Futurism and Accelerationism

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
English author & mystery novelist (1874 – 1936)

Utopia literally means “nowhere’. But the quest for Utopian-like power certainly exists in the minds of those detached from Creation.

Worship of the Future (think H.G. Wells, Star Trek, Star Wars, Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk…) has long been a more or less unconscious American indication that things are not alright with us.

Sherry Turkle and Roger Scruton, among others, tell us why change for change’s sake and futurism makes for grave human loss, especially when based on an incessant precarious technology on route to Technocracy.

In that scenario, human beings are reduced to mere animals who will have to be farmed by technocracy’s shapers.

To forfeit organic natural development in faithful continuity with the past reflects a grave spiritual ill showing a society being engineered.

Scruton’s books and his many videos on YouTube, together with Sherry Turkle’s book, Alone Together, is a warning to the present about the dehumanizing threats of hyper-technology and our dangerous unreflective dependence on it.

Then there is this much admired mad man. Ray Kurzweil (R&D Google) says he is striving for material “immortality”. He said:

“We are going to put these technologies inside us, blood-cell-size devices that will augment our immune system, make us a lot healthier, destroy disease and dramatically push back human longevity, go inside our brains and actually enable us to remember things better, solve problems more effectively. We are going to become a hybrid of machine and our biological heritage. In my mind, we are not going to be transcending our humanity. We are going to be transcending our biology.”

But note again how we are almost always presented with only the [supposed] positive side of “human enhancement” by its zealot advocates. The shadow side is largely hidden.

It was the very complicated Aldous Huxley who drew our attention to that shadow side as far back as the 1930’s in Brave New World, and then again in his non-fictional essays on the trajectory of technological developments nearly 30 years later in Brave New World Revisited.

When it comes to technology the Atomic Bomb was, to say the least, instructive. Who can put that genie of doom back in the bottle?

The hubris of man needs to be watched, held constantly in check, and not allowed to do evil that supposed good may come of it, lest in their hallucinations technocratic mad men take all of humanity over the precipice and into the abyss with them.

“Scientific” Dictatorship

The ‘scientific’ dictatorship which Huxley warned of is perhaps the greatest threat to human freedom today, precisely because it is more occult than actual science, and is largely bereft of wisdom…See the video and transcript

From the vantage point of living long after the French Revolution we are now able to see where spiritually unaided ‘reason’ has taken us, straight to a culture of death and madness especially in large parts academia often coupled with the Military Industrial Complex; not to a world beyond war, but to a world where a state of permanent war against all opposition is called ‘peace,’ (Orwell) and where murderous practices (abortion is but one) are put forth as solutions to our real or imagined problems.

But ‘Reason,’ like ‘science,’ is an epistemologically loaded conception which must be deconstructed in our time by tracing its philosophical assumptions to the roots, and how the concept is being used. Whose reason?

It is alarming to consider how many people there are today who reflexively assume they are socially ‘progressive,’ ‘avant garde,’ but who do not realize that they are in fact the result of abject herd conditioning by all kinds of engineered forces, especially of course media. Who are the actual engineers? Where are they going?

Whatsoever a man sows, that also shall he reap” (Gal 6:7).

Freedom is a perilous gift.

We boast of our technology. We could very well die by our technology. Sin must be figured into the equation. But it isn’t, and sin literally means “misses the mark” of being (Gen. 1:1; John 8:31-37).

Technology, when made our highest boast, when abused and made the instrument of oppression and cruel arrogance, may very well prove to be our undoing.

Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial—but Democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.”

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, published 1958

We need to take heed, lest God our Maker surprise the proud who seek to reshape the souls of ordinary people. Because after they are done there will be one more everlasting Stop. (Heb. 9:27). — SH

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Bill Joy : Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us

Updated September 2021

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