyone else without having to actually do anything. In the meantime, they left the genuine New Age gurus drained and fucked over, wondering what the hell actually happened.

The reason why I’m untouched by all that is simple: I’m quite good at figuring out patterns, and I woke up and smelled the coffee early on. The desire to be of help to others and be a bodhisattva is a tempting side-road, and it would actually make some sense if those whom we wish to help actually needed us or benefitted from our efforts, but the sad truth is, the only one who actually needs great souls are other great souls. What small souls say they need is great souls, but what they actually need is a lot of small souls exactly their size, who will like them on Facebook. The only use they have for great souls is to screw them over and show them they aren’t either all that great or all that necessary. Essentially, great souls want the small souls to become great, and small souls want to shit and piss on the great souls, to humiliate them, exploit them for resources and show them there’s nothing so great that they couldn’t make it small.

An instruction manual for great souls: if you want small souls to become great, put your trust in the greatest, most efficient way for becoming a great soul, the one that created the likes of you. It’s called natural evolution. It’s an efficient vehicle, and you don’t need to get out and push in order for it to work. If you think you need to get out and push, you’re not being compassionate, you’re being an idiot.

Laughter and ridicule

Posted on by
Reply

There is a common prejudice that laughter and ridicule are a positive thing, in that laughter makes one feel better and helps one overcome situations that would otherwise overwhelm him, and ridicule exposes that which is worthy of contempt and thus serves a positive purpose.

I disagree. I think both laughter and ridicule are neutral, in that they can both be good or evil, depending on the circumstances.

Laughter might help people to overcome difficult situations, but personally, I can’t remember ever having such experiences. What did help me overcome difficult situations was either faith, or trust, or someone’s helping hand. I actually find it more helpful to endure difficult situations by admitting their gravity, crying and asking Gods to help me. Laughing in the face of a difficult situation looks more like denial and madness, an attempt to portray a lion as a sheep in order not to fear him, but a lion remains impervious to such mental fuckery and will eat you regardless. I find it more useful to cry for help and beg for a gun, than to pretend that I’m not facing a real lion. Laughing might help you not feel afraid, but it will not help you survive. It’s the opposite of helpful. The Jews in Hitler’s Germany had two options: optimism or pessimism. Those who chose optimism imagined Hitler as a silly character who can’t really hurt them, and those who chose pessimism fled Germany and Europe in general, and made a new life for themselves in America. We know how that turned out for each group. As I said, optimism and laughter can indeed make you feel better and safer, but it doesn’t actually help you solve any problems. It’s a form of putting your head into sand and hiding from reality, and is not all that far from madness, at least the way I see it. What does help you is to acknowledge the gravity of your situation and seriousness of your problem early on, to invest all your powers into solving the problem and asking for all kinds of help in order to increase your chances of overcoming the problem. If you still fail, at least you didn’t die in denial.

Ridicule is similar, but different in that it isn’t directed at oneself, but others. The role of ridicule is to present the object of ridicule as small, unworthy and contemptible in the eyes of the audience; essentially, it’s a form of social manipulation. When used in order to put emotional accent on the conclusion of an argument, essentially by applying tar and feathers to someone whose arguments were soundly defeated, it can be legitimately used in the context of a debate, but when it is used as a substitute for arguments, in order to manipulate emotional responses of the audience when arguments themselves fail to convince, it is a grave logical fallacy and a form of demagogy.

Let’s see some examples of proper and improper use of ridicule.

Let’s say someone is stating that the Earth is flat. Proper use of ridicule is to state that this person obviously didn’t travel much, because if he did, he would notice how the constellations in the southern hemisphere differ from those in the northern hemisphere, which, combined with the evidence of daily rotation of the sky proves we are on a sphere. This form of ridicule uses a strong argument to disprove a fallacious thesis, and then uses the obviousness of the argument as evidence that the person making the fallacious statement is stupid. Essentially, ridicule is corollary to the conclusion, and not an argument in itself, which is why it cannot be considered a form of ad hominem fallacy. Ad hominem would be “this person is an idiot, which is why his argument is false”. A corollary of the proper conclusion is “the argument against the thesis is x, and since x is rather obvious and straightforward, this person is an idiot”. Such argumentation serves the useful purpose of encouraging one to perform thorough examination of one’s arguments for obvious errors before expressing potentially idiotic theses in public.

