How to Defeat Chat GPT Enslavement By Embracing Your Inner Greek Chad
Part 2 of “The Will to Power Off”, a look into recent developments in AI and Nietzsche
The Grand Project of Civilization Has Always Been Avoiding Grunt Work
From scrubbing toilets to cobalt mining to handling dead bodies, there are endless numbers of chores most people wouldn’t willingly do. So how did some people get stuck doing them? Survival and conquest.
Survival: Hegel simplifies things down to two people.
Times are tough, food has run out. If nothing is done, both will starve. But then they come across an emaciated deer. Like in a Looney Tunes cartoon, it starts to look like a walking spit roast with antlers. But those killer antlers though…
Person B is too afraid of “death by antler” to do anything. Meanwhile, Person A looks at the deer, says, “f*ck your antlers” and attacks. By some miracle of cave man magic, he wins.
Now A has more meat than he knows what to do with. B has to admit that he’s basically dead, but if A would give him enough food to keep his body going, then he’ll do whatever A doesn’t want to do like some kind of zombie or caveman robot.
Conquest: Nietzsche explains how aristocrats came to be.
Nietzsche’s explanation is a little more grounded in historical fact. He looks at Eurasian societies and tries to understand the origins of caste and class. At some point, perhaps driven by the same threat of starvation that faced A and B, one group of hunters looked to their farmer neighbors and decided to take over. Anyone who resisted was killed, and those who survived became the subjects of those who specialized in hunting aka war making.
Once again, those unwilling to die became the slaves, peasants, and serfs while those who risked death and conquered became their lords or masters.
What you get in both explanations is an understanding of elite dominance or “privilege” that precedes the society. It’s useful because it doesn’t just stop at “inheritance” or “structural inequality” but follows that inequality to its source.
At some point, one group did something the other group was unwilling or afraid to do, and that’s how you get an upper and a lower class. Those willing to do the unthinkable get to avoid having to do the intolerable.
Freedom Is A Question of Leisure vs Laziness
Yes, it’s horrible, just horrible, how people used to treat each other.
And yes, it’s not how things should be. Thank God for Jesus or (insert your messiah here), am I right?
But let’s dwell in these pre-enlightened times a little longer because what comes next makes our modern moral ideals possible: free time.
While it was still exceedingly difficult to move up in any caste or class system under any pre-modern empire, it was done. People of distinction or great genius, like Epictetus, were able to win their freedom. But for the vast majority, creature comforts, entertainment, and mindless play were enough to occupy the time they weren’t working to keep them enslaved.
Slaves didn’t want to do the work, so they avoided work wherever possible. Fear of death in the original instance became fear of discomfort of any kind. And they sought pain minimization and pleasure maximization with whatever free time they had.
Notice I didn’t say ‘leisure’ time. That word had a different meaning back then. We have this notion today of the ‘noble classes’ engaging in all sorts of debauchery and drunkenness all day long. In reality, most of the "leisure classes” had to spend the time freed up from working the fields practicing skills suited to war.
This is why so much of our language today has military origins, why the Olympics still includes javelin throwing and combat sports, and why the Greek word for sin was once the same as the word for error in archery practice. Because when the need for war fell away, the virtues attained from preparing for them remained.
Great Things Came From Seeking Victory in Peacetime
And when the higher classes got to stop worrying about farming and war for a bit, they turned their warrior virtues to the pursuit of higher culture. They strove to outdo each other in art, literature, science, engineering, drama, sports, spirituality, even state building.
In Athens, you got democracy and Classical Greece. In India, you got the “inner space race” that produced Buddhism.
You could say that the slaves and peasant classes, the untouchables and serfs of history would have done the same had they been afforded the opportunity, and you might be right. But for those throughout history who did get a chance to better themselves and chose instead to waste it, you have the continued justification for why they stayed slaves and did not become free.
There’s a reason why the Buddha was said to come from the warrior caste. It would have been unbelievable for anyone who didn’t have warrior virtues like intelligence, discipline, and intensity to defeat the world of Mara and win freedom from suffering.
But even if the general stereotype of slave vs master held true, many noble slaves and cowardly nobles were still not getting what they deserved. On some level, and at some point, refinement leads to the recognition that those above are really not so different from those below, those within are really the same as those without.
