Category Archives: society

Bad ideas that refuse to die

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I was thinking about socialism and how wrong ideas never seem to die, regardless of how harmful or useless they proved to be. For instance, at one point more than half the world tried to implement socialism in one form or another, and it invariably produced widespread human misery. It simply does that by design, with its “eat the rich” paradigm. It eats the rich and then everybody is poor, there’s nobody to blame, and then the infighting begins, millions die, everybody is poor, and eventually people completely give up on the system and adopt some form of social Darwinism, which works excellently, produces enormous wealth and prosperity, but, of course, not everybody succeeds and then some fucking idiot re-introduces socialist ideas, like, how about redistributing that wealth so that those few poor people don’t get excluded from the widespread prosperity, so taxes are increased, the state bureaucracy is increased, free market is stressed by taxation, the worthless people get welfare and reproduce exponentially (because they are rewarded with more welfare for reproducing and failing at everything) while contributing exactly jack shit, the state goes into debt, scientific and high-tech programmes are curtailed because the socialist politicians think that all money must go to social programmes because socialism, and if there are problems, blame the evil black beast of capitalism and ask for more state control and socialism as a solution. The problem is with the concept that the poor possess virtue, that God is on their side, and that people are equal and therefore deserve the same outcomes regardless of their actual abilities and choices.

If you try to introduce some alternative to socialism or use common sense, you’re immediately attacked and “de-platformed”, as it is called – you’re a x-ist and x-phobe and all the tolerant multicultural people want to kill you. Somehow, there’s an implication that they are good, that they are progressive, despite the fact that what they are proposing was actually all tried in Stalinist Russia, and is by definition regressive because it’s a step backwards in history, and despite the fact that their socialism is probably the only political system that was scientifically tested and tried, and proved not to work, so basically if someone wants to benefit mankind, socialism is the only system he should never attempt to use because it’s worse than useless.

There are, of course, other ideas that are a disaster; determinism, for instance, which basically states that whatever you do, the end result will be the same because it’s determined by outside forces, be it God, destiny, karma or societal circumstances. By adopting such attitude you are guaranteed to fail, and this is the main reason why Catholic countries are economically usually worse off than the Protestant countries, because the Protestant countries are closer to the Jewish belief that God will reward the righteous people with wealth, while those who are not in his favour will be poor. The Catholics believe that God doesn’t work like that, and that wealth can actually be a hindrance or a temptation. Be it as it may, beliefs of this sort influence people’s work ethics and attitude, and if they believe that wealth is a reward from God, they will try to attain it, and see their success or lack thereof as feedback. I actually see the Catholic position as a contamination with Cathari beliefs that were semi-officially canonized together with St. Francis and St. Claire, where worldly possessions are seen as a spiritual burden and avoided altogether. How useful that is in a spiritual sense, it’s difficult to tell, but as an influence to economy it’s a disaster, because the wealthy and successful individuals are shunned in favour of ragged demagogues. If the wealthy aren’t respected and admired, the end result will be social apathy and widespread misery. But determinism causes an even worse problem: those who actually invest effort in order to change their situation are seen as “not having faith” or “not accepting the will of God”. This gives apathy and despondency an aura of spirituality and elevates it to the position of almost-holiness.

I understand that such negative attitudes about wealth might have been the result of unity of church and state, and that the church was so preoccupied with amassing wealth and power that it neglected its spiritual role, and that those who preached poverty might have played a constructive role of redressing an imbalance at one point, but such ideas are actively harmful from the position of economy. If you see wealth as a snare of Satan, well, nobody wants to be ensnared by Satan. I personally believe that poverty is a snare of Satan and that wealth means freedom to pursue forms of spirituality that are not pre-determined by the shackles of poverty, but I’m the enfant terrible of spirituality and nobody really listens to what I have to say.

The problem isn’t social injustice. The problem are the bad ideas that produce misery, suffering and death wherever they are implemented, but somehow still get to wear a halo of sainthood.

And regarding sainthood, it might be a very good showcase of all the widespread misconceptions and illusions which hinder spiritual and personal growth of individuals, because when you think of it, sainthood seems to be defined by poverty, self-denial, extreme compassion, self-sacrifice, detachment from all worldly issues, celibacy and, essentially, removal of oneself from all practical matters of society.

Wanna hear my definition of sainthood? A saint is a person who has a first-person realization of God, and attained success at harmonizing his/her entire life with the nature and character of God.

