Academia Iluministă (80)
“Playing World of Warcraft makes me feel godlike. I have ultimate control and can do what I want with few real repercussions. The real world makes me feel impotent … a computer malfunction, a sobbing child, a suddenly dead cellphone battery – the littlest hitch in daily living feels profoundly disempowering.” –Ryan van Cleave, US author and academic
In the gaming world, players receive constant rewards (making them feel high), constant realtime positive feedback and can see themselves making tangible progress (within the game). In real life, they rarely get rewards, pleasurable highs or see any signs of meaningful progress. Real life is drudgery for most people. So which world would you rather inhabit? But if you immerse yourself in hyperreality, you have ensured you will never succeed in reality. So, what’s it be?
Real heroism and real success – or success and heroism based on make-believe. YOUR CHOICE.
The tale of Ryan van Cleave provides a warning to all gamers. His addiction to World of Warcraft (WoW) was so extreme that he became uninterested in real life. He lost his enthusiasm for his wife, children, and his job as an English professor. He played WoW for some 60 hours a week, including before classes and at night while his family slept, leaving him exhausted. He often ate while at the computer – only things that needed one hand, leaving the other free for gaming. He argued constantly with his wife about the excessive time he spent on the computer. He sometimes zoned out of reality and thought he was inside the game.
His wife felt abandoned. “I couldn’t believe that someone could choose a virtual family over a real one,” she said.
Why do many people own dogs? It’s because they can have control over their dog. If you don’t feel in control of your life, you find something that gives you the control you crave. Gamers have total control in their virtual reality. The more out of control they are in real life, the more they retreat to games (just as other addicts retreat to drugs or alcohol or whatever).
Depressingly, the virtual world soon seems to become a lot like the real world. Van Cleave said, “You can never have enough in-game money, enough armour, enough support. You’ve got to keep up with the virtual Joneses.” Keeping up with the VIRTUAL Joneses?!! Is that not the supreme definition of futility?
Needless to say, Van Cleave’s life started to fall apart. His career disintegrated, his marriage was on the rocks and he contemplated suicide. At last, he drew himself back from the abyss, got rid of the game and put his life back on track.
What is “virtual reality”? It’s where people HIDE from real reality. What is the spectacular society? It’s where people watch other people having the spectacular life of which they dream. Why don’t they try to make it happen FOR REAL? There’s no high higher than REAL highs. There’s nothing better than being a real hero, not a fantasy hero. Ironically, all the spectacular people are a crashing disappointment in real life. They don’t have their scriptwriters with them to give then something clever and witty to say. They don’t have their make-up artists with them or the air brushers or digital image enhancers that make them look so good on screen.
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The Latest Bulletin from David Icke’s Fantasy World:
“His most staggering revelation is that the Earth and the collective human mind is manipulated from the Moon, which, he says, is not a ‘heavenly body’, but an artificial construct – a gigantic ‘spacecraft’ (probably a hollowed-out ‘planetoid’) – which is home to the extra-terrestrial group that has been manipulating humanity for aeons. He describes what he calls the ‘Moon Matrix’, a fake reality broadcast from the Moon which is decoded by the human body/mind in much the same way as portrayed in the Matrix movie trilogy. The Moon Matrix has ‘hacked’ into the human ‘body-computer’ system, he says, and it is feeding us a manipulated sense of self and the world 24/7.”
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Are you convinced yet? Has Icke finally nailed it? Will we soon be under attack from the men on the moon, joining the Illuminati lizard kings in their assault on humanity?
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The 400:
400 Americans have as much wealth as 150 million Americans. WTF! How is such a thing possible? The 150 million could crush the 400 in a trice. So why don’t they? Why do 150 million people permit themselves to be starved of the resources needed to provide a productive life while 400 selfish individuals are allowed to live like gods?
The 400, to keep their position, have had to wage an astonishingly effective propaganda war to justify their wealth, power, status and position. The reason the 150 million do nothing is that they have been manipulated into thinking that it’s right and proper that the 400 are so rich. They have had a false consciousness constructed for them by the elite. They think that their interests are directly connected to those of the rich when in fact the opposite is true.
The elite say that if there were no rich people in America it would be a communist state under a brutal dictator, with concentration camps for all troublemakers. People would have no freedom. America would be Godless and all of its people soulless and grey, with no hope for the future and at the mercy of the State. The conspiracy theories regarding the “New World Order” promote an identical message (in fact, conspiracy theorists unintentionally work in tandem with the right wing, rich elite since their analysis of the world is often identical – with socialist atheists being blamed for everything).