Improper use of ridicule is to use one’s own ignorance and ignorance of the audience as an emotionally charged argument against a valid thesis. Examples of this are unfortunately abundant throughout history; Kepler was mocked by Galileo for stating that Moon’s gravitational influence causes the tides. People who produced meteorites as evidence of extraterrestrial origin of meteors were mocked by Lavoisier. Tesla was mocked by Edison who tried to suppress Tesla’s invention of highly efficient alternating current in favor of his direct current. Jewish physicists were mocked by Hitler and his propagandists for inventing relativity and quantum theory, which didn’t sound “right” to the Nazis. Everybody who expresses support for eugenics or racial differences is immediately labelled as “Hitler” without any kind of argument provided. Essentially, it is used to dismiss an argument by emotionally labelling it as either ridiculous or evil, by association. The problem is, everything can be portrayed as ridiculous. To an ignorant person, Al Gore can be portrayed as over-the-top silly for stating that he took initiative in creating the Internet; an informed person would know that before his “information superhighway initiative”, Internet was an academic curiosity at best, without commercial value to the broader public. He saw the potential and knew what infrastructure needed to be built, and he saw to it; essentially, he deserves more praise for the existence of Internet as we know it than any other person, but he is ridiculed for it because people can’t believe that a single person could be so far-sighted and important. To use an even more shocking example, Jesus was mocked and ridiculed in his suffering and death, because “he called himself the son of God” and “because if he was God, why doesn’t he come down from the cross”. It is very important that we never forget those arguments, because they sounded valid to those who said them, and probably to the audience as well, and we now see them as cringe-worthy, in hindsight. Mockery is a terrible thing, because combined with ignorance, it is a terrible weapon against truth, courage and independent thought, and I am therefore highly skeptical of it. Mockery is like an idiot with a hammer, breaking priceless porcelain and bragging how it was trash to begin with, or he wouldn’t be able to break it. It is the favorite weapon of stupidity against challenging and difficult ideas, and the fact that it can occasionally be used against idiots and stupid ideas doesn’t fully redeem it. I don’t see it as a weapon of mass destruction that must never be used, but more as candy, that can be served after a proper meal of rational arguments and evidence, but never as a substitute. It’s sweet when used in moderation and properly, but misuse it and the consequences can be grave.

Good God, evil world

Posted on by
7

I’ve been watching the Game of Thrones clips on Youtube yesterday, as well as some of the reactions.

There’s a character named Ramsay Bolton who is an evil sadistic fucktard (OK, that applies to most characters but he’s above average). There’s a scene where he rapes a female character and apparently there was all sorts of shit in the media about how that’s horrible and how could they film that and how it’s a semi-historical portrayal of the dark ages when women were treated like shit and so on. And it wasn’t a particularly nasty scene, he simply fucks her against her will and treats her like a thing of little worth. Poor women bad men, right?

Not really, since the same fucktard character in another episode has a prisoner crucified in the dungeon, where he cuts his dick off, bores through his foot with a screw, cuts him with a knife and humiliates him in every possible way. A logical conclusion would be that this is a fucktard character, not that women are in a particularly bad position relative to men. If anything, I’ve seen more scenes of men getting a shitty deal, having their arms chopped off, eyes poked out, being crucified, having their cocks cut off, being humiliated and denigrated by both relatives and enemies, being flayed alive, disemboweled, having their heads crushed and so on. Yeah, women are being raped, strangled, stabbed, have their throats slit and so on. It’s a lovely series of which Satan would approve fully.

But there’s an interesting scene, where a female character, Arya Stark, pokes a man’s eyes out, stabs him with a knife multiple times while humiliating and denigrating him, and eventually slits his throat. Not a single feminist seems to be offended by that scene, and I am yet to read a single comment stating that it’s a semi-historic portrayal of the medieval times where men were treated like shit by women because there was no equality or men’s rights. When a man does it, it’s a horrible crime, but when a woman does it, it’s cute. It’s female empowerment.

The problem is, the series is quite realistic. The horrors might be more concentrated than in actual life, but I read enough history to know that reality was sometimes actually worse. Also, although feminist hypocrisy initially pissed me off enough to start writing this article, I quickly came to understand that something else pisses me off even more.

The purpose of this world is, supposedly, evolution, and learning things that would otherwise be impossible to learn, in order to accelerate spiritual evolution. That is according to Sanat Kumar. He’s a really compassionate fellow interested in the well-being of others, or at least so he says.

