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The world doesn't just contain optimists and pessimists, and wise and unwise technology users. It contains enemies of civilization as well. And knowledge is impartial. It can be used for good or evil. But the enemies of civilization all necessarily have one thing in common. They are wrong. And...

176,754 views • 2 years ago •via X (Twitter)

10 Comments

Deutsch Explains's profile picture
Deutsch Explains2 years ago

Excerpt From:

ASM's profile picture
ASM2 years ago

@theRSAorg @theRSAScotland I typically agree with most of your ideas, as expressed in your books. But on this one, I don’t think it is rigorous to associate speed with good. Many guys can act fast to defend their selfish interests, in conflict with the common good. Blind acceleration could be a disaster.

denis tremblay's profile picture
denis tremblay2 years ago

@theRSAorg @theRSAScotland Propaganda discourse disguised as epistemology. Procustean bed of ideology.Enemies of civilization are in each culture and enemies of cultures are in technological civilization.We must put wisdom over knowledge,knowledge over science science over technology. Speed is arms race.

Perspective Mapper's profile picture
Perspective Mapper2 years ago

@theRSAorg @theRSAScotland ❤️‍🩹 The problem is we all assume we're the good guys.

Physics Memes's profile picture
Physics Memes2 years ago

@theRSAorg @theRSAScotland True, they increase the noise to signal ratio

Kristo Valdmann's profile picture
Kristo Valdmann2 years ago

@theRSAorg @theRSAScotland Voluntary everything is the only truly ethical way forward from here.

Eduardo Luft's profile picture
Eduardo Luft2 years ago

@theRSAorg @theRSAScotland Yes, you may be right about acceleration, but only because knowledge of knowledge, with its prior commitment to truth, is not, and cannot be, impartial.

Spiros Evangelou's profile picture
Spiros Evangelou2 years ago

@theRSAorg @theRSAScotland The only defence is speed? This is the characteristic of our times. I thought the only defence is thought!

Maria's profile picture
Maria2 years ago

@theRSAorg @theRSAScotland Who are the good guys?

Alexandre Bairos's profile picture
Alexandre Bairos2 years ago

@theRSAorg @theRSAScotland Godspeed.

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I think we've been deprived of a lot more than flying cars and Mars colonies. I think civilization is currently burdened by a debilitating pessimism. Not just prophecies of doom, because they've always existed. There's something deeper. The term technological fix has become as pejorative as Luddite used to be. The aspiration for technological solutions is now widely regarded as naive. A fantasy that ignores the inevitability of missteps and side effects. And that naivety is labeled optimism. Because optimism has come to mean something like the assumption that the best will happen, or probably will. And pessimism that the worst will. They're both false as general principles. No one adopts them. They're irrationalities that people accuse each other of having. And everyone classifies themselves as somewhere in the middle. And perhaps admitting to a slight bias in one direction or the other. And therefore admitting to slight irrationality. But in fact, both ends of the spectrum and the middle are predictions of success or failure. Maybe probabilistic. Derived only from an attitude or a principle. Not from explanations of why reality should match them. And prediction without explanation is prophecy. Which is reliance on the supernatural. Which isn't a rational attitude to planning for the future. So what is? Well, here's the bad news. Conventional pessimism is right that civilization has no guaranteed future. Nor does our species. The overwhelming majority of civilizations and species that have ever existed are now extinct. Including significantly every one of our cousin species. Every species that has ever tried to survive by creating knowledge that was not in their genome. New explanatory knowledge. How to make clothes and fire and farming. And to live the new ways of life that that enabled. That is our biological niche. To survive through the exercise of creativity. And we are the last species left in that niche. For such species, stasis is not available. We conquer problems by creating knowledge or they conquer us. So there's nothing new in our situation of all sorts of existential danger. It's undeniable that the worst can happen. Because the very worst has already happened many times. So now for the good news. All those civilizations who believed that their famines and droughts and disasters were divine punishment for their wickedness or whatever. In reality, it was just that they didn't know enough about irrigation, medicine, and so on. If the ancient Athenians had known about antibiotics or just about hygiene, they could have prevented the plague that contributed to the fall of their nascent optimistic society. And if they had, then as Carl Sagan speculated, we might now be at the stars. And technology would be regulating trivialities like the planetary climate. As automatically as it's now regulating the temperature in this room. We know that's possible because of a momentous dichotomy that follows directly from the rejection of the supernatural. Namely, every transformation of physical systems that is not forbidden by laws of physics is achievable given the right knowledge. And hence, the rational attitude to the future is what I call optimism. The principle of optimism, namely that all evils are caused by lack of knowledge. That isn't a prophecy of success. It's an explanation for failure. If we fail at anything that's physically possible, it's because of some knowledge that we fail to create. Admittedly, some of the dangers that we currently foresee are themselves side effects of knowledge creation. But trying to slow that down won't help because what do you slow down? In 1900, no one could possibly have foreseen that research in pure physics into the esoteric properties of the element uranium would within 50 years become the centerpiece of everyone's existential fear. Or that another half century later, the centerpiece would be carbon dioxide. In our future too, the greatest dangers will inevitably be unforeseen. And the only type of knowledge that's capable of dealing with those is fundamental knowledge of universal regularities in nature. Any area of fundamental research could suddenly become essential to our survival. Biology, engineering. In World War II, pure mathematics was. We also need knowledge of how to structure human institutions to retain the miraculous property of keeping civilization stable under rapid change. Traditions of criticism and error correction. And we need wealth, meaning the ability to deploy technology in practice. And there's a final consideration. The world doesn't just contain optimists and pessimists and wise and unwise technology users. It contains enemies of civilization as well. And knowledge is impartial. It can be used for good or evil. But the enemies of civilization all necessarily have one thing in common. They are wrong. And so they fear error correction and truth. And that's why they resist changes in their ideas, which makes them less creative and slower to innovate. So our defense against the existential danger from malevolent uses of technology, the only defense, is speed. The good guys must use their only advantage to stay ahead. David Deutsch