You could argue that this was the secret to Christianity’s eventual triumph over paganism: A religion centered around the idea that the master of the universe sacrificed himself to free all slaves. But even this wasn’t enough to actually free us from toil. Instead you ended up with what amounts to a different set of titles. Slaves became serfs and peasants. Masters became lords and dukes, barons and earls.
Machines Are Metal Slaves We Don’t Have to Feel Guilty About Working To Death
For millennia, the great project required cruelty and domination of other human souls. The many straining under the yoke of civilization, minding the soil for sustenance so that the few can watch the skies, explore inner and outer space, and produce works of high culture and refinement.
I’m departing from Nietzsche here for a bit, but the story continues. The Black Plague and countless larger and larger wars forced society to offer greater incentives for the remaining farmers and workers to keep working. Craftsmen formed guilds, workers formed unions, and new methods of cheap labor became necessary.
And so it was that we entered into a new phase of the project. The freeing of slaves and their replacement with mechanized beasts of burden.
It is no coincidence that the concept of universal human rights emerges here. Nor is it any wonder how the mechanized North was able to espouse high-minded ideals once its machines no longer required forced labor to work like the South still did.
The Problem Is That The Humans Who Ran Machines Forgot They Were Humans
Now you have the machines we built to replace soulless work. Ones which first required much human muscle to get moving but whose human cogs gradually shrank and decreased in number.
Today we are gazing upon an age where the only human organs required to power them are brains and fingers.
But we faltered. We lost sight of the fact that this was what we were doing. Or perhaps it was because we were never told outright that this was the plan.
Those mind-numbed by work demand that their minds stay numbed after work ceases. Like slaves of Rome, we demand bread and circuses.
Couched in mechanical terms like, “a need to unwind”, “recharge our batteries” or “fuel our bodies”.
Instead of real conversations, we want to interact through digital interfaces. Instead of uncharted territory, we want “safe spaces.” Instead of human dating and the risk, uncertainty, and delights they entail, we want it all reduced to a finger swipe and matchmaking by algorithm. The meaning of “adventure” has been reduced to little more than “some portion of this experience will be spent outdoors and may involve physical exertion.”
It’s all a subconscious tell that we’ve mistaken ourselves for machines.
The Question of the Future Lies In What You Will Do With Your Freedom
Now that machines are replacing logical as well as repetitive tasks, what
terms, "wordcel" jobs, that freedom from work we all longed for seems to be on the horizon.I don’t anticipate government and society allowing all us meat machines to just die off en masse. Call it Universal Basic Income, “Increased Social Benefits” or whatever you want to call it, will come, but I suspect it will not be enough to make any of us truly happy.
We don’t want true risk, or challenge, or adventure. We no longer want to outdo each other except in video games. And it seems with the rise in obesity rates and time spent online that the we are perfectly willing to pursue pain minimization ever further downwards.
Even though everyone reading this is enjoying opulence on a level 99.9% of aristocrats could never have dreamed of–from running water to central heating to near-instantaneous vehicular travel–things will never be comfortable enough.
So the question becomes, what will you do with your free time? Because if your answer is still that you want more (whether material or spiritual it doesn’t matter), you’ll have to shift how you approach your fear of everything from discomfort to death.
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Nice commentary on deceptively idiotic AIs.
To clarify my point, the wordcel-shapelord distinction is similar to Dril's Email-Farm distinction, jobs that require disproportionate rhetorical skills against jobs that require deep thought. Service jobs (tertiary sector) against manufacturing (secondary sector) and research (quaternary sector).
The quaternary sector is what wordcel anprims found to be the enemy, which this "green" movement (including XR) now manifests as Quangos (quinary sector), and this explains why most activists are neurotic and hyper-social.
The battle between priests and warriors, between merchants and craftsmen, are now migrated into the realms of technocrats against activists. For every step to crush the wordcel (firepower, industry, analytics), there will be always a counter-move (dogma, advertisement, propaganda).
To be easily displaced by AI must also imply that ones psyche is being leads by words rather than action, and that the latter is near impossible in a biological rather than an environmental level. There is treatment but no cure, lest one becomes an "AI activist" to give oneself meaning, or accept that every man has their own limits in success.