“And there are those who claim that Big Data will supplant Sapiens and drag him helplessly along like a straw in the mighty flow of information. We will then be close to knowing almost everything we don’t need to know.”
– Roberto Calasso, The Unnamable Present, 2017
Onerous it is and more onerous it will be when AI relieves us of the burden of knowing anything except how to ask AI the answers to everything. The weight of thinking for oneself, reading books, and living in natural reality will be lifted. Siri, Alexa, and the other AI assistants will usher us conveniently into virtual “reality” – an insubstantial world – where all anxieties will be tranquilized by trivia and the natural flow of time will be replaced by pointillist beeps of agitated inattention.
And most importantly: truth will disappear behind propaganda, for artificial intelligence and the digital world have been created and are controlled by the technology companies and government intelligence agencies that together with the corporate media are our controllers. Their mission is mind control, writ large for everyone.
Calasso wrote the words quoted above nine years ago, and I wrote the previous paragraphs in the future tense. But let us get up to date and realize that the future is now, even as we remember that the Internet grew out of the Pentagon’s Advance Research Project Agency (ARPANET) in the late 1960s when there were many warnings that the development of digital computer technology would lead to repression and surveillance, not emancipation.
“Hey, Siri, why am I asking you anything?” is not a question that many ask today.
There is a reason the smart phones are called smart: they are designed to make everyone stupid, but only stupid people would fail to grasp this. Everyone has a reason why they must have a smart phone. Cram people’s heads full of useless information and watch them spin. Henry Thoreau understood this in reverse long ago when he wrote in his essay, “Life Without Principle”: “It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember.” Today, no one can remember anything, so there is no need to forget. The useless washes minds night and day. It’s here and gone simultaneously, the ultimate evanescent mind bubbles popping incessantly.
So what is worth knowing? It is a good question.
But it is superseded by a prior question: What is important to ignore? Censorship today is primarily accomplished by flooding people with pointless information. Therefore, it behooves us to know how to avoid this inconsequential data.
Surely the first step is to ignore social media as much as possible and never to ask AI any questions. Then to avoid the corporate media’s reporting and nonsensical articles aimed at leading audiences down the primrose path where “relaxing” fiddle-faddle follows the fear-mongering headlines. And to dispense with “smart” phones, which are the current surveillance and distracting machines essential to the process of creating inattention and stupefaction in their users. Laptop computers are bad enough, but at least one can’t carry them in one’s pocket. Smart cell phones are self-imposed cells the keys to which are not carried by their owners. This is so obvious that it isn’t. Behind such tools lie the gullibility of those fooled by their jailers. Yet to suggest the abandonment of these phones seems so ridiculous and impossible that it proves their power over those who can’t imagine living without them.
As to the prior question, let me answer succinctly. Knowing the following will save one much time and psychic energy.
- The United States is an imperial warfare state built for endless war.
- It wishes to rule the world as the only empire.
- Its wars against Russia and Iran will not be ending since they are part of a strategic war plan to defeat China as well. There will be no “deals” that result in less than total victory.
- Israel is a U.S. forward operating base in the Middle East. Their coordinated wars of aggression and Israel’s expansion are aimed at controlling the region.
- All mainstream media reports to the contrary are lies meant to lead people on, to have them think peace is possible when only war is planned. Temporary ceasefires are part of the war planning.
- This strategy is endorsed by both the Republican and Democratic parties, who serve the interests of invisible financial forces who own the country and control its economy. Though the parties and their leaders may disagree on tactics, they agree on the strategic plan to continue the wars on Russia, Iran, and China to maintain U.S. world dominance.
- Essential to their control is the digital propaganda war waged against ordinary people whose minds must be captured and assuaged through lies and an overload of trivia.