Of course, the nightmare presented by the elite to terrify the masses is the opposite of the truth. The elite themselves are the nightmare. If all of the assets of the rich were seized, the debts of the world could be paid off and the world could start again. So why don’t we do exactly that? Wasn’t it the elite that brought us to the precipice of financial meltdown? It certainly wasn’t any of the ordinary people who had no decision-making input at all. Therefore shouldn’t the elite be held accountable for the disaster they themselves created? Shouldn’t they pay? Why are the people paying? Why are the people SO STUPID?!
The elite have got it made. Even in the midst of financial catastrophe, they are still paying themselves enormous salaries, with massive pay rises and bonuses, while all the debts they ran up are dumped on the dumb taxpayers. Isn’t that GENIUS?! When you can rob someone blind and they even help you put your hands in their pockets to remove every last cent, you know you are indestructible, that your propaganda is so deeply ingrained that the people can no longer think. The people do not know how to pursue their own self-interest. If they did, they would destroy the super-rich. If the super-rich aren’t responsible for fucking the world then who is? If we don’t know where to attach blame and punishment, how can we ever move forward?
The super-rich have made our world the shit place it is. They control the world and its assets. How can anyone analyse the state of the world and do anything other than conclude that its woes are caused by the rich?
The rich pursue an extremely simple twin-track policy: 1) To selfishly and ruthlessly enrich themselves at every opportunity, and 2) To do everything to ensure that the masses take no action against them. So, their policy is one of aggressive acquisition and one of equally aggressive propaganda to inhibit the masses from pursuing their own self-interest. As long as the masses believe their interests are aligned with those of the elite, they will never challenge the elite. Revolutions occur whenever the people wake up and they realise that their interests are the opposite of those of the elite, hence the elite must be destroyed.
Make no mistake, the world is now in a Revolutionary phase because the elite have committed catastrophic blunders and the masses are beginning to comprehend that the elite are actually incompetent at everything other than feathering their own nests (at which they are geniuses). The rich are not your friends. They are your enemies. They must be overthrown. Meritocrats devoted to the welfare and improvement of the whole population must be in charge. All systems of privilege must be abolished.
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Oiling Up:
The UK’s Eton College, the most elite private school in the world, promotes an activity called “oiling up”, designed to develop “a mixture of ambition, self-confidence and bloody-mindedness”. There’s certainly not much “oiling up” going on in the public education sector.
More like “greasing down” – a mixture of zero ambition, low self-esteem, cowardice and submissiveness. Etonians are trained to regard themselves as an elite, and that’s what they become. Most people are trained to be failures, and they do a splendid job of it.
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St Pauli Football Club:
Fußball-Club St. Pauli is a German football team based in the St. Pauli quarter of Hamburg and has a close relationship with Celtic Football Club in Glasgow in Scotland. St. Pauli’s flag is the same as the Illuminati’s – the skull and crossbones. The Illuminati are fans of this team because St. Pauli is left wing, punk, anti-corporate and rebellious. The Wikipedia entry on St. Pauli says:
“It was in the mid-1980s that St. Pauli’s transition from a traditional club into a ‘Kult’ club began. The club was also able to turn the location of its ground in the dock area part of town, near Hamburg’s famous Reeperbahn – centre of the city’s nightlife and its red-light district – to its advantage. An alternative fan scene emerged, built around left-leaning politics and the ‘event’ and party atmosphere of the club’s matches. Supporters adopted the skull and crossbones as their own unofficial emblem. St. Pauli became the first team in Germany to officially ban right-wing nationalist activities and displays in its stadium in an era when fascist-inspired football hooliganism threatened the game across Europe. In 1981, the team was averaging crowds of only 1,600 spectators: by the late 1990s they were frequently selling out their entire 20,000-capacity ground.
“It was also during the 1980s when the club first became associated with the Skull and Crossbones symbol. The symbol had always been associated with St Pauli in one way or another. Hamburg fostered the most famous pirate of Germany Klaus Störtebeker and the symbol had been used by the house occupants at Hafenstrasse, but the one who should be credited with bringing the symbol to the club is probably Doc Mabuse, the singer of a Hamburg punk band, and as the legend tells, he first grabbed the flag from a stall while passing drunk through the Dom on his way to the Millerntor-Stadion.
