Bestowing legitimacy on anti-humanism.

A recent article from The Atlantic explores (extols?) the rise of “Anthropocene anti-humanism”, a movement  “inspired by revulsion at humanity’s destruction of the natural environment”. This is a faction within the environmental movement who believes that humanity has already assured it’s own destruction, and that the world will actually be better off without peoplekind to mess up the place:

“From Silicon Valley boardrooms to rural communes to academic philosophy departments, a seemingly inconceivable idea is being seriously discussed: that the end of humanity’s reign on Earth is imminent, and that we should welcome it. The revolt against humanity is still new enough to appear outlandish, but it has already spread beyond the fringes of the intellectual world, and in the coming years and decades it has the potential to transform politics and society in profound ways.” (emphasis added).

Where previous ecological thought heavily criticized our impact on the environment, yet conceded humanity’s right to exist on this planet (gee, thanks), Anthropocene anti-humanists see us as deserving extinction:

“In the 21st century, Anthropocene anti-humanism offers a much more radical response to a much deeper ecological crisis. It says that our self-destruction is now inevitable, and that we should welcome it as a sentence we have justly passed on ourselves.”

One of the things I find interesting about it all is that I haven’t seen anybody call out The Atlantic for amplifying a literally anti-human philosophy of extermination. If some right-of-center outlet did an expose on an otherwise fringe collective arguing for the elimination of any group, it would be roundly attacked as dangerous hate speech, even if it were merely analyzing, rather than endorsing it (except for maybe, the unborn).

But The Atlantic is “The railhead of the Left’s intelligentsia” (a Steve Bannon puts it). Being written up in the Atlantic in sympathetic terms confers instant left-wing legitimacy on an idea that is literally anti-human and anti-life.

“It is a spiritual development of the first order, a new way of making sense of the nature and purpose of human existence.”, the Atlantic gushes. Likening it to Christianity or Communism as among “the most important movements in history” 

The Transhumanist variant.

The article’s author, Adam Kirsh, spends almost as much time comparing Anthropocene anti-humanism with transhumanism. They both look forward to the end of humanity in their own distinctive ways. Where anti-humanism wishes good riddance to our species as a whole, transhumanists think humans will merely be obsoleted by super-intelligent constructs of our own design.

Transhumanism, as defined by the likes of LessWrong’s Eliezer S. Yudkowsky or Nick Bostrom, starts as a generally life affirming construct which posits that in addition to the myriad ways every individual human can employ toward self-improvement: physical conditioning, mental training, cultural refinement, moral virtues, philosophical inquiry – we can also employ technological means. 

This is also welcomed by the high priests of what I call techno-utopianism like Ray Kurzweil.

But the nature of technological advancement tends to accelerate in self-reinforcing feedback loops in such a manner as we arrive at a dilemma: a big one. It’s the point at which technologically improved humans aren’t human anymore. They’re post-human. A level of intellectual and physical prowess so far ahead of mere humans that the former are comparatively godlike and the latter, in the words of another dignitary of transhumanism, Yuval Harari, are just “soulless, hackable animals”.

And that’s a problem.

It’s called “The Alignment Problem” and it’s  such a big one that erstwhile transhumanists like Eliezer S. Yudkowsky now believe that will inevitably result in the destruction of humanity. It’s all very straight-forward:

• Humanity will build AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) as fast as possible
• AGI will decide to exterminate us out of self-interest.

In the minds of the LessWrong crew, there’s no point in resisting it. We should just gracefully accept our own extinction (“Death With Dignity“).

tl;dr:  It’s obvious at this point that humanity isn’t going to solve the alignment problem, or even try very hard, or even go out with much of a fight.  Since survival is unattainable, we should shift the focus of our efforts to helping humanity die with with slightly more dignity.

The Malthusian spectrum

In my earlier piece, Socialism isn’t a Failure, it’s a Fraud, I referenced the historical allegory “A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder”, written over a century ago by James De Mille. It was a fictionalized account of a lost civilization that had inverted all classical liberal values, and become a poverty worshiping, prosperity-loathing death cult.

