Revolutions
Might as well post this here too:
I find interesting that when one sees Erasmus or Servetus, it’s clear that the growth of classical knowledge and the advancement of science had created a situation in which large parts of the intelligentsia in Europe had realized that Christianity was bogus.
They probably thought that rationality would prevail and that the Church would lose its power to science or something. But what happened is that screaming demagogues came out of nowhere in droves and soon dominated the ideological vacuum that incipient science had created. And what they sold was not rationality or heliocentrism, but something 10 times wackier and more violent than the Roman Church had ever been.
Fast forward to the late 18th century, and the further advances of science and history produce a new cohort of intellectuals convinced that Christianity, this time in 2 flavors is bogus. They probably thought that rationality would prevail …
but something 10 times wackier and more violent than the Puritans had ever been appeared, and won. We call it progressivism.
Fast forward to the early 21st century, and a small group of aspiring intellectuals are starting to notice that Progressivism is bogus. They probably thought …
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[…] Source: Bloody Shovel […]
Well maybe so, but Progressivism killed around 200 million people in the 20th Century alone. Unless you anticipate triumphant neoreactionaries starting a central nuclear war or something...
Actually leading lights are Trans-humanists, which means AI. And they're not delusional enough to think it will be friendly.
Say the Maoists take power in India. You could have 1 billion dead in months. There's a lot of ruin in a nation if you put some effort.
Oh, yeah, Maoists could do it, I thought that we were talking about the insane potential of Neoreactionaries.
Neither Erasmus nor Voltaire did any carnage themselves. They just discredited their religions and somebody else came to fill the void.
But Maoists are a form of Progressive, and, according to the above scenario, that is what is being discredited. Fascists, maybe? But of course, Fascists, as opposed to Nazis, usually kept their killing in the low six digits.
The need for a theory of everything is strong. But after the wacky people commit to a new orthodoxy that purports to explain everything, they start bending people to fit it. Non-hilarity ensues, as chronicled here and a few other places.
Dunno, Robespierre and John Winthrop seem to have had a bit of a tactical distance in both scale and self-destructiveness despite supposedly falling under the same intellectual tendencies of the age. Possibly this may be due to the fact that one actually believed his holy books, or that one's holy books were actually truer than others. In all fairness, once the revolution really got rolling, Moldbug's law of democratic tyranny activates and no one can be as crazy as to actually bind themselves to a common set of values, since that would totally limit your ruling options, and someone less scrupulous would come by and undermine you.
The law of entropy says that people become as degenerate as the environmental constraints allows them to be. Advancement in science & knowledge ==> An increasingly intellectual minority holding together an increasingly degenerate majority.
Then I guess we should be happy that science isn't advancing that much any longer.
Or you can see that the degenerate mass as the framework to support and motivate innovations. The degeneration creates new problems that force the intellectuals and provides profit potentials to further science and knowledge.
This hints at their being an equilibrium with mild oscillations. Of course where the equilibrium is depends on many things. So what's the next equilibrium? Dark Ages? Idiocracy? Slightly browner version of 1880s?
Ecology always reach equilibrium in the form of a food chain pyramid. There must be enough lower level entities in varies niches to support the higher level in the food chain; the equilibrium is reached when the size of the lower-level is large enough to counter-generate the degenerating entropy of the higher level. Humanity creates memetic food chains addition to genetic food chains; we differentiates into "social/memetic races". Human used to hunt foods and use beasts to do their bidding. The lower echelon of humanity are themselves foods and beasts for the upper echelon. Humanity won't collapse, it will keep advancing but may evolve to be very complex. The ones who know how to play this complex game will be the apex predators. There is no assabiyah for the whole humanity. The best one can do is to navigate the society and ascend oneself.