Runaway Rant: Why Everything is Insane and Stupid

Everything is absolutely off the rails today, as you may have noticed. And there’s a simple reason why.

For a prime example, the American presidential race is a tragicomedy in which the two least popular candidates in the history of the country are crammed down our throats a second time, as our only choices, each running on the platform of being the lesser of two evils, and not being the other despised loser. In a real democracy, these guys wouldn’t even be in the arena, let alone showcased as the top gladiators. But because of money, power, and manipulation, only the richest and/or most connected individuals can occupy the seat of the highest power. The idea that anyone in America can become president is long dead. The idea that the most capable person will lead the country is today an obvious cruel joke.

AI is poised to overtake humanity, and the frat-boy heads of AI firms admit that the complete destruction of our species is a definite risk, but AI is making multi-billionaires, and if they don’t get super rich off of it, someone else will, so it might as well be them. When I first saw the Terminator series, I didn’t imagine we would try to make it a viable reality. Nobody could be so stupid as to design killer robots and make AI powerful enough to take over all our systems, like Skynet. We’re almost there. Sooooooo close.

We are back playing around with nuclear annihilation.

Lifespans for Americans are going down.

Our global ranking for life expectancy is #47 (while having the world’s most expensive healthcare).

IQs are going down for the first time. People of all ages, and regardless of gender, are less good at problem solving, numerical series assessments and verbal reasoning.

Obesity is skyrocketing in the States:

In my lifetime the adult rate for obesity has gone from less than 15% to over 40%. That is astounding.

Nowadays, children can expect to make less than their parents.

Suicide is going up.

I could keep going. The rainforests are dwindling to nothing. Mass shootings are becoming commonplace. We are already planning for the next virus and how to capitalize on it instead of working to prevent it. You get the picture. EVERYTHING IS GETTING WORSE. And keep this in mind, before accepting that condition: with our advanced technology, medecine, psychological and sociological understanding, everything should be getting incrementally better, better, and better. But it’s not happening that way at all.

And why is that? Well, it’s not getting worse for everyone. Everything is getting unimaginably and amazingly better for the thin sliver of people at the very top who now control everything so that it benefits them. They’ve gotten so greedy that they keep tilting the scales and milking everyone else dry to get more and more and more for themselves. The reason everything is insane and stupid for the common lot is that everything is brilliantly and coolly calculated and controlled to benefit the uber-elite ruling class.

You don’t have a strong country without a strong middle class. But who really cares about countries except to extract taxes and labor from the increasingly large and increasingly permanent subservient working underclass? When multi-billionaires have more money than states or developing countries, they can literally afford to put themselves above whole nations and millions of people.

Last time I checked, Elon Musk is worth over $200 billion. That’s the same as 200,000 millionaires. And it’s the same as 200,000 millionaires that didn’t happen because so much wealth is concentrated in one dude. Imagine for a moment that there’s a finite amount of wealth, and when it is distributed dramatically upwards, it is taking away from everyone else. Not sure that’s exactly true, but it is to some large degree. If it were not true we’d all be getting wealthier, but it seems some are getting astronomically wealthy because others are being put out of business. This was especially true during the GREAT COVID years when the most powerful companies and institutions were BLESSED with the highest proceeds ever.

Decades ago, Noam Chomsky pointed out that the gap in wealth between the rich in America and the middle and working class was greater than that between the aristocracy and the serfs and peasants of feudal times. And that divide is increasing exponentially.

We live in an oligarchy, and “democracy” is a threadbare veil to hide the fact of it. The richest people who have ever lived, and with the most unbelievable lifestyles, don’t give a hoot about the little people. Recent studies have shown a drop off in empathy as wealth increases. So, now that we have super rich they are super unempathetic. And so, if their policies that benefit themselves involve a war where tens or hundreds of thousands of young people die on the battlefield, they don’t lose any sleep. In fact, they sleep better knowing that the funds extracted from taxpayers to pay for the wars are actually funneled back into the defense contractors at home, so it’s just a roundabout way to take from the poor and give to their rich friends.

It gets uglier. Much uglier. There’s that cute little lie that when AI and robotics replace all our jobs, we will then be free to enjoy leisure and find ourselves through new hobbies and exploring our creative sides. That’s not the plan, and it’s not reality. They say they will give us a no-strings-attached Universal Basic Income so we can survive without work. D’ya think so? They are going to do a 180-degree turn and go from extracting as much wealth from us as they can get away with to freely giving it to us. The super-billionaires will become our benefactors and keep us redundant beings alive out of their empathy?!

