Tuesday, July 17, 2018

JD: The fake wisdom of the elite

Responding to yesterday's post about doomster-prepper billionaires, JD says:

On 6th June 1968 (fifty years ago) John Lennon sat in a press conference at the National Theatre in London to talk about a new play based on his book "In His Own Write" As is the way of these things the conversation drifted into other topics. This is what Lennon had to say about the Government, all Governments:



Looking at the world of 2018, it appears that governments have become ever more remote from the citizenry who all, if only subliminally, agree that our leaders are even more insane than they were fifty years ago. Voters around the world have been rejecting the established political parties and have turned to alternatives. I am reminded of Chesterton's aphorism “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”  and that choice is also what our political 'leaders' have given us. We no longer believe in them and are casting around searching for something, anything which is not "more of the same."

It is not just politicians who are insane, our technological 'wizards' are also insane: "Men like Thiel (Paypal founder) or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have invested millions in immortality projects; meanwhile Yudkowsky, the MIRI theorist, thinks anyone who doesn’t sign their children up for cryogenic freezing is a “lousy parent.” In that quest for an immortal soul, two things stand in the way: death and a revolt of the underclass. AI threatens to combine both—semiotically and, just perhaps, literally."
http://www.documentjournal.com/2018/04/the-existential-paranoia-fueling-elon-musks-fear-of-ai/

I have already made some observations on that subject in the second part of this post - https://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/tv-from-sublime-to-ridiculous-by-jd.html
You have continued the theme in your recent post about the pessimism of the 'elite' They are not pessimistic, they are insane or, at the very least, they are lacking in imagination (something which also applies to the aforementioned 'techie geniuses', they have no practical expertise in or experience of anything) http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-pessimism-of-elite.html

John Cleese was right when he said in a lecture recently “If I can persuade you this evening to abandon this hope, you will find yourself a lot more relaxed, you'll worry less and laugh more.  I promise you that.”
http://consciousnessunbound.blogspot.com/2018/04/hilarious-hopelessness-wisdom-of-john.html

1 comment:

Brett Hetherington said...

Yes, we are surely living in the most extreme of times since the mid 1940s. The powers that be consult only with the richest (such as Bezos) and a new feudalism has begun. To arrest this populaces cannot continue to turn to petty nationalism and the simple responses of the right, who in the first place are very much the same people who have created hyper capitalism, now almost entirely unchecked.

(BTW, I accidentally deleted your comment on my most recent blog post. Would you mind reposting it?)