- Central to this mind control is using the Internet and digital devices to control people’s thinking by creating confusion, distractions, fear, hope, and despair in alternating narratives. Elections are a key part of this “hopey” propaganda. Study the U.S. wars of just the 21st century for complete confirmation of this bipartisan consensus
- The only small hope that these endless wars – really one strategically connected war – can be stopped is for a genuinely radical and deeply informed anti-war movement to arise in the U.S. and for the multipolar countries to realize that the U.S. has no intention of stopping its wars and for those countries to bond together like steel in their opposition to the U.S.’s agenda.
Don’t be distracted and tranquilized by digital trivia and all the things you don’t need to know. Attention must be paid to the few essentials, as with the political ones above.
Beyond those, however, and far deeper in a place of epiphanies, are what the extraordinary Roberto Calasso, in Literature and the Gods, calls “absolute literature,” which is knowledge accessed only through literary composition “in search of an absolute, and that thus draws in no less than everything, and at the same time it is something absolutum, unbound, freed from any duty or common cause, from any social utility.” It is writing that one has to read, to enter, whose luminescence vibrates in the mind where a second reality opens up and sends shivers of recognition that ravishes one. It is what Nietzsche said was a place of truth, “a mobile army of metaphors” far beyond normal discourse or conceptual thinking. I mention it because it is essential to experience, a place where art opens the heart and mind to the sublime. Let this digression of mine seem jolting as we skip through what is not worth knowing and what is. Let it seem as enigmatic as it is meant to be. The wars are as much spiritual as physical, a truth certain artists have always known. We are always by the way on the way.
Daniel Berrigan, S.J., a friend and mentor and anti-war poet of the spirit, died ten years ago yesterday. He had a way of reminding us with his dissident life and blunt words of essential truths. Here are a few:
“The only message I have to the world is: We are not allowed to kill innocent people. We are not allowed to be complicit in murder. We are not allowed to be silent while preparations for mass murder proceed in our name, with our money, secretly … It’s terrible for me to live in a time where I have nothing to say to human beings except, “Stop killing.”…Our plight is very primitive from a Christian point of view. We are back where we started. Thou shalt not kill; we are not allowed to kill. Everything today comes down to that — everything.”
Edward Curtin: Sociologist, researcher, poet, essayist, journalist, novelist….writer – beyond a cage of categories. His latest book is AT THE LOST AND FOUND: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope (Clarity Press).
Dear Select Writers and Activists, from every part of the so-called ‘Political Spectrum’:
Edward Curtin is among my favorite contemporary writers. An outstanding piece from him is published this morning, on his own blog, ‘Behind the Curtain’, as well as by ScheerPost, entitled ‘Everything We Don’t Need to Know, and A Few We Do’…
This piece contains list of ‘things people need to know’, that, as I mention below, is reminiscent of Jefferson’s listing of the King’s usurpations and tyrannies in the Declaration of Independence.
Just to remind people, Jefferson also proposed, in that same document, which has long has been universally accepted as our nation’s founding document, a document that expresses our deepest assumptions and beliefs, as a people, as a polity, as a nation, that (quoted from memory so maybe inexact) “whenever any government should become destructive of those ends, it is the right of the people to alter, or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to favorably affect their safety and happiness”…
I hope all are aware of the very high general quality of Edward Curtin’s work. Like another among my favorite contemporary writers, Patrick Lawrence, Mr Curtin is a ‘neighbor’ of mine, up here in the northern latitudes where nights in early May still dip into the 30s.. I always think of Robert Frost when I read Mr. Curtin’s excellent work…
Copied below are the comments I attached, as Jack Everman, to Mr. Curtin’s article as it appears on ScheerPost…
Hope all are well, and in strong spirit…
Simius Cognitius
The Joy of Elevated Thought
This is a truly extraordinary piece from Mr. Curtin… It excels beyond even the high standards of excellence that generally characterizes his writing… His list of things we should know “to save much time and psychic energy”, would go well beside Jefferson’s listing of the King’s usurpations and acts of tyranny in the Declaration of Independence… Thank you, Mr. Curtin, for your work in general, and thank you most especially for this outstanding piece…