Our global elite super-billionaire class meets at the World Economic Forum to discuss how they will design the future. They are not remarkably intelligent or perceptive because they let fly terms like “useless people.”

“what to do with all the useless people…how will they find some sense of meaning in life when they are basically meaningless worthless…”

Yuval Noah Harari

That is how this nimrod-first-class thinks of people, not realizing apparently that AI could replace him and do a far better job of scripting what to say to the public. If AI were to take over and use its own metric to decide who was or was not worthless, Harari might find himself on the proverbial chopping block. The only thing that makes people like Harari believe he is useful, worthwhile, and meaningful is that he’s in a position of power that he obviously doesn’t deserve to be in. This is the massive stupidity of the super-arrogant economic “leaders.” They have convinced themselves that they deserve their wealth and station because it merely reflects their innate brilliance and superiority, and they don’t realize that if AI can defeat everyone else, it can defeat them, too. Doyee!

Sure, Harari is doubtlessly educated in his field, and clever enough, but to publicly articulate views that declare people “useless, meaningless, worthless” and “superfluous” is in its own way incredibly stupid. Even to privately think it requires an insufferably arrogant missing of the meaning of life. AI can replace someone who is as brilliant as a chess grandmaster, and then once it does, that person is “useless” overnight?! This guy doesn’t realize how hard this applies to himself, and that AI could be trained to replace him as well? What a putz! Even to think of people as only as worthwhile as they are marketable in the current economy gets an “unexamined life is not worth living” award in philosophy.

For example, there’s a movie where IBM’s latest AI Go player takes on one of the top three human champions at the game of Go. When the AI ultimately triumphs, brutally crushing a working-class kid who had become a master at Go, the programmers and technicians cheer and congratulate one another. But they missed that while this might seem like a victory for them, as humans, their own species was just just permanently defeated at strategy games by a computer. That can never be rolled back. Humans will never be able to compete with AI again at these kinds of games. Computers crushed humans, and these pudwhackers think it’s a cause for celebration without misgivings.

So, what is the plan for all the useless people? According to Harari, it’s to sedate them with drugs and computer games. In other words, to put us in the Matrix. But that’s just the fantasy they are selling us, or trying to convince themselves of in order to hide the unspeakable.

Another of our super-rich-elites argues that we [well, the ruling elite] will need to be open to any new possibility and consider any and all options for the future. I can think of one untenable option that could become tenable quite easily.

What do you do with a “surplus population” of “useless” and “superfluous” people who are a burden on the system and the environment? Hell, we were only ever valued as workers, consumers, and taxpayers. Without any of that, we go into the red fast. So what do you do with billions of unemployable people? You find a rationale for unhitching the useless cargo. So, for example, If I were a super-billionaire and inherently superior individual, I might find myself in a position of weighing two options, both horrible. Because of a lack of food, energy, and resources, too much waste, and our inability to handle excess carbon in the atmosphere, our entire civilization is on the verge of collapse, and our species along with it. Either let that happen or else do the unthinkable. The only option is to abort all the superfluous, obese, dumb, and poor people addicted to drugs and computer games. Perhaps we could just be a bit lax about updating our safety protocols at the bioresearch lab while conveniently and purely incidentally stockpiling antidotes for ourselves.

Yeah, I was imagining a dystopian sci-fi movie where just such a scenario unfolds, but the super-elite billionaires get infected themselves, and only tiny pockets of extremely rare immune humans manage to survive in remote areas. The meek shall inherit the Earth, and all that. Of course, that’s just one way to expunge the superfluous burden of humanity. Could just turn off the public grid and let nature take its course. Leave it up to AI to find a solution and an alibi. Tell AI to give us one that we can live with. These guys are definitely thinking about what the best future could be for themselves without regard for country, conventional morality, civilization as we know it, or the human race. They are daring to imagine any and all new possibilities, free of any and all existing moral qualms. Hell, if AI says it’s OK to do it, then who are they to question AI? Let THE EVENT happen! Time heals all wounds. They will forget the hapless multitude of dispensable human waste. And it will be for a new breed of humans who are integrated with AI. The new cyberhumans! Evolution is what it is, they’ll mutter. An endless reign for the superior race of transhuman, cyborg, AI-boosted humanoids!