“In the early 1990s, the media in Germany started to work on the Kult-image of the club, focusing on the punk part of the fan-base in TV broadcasts of the matches. By this time, the media also started to establish nicknames like ‘Freibeuter der Liga’ (buccaneers of the league) as well as das Freudenhaus der Liga (‘Brothel of the League’ but Freudenhaus also literally means ‘House of Fun’).”
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The Futurists:
Futurism was an art movement founded in 1909 by Italian poet F.T. Marinetti. He called upon artists to embrace kinetic art – art obsessed with the motion inherent in modern technology, such as the car and the plane. Show “courage, audacity and revolt,” he declared, “celebrate a new beauty, the beauty of speed.” The Futurists tried to capture and reflect speed and movement in all of their works. They combined bright, bold colours, sharp angles, Cubist planes and intense lines of force. Rather than show a freeze-frame snapshot, they wanted to somehow fit an entire movie into a single frame; to portray cinematic flux.
The Futurists were great self-publicists. In one stunt (or “happening” as they liked to say), they climbed the bell tower of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice. As the congregation came out, they showered them with propaganda pamphlets advocating demolishing the city, burning the gondolas, and filling “the small, stinking canals with the rubble from the old, collapsing, and leprous palaces.” They described Venice as, “this putrescent city … this bath adorned with jewels for cosmopolitan whores”, with its “stinking little canals … its shady little businesses”. Using megaphones, they bellowed outrageous slogans: “Burn the museums! Drain the canals! Burn the gondolas, rocking chairs for cretins! Kill the moonlight!”
The more they were abused by the crowd, the more the crowd hurled rotten fruit and old spaghetti at them, the more the Futurists defined their happening as a great success. They were opposed to the past, to sentimentality and nostalgia, conservatism and tradition, the infatuation with the past. Shouldn’t humanity be forward looking?
The Futurists were fans of provocative manifestos that proclaimed their position. The movement began with Marinetti’s 1909 Manifesto.
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The Futurist Manifesto.
We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we have been discussing right up to the limits of logic and scrawling the paper with demented writing.
Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs. Alone with the engineers in the infernal stokeholes of great ships, alone with the black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives, alone with the drunkards beating their wings against the walls.
Then we were suddenly distracted by the rumbling of huge double decker trams that went leaping by, streaked with light like the villages celebrating their festivals, which the Po in flood suddenly knocks down and uproots, and, in the rapids and eddies of a deluge, drags down to the sea.
Then the silence increased. As we listened to the last faint prayer of the old canal and the crumbling of the bones of the moribund palaces with their green growth of beard, suddenly the hungry automobiles roared beneath our windows.
“Come, my friends!” I said. “Let us go! At last Mythology and the mystic cult of the ideal have been left behind. We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks! Let us go! Here is the very first sunrise on earth! Nothing equals the splendour of its red sword which strikes for the first time in our millennial darkness.”
We went up to the three snorting machines to caress their breasts. I lay along mine like a corpse on its bier, but I suddenly revived again beneath the steering wheel – a guillotine knife – which threatened my stomach. A great sweep of madness brought us sharply back to ourselves and drove us through the streets, steep and deep, like dried up torrents. Here and there, unhappy lamps in the windows taught us to despise our mathematical eyes. “Smell,” I exclaimed, “smell is good enough for wild beasts!”
And we hunted, like young lions, death with its black fur dappled with pale crosses, who ran before us in the vast violet sky, palpable and living.
And yet we had no ideal Mistress stretching her form up to the clouds, nor yet a cruel Queen to whom to offer our corpses twisted into the shape of Byzantine rings! No reason to die unless it is the desire to be rid of the too great weight of our courage!
We drove on, crushing beneath our burning wheels, like shirt-collars under the iron, the watchdogs on the steps of the houses.
Death, tamed, went in front of me at each corner offering me his hand nicely, and sometimes lay on the ground with a noise of creaking jaws giving me velvet glances from the bottom of puddles.
“Let us leave good sense behind like a hideous husk and let us hurl ourselves, like fruit spiced with pride, into the immense mouth and breast of the world! Let us feed the unknown, not from despair, but simply to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the Absurd!”
As soon as I had said these words, I turned sharply back on my tracks with the mad intoxication of puppies biting their tails, and suddenly there were two cyclists disapproving of me and tottering in front of me like two persuasive but contradictory reasons. Their stupid swaying got in my way. What a bore! Pouah! I stopped short, and in disgust hurled myself – vlan! – head over heels in a ditch.