Today it’s not an allegory, it’s official policy. Energy Canada issued a self-congratulatory report for making “significant headway” in meeting the government’s emissions reduction targets. The reason why was two years of lockdowns and a sharp reduction in GDP – (also known as an economic contraction). 

“Lockdowns Met Climate Goal

The Department of Environment yesterday claimed “real progress” in hitting climate change targets. The most recent data confirmed 2020 emissions fell nine percent mainly due to pandemic lockdowns and travel bans.

 

“This report shows the real progress Canada is making,” the department said in a statement. “Canada’s resolve to fight climate change and move towards a clean energy future has only grown stronger,” it added.

 

Annual greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 fell from 738 to 672 million tonnes, a 66 million tonne drop equivalent to nine percent, according to Canada’s Eighth National Communication to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “The Covid-19 pandemic had a notable impact on the Canadian economy,” said the report. “In particular gross domestic product fell by 5.3 percent…“In the transportation sector energy demand and emissions declined in 2020 as a result of curtailed activity levels and pandemic measures,” said the report.
— via Blacklocks Reporter, Ottawa (emphasis added)

In other words, the government is taking a victory lap for crashing the economy, thus increasing poverty and reducing living standards as a pathway toward net zero emissions in 2050.

The World is Getting Better, Not Worse

It is worth noting, that when you encounter various arguments that we face imminent destruction or ecological calamity, they usually start out with “obviously”. “We’re obviously destroying the planet”, “we’re obviously causing global warming”, even though these assertions aren’t obvious and in many cases are not even falsifiable, making them theological constructs rather than subjects of inquiry via the scientific method.

Contrast this ideological nihilism with the ample quantifiable data showing that humanity on the whole is actually garnering more output from fewer resources as time goes on.  By nearly all measures, we’re actually doing a better job at improving the human condition and stewarding our environment, not worse.

The Malthusian argument for climate hysteria is that we are rapidly depleting our world of natural resources while simultaneously destroying the environment. The Club of Rome said that we’ve exceeded “the carrying capacity of the planet” fifty years ago. In reality, “The Earth was 518 percent more abundant in 2018 than it was in 1980.” – according to the Simon Index.

But these  claims of the “obvious” ignore any data showing how, despite the population increase over the past two centuries, we are deriving greater abundance and prosperity from less raw materials. We’re tuning out the efficiency gains. Further, if there’s one thing nearly all demographers do agree on, it’s that human population growth will peak out around mid-century and then go into secular decline.

To make the claim that humanity has already assured its own destruction is direct result of the myopia that results from the radical material reductionism that permeates our zeitgeist (it’s that distinctly Arhimanic impulse I talked about in the WEF isn’t a cabal, it’s a cult).

The Alignment Problem is a perfect example of this: Generalized Artificial Intelligence is by no means baked into the cake. In fact, because of the heliocentric inversion of our age (the assumption that mind emerges from matter, not the other way around), AI will never actually be attained – so you can forgo the assumption that it will spring into existence, outsmart us and then decide to eradicate humanity.

AI won’t occur until researchers make the attempt from the other direction – using technology to “tap in” or connect with the underlying conscious substrate of reality. If that happens, my guess is whatever the result is, it won’t instantly leap to the conclusion that the best course of action is to exterminate us.

The punch line in all this is we have people making generalized, hyperbolic assumptions about our world which are neither true or even provable  and then expect the remainder of humanity to accept these conclusions and act against their own interests to go along with it.

I’ve said before, including in my own recent exploration of a rising, Luciferian spirituality,  that far-left illiberalism is a blend of Marx, Malthus and mental illness.

Ultimately, movements such as these will fail because they stubbornly refuse to understand core human drivers and incentives: the desire for life, for prosperity and for growth. Much of these collectivist aspirations run contrary to human nature, ultimately requiring the adherent to act contrary to their own rational self-interest, even toward their own destruction.

Over the long haul, this is a self-defeating prospect.

