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# 2022-10-21
“*The harvest is the end of the age*” (Mat 13:39).
It is often the assumption that
--- nAI, bible -------
the end of the world will be a final battle, or a grand apocalyptic event. But what if it is a gradual process, like the decline of the empire, or the death of a marriage?
What if, instead of a war, there is a process
The “age” (αἰῶνός) could be the one of Pisces, or simply of a technological paradigm.
--- nAI, bible -------
A “harvest” is a harvest of wisdom, as opposed to a harvest of grain.
Our point though, is that people tend to focus on the agents of the harvest, the messengers (ἄγγελοί). Which is a kind of a learned helplessness, a mindset which is passive and not proactive, a lack of agency and volition.
“*El sueño de la razón produce monstruos*.”
This lack of agency and self-organization is precisely the sleep (καθεύδειν) which plagues humanity (ἀνθρώπους, Mat 13:25).
Now, the separation of wheat from chaff (ζιζάνια, Mat 13:30) needs not to be more than the “survival of the fittest”. The agents of Apocalypse, the horsemen and the angels, are but the faces of a much simpler principle. Those capable of thinking and killing - will survive into repository (ἀποθήκην, Mat 13:30) of a new age. Those who learned to be asleep and afraid - will burn. Our culture is, indeed, reversed: those who wish to repose in the heavens, the proponents of pious consumerism, are like the insulin-crazy, plastic-fed and cancerous fat.
“*Should we rejoice in the scepter of My son? The sword despises every such stick.*”
---
“*What is the Kingdom of God like? How can I illustrate it?*”
It is like [St. Petersburg paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=St._Petersburg_paradox&oldid=1115406580).
The odds of getting the infinite prize are infinitesimal, but “*one should therefore play the game at any price*”.
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A common humanistic premise is to nudge rather than to push. The “light touch” of Chuang Tzu: a ruler that rules not. The “poor standard” as motivation for kaizen. The ideal of self-organization.
Touched by that meme, we might *expect* a person or society to
--- nAI, VtM -------
grow up, to mature and to self-organize. But, as we can see from our recent reading of the Bible, the opposite is true.
The most aggressive, violent and cruel leaders are the ones who get ahead.
--- nAI, tolkien -------
be like a tree, to grow and flourish with the proper conditions: to change, and adapt.
But to be like a plant, the way it grows is slow, and the rate of growth is very low.
develop on their own. It is a kind of a *faith*, this *respect*
--- nAI, kuros -------
for the freedom and autonomy of others. A kind of a religion.
The problem is that the religion of the free, of the autonomous, of the self-organizing, is very weak.
It is not a religion of the free.
It is not a religion of the autonomous.
It is not a religion of the self-organizing.
It is a religion of the powerful.
Or, perhaps, of those who would like to be powerful.
Indeed, nonviolence can be promoted by the powerful few to drug and bind down the masses.
Hence if you want to hear the very best speeches
On love, duty, justice, etc.,
Listen to statesmen.
(Chuang Tzu)
In other words, the thought that a society will organize itself well, in the distributed “free market” fashion (oft promoted by Jordan B. Peterson) - might be a planted “junk value”, which through “bystander effect” renders society helpless.
Instead of taking reigns, putting hierarchies in place and giving *orders*, we see civil leaders waste their time urging people *themselves* to raise and take action.
The powerful speeches have their place, but there needs to be an effective hierarchy in place to organise the members thus attracted. Like a 3D printer producing animal tissue, the party needs to shape incoming folk into a scalable fractal.
The fancy dream of people managing that on their own - crashes on the rocks of “junk values” and actively disruptive adverse environment. The real life is not a charm school just waiting patiently for the students to improve a “poor standard”. It is only withing the protective shell of a hierarchy that the nurturing nudging is effective, and the attempts to replicate it in the adversarial Animal Farm are laughable.
Of note is how this cultural virus affects us on the personal level. “*But not in all men the knowledge (γνῶσις, gnosis)*” (1 Cor 8:7). Different people have different capacity for decision making.
The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly.
(Chesterton - Orthodoxy)
The humanistic expectation (junk value!) of self-organization can in turn sabotage the “range of authority” (as mentioned by Robert C. Ginnett): If we expect a person to *govern themselves* as much as we expect them to *blow their own nose*, there comes a point where we would look down on *blowing their nose for them*.
p.s. It's funny, to find humility hiding in lifting oneself up, and pride hiding in being level (Genesis 4:9).