Oh, maternal ditch, half full of muddy water! A factory gutter! I savoured a mouthful of strengthening muck which recalled the black teat of my Sudanese nurse!
As I raised my body, mud-spattered and smelly, I felt the red-hot poker of joy deliciously pierce my heart. A crowd of fishermen and gouty naturalists crowded terrified around this marvel. With patient and tentative care they raised high enormous grappling irons to fish up my car, like a vast shark that had run aground. It rose slowly leaving in the ditch, like scales, its heavy coachwork of good sense and its upholstery of comfort.
We thought it was dead, my good shark, but I woke it with a single caress of its powerful back, and it was revived running as fast as it could on its fins.
Then with my face covered in good factory mud, covered with metal scratches, useless sweat and celestial grime, amidst the complaint of staid fishermen and angry naturalists, we dictated our first will and testament to all the living men on earth.
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MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM.
1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
4. We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath … a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervour of the primordial elements.
7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We want to glorify war – the only cure for the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-collared and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.
It is in Italy that we are issuing this manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence, by which we today are founding Futurism, because we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries. Italy has been too long the great second-hand market. We want to get rid of the innumerable museums which cover it with innumerable cemeteries.
Museums, cemeteries! Truly identical in their sinister juxtaposition of bodies that do not know each other. Public dormitories where you sleep side by side for ever with beings you hate or do not know. Reciprocal ferocity of the painters and sculptors who murder each other in the same museum with blows of line and colour. To make a visit once a year, as one goes to see the graves of our dead once a year, that we could allow! We can even imagine placing flowers once a year at the feet of the Gioconda! But to take our sadness, our fragile courage and our anxiety to the museum every day, that we cannot admit! Do you want to poison yourselves?
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Do you want to rot?:
What can you find in an old picture except the painful contortions of the artist trying to break uncrossable barriers which obstruct the full expression of his dream?
To admire an old picture is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn instead of casting it forward with violent spurts of creation and action. Do you want to waste the best part of your strength in a useless admiration of the past, from which you will emerge exhausted, diminished, trampled on?
Indeed daily visits to museums, libraries and academies (those cemeteries of wasted effort, Calvaries of crucified dreams, registers of false starts!) is for artists what prolonged supervision by the parents is for intelligent young men, drunk with their own talent and ambition.
For the dying, for invalids and for prisoners it may be all right. It is, perhaps, some sort of balm for their wounds, the admirable past, at a moment when the future is denied them. But we will have none of it, we, the young, strong and living Futurists!
Let the good incendiaries with charred fingers come! Here they are! Heap up the fire to the shelves of the libraries! Divert the canals to flood the cellars of the museums! Let the glorious canvases swim ashore! Take the picks and hammers! Undermine the foundation of venerable towns!
The oldest among us are not yet thirty years old: we have therefore at least ten years to accomplish our task. When we are forty let younger and stronger men than we throw us in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts! They will come against us from afar, leaping on the light cadence of their first poems, clutching the air with their predatory fingers and sniffing at the gates of the academies the good scent of our decaying spirits, already promised to the catacombs of the libraries.
But we shall not be there. They will find us at last one winter’s night in the depths of the country in a sad hangar echoing with the notes of the monotonous rain, crouched near our trembling aeroplanes, warming our hands at the wretched fire which our books of today will make when they flame gaily beneath the glittering flight of their pictures. They will crowd around us, panting with anguish and disappointment, and exasperated by our proud indefatigable courage, will hurl themselves forward to kill us, with all the more hatred as their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us. And strong healthy Injustice will shine radiantly from their eyes. For art can only be violence, cruelty, injustice.
The oldest among us are not yet thirty, and yet we have already wasted treasures, treasures of strength, love, courage and keen will, hastily, deliriously, without thinking, with all our might, till we are out of breath. Look at us! We are not out of breath, our hearts are not in the least tired. For they are nourished by fire, hatred and speed! Does this surprise you? It is because you do not even remember being alive! Standing on the world’s summit, we launch once more our challenge to the stars!
Your objections? All right! I know them! Of course! We know just what our beautiful false intelligence affirms: “We are only the sum and the prolongation of our ancestors,” it says. Perhaps! All right! What does it matter? But we will not listen! Take care not to repeat those infamous words! Instead, lift up your head! Standing on the world’s summit we launch once again our insolent challenge to the stars!