Deutsch Explains

38,267 views • 1 year ago

.Logan on our latest piece in Human Progress about what unifies the enemies of civilization: What unifies all of the enemies of civilization is that they all slow down the growth of knowledge. Now, you ask, how can we take advantage of this fact, namely that all of the enemies of civilization share in common this feature that they curb the growth of knowledge? This fact tells us that we can, if we so choose and if we make the right decisions, outpace them in the growth of knowledge. So, one strategy to defeat the enemies of civilization is basically to outpace them in this great war of memes and growing wealth and knowledge, such that eventually, the memes that comprise the enemies of civilization, as well as the wealth that the enemies of civilization control, is an ever smaller fraction of the total meme pool and wealth that civilization has to offer. So, this is what success would look like if we think about outpacing them. But there's also the strategy of replacing the memes that comprise the enemies of civilization with better ideas. This is just a fancy way of saying we could also persuade people. So that would be a kind of inside-out approach, rather than the out-pacing, which is kind of from the outside in. And of course, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can continue to build and outpace the enemies of civilization while persuading people that the relevant ideas that curb the growth of knowledge are mistaken. And by the way, just to make the conversation a little less abstract, the enemies of civilization that we wrote about in our piece, which is an excerpt of the script we wrote for your upcoming documentary, those enemies are socialism, environmentalism, scientism, relativism, dogmatism, and doomerism. And I don't think I ever told you this, Arjun, but what I like about the list we came up with is that understanding the inner workings of each of these enemies of civilization, that is to say, understanding the how and why of how each enemy of civilization curbs the growth of knowledge, gives unique insights into the nature of progress and epistemology. This clip was recorded and made using Airchat.

Arjun Khemani

23,825 views • 1 year ago

Fundamentally wrong on multiple levels. First of all, if your reaction to the defeat and removal of a swarm of foreign invaders is "that's cruel", then you are not ready to make adult judgements about foreign policy, and shouldn't be allowed to vote. Let me make it simpler: You are supposed to be cruel to your enemies, you silly person. They are not your friends you haven't met yet. They are your enemies. They mean to hurt you, either because they hate you, or because they want what you have, and don't care what happens to you when they take it. Sacrificing your countrymen and your civilization over naive principles you learned from your midwit kindergarten teacher is a disgusting moral betrayal. It is your countrymen, and your civilization, that defend you, sustain you, and provide for you every good thing that you have, including everything from the right to say silly things online to the smartphone you say them with. To set all that at nothing so you can virtue signal is not only silly... it's ungrateful. And ungrateful people are trash. Secondly, if you describe deporting the dregs of the third world back to where they belong as "warlord" behavior, you not only have no idea what a warlord is, you have no idea what most of the world is like, and you are unqualified to vote in elections that effect foreign policy. Warlords do not chain their enemies up, load them onto planes, bring them back to their homelands and set them free. Warlords feeds their enemies to dogs. Was your best friend dragged out of his home by masked men, in front of his wife and child, and stuffed into a waiting van? Was his naked corpse found hanging from a lamp post the next day, covered in burn marks and puncture wounds from an electric drill? That's what warlords do. So save the term for when you actually need it. Trump was and is the soft option. If you somehow manage to thwart him, I promise you that you really, really will not like who comes next. Third, western civilization has been brought to the brink of inevitable collapse because you listened to silly women who think military-age males from Ethnicklashistan are cute puppies who need love and understanding. You have to stop caring what silly women think. Because you will not reason them out of this. They will continue to believe in Cute-Puppy Theory, right up until the moment they get raped, stabbed, or both. People from places where human life is cheap, behave as if human life is cheap. But silly women cannot imagine this. Their definition of the word "attack" is someone saying mean things about them on twitter, kind of like I'm doing right now. People like this have been sheltered so well, for so long, by others who capable of ruthlessness and violence, that they forget what they are being sheltered from, or what ruthlessness is for. And then they start interfering with the very people and processes that protect their safe space, and indeed their lives. Because defending your tribe is mean to Cute Puppies or something. Fourth, anyone who think political power is maintained by appeasing your enemies has clearly never had any power to maintain. Your must energize and reward your friends, and discredit and demoralize your enemies. The left isn't going to stop hating western civilization if we keep our sober faces on and pretend we're not overjoyed about winning out over obvious evil and depravity. Appeasing the left has no value at all, because what the left wants is "everything", and they destroy anything they get their hands on, then demand more. Anyone who thinks deportations are "mean" is part of the same set of people who gave us this problem in the first place. And the only reason things are better now is that we stopped caring what they think.