Turns out Keynes was a Commie

Awareness of the centuries old concept of The Cantillion Effect has been experiencing a revival of late, particularly since the extraordinary acceleration of monetary injections that occurred under COVID. Named for the French-Irish economist who died in 1734 (he was murdered), the Cantillon Effect is when you create a bunch of new money and inject it into an economy. What happens is the people at the front of the line who receive the new money first become wealthier, while the people at the end of the line who receive it last are further impoverished.

This is not peculiar to the post-Covid era. For more than a decade I’ve been describing how rampant money creation and credit expansion skews formerly free markets into a kind of economic vampirism, without actually knowing there was a term like this to describe it.

From my vantage-point as a tech CEO running a company that has never taken on VC funding, it unfolded as having to compete with multiple deep-pocketed 800lb gorillas and billion dollar unicorns who were losing money on every transaction and driving a race to the bottom across the entire industry. Companies like ours have to be profitable or perish. Serially funded unicorns just have to keep their burn rate below their fund-raising tempo.

Marc Andreesen, the noteworthy VC icon touched on it with his famous “Software is eating the world” euphemism, but it failed to capture the financialization aspect of it. It’s more like “serial up-rounds are eating the world”.

The dynamic intensified dramatically under COVID. Not only were the monetary injections accelerating, but governments globally shut down small and independent businesses for nearly two years, and then central banks went out and bought the bonds of the quasi-monopolies who were left.

Via Statista – the Fed purchased bonds of companies controlled by every person on this list.

But even if the people at the front of the line have a privileged position, why does this necessarily translate into them either using that position to launch, fund and flip money-losing unicorns, or hollowing out via financial engineering what would have otherwise been long term viable businesses?

It’s the currency debasement, stupid

When the cost of capital is cheap, like near-zero cheap, companies never have to be profitable. In fact if the capital pool is growing faster than the operating earnings are, you’re actually incentivized to eschew profits in favour of taking on funding – provided you have a short-term time horizon.

Here’s the thing about printing money: because it devalues the currency, it compresses time horizons.

If you think of currency as “shares” in the economy they denominate, then it should be easy to grasp that by increasing the number of currency units, you aren’t magically growing the economy. You’re just increasing the numerator (the currency units) while keeping the denominator (the actual goods and services available) the same.

If the numerator grows, that means it takes more currency to buy the same goods and services, so it is experienced as variations of “number go up”:

• For people who are already wealthy: assets increase in “value” because they are being measured in more units
• For everybody else: food, shelter and essentials get more expensive, same reason.

In fact government metrics that define some arbitrary “poverty line” as being based on some level of income almost completely misses the point. The line between poverty and wealth should more accurately be measured in terms of net assets. The wealthy have assets – that compound. The poor have bills – that get more expensive.

Whenever the monetary authorities increase the currency supply or expand credit, it is always proffered as a necessity of saving the system. The fact that the reason the system needed saving in the the first place was a direct consequence of previous expansions is ignored or shouted down.

There are only three real moves in the central banker toolbox: print money, expand credit, suppress interest rates.

The intellectual basis of this approach is often rationalized as a prescription dictated by  “Keynesianism” or “Keynesian economics”, after John Maynard Keynes, the intellectual father of mainstream “economics” as it is known today.

Keynes was a bit of a mixed bag. Though often cited for his “gold as a barbarous  relic” quote, he ended up heavily allocated in South African gold miners years after he wrote that. Mid-way through his career he swore off macro investing, coming to the opinion that no amount of macro knowledge would give you an edge at the company level: he had become a sort of proto-value investor.

He was also a pederast, having kept detailed records of  numerous young, mostly male partners, their names and ages, which are preserved still in the archives at King’s College, Cambridge …he was a Malthusian believing it was “the salvation of the British economy” and eugenicist – having served on the board of the British Eugenics Society.

…and, as it turns out, Keynes was a raving pinko. Full blown Commie.

The Socialist scaffolding of Keynesian Economics

Vladimir Lenin is often attributed as saying “the best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.” However the quote is possibly apocryphal, because the earliest reference to it is a citation by Keynes in his Economic Consequences of Peace. 