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We like the energy of the Futurists, if not many of their sentiments. We also like the tool of the manifesto and the call to action. Where’s your manifesto?
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The Meritocracy Party:
THE MERITOCRACY PARTY campaigns to replace democracy with meritocracy. Democracy has become the single biggest obstacle to the rise of the most meritorious. In the USA, no matter your talents, you cannot become President unless you have access to vast wealth to fund your campaign. In Great Britain, social mobility – the opportunity to improve your social standing – has gone into reverse. If you are born into a poor family, you are statistically almost certain to remain poor, regardless of your merits. If your parents are rich, you can start looking forward to a prosperous future, again regardless of your merits.
The Meritocracy Party seeks to remove the link between parental wealth and children’s outcomes in life, and to eradicate nepotism and cronyism, the dual drivers of privilege. The Meritocracy Party is “viral”. You don’t need to join anything, seek anyone’s permission, go to any meetings or pay any money. If you’re broadly in tune with the meritocratic ethos, all you have to do is go out and spread the word.
The world can be changed: conversation by conversation amongst intelligent people.
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The following material concentrates on the British political system, but the same arguments apply in every country. The idea is to have a Meritocracy Party in every country of the world, all of which are affiliated to create the first global political Party. With global capital relentlessly forcing down costs (people’s pay) while increasing their own profits, only a global political response will suffice. Whatever country you are in, start building the meritocratic future.
The Meritocratic Aims.
The Meritocracy Party aims to replace consumerism with high culture. We wish to place ideas above money, aesthetics above shopping, community over the “I’m all right, Jack” ideology. Private property leads to private lives, dislocated communities, suspicion and competition between neighbours. We are not allies, we are enemies. How do we heal the rifts between us? We have to reduce the importance of the main focus of division between us: lust for money.
The Five Meritocratic Principles.
1) NO NEPOTISM
It’s not who your parents are, it’s who YOU are.
2) NO CRONYISM
It’s not what others can do for you, it’s what YOU can do.
3) NO DISCRIMINATION
Sex, race, religion, age, background are irrelevant. Talent is everything.
4) EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES
You start from the same point as everyone else, and you go as far as your talents take you.
5) REWARDING MERIT
The highest rewards for the highest achievers.
Goals.
1) To implement the five Meritocratic Principles.
2) To abolish the monarchy since it contradicts the first Meritocratic Principle. In a monarchy, the only thing that matter is the identity of your parents. In a meritocracy, your parents are irrelevant. The advent of meritocracy is accompanied by the automatic abolition of the monarchy. No meritocrat would seek the ‘permission’ of a monarch to govern.
3) To abolish the House of Lords (the House of Cronyism), which contradicts the second Meritocratic Principle since it’s the product of patronage. In a properly constituted meritocratic system, there is no requirement for a second House.
4) To abolish Party Politics. Political parties are irrelevant in a meritocratic system. Parliament will be populated entirely by independent, meritocratic MPs with no set political affiliations (other than their commitment to meritocracy).
5) Each independent MP is selected on the basis of their merit relating to their field of expertise. So, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is selected from amongst practising economists (and will be elected only by other economists). The Secretary of State for Health will be someone who works in the health field (and is elected only by health workers); the Secretary for Defence will be from the armed forces; the Foreign Secretary a serving official in the Foreign Office; the Secretary of State for Education a serving teacher/headmaster/
6) The Prime Minister will be elected by the MPs from amongst their number. Every five years, there will be a general election in which every MP has to seek the endorsement of their voters, or be replaced.
7) To abolish Cabinet Collective Responsibility. The principle that people should promote views with which they privately disagree is absurd and ipso facto brings politicians into disrepute. Why haven’t they resigned if they disagree with a policy? How can they defend a position that they themselves don’t believe in? If they publicly support a policy they privately reject, they are hypocrites.
8) Critiques of government policy will be provided by select committees of MPs. Special committees comprising scientists and philosophers may also be used, chosen because of their critical-thinking abilities and their expertise in challenging assumptions. Committees of artists, entrepreneurs and designers may also be called upon. Pressure groups will be given a prominent voice too since meritocracy welcomes close scrutiny.
9) To abolish the ‘moralising’ approach to politics (what’s ‘right’ and what’s ‘wrong’ – the politics of principle) in favour of the scientific method (what works and what doesn’t – the politics of pragmatism).