Would that mere writing, mere words, have the graphic powers that could match Calasso’s hopes for them:
“…literary composition “in search of an absolute, and that thus draws in no less than everything, and at the same time it is something absolutum, unbound, freed from any duty or common cause, from any social utility.” It is writing that one has to read, to enter, whose luminescence vibrates in the mind where a second reality opens up and sends shivers of recognition that ravishes one. It is what Nietzsche said was a place of truth, “a mobile army of metaphors” far beyond normal discourse or conceptual thinking. I mention it because it is essential to experience, a place where art opens the heart and mind to the sublime…”
Indeed… This reminds me of some of my favorite lines from Wordsworth, from ‘Tintern Abbey’…
“And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thought… A sense, sublime, of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is in the light of setting suns, and in the living air, and in the round ocean, and in the blue sky, and in the mind of man”
“…shivers of recognition that ravishes one”… “a mobile army of metaphors far beyond normal discourse…”
Indeed…
One wonders if Mr. Curtin is familiar with Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Critic as Artist’?… From the depths of her or his own feelings, from the wellspring of her or his raw unformed Desire, the writer creates the ‘army of metaphors’, poetic images painted with words as an artist applies brush to canvas, but it is the reader who must re-create the images in her or his own heart and mind, and then have the same feelings, the same surge of raw Desire, evoked…
It is the reader whose own perceptions of her or his own experience, which in some way both writer and reader must share, cause the “shivers of recognition”… the “joy of elevated thought”…
All communication is a joint effort… The writer fashions into words the feelings evoked by the images in her or his heart and mind, and the reader, in her or his due turn, must reverse the process, arriving at the feelings that evoked the writer’s efforts, through the words the writer chose…
Thus Wordsworth’s feeling of pure joy leaps up in my own heart, upon reading the words he wrote so long ago (in 1798)…
Mr. Curtin should search for the Hope that can salve his yearning in the power of truth itself, and in the fierce animal spirit that burns in human hearts and souls… AI does NOT have the powers we are being forced (by the very propaganda Mr. Curtin decries) to believe it has… AI can NEVER be ‘alive’… It can only do the bidding of the living… Oh sure… at the behest of evil living people, it can suppress the truth… but it does not have the power to extinguish it… The truth knows no command, and the truth’s power lies in its ALWAYS finding a way to make itself known…
“Hope springs eternal in the human breast” — From Alexander Pope’s ‘Essay on Man”… Life is Desire… The fire may, at times, cool to embers, obscured by its own ash, but it will always roar back ‘to life’, because life itself, the power of our raw animated Desire… the power of our sheer human ‘will to live’, our burning living animal Desire, (which the inert, non-living powers of AI can never match), will always feed it the fuel it needs…
“Hope springs eternal”… The human desire to find and know the truth is an eternal force… Even the tiniest embers can create a newly roaring fire… The fire will always burn as long as we remain alive… (The latter, remaining alive, is currently Humanity’s over-arching challenge)…
Mr. Curtin writes:
“The only small hope that these endless wars – really one strategically connected war – can be stopped is for a genuinely radical and deeply informed anti-war movement to arise in the U.S. and for the multipolar countries to realize that the U.S. has no intention of stopping its wars and for those countries to bond together like steel in their opposition to the U.S.’s agenda.”
His ‘hope’ may have cooled to an ash-covered ember, but it WILL again become a roaring fire in ALL human hearts… Let us apply a more apt name to what Mr. Curtin here calls “the multipolar countries”… There is a fierce war raging, a war of open rebellion against the last remaining Enemy of Humanity… Let us call those who are rebelling against this Evil Enemy’s power the “Rebel Alliance”… Let us, living here in ‘the belly of the beast’, living here in the foul stinking bowels of this Evil Enemy’s Empire, soon come to a fuller understanding of the implications to be drawn from Mr. Curtin’s VERY perceptive words.