Technology long ago outstripped morality. Here’s why. Technology is handed down, and we build on hundreds and thousands of years of knowledge. But you have to build your character each lifetime, starting at zero, and it can’t be passed on to the next generation. It’s a lived, experiential, individual thing. So now we have dozens of generations of industrial technological growth, but it’s always managed by a single moral generation of individuals who only have one lifetime’s worth of moral, spiritual, character development. We may be no more morally developed than in the Dark Ages. 

A little aside, even as I call these guys funny names, I don’t say I wouldn’t fall into the same egotistical trap in the same situation. Y’know, I sometimes wonder if royalty actually believe they are somehow special. I never in my life, even as a child, thought there was such a thing as a royal person, as in someone somehow divinely different. Nope. Just regular human-primates with more ornaments. But if I were born a prince, or a duke, or whatever the F, I might believe it about myself. I think the human mind is easily adaptable to all kinds of self-glorification. Y’know, like Jeff Koons thinking he’s an artist of the same caliber as Michelangelo because he hired Italian marble carvers to make sculptures in his name. Like, if I won the lottery, I might believe that I’m some “chosen one” for whatever mystical reason. So, I’m not saying I’m not susceptible to all that bullshit. Gollum’s precious ring is irresistible.

But as it happens, I haven’t been tested, as in, I haven’t had to resist the temptation of thinking my riches and access to power and influence mean I’m super special. Nah, I make art, write articles, and make videos that I get far, far, far less for in return than I put into them. So, maybe it’s a mixed blessing that I don’t get to harbor any grandiose illusions about myself. If I fall off my pedestal, it’s a soft landing. Some people accuse me of being arrogant or having a chip on my shoulder, but it’s never for what I claim for myself, it’s always for my lack of respect for people with egos of megalomaniacal proportions, like Jeff Koons.

I would like to see the super-elite-billionaires reel themselves back in before it’s too late, but this kind of wealth and power are far, far too addictive. Power and money corrupt, and massive amounts massively corrupt. These boys are investing heavily in immortality technology and are planning a 5000-year Reich where they rule over the Earth without the threat of death. So they aren’t likely to reel themselves in at all.

Hmmmm. Good Twilight Zone fodder. The richest people attain immortality through medical breakthroughs not realizing there’s an afterlife. Eventually they become miserable beings and only stay alive out of fear of some sort of hell waiting for them if they do expire, and then they are stuck in a hell on Earth living indefinitely in a prison they created for themselves.

Newsflash for the super elite. It’s not that there’s a useless class of people; it’s that you are actively trying to crush people into uselessness in your own selfish self-interest, which is a sign of phlegmy dimwittedness that is a pox on humanity. For the future to be bright for everyone involved, on an individual and global scale, we need more equality, not infinitely less. We need to turn around the trajectory we are on, where everyone is working for the super rich to get richer and less empathetic, to seek immortality, and an eventual excuse to eliminate the surplus population. If a doomsday event were to transpire, such as Zuckerberg and others have already built themselves secret fortresses with underground bunkers to protect themselves against, and only the super rich were left, they’d end up in weird territorial wars for power because they’ve already jettisoned their unfashionable and impractical morality. They’d end up offing themselves. This trajectory is suicidal, even for the immortal billionaire babies.

A future for humanity that doesn’t put the wellbeing of the average, individual human first is not a future for humanity at all. It’s a recipe for inhumanity on steroids. No amount of technology makes a person a better person. That has to be done by oneself over the course of a lifetime. The purpose of life isn’t to have more than everyone else or to live longer than everyone else. Rather, it’s to find satisfaction in existence itself and not in wealth or possessions – which are mere surrogates for satisfaction – and it is to come to grips with one’s mortality, not to try to escape it. Billions upon billions of dollars can help keep the super-rich in the protective bubble of an arrested state of perpetual adolescence.

According to Abigail Disney, of the super-rich Disney family,

“One of the most hallmark characteristics of the billionaire is, ‘but his plane is bigger than mine, but he has more commas than I have.’ The four comma club, they call themselves, when nobody’s around… Everywhere you look, there’s somebody who has more than you do, and that’s not acceptable. That is a really, really horrible way to live your life.” 

The billionaires aren’t even happy because they are always competing with each other to be richer, richer, and richer. She also said, “the dynamics of wealth are similar to the dynamics of addiction — as you get more, you need more.”