10) To increase Inheritance Tax to 100%. No one should be able to posthumously transfer an advantage to another person of their choosing. The state should acquire all of the assets of the deceased and should reinvest them to advance the public good, particularly via education.
11) Education is the bedrock of merit, and should be accorded the highest importance in the meritocratic state. The current education system is a demonstrable failure and should be overhauled in every respect. Our education system is designed to produce shoppers (these being what capitalist democracies require to sustain their economic model). True education is the opposite of shopping. It liberates the mind, not the credit card.
12) To promote the ideas of the most radical, freethinking, independently minded philosophers e.g. Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Rousseau, Diogenes, Camus, the Situationist International.
13) To provide community-based alternatives to the family (based, for example, on the Kibbutz model) so that if a family fails, its members can be nurtured in a different, constructive and productive environment of psychological and educational well-being.
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The Decline of Social Mobility:
The last few years have seen a marked decline in social mobility in the UK, accompanied by an equally steep rise in the number of the super-rich. The two trends are of course connected. Social mobility is directly proportional to the extent to which ‘markets’ (in the widest sense) are unrigged (read meritocratic markets). Social mobility declines when cronyism and nepotism are allowed to flourish. Cronyism and nepotism (drivers of rigged markets) allow the gilded few to pay themselves whatever they like (since there are no meritocratic mechanisms to increase competition and make inappropriate payments impossible). Hence we see the emergence of an increasingly powerful class of super rich – the extreme beneficiaries of cronyism and nepotism.
Meritocracy is the antidote.
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The Incompetence of Privileged Institutions:
“Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.”–George Orwell
“Success has always been the greatest liar.”–Nietzsche
“One must push what is collapsing.”–Nietzsche
All empires fall. Success creates complacency. Empires become arrogant. They lose the ability to criticise themselves, to see their inevitable flaws. They believe their own propaganda. The same is true of institutions. They are inept at self-renewal, of re-energising themselves. They are never associated with radical change. How telling is Orwell’s remark? – the very success of Eton becomes the cause of subsequent calamity.
If we wish to avoid the disaster of privileged institutions that have grown fat and tired, we must promote ferocious competition that pushes over anything that carries too much weight. Meritocracy is the mechanism. It’s a permanent challenge to privilege; the sword of Damocles hanging over the bloated, the smug, those wallowing in their own imagined success. The greater the competition, the greater the merit of the winners.
In the UK, a few institutions have become untouchable, and the nation has stagnated as a consequence. The British never achieve anything great and inspirational. Privilege kills talent and vision. It seeks only to maintain itself in its decadent comfort.
There should be no sacred cows. Survival is not compulsory. Meritocracy will sweep away the incompetent institutions that are holding back the nation and its people.
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The Charity Con:
In a nation of appallingly selfish people who’d do anything to get ahead, there’s an absolute need for TV charity shows like Children in Need. People who spend 364.5 days a year contemplating property prices, how they can get their children into the best schools at the expense of other children, and who they can shaft at work to get a promotion, need their half a day a year when they can pretend to be interested in the welfare of others. Pretend to be human, perhaps.
Charity events are the obscene means by which the uncharitable masses worship their shameless pretence of altruism. Such events are playgrounds for nauseating extraverts to inflict themselves like the worst bullies on hordes of introverts, forcing them to have ‘fun’.
Vain, egomaniacal celebrities are permitted to feign that they have some interest in the lives of those less fortunate (as if!). And it’s so good for their media profile, of course. Their publicists and agents never tire of telling them to get their faces in front of the dumb public, and these are the opportunities par excellence. And did you see the sales rocket of all those bands that took part in Live Aid? You can’t manufacture ‘selling’ events as good as big charity shows (and isn’t that the real purpose of charity?) Even debutantes (or whatever it is they call themselves nowadays), get in on the act with their swanky charity balls – the places where you must be seen if you’re anyone. God only knows what any of these events has to do with charity.
Next year, keep your collection cans and fancy dress costumes. Go out to Africa and actually do something charitable, or face the fact that you’re totally selfish, and a hypocrite into the bargain. Anything that’s worthwhile should be funded by the State. If it’s not worthwhile, it shouldn’t be funded at all. So what’s the point of charity?
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Unacceptable:
It’s simply unacceptable in the 21st century for people to invoke ancient prophets and gurus. Although we proclaim Pythagoras to be a monumental genius, the fact remains that humanity has mathematical tools available now that he could only have dreamt of. The past geniuses have brought us where we are today, but where we are today is far more advanced than anything that has ever gone before. You are anti-evolutionary – retarded – if you turn to any ancient religious beliefs and regard them as better, wiser and more useful than mathematics, science and philosophy. That includes all people who look to Buddhism and Hinduism. Ontological mathematics has made all religions redundant. It has transformed religion from Mythos into Logos.
