Podcast Transcript
We are living through a time of extreme uncertainty, instability, and insecurity.
There are two forces driving this.
One is the blinding speed of technology.
In itself, this should be positive. It is progress. But as pointed out by those who know the matter best, it also carries great threats. According to many, tech such as AI even threatens our very existence.
We are reaching a point where progress exceeds our capacity to keep up with needed safeguards and guard-rails.
We have come to a point that the power of the technology itself is potentially dangerous even under ideal circumstances. How much more dangerous does this become when we add to this the moral poverty, greed-addiction, and ideological zealotry that abounds among those developing or governing these developments?
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The combination of both only adds to our justifiable sense of danger and fear naturally.
This insecurity and fear may not be felt in the forefront of our consciousness. Thoughtless consumers giddily lust for every new, shiny thing in the world of information, communication, and other areas of novelty. Yet at the same time there is an angst just below the surface.Things seem dangerously near the edge.
Too much of the ground seems to be shifting. Change is too fast. Even the near future feels beyond our line of sight. The ground feels that it is moving beneath our feet.
The second thing creating instability and insecurity is not only the breakneck pace of change and tech development, but the features under development too easily contribute to destabilization.
Huge in this is the explosion of surveillance over every part of our lives. The state does it. Private people (corporate leaders) addicted to greed and power do it. And the two work in tandem, such as the US Government infiltrating surveillance empires built by people like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey.
Imagine spending your whole life being followed around by a squalid man peering in your windows, planting bugs in your bathroom and bedroom? This is Facebook and Amazon. This is what they do.
Think of life in the Communist Soviet Union where the state read your letters to your mom to decide if they would deliver them or not? Imagine a government that asked children to report on their parents, and neighbors to spy and report on one another? This actually IS our life in America today. All of it. Each thing I just mentioned that defined life under such regimes as Cuba, East Germany, and Soviet Russia, is our life today. In America.
How can living in this way not make people anxious, feeling unstable and insecure?
Another abomination associated with developing technology is the deliberate design of social media algorithms to addict users for the sake of profit? Social media are designed explicitly to create addiction in users. These wicked souls rake in 10s of billions of dollars, addicting young children and youth, purely for the sake of profit.
Until recently, people that did things like this, turning children into addicts for the sake of quick easy money, were known as bad people. Drug pushers who sold near schools, deliberately preying on children would not even be safe in a prison. They could be killed. Even hardened criminals spurn people who target minors and children. Yet this is what people like Zuckerberg and Bezos do.
If you lived in a neighborhood full of drug pushers who infest school yards, you would feel insecure, unsafe. Yet this is our life. Developers of social media have designed their software to deliberately addict people and children. To exploit others for greed and control.
Our lives have become cesspools of illegal surveillance, spying, addicting, exploiting.
There is another pernicious effect of technology. It is intensifying at blinding speed, extreme separation of people into structures of division; powerful and powerless, privileged and servile, masters and slaves.
Much of this comes simply from the innate features of the technology itself. Not from deliberate evil misuse of it.
All this makes it impossible to feel life as stable, even if it were not being exploited by greedy people in the government and conglomerates who are addicted to greed and power.
This first part is about the destabilizing impact of our current tech avalanche
In addition to this, we are living in amid devastating erosion, even the implosion of almost every institution that we counted on to be more or less trustworthy and help to anchor fluctuation in life.
These formerly trusted sectors included Media, government, medicine, sports, universities, banks, even grade-school teachers.
All this is gone, plummeted off the cliff. All trust squandered as corruption and degenerate behaviors are exposed day after day.
We trusted the media to not deliberately lie, mislead, and gaslight. We were aware of bias. We took this into account. But there used to be honor in the profession. Doctors were generally thought to be committed to health and care, not to be shills for trillion dollar pharmaceutical corporations.
Certain things were sacrosanct. Things all people held as true. The innocence of children used to be sacrosanct, regardless of political persuasion. Sexual exploitation of minors was considered vile and evil. Exposing children to pornography was considered evil. We used to think that women had the right to privacy and modesty. We used to think it was wrong for men to bully women.
Among normal people who have not been poisoned mentally, or infected by shallow political self-seeking, no one ever thought that laws would be passed deliberately placing women and schoolgirls in danger of male aggression and rape in their changing rooms and bathrooms.
We never thought university professors and officials would demand that parents be forced by the state to have their children subject to sexual depravity, while forbidding parents by threat of state force knowing what is being done to their children?
These things are too difficult for normal people to comprehend. Decay at this level of darkness makes people feel unsure and anxious.
I have presented only a short, superficial list of the forces that fill us with uncertainty and insecurity.
I have done so to bring us to the point of my message, namely what do people do in such times?
In the end there are basically two quite opposite reactions in times of deep uncertainty and insecurity.
Both have to do with sovereignty . Both relate directly to the radical turning point in history that led to the US Declaration of Independence. In it was a proposed a definition for being human, and a definition for social organization.
56 people pledged their Lives, Fortunes and sacred Honor to defend these few simple beliefs. Every person is equal before the law. Every person is born with inalienable rights that come from the laws of nature and nature’s God. And no one may govern without consent of the governed. Equality, Human Rights, Personal Sovereignty.
But when things become this unstable, so pure and complete a level of independence becomes scary. When people become afraid and insecure they seek protection more than freedom.
Average people will give up anything when faced with fear. Their dignity, their rights, anything. Just don’t let me get hurt. I don’t want to get sick. I’m afraid.
Tragically, it is the nature of power to seek ever more. It is an insatiable addiction, the lust to own, to control, to master. When people because of fear and uncertainty forfeit their God given sovereignty for the promise of protection, they give it up forever.
These days, big swaths of various demographic groups are rushing to give up our rights to despotic governments. They even want a State so autocratic that it can destroy people for saying something like “there are two genders.”
To review: These are the forces creating insecurity and fear? The rapid advance of technology, the collapse of institutions, the ruin of basic morals.
Does anyone believe that a totalitarian government will say, OK, we only want power over people only until we bring these concerns under control. Then we will give up our power?
Of course we are seeing only the beginning of the rampant uncertainty of our time. We are simply in a time of extreme change. That IS our time.
To get through this, with our humanity, dignity, personal freedom, and confidence intact, we need to double down on our God given sovereignty and unalienable rights.
Our way through these tumultuous times is less intrusive government not more. Our security and strength both in peaceful times and in hard times, comes from the laws of nature, nature’s God, and from the ones we love and who love us.
Normal people, moderate people. People who know the basics, and common sense know these things.
THIS is the way to stand confidently above the at once thrilling and frightening technology. And to stand shoulder to shoulder against those who wish to abuse it to exploit and control us.
Fear and weakness, that tempts us to abandon our rights and sovereignty to corrupt seekers of power is not a safe path in uncertain times.
Instead raising our heads higher is the way. The institutions that will help and protect us during difficult times are not those populated by putrid, bloated, morally lost governments and their social accomplices.
The institutions for uncertain times are our families, clans, communities, churches, and friends. We are not alone.