Which means that for me, an ideal saint is Krishna, the warrior-king who lived a life of first-person godhead and who fought, had sex, fooled around with his best friend, and inspired holy scriptures of the highest order. He wasn’t poor, he wasn’t celibate, he wasn’t self-denying, he wasn’t dedicated to “fighting his ego” or “controlling his thoughts and desires”, and to whom yoga was the art of correct action, not denial of action or removal from the world. To me, St. Francis and St. Claire are worthless examples and worthless people, because they did exactly jack shit to improve anything in the world, and if one tries to emulate their lifestyle it will be a personal disaster. The thing is, Bhagavad-gita wasn’t a result of two renunciate monks discussing haute spirituality in some cave. Bhagavata-purana wasn’t inspired by the life of Shuka the renunciate. It’s about Shuka the renunciate praising the life of Krishna the warrior king as the perfect example of what God looks like when he comes into this world.

So yeah, being a saint isn’t about being poor and naked and celibate and “controlling your ego”. It’s about being in the flesh what God is in His pure spiritual nature, and while we’re at that, we should have in mind that the probable reason why all the renunciate sages fail to understand true spirituality is that they fail to take notice of the fact that Vishnu is married to Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and fortune. So the next time you think of how spiritual some poor person is, or how spiritual you must be because you’re poor, or how spiritual you are because you are ignorant of worldly affairs, remember that that the perfect image of God in this world fucked the goddess of fortune (who looks like a billion dollars BTW) while not otherwise preoccupied with waging wars, manipulating politics and inspiring holy scriptures. And the barefoot sages, they merely wrote it all down while trying to figure out what the fuck they were missing in the entire picture.

Tales of the glorious white men

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I’m going to tell you two short stories about “privileged white men” in high positions of power and authority.

The first story is about the “M” in MiG, Artem Mikoyan, Hero of socialist labor, order of Lenin, order of Stalin, deputy in the Supreme Soviet. He was the head of the MiG design bureau and designed some of the best and most famous airplanes in world history. As Americans would say, he was the “bad guy”.

During the familiarization flight with MiG 25 in 1969, another “bad guy”, Lt. General Anatoli Karantsov, the air defense aircraft commander in chief and a personal friend of Artem Mikoyan, was killed.

Artem Mikoyan was so distraught that he died from a heart attack soon afterward – his aircraft’s malfunction killed his friend, and it literally broke his heart.

The second story is about the flight of Soyuz 1 and cosmonaut Colonel Vladimir Komarov. Prior to launch, Soyuz 1 engineers are said to have reported 203 design faults to party leaders, but their concerns “were overruled by political pressures for a series of space feats to mark the anniversary of Lenin’s birthday”.

Yuri Gagarin was the backup pilot for Soyuz 1, and was aware of the design problems and the pressures from the Politburo to proceed with the flight. He attempted to “bump” Komarov from the mission, knowing that the Soviet leadership would not risk a national hero on the flight. At the same time, Komarov refused to pass on the mission, even though he believed it to be doomed. He explained that he could not risk Gagarin’s life. Knowing he was about to die, he made the last will in which he ordered his burial to be in open casket, for the bastards to see clearly what they have done.

During the flight, one solar panel failed, causing shortage of power to the systems. By orbit 13, automatic stabilization system was dead, and the manual system was only partially effective. Still, Komarov managed to make a successful reentry into the atmosphere, but then his parachutes failed and he crashed at full speed to his death.

So let me get this clear. I’m directing these two stories both at the American propagandists and at the feminists – at the propagandists because they portray the Soviet Union as some sort of an evil empire populated by communist zombies from hell, who wanted to unleash the “dark side of the Force” upon the poor freedom loving Americans.

You have an “evil” air defense commander who personally test-flies an airplane and dies, and as a result his friend, the “evil” main aircraft designer in the “evil” country, is so heartbroken he literally has a heart attack and dies. Just two years earlier, two other “privileged white men” and “champions of the evil Empire” had a discussion that went something like this:

Gagarin: This Soyuz thing is a death trap, Vladimir Mihailovitch. I can’t let you fly in it, let me go instead.
Komarov: No, I cannot allow this, Yuri Alekseevitch. It’s my time to go, and I can’t have my friend die in my place. But remember me and have a good life.

If you think that the story about the bastard politicians who sacrificed their best men for the sake of mere propaganda are proof that Americans are right about the Soviet Union, you can read another story, about three more “privileged white men” who burned alive in the Apollo 1 capsule which was also a deathtrap and a piece of shit no better than the Soyuz 1. Prior to that, Neil Armstrong saved Gemini 8 from being a similar disaster, when one of the roll thrusters was stuck in the “on” position and the spacecraft was rolling uncontrollably at the rate of one revolution per second. Regardless, he managed to manually control the spacecraft to a safe landing.