Reason is now the name of the game, not prayer, faith, meditation, revelation and mysticism. There is no longer any excuse at all for holding silly, irrational beliefs. Ontological mathematics has bridged the gap between atheistic scientific materialism on the one hand, and religion and spirituality on the other. Math explains the whole thing … rationally!!! This is the Age of Logos. Get off your knees. Uncross your legs. Stop praying and meditating and start thinking and reasoning. You are supremely unenlightened if you look to ancient beliefs that were in circulation thousands of years before Europe underwent the Enlightenment, when the grip of Christianity at last started to be released. Why abandon the nonsense of Abrahamism, only to embrace the equal nonsense of Karmism?
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No Excuses:
If you believe in Hinduism or Buddhism, don’t kid yourself that you’re vastly superior to, and more rational than, Abrahamists. You’re as hostile to reason, logic and knowledge as they are, and every bit as mired in superstition, credulousness, faith, mysticism, revelation and Mythos.
Given the nihilism of atheistic scientific materialism, people had an excuse for looking to something to provide them with spiritual sustenance. But that excuse no longer exists. Illuminism and ontological mathematics allow scientific materialism and empiricism, which is incompatible with religion and spirituality, to be converted into scientific idealism and rationalism, which is fully compatible with religion and spirituality, and fully explains the eternal, dimensionless, immaterial, mental reality that underlies the observable world and gives it its meaning and purpose. With scientific idealism and rationalism, mind, not matter, becomes the basis of reality. All material things are transformed into mental things, and atheism becomes an absurd superstition wholly divorced from the facts of existence. It’s math, which lies at the core of science, that destroys materialism since mathematics is not material.
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Either/Or:
You either keep on believing ancient old shit, or you wake up and try to understand the staggering amount of knowledge humanity has amassed in the last four hundred years. Anyone who spends any time at all on any Mythos religious system whatsoever has turned their back on human progress, and effectively declared useless all modern knowledge. Why are you going backwards rather than forwards, to unreason rather than reason? Why are you going back to ignorance and superstition? The answer is simple … you don’t understand modern knowledge whereas you’re perfectly happy with ancient mumbo jumbo and hocus pocus.You’re addicted to fantasy and illusion and despise reason and reality. Why would anyone seeking to be “enlightened”, study Buddhism or Hinduism rather than Gödel’s incompleteness theorems? Er, because Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are fucking hard, whereas any dumb ass can get some kind of hold on Buddhism or Hinduism. Talk about dumbing dowm and the race to the bottom! What’s the average IQ of the kind of person who studies Gödel’s incompleteness theorems compared with the average IQ of the type of person who gets involved with Abrahamism or Karmism? That tells you the whole story. Stupid people study stupid things, and smart people study smart things.
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Scientific Materialism:
Even science has serious difficulties. Science can be regarded as mathematics allied to and modified by experiments. Mathematics reflects rationalism, while experiments reflect empiricism. Rationalism and empiricism are incommensurate. Science is thus the philosophy of empiricism (and materialism) imposed on rationalist mathematics, which has nothing at all to do with experiments. Science refuses to address this contradiction. It’s driven by pragmatism, not Truth. Science seeks to understand the world, and yet, bizarrely, can’t understand itself, and makes no attempt to do so. But science, for all of its lack of intellectual integrity, has applied mathematics to the world and been fantastically successful. Remove math from science and you would have nothing but augury. Why have so few failed to realise that it’s when you apply numbers (math) that you get to grips with reality, and when you use words, emotions, faith, mysticism, and so on, you get all the crazy religions and ideas that have defaced human history.
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The Truth:
Words and numbers are incommensurate. Reality is based on either words or numbers. It can’t be a bit based on words, and a bit based on numbers, since numbers and words, like Cartesian mind and matter, have no basis for interaction. You have a very simple choice to make. Will you attempt to understand reality verbally, numerically, or via an incoherent combination of the two? There can only be one answer to existence, and if you choose the wrong means to address reality, you have failed automatically. So, we ask you a very simple question: Was Pythagoras right that all things are numbers, or will you contradict him and claim that all things are words? Your choice. Make the wrong choice and you have cut yourself off from Truth and are living in a fantasy world.
