Bias
What is a "Cult State"? To answer that, we have to explore complex beginnings before our time.
To say "I am X" is to also say "I am not the opposite of X". This self-imposed limitation hinders the ability to adapt and survive in a chaotic universe. Therefore, to ensure the demise of entire civilizations, offer luxurious and exotic identities for members of a population to associate with. By claiming to be a representative of an identity, the rest of the reality that offends or does not confirm to that identity is permanently shut off to hte adherent. This is the contemporary Hegelian dialectic approach to self-destruction:
Thesis: "I am X."
Antithesis: "I cannot be the opposite of X."
Synthesis: "I am not X because there is only X."
Allegiance to the identity means receiving the material, social, and potential benefits perceived to be granted to that identity. As the rewards and experiences of self-fulfillment offered from the identity allegiance mount up, an individual becomes trained to completely sacrifice his or her concepts of self in the name of identity continuity. With a steady exposure of risk-free conflict that forces an individual to favor identity continuity, they gradually begin the justification of sacrificing the entire self to preserve the identity. I call this process "dialectic martyrdom" and the religious associations of such a phrase explain the name for this blog.
As you might be able to tell, I herald from the Marxist school of thought. While I have been known to have a vicious temperament at times, I am not one of the emotional junkies typically associated with this brand. Many of my economic perspectives are influenced by Marxism, specifically, how Marx was able to use Gresham's Law to explain systemic flaws within the Britain's gold standard established by Isaac Newton. You would be surprised how many contemporary financial, trading, and monetary terms and concepts date back to Marx. Not all who have subscribed to Marxism had a focus on the equilibrium of industrial production and consumption. Most are merely emotional junky rank-and-file on the prowl to kill people for daring to contemplate any ideological competition. The further we obfuscate our industrialist underpinnings, the more Marxism takes on mythic and religious qualities... qualities that have been aggressively interfering with human development since the 1960s.
American mass media in the 1990s were a golden age of exploring how to blend mass media with the theories of Gramsci (normalizing cultural Marxism), Marcuse (tactical and pragmatic Marxism), and Derrida (mythic Marxism). You might have heard this processes wrapped up a simply "cultural Marxism". (I have always found ironic since Marxism describes culture to be nothing more than a superficial bourgeois artifact of the superstructure.) It was Gramsci's isolation in an Italian prison, away from his incompetent ideological peers, who formulated the value of studying and undermining dominant cultures. It was Marcuse who made it simple and effective: invert social norms, normalize taboos, reward minority cultures, and punish members of the majority culture. It was Derrida who gave it the adornments of luxurious intellectualism. At the base of all of these operations lied the axiomatic component: mutable identity disguised as universal human behavior. Once identity-seeking behavior is given incentive and people engage, the emergent disease of identity politics takes hold and becomes difficult to dislodge. Before long, the entire population tells themselves they are their identity, they never be the opposite of that identity, and that they cease tto exist because there is only the identity.
These psychoculture hacks supercharged Marxian philosophy by giving it access to the secrets of religious control while offering complete plausible deniability of negative outcomes. The Greeks had a word for people who became powerful from such tactics: Tyrant. I will be the first to admit that watching these populist saviors of the naive betray their loyal cadres over and over again throughout history is an endless source of entertainment. However, once you start throwing nuclear weapons into the mix, you begin to realize the seriousness of how this tyrant creation mechanism can play out very poorly for the rest of our species. This potential blend of identity axe-grinding, demographic disequilibrium, cultural warfare, and nuclear weapons makes the Uranium Barrier (To cite "Hyperspace" by Michio Kaku) the most likely candidate for the Fermi Paradox. This realization put me on a twenty year search for our way out of this trap.
The details of this search will be released over timehttps://archive.li/CURJz, but during those decades, I've learned an axiomatic truth about this problem:
All concepts of justice assume that humanity will have an eternal monopoly on sentience.
When I tempered this observation with the various disciplines of computer science, artificial intelligence (neural nets, Bayesian filters, natural language processing, unsupervised training), genomics (regulation of gene expression), neuroscience (limitations of synaptic plasticity, ocular dominance bands) quantum physics (Shannon entropy, Bekenstein bounds, Holographic principle. loop quantum gravity), and thermodynamics, I started to realize that such a monopoly can be ended. Soon after, I would abandoned my previous associations with Marxism and all of its derivatives due to its complete failure to address or adapt to thet ending of the human monopoly on justice.
I started to wonder about a world where that monopoly no longer exists. So in 2005, I wrote a book called *The Empath* about what would happen if the financial sector invented Strong AI before any other sector and used it to analyze the incomprehensibly huge volumes of meta data from NSA trunk lines in real-time. The results were so unnerving that I never released the book because it was no longer a political sci-fi story... it was a blueprint on how to create civil wars-as-a-service while disguising instigating elements as normal global market activity. I knew this outcome was inevitable, but because of my book, I had critically explored every meaningful way to hijack and steer such a platform for my own ends. Most importantly of all, I needed a tremendous amount of time to repair the psychological damage I had inflicted upon myself during this period so I could execute upon my vision with clear intentions. The key thought experiment that drove me out of the darkness and into action was simple, but incredibly profound:
Can you create a new emotion?
If you follow that question to the farthest, most exhausted logical conclusion, you will understand why I have started down this incredibly challenging and, at times, lonely road.