You get to learn horrors of the kind that are impossible on the worlds that were actually created by God, and not by Satan. You get to be exposed to pressures that would otherwise be impossible, with the purpose of making you believe that God had forsaken you and that you are worthless, trying to break you spiritually and turn your evolution away from God. You get to be raped, starved, tortured, humiliated, exposed to weakness, disease and poverty. And the supposed purpose of all that is “to be like God”.

The actual purpose of all this is to subject souls to such humiliating treatment that they would never even dare to think that their destiny could be anything other than humiliation, pain, weakness and loss. The actual purpose of this world is to convince souls that the Prince of this world is their master and that they shouldn’t even dare to think of any other potential destiny, for instance that which God actually wants them to achieve. The purpose of this world is not evolution, it is to break your spirit to the point of such hopelessness and despair that you accept your enslavement willingly and actually refuse any possible salvation, calling this world the only valid reality, refusing to believe in anything transcendental.

And I agree that this thing is possible only in this world, which is why its creator it the most evil being imaginable. I completely understand why people who think that God created this world want to become atheists (although the argument negates itself, because if you believe that God did something bad, and you renounce his authority because of that, you’re not an atheist, because in order to hate God you have to believe there is one). If I believed God created this place, I would spit in his face and curse him with my dying breath, and I would refuse any kind of an afterlife where I would have to look at the bastard who created this cursed dungeon of a world – because that, too, is the purpose of this world. It’s meant to make us hate God and turn away from him. The whole purpose of this place is to convince us of a lie. But it’s not reality; the true reality is the beauty and magnificence that is God. This is just a very persistent, convincing illusion that is perpetrated by suppression of memory, mandatory restriction on use of spiritual powers, and immersion in a sensory illusion. Imagine the Game of Thrones, a virtual reality engine, that suppresses your memory so that you can’t remember anything before immersion, and then the “fun” starts, when you are forced to try to survive by committing and surviving hideous acts that break and condemn you spiritually, all with the purpose of altering your spiritual evolution so that you become a plaything of Satan.

Tolkien told a story about how Morgoth created the Orcs, by capturing the Elves and deforming them by vicious torture in his dungeons. When I read it, I thought: so that’s where we are, and that’s the purpose of this place. We are in the dungeons of Satan, submitted to vicious torture and humiliation in order to turn us into Orcs.

What I don’t understand is how anyone can look at this world and seriously believe it had been created by a good God. Because there is good in the world? Yes, there is. There’s a good thing on the hook, too, says the fish. The problem is, sometimes it’s the good thing that gets you into trouble, because it’s the real purpose of its presence there. The bait is always a good thing. Discrimination, or viveka, is not so much about knowing what is true and what’s false, or what’s reality and what’s an illusion. It’s about knowing when an apparently good thing is really a bad thing, because, how many fishes would try to eat a hook without a worm on it?

War as a thermodynamic phenomenon

Posted on by
33

When people think about hurricanes, they think of them in context of bad weather. I, however, think of them as a thermodynamic phenomenon of cooling the ocean, which accumulated too much energy from the Sun and, in context of seasonal change, releases the excess via entropy into the atmosphere until thermodynamic equilibrium is established.

People also think of war in terms of bloodshed and conflict of nations and ideologies and interests, but the more I think of it, I think of war in terms of a sociological hurricane – a thermodynamic phenomenon of equalizing energy potential (wealth and control of resources) of different groups of people in a situation when current distribution of resources doesn’t match the balance of power between the groups.

Let’s test my hypothesis on the example of two world wars. I am yet to see the satisfactory explanation of the First World War. Nobody seems to be able to tell the root cause. They can tell you the unimportant stuff, they can tell you how the events themselves unfolded, but none of it explains why the great colonial powers felt such a strong itch to go into war, jumping on the first casus belli that presented itself as if war promised more than peace. None of it makes sense – the Austro-Hungarian empire, for instance, was seriously itching to go into war, for which it was the least well prepared of all great powers. Germany was better prepared, and it too itched to go into battle against Russia before it grew unstoppably powerful due to its ongoing industrialization, and yet the end result of the war was a near-destruction and humiliation of Germany. Austro-Hungary didn’t survive the war – it broke apart and its constituents started their independent lives as unstable, immature states, whose erratic behavior seems to have boiled over into the second world war, and the process doesn’t seem finished even now. What are we seeing here, since it doesn’t seem to be motivated by obvious self-interest? We have a war that transformed the society and yet none of the parties involved seems to have benefited from it; all seem to have been disrupted and brought out of balance as a result.