Devon Eriksen

43,861 views • 1 year ago

Ritual abuse survivor/trauma therapist Max Lowen: "The entire world is basically run by a satanic cult. They're psychopaths, they're pedophiles, they're parasitic... [and] they harvest us physically, etherically, spiritually... But they're not human... these are interdimensional beings that have come to this planet, that have taken it over. And they are dark, they are evil. And they are patriarchal. So they have created everything in that image." This clip of Lowen (Max Lowen) is taken from a conversation with Seth Holehouse (Man in America) posted to the Man in America Rumble channel on February 15, 2026. ---------------Partial transcription of clip---------------- "The entire world is basically run by a satanic cult. They're psychopaths, they're pedophiles, they're parasitic. So they use. They harvest us physically, etherically, spiritually. "And so at the tippy top of the pyramid, and this is going to sound, you know, I mean, we're already in crazy land for some people with what's released in Epstein, so I'll just go there. But they're not human. Okay? "So these are interdimensional beings that have come to this planet, that have taken it over. And they are dark, they are evil. And they are patriarchal. So they have created everything in that image. And then the whole hierarchy is completely compartmentalized. So different rungs have different tasks. "And things that they do. And they have different amounts of the big picture. And right below that tippy top and still above all the things like the Vatican and Freemasons or whatever are covens, believe it or not. So, practitioners of black magic, that's a big part of the control structure. But that's basically the hierarchy. "So every institution that we have on this planet, everything, has been either created or infiltrated by this cult. So that's why no one's getting arrested, because they control the military and the police and the justice system. "And so, for example, the medical system, we used to have, you know, real healing, like herbs and energetic healing. And then the Rockefellers, which are one of the bloodline families, that's a layer in that hierarchy as well. They created the allopathic medical system deliberately to slow. Poison us and slow. Kill us, profit off that process, and then shorten our lifespan, and kill us prematurely. "So that entire system, this is hard for the human to grok because we've been taught to trust these people. We look at them as, like our parental figures, benevolent. And they're not. They're actually, as a good example, the medical and pharmaceutical system are designed to harm us by its inherent design. "[And] everyone knows the food is toxic, the water's fluoridated. They spray us with chemtrails. Like these people, they worship Lucifer. They worship dark, demonic entities. They are a death cult. They also need us because they're parasitic. They have been cut off from the creator. What, God— You know, whatever you call that. The oneness. And because they're cut off, they're cut off from the life force. Their highest achievement is ego, right? Which is why they're into power and fame and wealth and all those worldly things. "So they, like many movies and TV shows, are revealing the truth. We're their batteries, like Morpheus says to Neo in the Matrix, right? So they need us— They, they particularly like to prey on babies and children because of their purity, their essence. They're a soul. They've just come in from God into a human body. "So that energy is very rich to them and they, they harvest it etherically and then they harvest it physically in the form of blood and flesh eating as well, right? So they paradoxically hate us. They consider us cattle. They, you know, and they want to depopulate us, but to a point they have to keep some of us because we're their, their energy, their fuel source, if you will. "And we're also co-creators with God, but they're, they can't create anything. They can only piggyback off existing creation. So what they do is they get us to create this, now that we see it clearly, hell on Earth reality. Now how do they do that? They use trauma-based mind control. So the same things they did to me, they do to the collective."

Sense Receptor

75,067 views • 7 months ago