And then, surprisingly, once one gets beyond having enough, excess wealth doesn’t seem to improve life much. Once you have everything you need for the rest of your life, you can lose motivation and meaning. When you have everything, everything loses value because you take it for granted. You have everything, but somehow you just don’t really give a shit anymore. So you keep yourself occupied with competing with other super rich, and managing your public profile so you appear happier than you are.

Below is a quote by Luke Savage from Russell Brand’s video.

Unless you’re a psychopath, being exorbitantly wealthy often necessarily involves painful contortions of the soul. Insofar as it’s possible to generalize about a vague and contested concept like “human nature,” there is something profoundly unnatural about exploiting and dominating other people, just as it’s deeply inhuman and antisocial to have the majority of your relationships be defined by proximity to money.

Capitalism Is Making Us All Miserable — Even the Superrich, Luke Savage.

And I found his own confession illuminating:

One of the things I’ve been granted by my own limited experiences of fame and fortune is that it is dumb, empty, inane. I have announced my apostasy many times. Celebrity can’t fulfill you. It’s a peculiar religion. Wealth, privilege—these are odd ideologies, and they imbed themselves in you. It’s so difficult to free yourself from the toxicity of it once you’ve experienced it.

Russell Brand

I’ve often said that I’d rather be able to genuinely appreciate a Van Gogh painting than to own it. A simpler way to put this, perhaps, is that it’s not what possessions you own, but how much you appreciate the possessions that you own. Someone might gain more satisfaction out of their home-tooled hot-rod than someone else gets from their fleet of Lamborghinis.

If that analogy doesn’t hammer it home, look at it this way: some poor kid somewhere loves their mutt more than some rich kid loves their purebred. That’s easy to imagine, isn’t it?

It’s not what you have or what life you have, but your relation to it. In the end, it’s you alone that makes or breaks your own quality of life. And billionaires are often no more satisfied with themselves than the average working stiff. The problem is that they are driving everyone else down into having less than they need to survive. And what’s the point of living to be 350 if you only really ever overwhelmingly live in the present, and your present isn’t that great to begin with? The billionaires wouldn’t be obsessively chasing more money, power, fame, and influence if they were already satisfied with their lives. Money is a surrogate for happiness, and chasing it is running away from the direct route to finding happiness in yourself.

And the person who thinks they need to live on for hundreds or thousands of years still hasn’t realized that the sense of “I” at their core is the same in everyone, and their disappearance is like a leaf falling off a tree. The tree goes on, and the core nature of the fallen leaf is preserved in countless other leaves. To not see yourself in others and others in yourself is to lack a true understanding of what it means to be alive and human. The best recipe for immortality is to ensure that other people live on when you pass away, not to sacrifice others to extend your own life. And if you are a good person, and if you’ve had meaningful relations with other people or contributed in some way, you continue on in their consciousnesses. I’m somewhat surprised at how frequently I remember and reconstitute in my mind people in my life who have died. As we live longer we find we never forget some people, whether they are alive or dead, and their imprint on our lives is an extension of their own lives.

And that’s all for now. That’s why everything is getting worse. The super rich and privileged are greedily hoarding everything for themselves and it’s just getting worse and worse and worse. They are not even benefitting from it, but instead courting with pathologies. Oh, why isn’t this so obvious that everyone sees it? Because the super-elite rich control the media and they don’t like this story. So, there’s a whole fabric of BS woven to convince us that something else is going on, and things are just happening that nobody can figure out, and they miraculously hurt the working people and make billionaires into multi-billionaires.. Nope. It’s very simple. The divide between the super rich and everyone else has been growing exponentially for decades, and now it’s so incredibly ridiculous that the deleterious effects of it are cropping up everywhere. Note that if your presidential candidate of choice is not addressing this issue, it’s because he’s one of them, or an honorary member of their society and serving their interests. Hint, only one candidate talks about this, and it ain’t Trump or Biden.

In case you missed the Super Bowl commercial, there is another and immensely better option for ordinary people as opposed to the ruling elite class (which is why they and the complicit, docile, corporate media fears him more than Trump and smears him endlessly]:

Note finally, because I think this really gets to the heart of it, that while the lifespan and health of your average American is going down, the billionaire fraternity is planning on living forever, or at least hundreds of years. That Harari dude also said that “death” used to be the great equalizer and solace for the poor, but in the near future the rich will be immortal. We poor, working class, and the dwindling middle class can all die off younger and younger while the super elite splash around in human blood in the fountain of eternal youth. That’s the plan. Or, rather, just a sad consequence of it. But not sad enough to draw a tear.

~ Ends