The Enemy of the American People, the Jewish-dominated Super-Wealthy Elites that have captured our sad broken nation under their tyrannical power, is ALSO the Enemy of all Humanity…
When we come to realize that, when we come to realize that we share a ‘Common Enemy’ with the Rebel Alliance, we will much better understand who our allies should be.. The Rebel Alliance is, by its most essential nature, allied to our own most desperately crucial cause…
People who share a common enemy should be allies… People who should be allies must FIRST stop being enemies…
– “the first step is to ignore social media” : DONE, never had an account on these brain killing tools
– “never to ask AI any questions”: DONE
– “avoid the corporate media” : I stopped watching TV in 2020 when they launched operation ‘covid’. Last time I read a MSM newspaper was 20 years ago…
– “dispense with “smart” phones” Never ever owned one. Some employers once obliged me to have one but I used it only to make calls and receive/send work emails. ,
– “computers” : obviously I wouldn’t comment here if I hadn’t one and frankly it is necessary for many reasons but like everything, it has to be used with moderation.
It is possible to live without all their control tech gadgets purposely designed to control the weak minded. And to live well without them.
The problem, however is the mind-blowing number of addicts (and the term is not strong enough to describe their alienation). Especially among young people who wrongly believe that without these tools of control they could not have friends or social lives.
It’s BS of courses and comes from the fear propagated by those who want us to be dependent.
So-called technological progress is in fact the biggest regression ever experienced in human history. If you let the tool controls you, you are the machine.
In regard to young people, a measure of compassion is called for, I think. Consider the restrictive environment they face in the automated school, forced to interact with the disabling devices, i.e. computers. All interactions between teacher and student now take place within the panopticon. Furthermore, most of them suffer, understandably, from self-consciousness and fear when it comes to standing alone, breaking away from the herd, as their efforts may be recorded and mocked by the peanut gallery. It requires more self-confidence and courage than ever before for young people to assert themselves autonomously. For anyone old enough to have escaped the obligation to interact with computers in school, those c. 60 or older, I’d estimate, some gratitude is in order. Not that the educational system had not been deformative and soul-crushing before that in many ways.
I am not sure about the 60+ years old, I am younger and never had any computer at at school. It might be something specific to the US I don’t know. However, I don’ think it requires more courage to stand autonomously, it’s also the responsibility of parents not to addict their kids from an early age with screens, smartphones etc… I unfortunately saw too many parents doing just that: getting rid of the responsibility (and the noise) by putting their kids in front of screens, preparing them to become the same automatons as they are.
Kids nowadays are often over protected, think the world owe them everything and extremely sensitive to anything, hence the name ‘snowflakes’.
It is true that the society constant brainwashing tends to make them weaker, confused, (thanks to the woke Marxist cultural assault), indifferent and arrogant.
The maxim remains true: “I am too old to know everything”
How will all these addicts get out of their digital torpor?
Wesak was this month and this is one elementary practice from Loving Kindness…………………..
Whatever living beings there may be
feeble or strong, stout or of medium size ,short ,small, large,
those seen and those unseen, those dwelling far or near, those who are born as well as those yet to be born, – may all be happy
“The only message I have to the world is: We are not allowed to kill innocent people. We are not allowed to be complicit in murder. We are not allowed to be silent while preparations for mass murder proceed in our name, with our money, secretly … It’s terrible for me to live in a time where I have nothing to say to human beings except, “Stop killing.”…Our plight is very primitive from a Christian point of view. We are back where we started. Thou shalt not kill; we are not allowed to kill. Everything today comes down to that — everything.”
Including ALL sentient beings — they’re innocent people, too, sho do not deserve our cruelty and greed!! Philosophers through the ages have said that there will be no peace until we stop killing animals for our own purposes, including for our food when there is NO need to eat them, which takes the argument into the real of morality. What we can do to other beings, we can do to humans — and we do! Go to vegdogsavesplanet.com. Also I urge you to read The Omnivore’s Deception by J. Sanbonmatsu
Of course, Margaret. This is my wife: https://jeannelemlin.com/
Good on you both, Margaret and Ed.