As a conclusion, to those who portray the Russians as the “bad guys” and ridicule them, a big “fuck you” from me. If those same Russians lived in the USA, you’d have given them a Congressional Medal of Honor or something similar, instead of the Order of Lenin, but the meaning would be the same: they are heroes, and if they were your own, you would honor them as the best of your own. If they didn’t prod you to a technological race, you’d still be in the 50s. They, together with you, helped make this civilization glorious and great.

To feminists, who in their propaganda state that men, especially white men, are privileged, another big “fuck you”, because it wasn’t women in Soyuz 1, Gemini 8 and Apollo 1, and it wasn’t the Africans, and it wasn’t the Arabs. It was white men who risked their lives and died so that you could have your air conditioning at your comfortable safe well paid office job. That’s why white men rule the world, because they made it what it is, with their risk-taking, their loyalty and courage. And since you live in the world they made for you, you might as well show some respect and some gratitude.

About snobbery in art, and a spiritual message of “Twilight”

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The most revealing, accurate and scathing criticism of modern art is something I read in Robert Heinlein’s “Stranger in a strange land”, where the author, through one of his characters, says that the main reason why modern art is worthless is that it doesn’t communicate, that it amounts to pointless exercise in navel gazing by pompous pricks. You see, art is supposed to be a form of communication, where the artist communicates his ideas, emotions and other aspects of his psyche with the audience, and this is possible only if they share a common language, in this case of visual symbols, meanings and hints. Where modern art got it wrong is when every artist started making up his own visual language, and the critics applauded because they wanted to have their ego stimulated by being part of the “in” crowd, the ones who “get it”, while it is often the case that they don’t get it because there’s nothing to get, because the emperor is indeed naked. The modern art tries to imply that it is an encoded message that requires possession of the “decryption key” in order to figure it out, but if the “secret key” isn’t shared with the audience, if the audience is required to guess it, in reality there will be no difference between an encrypted message and random noise.

So, if a modern artist has indeed created a piece of art with a secret encoded message, all the while providing no clues for its decoding, he is a pompous ass.

Alternatively, it’s all bullshit without any value whatsoever.

Let me illustrate the difference between bullshit in modern art, and modern art with a message:

This is random bullshit without any value whatsoever, created by Jackson Pollock

This is a message about the state of modern society by Banksy

See the difference? Banksy uses commonly intelligible symbols, like words, sentences and figures. If you’re reasonably intelligent, you’ll have no problem understanding what he wanted to say. With Pollock, you can’t understand what he wanted to say, because it’s just random blotches of paint on a canvas. What it does show is that the author got lost in his own bullshit and no longer knows what he’s trying to do. Basically, he’s just getting drunk and going crazy.

Banksy’s art has a strong message, and this message is conveyed in the manner intelligible to his intended audience. The only thing that’s missing in his art, is pompous pretense and snobbery.

What I actually find funny is that I can often find a more profound message in works that are massively popular and are not commonly seen as art, than in works that are presented as art. The stuff that’s presented as art is usually just stupid and crazy; the message, if it even exists, is trivial and shows only the shallow and superficial nature of the author.

Stuff that’s widely popular in the general population, on the other hand, is usually popular because it has a strong message, something that strongly resonates with the audience. I’ll use the “Twilight” series of books as an example, because it’s an excellent example of a work that’s commonly frowned upon by the artistic “elite”.