Conventional religion and spirituality are all about emotional and mystical words. Philosophy is about the careful examination of the meaning of words and what they imply about reality. Science is a mixture of philosophy and numbers, and math is all about numbers.
There can be no Cartesian dualism or pluralism. You can’t mix, match and combine incommensurates. There must be a monism, and the only coherent monism is the monism of numbers.
Scientific experiments are an artificial add-on to mathematics. They have the effect of force-fitting mathematics to the observable world and thus producing something that seems “real” (to the senses). However, they also have the disastrous effect of annihilating all mathematics that is not compatible with sensory observations. The whole point of ontological mathematics is to address both observable AND unobservable reality, and to unify them in a single system. “Dimensionless” mathematics concerns immaterial Fourier frequency (mental) functions outside space and time, while “dimensional” mathematics concerns Fourier spacetime (material) functions. The two interact via Fourier mathematics. And thus the whole of reality is explained. It’s all in the math. Do the math.
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The Exam:
You’re in an exam – the exam of existence. Do you know how to pass it? To whom will you turn for advice? This is the strangest exam of all. You are presented with a blank sheet, and you yourself must provide both the questions and the answers. How well you do this will determine whether you pass or fail. Most people ask the wrong questions and give the wrong answers.
Know Thyself
Get Real
Keep it Real
This is the Dawn of the Coming Race, the Supermen, the Hyper-humans.
We are the Illuminati and this has been our gospel.
-AC
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The Cult of the Professional (Charlatan/Bullshitter):
“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” –Baudrillard
In his book The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen lamented the opportunity the internet has afforded any Tom, Dick or Harry to place their thoughts, movies, music tracks, stories etc in the public arena. As more people access this free material, fewer pay the traditional content producers (newspapers, magazines, book publishers, film studios, record companies, TV and radio companies). Where will it all end? The collapse of civilisation? That appears to be Keen’s hypothesis.
Keen is in no doubt that the amateur efforts that abound on the internet are rubbish. The commercial material, on the other hand, is held up as something of the highest calibre. Who is this guy kidding? He obviously hasn’t watched many Hollywood movies, or much TV, or actually read any newspapers or magazines, or listened to the junk on the radio. Almost all commercial content is garbage to a quite extraordinary degree. And don’t forget – people are actually being paid, often ridiculously well, to produce it.
The vast majority of people in the media got their jobs through nepotism and cronyism. They’re not professional paragons: rather they’re professional charlatans, bullshitters and ass lickers. They have no talent at all, apart from managing to get someone to pay them for producing junk. Keen is a snob, a slavish worshipper of the myth of the “legitimate”, “professional” expert when virtually no one, outside the world of academics (and scientists in particular), is worthy of that description.
The Independent used to be a good newspaper, until it became a viewspaper. Why should anyone pay to read the views of some commentator in The Independent when he could just as easily freely read the blog of some person on the internet who may be much funnier, more controversial, more radical, more interesting, more intelligent – and a better writer? Newspaper commentators are simply bloggers who get paid: grandiose, self-deluded bloggers in other words.
Keen argues that the conventional producers of paid content are the gatekeepers to some Promised Land of standards, taste, and high quality. They filter good from bad, true from false. Yeah, right! All they do is promote their own agendas. Their “good” is nothing more than a reflection of their personal tastes. Their opinion that something is “good” doesn’t render it so. Equally, their ideas of true and false are simply perspectives from the viewpoints that prove most advantageous to them.
Try reading Nietzsche if you want the “truth”. Try reading Baudrillard. The last person you should go to is one of the chattering classes, one of the media gatekeepers.
Another obvious point to which Keen is astoundingly oblivious is that the internet merely reflects the culture that the “gatekeepers” created. The gatekeepers were the Frankensteins who gave life to the monster. If the gatekeepers had engineered an entirely different culture, one that lauds all the values that Keen claims to admire, then the internet would be a paradise.
That it isn’t is thanks to no one but the gatekeepers who pursued a relentless agenda of producing dumbed down content to chase ratings and higher profits. It’s old-fashioned justice that their monster has turned on them, and they surely deserve to perish. They chose to worship the Lowest Common Denominator, and they have reaped their moronic harvest.
It’s time to kill the spectacle. It’s time for the Revolution.
The End
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The Armageddon Conspiracy: The Plot To Kill God
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http://www.amazon.com/
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5/5