As an alternative explanation, I came up with modernity. You see, the most significant aspect of modernity is change of the entire energy-structure of society. Prior to the explosion of science and technology, the entire society was solar-powered, in a sense that you had land on which you could grow plants, and domesticated animals which fed on those plants, and the amount of resources available to the society was more-less constant and determined by the amount of people who worked on the available land with primitive agricultural technology. Those people were treated as a basic resource that came with the land, and were divided among the warrior class which used force to conquer and dominate. Political power was measurable through the amount of agricultural land populated by serfs, that a nobleman controlled. Each nobleman could directly control only as much land, and the pyramid of power was established, with lower-tier noblemen who directly controlled the serfs who in turn controlled the land, and higher-tier noblemen who had lower-tier noblemen as underlings. The higher-tier noblemen were subjects to a king, who in turn was subject to the highest entity of civilizational cohesion, for instance the Pope. As long as the basic energy source of the civilization remained constant, this was a stable system.

However, with the ascent of technology, industry and free market, the energy structure of society changed, and it became possible to acquire wealth by means other than top-down distribution of force-acquired solar-powered resources. Inventors, industrialists and bankers acquired wealth that rivaled and soon greatly surpassed that of feudal solar-powered structures; the social leverage, essentially wealth, that was created with the invention of the steam engine or the mass-production of high quality steel, or fractional distillation of petroleum, or electricity, or artificial fertilizers, changed the entire energy structure of the society, while the entire social system relied upon an obsolete hierarchy that was established in the pre-industrial age and was ill-suited to handle the needs and challenges of modernity. This is why the entire society boiled over in order to establish a new thermodynamic equilibrium, a political and economic structure that was better suited for the open-ended energy model. One example of that is the abandonment of the gold standard of currency and adoption of the fractional reserve fiat currency, which is able to create new money based on GDP in order not to artificially constrict the economy of the state. This is absolutely necessary when you have a situation where a Rockefeller or a Tesla can invent an entirely new open-ended energy model which creates an extreme amount of new wealth that is not covered by the gold reserves. Unless you want to artificially appreciate gold and thus give the owners of gold reserves an unfair and undeserved amount of wealth, you need to grow the monetary supply by the amount that at least equals the growth of the real economy, and in fact anticipates further growth. Furthermore, you need to acknowledge that nobility no longer controls significant enough portion of the economy to warrant their special status, and political control of the country must take the new balance of power into account.

I see the two world wars as hurricane 1 and hurricane 2 of the same season, where the second one continued where the first one failed to finish the process of achieving thermodynamic balance. Whenever a group of people controls too much resources for the amount of actual power their wield in the current state of affairs, there will be a violent conflict that will establish the real state of affairs. An example of this is the conflict between the Europeans and the native Americans, who controlled too much land for their state of technological and military power, and were therefore wiped out in order to establish a thermodynamic equilibrium.

The Second World War and its aftermath allowed modernity to run its course and try to fulfill its promise, and when it mostly failed, it resulted in profound soul-searching and often destructive self-criticism within the Western civilization, which is now trying to figure out its fundamental guiding principles and its reason for being; essentially, it is trying to figure out whether it has a mandate, and has for the most part relinquished its dominant role, with inferior savages such as Muslims trying to fill the vacuum created by the Euro-American civilization’s unwillingness to assert itself in ways it previously did. Establishing “life”, without any further elaboration, as the supreme value, is indicative of this abdication of mandate.

To me, all the elements of a social thermodynamic storm are ready to produce an outward phenomenon that will redistribute energy across the system according to the new realities that are yet to fully establish themselves.

Social networking as an orgasm button

Posted on by
6

In my last article I come off as a technophobe of a sort, or at least a techno-skeptic, and weird as that might sound, I think this perception might actually be accurate. I think of technology as a tool for solving problems and doing things that you want to do. If it creates more problems than it solves, does it really fulfill its purpose?

I’m a techno-skeptic (with a dozen working computers of all kinds in the household) because I see how people use technology. If someone was spending his life hanging out in a bar and wasting time in superficial, shallow conversations, we would recognize this as socially unacceptable, something worthy individuals don’t do. However, this is exactly what social media is: shallow people wasting time in superficial quasi-dialogue, and it’s all worthless and going nowhere. The only one actually profiting from it all is the bar owner.

Technology gives every kid an opportunity to become the smartest person who ever lived. You can buy a Raspberry Pi for a few dollars, plug it into a TV, keyboard and mouse, and install a free Linux OS on it that allows you to access the vast tomes of knowledge on the web, play multimedia and write code in multiple programming languages. And how many use it for that? How many of you did sudo apt-get install gcc?