On the surface, it’s a “young adult” book series about teenagers and vampires and werewolves and it’s as shallow as a piece of paper. But on the surface, “David” is just a piece of marble. Let’s see what’s packaged inside the superficial content. First you have the concept of self-control as the way of overcoming one’s lower animal nature and attaining higher forms of existence that are not possible if you immediately go for the quick gratification of senses. If you’re a vampire and you simply follow your thirst for human blood, you end up killing your future wife and your life is permanently altered for the worse. Furthermore, it’s a test of resolve: Edward, the male protagonist, wasn’t given a common level of temptation to overcome, he was given an almost impossible level of temptation, and at the most sensitive, vital spot, in some form of incredible cruelty of destiny, because that is what is needed to crush his arrogance. He knows that if he eats her, he will betray his father Carlisle, who is some sort of a vampire saint and his perfect role model of restraint, love, wisdom and intelligence. Later, as he actually falls in love with the girl, his instinctive bloodlust still threatens like Damocles’ sword, and now it’s no longer about possibly killing an innocent stranger, it’s about possibly killing the love of your life, and the temptation is still so bad it’s always a close call, and he needs to acquire a supernatural degree of self-control in order to be harmless enough not to destroy his life by accident. And this is not all. Unbeknownst to him and his family, the Volturi, a super-powerful ruling family of vampires, are set on their path at some unknown point in the future, where they will attempt to acquire some of them for their guard, while destroying the others. Bella, the super-tasty human girl, is the only possible defense, with her supernatural mental shielding ability, but nobody knows that. As far as everybody knows, she’s merely a human with incredibly bad luck, which forces Edward and his family to constantly get into trouble by trying to protect her, and if they do everything right, not only saving her life, but being the kind of people she would love enough to exceed all normal limits of her shield and instinctively expand it to protect them against supernatural attacks, only then do they have a chance of surviving. It’s very obviously hinted that destiny played a hand in things, and it’s not a destiny that just happens, it’s a destiny that demands that you make a choice, a choice that would prove you worthy in the eyes of God… or not. If you are worthy, not only will you get the instrument of your salvation, you will also gain fulfillment in your life, and by the virtue of your choice you actually become worthy. If not… the mechanism of your destruction had already been set in motion and it will reach you with the inevitability of sunrise, and you will have killed your only defense. And the thing is, you don’t know it. You don’t know how important the test is, you don’t know that absolutely everything is at stake. And there is more, of course: the implied hints that Carlisle is looking for a sign from God that he’s doing the right thing, because as much as he tries to be a good person, he can’t ever be sure of how his actions will be received by God – is he a doomed, soulless monster whose attempts are in vain, or is he merely a different child of God, who will be judged on his choices and efforts like everyone else. He doesn’t know whether his choice to make other vampires is a grave error or an act of kindness; however, now the fate has placed a person in his path, who can and will save him and his family if, and only if all these conditions are fulfilled: if they protect her with their lives, if she gets to love them beyond reason, and if she is turned into a vampire. If any of those conditions aren’t met, they all die. So, turning her into a vampire is God’s test to see if they are worthy, and, implicitly, it’s approval of their worthiness for salvation, proof that they are important enough and precious enough to be saved by such an elaborate setup, but only if they choose to be the kind of people that deserve salvation. So, Bella isn’t just a teenage girl his son falls in love with. She’s not just a remarkable person with special gifts. She’s a sacrament from God, a visible sign of invisible grace of God, but she’s also a dire warning about the supreme importance of restraint, free will and choice.

And it’s all there, if you put your snobbery aside and actually read into it. I didn’t invent this interpretation, it’s implicit in the works, and some parts are actually explicitly stated. It’s not encoded, it’s there for everybody to see, but people need to put their arrogance aside and have faith that there’s something worth seeing, and this, apparently, is the test on which almost everybody fails, because they are too arrogant about their sophistication in art and literature to look for deeper meanings in teenage romance books about schoolgirls and vampires. But a hint about that is also given in the books: if you see Bella only as a tasty snack, it all ends there, and for you she’s nothing more. However, it’s a fail.

And this might as well be the reason why “Twilight” is so massively popular – it’s a subliminal message that God has something wonderful in store for us, if we are restrained, subtle, patient and prove to be worthy.

Why generalizations are good

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Yes, I generalize. Yes, I overwhelmingly rely on statistics instead of individual accounts. And now I’m going to explain why you should, too.

I am extremely sensitive to sample bias, because I tend to surround myself with extremely atypical individuals. This is not uncommon; if you study physics, all your friends can probably do calculus in their heads, and very soon you start believing that it’s something everybody can do, or that it is much more common than it actually is. The problem is magnified by the echo-chambers of the Internet, because similar people tend to form interest groups that exclude the outside world and are in fact rather hostile to opinions that are uncommon in their group. After a while, their perception of reality is so severely skewed by their personal sample bias, that what they think is going on in the world has very little in common with the actual world.

You can call it the Marie Antoinette syndrome, if you like; I’m referring to the anecdote where she was told about the riots on the streets and she asked about the cause, and when she was told that the people have no bread, she allegedly responded along the lines of “Stupid mob, they should eat cake instead”. That’s what I’m talking about when I refer to sample bias. When you’re surrounded only by rich people you can’t really understand that the poor people don’t have the option to choose between this or that food, because they can afford only the cheapest kind, and if it isn’t available, they will starve. You have only what one would call the first world problems (“the line at Starbucks was too long so I didn’t have coffee this morning”).

I’m not saying that applying personal preference to our personal choice of company is a bad thing. The whole point is to find people who are more like us, so that we can function at our peak potential, which would be impossible if we were surrounded by people who have interests and abilities so different from our own that there’s no significant intersection. It’s a good thing. What I’m saying is, it isn’t healthy to use our personal experience, formed by an extremely skewed sample of the general population, in order to form opinions about the state of society in general.

