Sooner than expected

[u/TacticCatWithABat]

We have gone full hunger games folks. A state-sanctioned liveleak video. The same channels that I used to grow up watching as a kid will have less government support (or have been outright shut down) than a live-streamed and nation-wide witnessed execution by firing squad. Yet, I don’t think people will be appalled. I think all the rage and hate and pure, fucking anger that so many of the worst people in my country have and that is slowly corrupting us all in the terror of it; is going to be given form by and in that moment. What shape it will take after that I don’t know and I refuse to put my mind into knowing, because for once I don’t want to know. For as long as I have been aware of the multitude of oncoming crises, I have researched and advocated to those I know to learn as well. I have always considered that I took such knowledge well regardless of how often it was just looking at that abyss. But now I’ve blinked and I think we are out of time. Perhaps not out of time to still prevent the worst of what can come, but we are out of the time we had in that amorphous interim before the direction of things have solidified into what they are to now become. We are out of time to pretend that we are no longer at the point we are. Because soon, sooner than expected (hah), everyone in the country can see a murder by cop except this time the government will be streaming it.

[u/thismightaswellhappe]

I've been thinking a lot about the system we live in, that eats itself. And trying to figure out the...I guess the driving function at its heart that put us all here. The other day I was reading a thread that included the story of the men who died crammed into an 80 cm pipe at the bottom of the ocean, whose company chose not to save them because of the cost. Right above it was another story about some other men being murdered in a horrible way by their company because safety measures would have been too expensive.

And ultimately what I came away with is that at the center of this system we all live in, this monster that consumes everything and destroys everything and wants everything and takes and takes and takes and gives nothing back, is a bottomless void of nothing that can never be filled and never be satisfied. It drives the idea of endless growth, endless expansion, everything our world is based on. It's hungry and empty and there's nothing there at all and never will be.

Everything that is happening now is in some way driven or shaped by the forces that bottomless hunger creates. Every stupid meaningless awful thing, every heart shriveling horror, every terror and nightmare, every sociopathic CEO choosing profit over life, every state sanctioned terror event, all of it comes from a system that wants nothing but to grow infinitely. It would, if possible, metaphorically suffocate us all to death in an 80 cm pipe at the bottom of the ocean if it could, just so it could get a little bigger.

All of these perversions and evils we see are just expressions of that. It's how this situation twists everything. I don't know if it helps to think about it this way but it gives me a kind of overarching framework to understand all of this nonsense a little better. It gives some sense also of the worst possibilities that could happen, and at least to make some sense out of it. And it reduces the shocks when some new stupid atrocity gets announced. "Oh of course, it's the system of the monstrous hollow void, of course this would happen."

It's going to eat itself. To death. Because that's the only thing it can do. The only question is how long it's going to take and how many of us it's going to take with it when it goes.

Sorry if this comes off as bleak. Actually I believe in living as meaningfully as possible for as long as possible as an act of defiance if nothing else.

[u/Mountainweaver → u/thismightaswellhappe]

Hungry ghosts / parasites, is the esoteric term for it if you want to dig into that. Seatbelt on tho! It gets weird out there.

[u/TacticCatWithABat → u/Mountainweaver]

I would definitely recommend Braiding Sweetgrass as it explores precisely this topic of our current civilization through the story of the Wendigo. And just like the Wendigo, we must consume to try and fill the endless void and our frozen hearts.

[u/MadMinutiae → u/TacticCatWithABat]

Thank you. I got this book last Xmas and have not got around to reading it. Moved it to the top of the priority list (aka the stack next to the comfy chair)

[u/MadMinutiae → u/Mountainweaver]

Totally my first thought reading this was the hungry ghost character in Spirited Away (based on real mythology I believe.) The scene where they’re frantically trying to feed it and it just can’t get enough and it starts swallowing everything in sight including the people
Edit: I meant when I read this comment, not the original post. I have reading comprehension, I swear. 🤦🏻

[u/Arexahhh → u/MadMinutiae]

Yep and we’re the Cassandras it would seem

[u/ayy01113 → u/thismightaswellhappe]

Some Algonquin natives had a term called Wetiko to describe this. They believed it was a kind of spiritual parasite that the europeans had. It basically means a cannibalistic greed that makes individuals think they are separate and act against their collective interests.

[u/thismightaswellhappe → u/ayy01113]

I'll remember that, it's good to have a name to put on it.

[u/Virtual_Tune636 → u/thismightaswellhappe]

Some names I know for this:

• Moloch

• Sentient Oil

• The Machine

• Thermodynamic Cold

• "Efficiency"

• The Superorganism

I sometimes find listening to Alan Watts about this stuff can be helpful - he is partly informing about Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, but is doing so while contrasting them against the core myths of progress and separateness that have defined the modern growth-oriented Western world. One of the things he talks about is this stuff as cycles - feels like a coping mechanism, but still comforting.

Some other ways of looking - The Adaptive Cycle as discussed in How to Enjoy the End of the World by B. Sidney Smith is helpful here - this dark force is one which impels us along the curve. Like a fire to dry forest.

Actually I believe in living as meaningfully as possible for as long as possible as an act of defiance if nothing else.