Vegetarianism and/or Veganism are very practical and caring ways to show our respect for other Life forms.
And with that comes the added benefit of better health.
But you both already know that.
Goat Cheese recipes….wonderful stuff. And Goats are very nice. Humans could learn much from Goats. In fact, humans could learn much from a brick !
A.I., like the Internet, has already made so many pleasures unnecessary.
Thank you, Ed, for flatly counseling against asking A.I. anything. Lots of people who should know better play around with it; ha ha, who knows what it might say?
No. Simply to participate is to affirm it. To interact with it is to collaborate with it and to volunteer to help it grow stronger and smarter.
Thank you for your enlightening work. Could you provide us with a list of some works of “absolute literature”?
Hi Tim,
I would recommend the following writers for a start: the essays of Baudelaire, John Berger(English writer), Nietzsche, and Paul Valery. There are many others, although by many I mean a small minority who think of writing as an exploration into the unknown and who are fearless in following their intuitions.
Quote of the Day by Bob Dylan: “Sometimes it’s not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don’t mean”
Truth. But there is one demographic that does not adhere to the values of “thou shalt not kill”. To them it’s a necessary sacrifice.
https://nxrstudios.substack.com/p/the-role-of-the-holocaust-in-modern
Another dimension not directly addressed in the excellent essay [though implicit throughout], the concept: alienation. . . a signal heuristic western scholars in humanities, particularly German and French scholars in 19th century directly addressed over and over again, particularly Marx, Toennies, Durkheim, Simmel, though obviously not just them, and going forward, e.g., Mannheim, Camus.
The concept and their [etc.] approach extremely important precisely because they understand that understanding [Weltanschauung] can get distorted and chopped up via fragmented consciousness, a thing this essay so well describe its contemporary, deleterious, consequences.
What about: alienation and the youth in United States today, in Massachusetts, in our local region; [– and, their instinctive preferences]?
What role does alienation occupy in youth actually tuning out, of, this gross absurdity?
Put another way, what additional forms of torture to be foisted upon our youth, including and beyond, instruments alluded to in this essay?
”Public opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
Willa Cather may be closest we had to our own, native, Toennies. . . “These stories of Miss Jewett’s have much to do with fisher-folk and seaside villages; with juniper pastures and lonely farms, neat gray country houses and delightful, well-seasoned old men and women. That, when one thinks of it in a flash, is New England. I remember hearing an English actor say that until he made a motor trip through New England he had supposed that the Americans killed their aged in some merciful fashion, for he saw none in the cities where he played.
“There are many kinds of people in the State of Maine, and its neighboring States, who are not in Miss Jewett’s books. There may be Othellos and Iagos and Don Juans, but they are not highly characteristic of the country, do not come up spontaneously in the juniper pastures as the everlasting does. Miss Jewett wrote of the people who grew out of the soil and the life of the country near her heart, not about exceptional individuals at war with their environment. This was not a creed with her, but an instinctive preference.” [February, 1925]
-30-
Hello Jim, Another by Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Ralph Waldo Emerson – from Education
I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret.
By your tampering and thwarting and too much governing he may be hindered from his end and kept out of his own. Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.
Nature provided for the communication of thought by planting with it in the receiving mind a fury to impart it. ’Tis so in every art, in every science. One burns to tell the new fact, the other burns to hear it. See how far a young doctor will ride or walk to witness a new surgical operation. I have seen a carriage-maker’s shop emptied of all its workmen into the street, to scrutinize a new pattern from New York. So in literature, the young man who has taste for poetry, for fine images, for noble thoughts, is insatiable for this nourishment, and forgets all the world for the more learned friend — who finds equal joy in dealing out his treasures.
In this region of Maine…it seems like adults take pride in destroying our youth, destroying anything that is real from trees to animals to people! Incompetent Authorities, unquestioned traditions…, there’s a different church on every street corner. How is this explained?
Speak about your greatest fear to someone who might least expect to hear your fear !
Spot on, Ed. Gotta to a show on this asap.