This is why I rely on statistics. If someone did a meticulous scientific analysis of some social group, using large unbiased samples, I am going to rely on his findings much more than I’m going to rely on my limited experience with members of that group, because if you’re in heaven, you will tend to think that everybody is a saint, and if you’re in hell, you’ll tend to think that everybody is a demon. What you need is a wider picture, which tells you how many people in total there are, of which how many are in hell and how many are in heaven, and of those in each group, you will want a breakdown by certain characteristics in order to see a pattern. Essentially, what you need to do is remove yourself from the picture and acquire sufficient distance, in order to gain perspective.

But this wider perspective doesn’t influence the way I treat individual people. I can have generalized opinions about a certain group of people based on statistics, but that individual you are dealing with can be normal for that group, or extremely atypical. It’s like trying to form opinions about me based on general statistical facts about Croats. Not the best idea. On an individual level, you need to treat people like individuals, and do your best to perceive the actual person you’re dealing with. However, this individual approach is actually dangerous when you’re dealing with large populations, and if you don’t resort to statistics you will be unable to form useful opinions. What you need are generalizations – you need to know what an expected median sample of a population is, and for an individual, you need to know where he is placed on the histogram of his population group. If you’re talking to a +3 sigma individual, you know how many of those you can realistically expect to find where he came from. If you’re in Jet Propulsion Laboratory you need to be aware that each individual there is probably extremely atypical for any population, to the point where he’s more alien than human; the average person there has a PhD and Mensa level IQ. If you’re in the army, everyone you encounter is most likely representative of the general population and it would be unlikely for you to encounter an atypical individual.

If you’re an atypical individual, it is exceedingly difficult for you to find others like you in a general population, and the best thing about the Internet is that it enables you to find others like you much more easily, allowing you to skip the arduous task of checking out uninteresting individuals with very low odds of finding what you’re looking for. However, this opens you to extreme sample bias, because the ease with which you can meet other atypical individuals can blind you to the placement of your interest group on the population histogram. Essentially, you tend to think that everybody is like you and that your group represents what people normally are, and that actually has an unknown probability of being true.

Why Socrates was an idiot

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Socrates supposedly used a triple-sieve technique to filter out signal from noise in his life. If something was true, good and useful, then it got a pass. If not, he wouldn’t want to hear about it.

Sounds reasonable, right? Let’s see how we would have fared if the most important things in history were subjected to his filter.

Someone breaks off a sharp sliver of rock and figures out you can cut stuff with it. But is it true? I don’t know. It just is. Is it good? I don’t know, it just is, ethical criteria don’t apply. Is it useful? Yes, but it’s also possibly dangerous because you can cut yourself with it or kill people. Fail.

Someone accidentally drills a hole in wood too forcefully and produces a fire. Wow, fire! But is it true? Well, it just is. Is it good? I don’t know, I guess you can either cook a meal with it or burn your house down, so it depends. Is it useful? Yeah, it’s useful. It’s also possibly harmful, so sorry, fail.

Someone invented the wheel and made a cart that can transport goods more efficiently to bigger distances. But is it true? Sort of. Is it good? How can we tell what will come of it eventually? Maybe people will use it to make chariots of war and kill people. Is it useful? Well, we don’t know, we haven’t tried it out yet. Fail.

And that’s why the Greeks poisoned the motherfucker, because if people used his kind of philosophy to decide about things, they’d still be eating bananas on trees. Maybe people then intuitively understood the peril of asking too many questions.

In order to make any kind of progress, you need to work exactly with things that haven’t yet been proven true, good or useful. You must be ready to test ideas that sound crazy, like the one that the Earth isn’t flat and that the Sun doesn’t actually move in the sky from east to west every day, but that the Earth actually revolves around its axis, or that men could possibly fly faster than the birds or dive deeper than the fish. You need to work with things that are morally ambivalent and can be used for both good or ill, because good or ill is not in things but in the mind of the user. You need to be ready to do useless things because you never know what you could stumble into. You might find mold spoiling samples in your Petri dish, you might throw plates around the cafeteria and see how they fall and discover quantum electrodynamics and win Nobel prize. You can’t know what you’ll end up with just based on what it sounds to your pompous quasi-intellectual arrogance.

You need to give things a chance to show themselves, to tell you what they are. You can’t just silence everything based on what you think you know about truth, goodness and usefulness. Socrates was a pompous ass who didn’t even realize how incredibly harmful and wrong his “philosophy” was. If cavemen questioned things the way he deemed appropriate, they would no longer be living in caves, they’d go back to living on trees. Fortunately, they tested things by practical application and experiment and not skepticism, and so here we are.