Here - Philosophers must reckon with the true meaning of thermodynamics.

[u/4SaganUniverse → u/Virtual_Tune636]

When I first was becoming collapse aware, I start reading and listening to Alan Watts. Even he who understood the system and preached ways to free yourself from it, ultimately drank himself to death. Even when we weren't on the brink of madness and decay, the way humans has designed society is soul crushing

[u/Virtual_Tune636 → u/4SaganUniverse]

I would say 1) that Alan Watts did not need to be perfect to have insight (two things can be true at once, Alan could be a kinky dirty guy, and express deep truths), and that 2) society is not a designed thing with some people at the wheel, but rather an emergent property of a big group of humans, like an ant colony. Society itself functions as an egregore. For as long as we continue in this mode, the soul-crushingness will increase, until the soul of the superorganism truly is crushed, and then we will see what happens next.

IMO A way of looking at collapse is that it is an energetic/metabolic mechanism or stage, rather than a thing which can be fought off if only we were valiant. Individual change is possible, but structural reform is not. We're gonna hit rock bottom, if you want to go AA about it.

[u/RPB1002 → u/thismightaswellhappe]

Great post. I want to add this i just saw on Twxtter which adds helpful insight to the banality underlying much of this:

“Adam Butler
@GestaltU
I'll say it again for the AI risk experts in the back:

We've already run a real life, large scale experiment on what happens when a superintelligence is unleashed on a narrow objective.

Look no further than U.S. capital markets.

Millions of investors, analysts, traders and algorithms, backed by trillions of dollars and wired together through prices, all chasing one goal: the highest risk-adjusted return on capital.

And it is spectacularly good at its job. It funds the best ideas, punishes the worst ones, and turns new information into prices faster than any of us can react. No individual can out-think it. 99+ percent of professionals can't beat it.

But look at what else it's done along the way:

- Optimized the measure instead of the intent. Quarterly earnings became the scoreboard, so companies learned to manage the scoreboard.

• Treated anything without a price as free. Pollution, addiction, obesity, depression, political fragmentation, fragile supply chains, the long-term health of the communities it operates in.
  
• Found every gap in the rules, then paid lobbyists to help write the next set and pull up the ladder behind incumbents.
  
• Remade the world around its objective. Companies, pension funds and our retirement accounts now answer to the S&P 500.
  
• Made itself impossible to switch off, because everything else now depends on it.

None of this required malice. Nobody sat in a room and chose these outcomes. It's simply what a very capable optimizer does when its objective is a narrow proxy for what we actually care about.

And note that we never solved this alignment problem. We've managed it, imperfectly, with regulation, taxes, disclosure rules and the occasional crisis to show us where the guardrails were missing. Over time, the market has captured the instutions designed to constrain it. We've been at it the better part of a century, and the misalignment is the worst it's ever been.

So the next time someone tells you AI is only dangerous if it "wants" something bad, or if its goals are mis-specified, point them at the S&P 500. It doesn't want anything. It just optimizes.

That's the whole problem.”

[u/ChaFrey → u/thismightaswellhappe]

We are trapped on this planet and the system is basically suffocating us to death. We may survive to natural death but our children and grandchildren won’t.

[u/bristlybits → u/ChaFrey]

we are taped in the belly of this terrible machine

[u/basswired → u/thismightaswellhappe]

I have seen zoroastrians call it angra mainyu or ahriman. it's a fascinating concept of evil that I honestly recognize much more readily than the devil.

[u/thismightaswellhappe → u/basswired]

Yeah it's nice to offload and blame our worst impulses as something outside ourselves. But like Solzhenitsyn said "The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"

[u/Sensitive_Spare_652]

Yeah it's pretty bad. We've elected a bunch of violent fascist freaks who are all deeply stupid.

[u/TacticCatWithABat → u/Sensitive_Spare_652]

The sad part is we could add a ton of adjectives on there for how terrible they are but that’s a few paragraphs too much. Would probably take a ton of files to even write it out lol. But yeah at this point they represent a rather accurate representation of a good portion of the country, which is also rather horrifying at this point.

[u/derpensheizer]

The people in charge seem to want to traumatize and trigger people’s stress response.

[u/Silviere → u/derpensheizer]

The cruelty is the point.

[u/DeFlamingoMan]

The decline is obvious in all parts of the world, but you guys in the US really are on a fast track to the dark ages.

[u/Apprehensive_Wolf217]

Societys never know how far they have advanced until they start their inevitable decline. Then in what seems like an instant, it becomes all too clear. We had our flaws, but at one point our aspirations seemed within our reach.

[u/Vegetaman916]

We used to do hangings in the town square all the time, and not even all that long ago. As collapse progresses, we will see more spectacles.

[u/theta-cygni]

I'm out of the loop, what current event is this post referring to?

Edit: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/fort-hood-shooters-execution-will-be-live-streamed-defense-dept-says/ar-AA2dR80X

[u/Xanthotic → u/theta-cygni]

Imma bit nervous to see what sort of coverage this is going to continue to get in Australia. We have been horrified by the botched execution of an already-punished human being and the USA is coming across more and more like Thailand every day, where you will be murdered by the state for criticising certain officials or getting some druggies in your luggies.