For 200 EUR you can buy a smartphone that’s actually a 8-core pocket supercomputer with Geekbench 3 score of over 4000. You can load it with a library of books and music, you can use it to access Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha, you can use it as a multiple-language dictionary, interactive road map with satellite navigation, you can use it to SSH-connect into a remote server, to write and execute Python code, essentially you can do everything a personal computer can do, that doesn’t require a keyboard and a big screen. Its price makes it accessible to almost anyone, and even for 50 EUR you can get a device that gives you most of those capabilities. Based on that, you would expect the people who own such devices, and the even more powerful ones, to be the smartest and most capable of all people who ever lived. Instead, they are barely literate, with poor mental focus, disastrous social skills, horribly limited general knowledge, are ignorant of history, philosophy, politics, art and science, they have very poor understanding of technology in general, and people in the 19th century would see them as retarded scum that lacks both education and proper upbringing.

Does it mean that I think that children should not own smartphones and computers? Of course not. My kids use whatever technology they need. They both have laptop computers and mobile phones. They both play videogames. However, they play Minecraft and Universe Sandbox, not Call of duty, and to them computers and mobile phones are not a life-substitute, but a tool. The older one can write code in Logo, Python and some c, and the younger one can tell you everything about masses and composition of planets in the solar system. Guess why? They read, they talk to adults, they use their brains.

The worst thing that can happen to children is to spend too much time talking to other children, because with other children there’s no positive intellectual and emotional differential, there’s just ignorance, prejudice, and a very violent and abusive pecking order. One of the main reasons why elderly people were so respected in the traditional communities is that they used to talk to children, to teach them true and useful knowledge, and do it in a calm and peaceful way that would unplug the children from the frenzy the other children caused. Children are actually the worst thing that can happen to children, because the only thing children usually learn in the company of other children is how to establish an abusive comparative ranking based on usually completely arbitrary criteria, because kids are too stupid and immature to know what’s really important.

And that’s exactly what people use modern technology for: they use it to entertain themselves and to participate in some social network with arbitrary and worthless comparative ranking. They thirst for attention and approval, and dread ridicule and criticism, and in they fears they primarily dole out ridicule and criticism. Essentially, the entire social network is a cesspool of ignorance, prejudice, ridicule and criticism of others and never satiated desire for approval. In order to earn others’ approval, people adopt one of the few memes and quasi-philosophies, and there’s no place for real diversity of opinion, because if you want approval of others there’s only one thing you want: you want a choice, an opinion and a philosophy that will earn you most approval, and everything else is secondary. That’s why you want the best phone, the best computer, the best camera, the best philosophy: you want others to recognize you as worthy and to approve of you.

You know what I told my kids about peer pressure and desire for peer approval? “Just accept the fact that you’ll never be accepted by all people, or even the majority of people. The only way you can get approval of idiots is to be an even worse idiot than they are. The only way to get approval of average people is to be slightly below average. What you need to do is accept the fact that whatever you do and whatever you choose, someone will try to shit on you. Even if you’re Jesus they’ll crucify you. That’s how people are and that’s what they do, and the thing is, you can never know if they are sincere, if someone is shitting on you because he honestly dislikes what you do, or if he’s just jealous. You need to measure your success by how much you are succeeding at realizing your personal goals, not by what others say. If you want feedback from others, ask the adults, who actually have a developed brain and a reasonable set of criteria, not children who are stupid and immature.”

That’s how people are abusing the technology. They use it to try to get peer approval, and instead they get to participate in a giant hen-house as a part of the pecking order, where they don’t learn anything really useful, except how to efficiently insult others and make them feel worthless, because they know what worked on them.

If you only let go of people and their bullshit approval, you can find great stuff on the Internet, stuff that can make all that technology worth while. You can find an abundance of downloadable books and music, that you can store on your mobile device and read. You can find excellent articles about ancient Rome and topology on Wikipedia. You can find analytical tools that can interpret common language queries as mathematical equations. Or you can get caught in some meme in order to get group approval on some forum.

I always use the best technology I can afford, if I find it useful. You should, too. However, to use it in order to create a virtual pub in which you’ll waste time trying to “be popular” is an abuse of opportunity. So, it turns out that I’m not really skeptical of technology; I just think most people are idiots to whom technologically facilitated social networking is as harmful as an orgasm button to a rat: it feels good, but eventually the poor animal dies of hunger and thirst pressing the damn thing all day.