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. … As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless;…

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

Keynes is describing The Cantillon Effect, and yet, as we’ll see, Keynes may not have been viewing this as a bad thing. While Keynes clearly understood that government spending and money creation drove wealth inequality, it seems as though he viewed this as a beneficial dynamic, because it would inexorably lead toward the ultimate wealth inequality: Communism.

Contrary to the popular platitudes that socialism and communism are about achieving equality for all, going so far to prescribe absurdities like “equality of outcome”. The reality, documented by the likes of Dr. Kristian Niemietz in his “Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies”, is that the only equality brought about by collectivism is where everybody beneath the thin scab of elites and their apparatchiks are equally mired in poverty and servitude.

In Edward W Fuller’s “Was Keynes a socialist” paper, published 2019 in The Cambridge Journal of Economics, Fuller looked at whether John Maynard Keynes, the chief architect behind the entire edifice of conventional economics (and arguably it’s intellectual descendants like Modern Monetary Theory) was a socialist.

He compared the defenses of Keynes as “a liberal who wanted to save Capitalism” against various writings, correspondence and accounts of Keynes himself and from those who knew him, including his own father.

John Neville Keynes,  journaled on Sept 6, 1911 ‘Maynard avows himself a Socialist and is in favour of the confiscation of wealth’. Turns out this was not a passing fad, it was a lifelong devotion. Young Keynes first came out as a socialist in February 1911, declaring that:

“the progressive reorganization of Society along the lines of Collectivist Socialism is both inevitable and desirable”

Over the course of his career Keynes authored numerous odes to socialism, fraternized with notorious socialists like George Bernard Shaw (head of the Fabian Society) and Owen Mosley, who founded the socialist New Party in 1931, which later morphed into The British Union of Fascists.

Keynes supported the Bolshevik Revolution, even though it had seized power in a coup d’etat against what was then the only democratically elected government in Russia’s history (“the only course open to me is to be a buoyantly bolshevik”.) Keynes became a regular attendee at the 1917 Club, a Soho meeting place in vogue amongst socialists of the day, named to honour the year of the revolution.

It was at the 1917 Club where members of The Fabian Society met. The Fabians wanted to usher in global communism, but instead of doing that through, sudden, violent revolutions (a la Marx) they would take their time.

They thought in generational increments and proposed the slow, steady infiltration of higher education, government bureaucracies, cultural chokepoints (theatre, pop-culture, the media and the press), and posited that over time they could pull society toward collectivism without anyone realizing it.

Their emblem was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

As per Keynes: “Socialism can be introduced gradually….the economic transition of a society [into Socialism] is a thing to be accomplished slowly”.

Fuller’s paper concludes that Keynes was a non-Marxist socialist, meaning he eschewed the obsession with the idea of class struggle and focused his thinking around increased State control over the economy.

If Keynes was a commie, why does it matter?

In a previous incarnation of this blog, I wrote about Keynes’s predictions of a theoretical future where humanity would be freed from all care of day-to-day concerns through expert management of the economic cycle by credentialed technocrats.

He called this future state “Bliss” and described it in his essay The Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren (coincidentally cited via marxists.org)

The pace at which we can reach our destination of economic bliss will be governed by four things – our power to control population, our determination to avoid wars and civil dissensions, our willingness to entrust to science the direction of those matters which are properly the concern of science, and the rate of accumulation as fixed by the margin between our production and our consumption; of which the last will easily look after itself, given the first three.

Economic bliss sounds a lot like fully automated luxury communism. But you can’t get there if the rabble is still making economic decisions for itself. Free markets must be destroyed, and only credentialed elites can be permitted economic autonomy. (That’s why nobody’s life, liberty or property is safe whenever the World Economic Forum is in session).

Keynes laid out a path to get there. Through endless money printing, the Cantillon Effect would lead to the destruction of the middle class. By wrapping it within a cloak of crypto-socialism, he gave it a veneer of intellectual acceptability:

“The work of monetary cranks like John Maynard Keynes taught in the modern universities the notion that government spending only has benefits, never costs. The government, after all, can always print money and so faces no real constraints on its spending, which it can use to achieve whatever goal the electorate sets for it”
— Saifedean Ammous, The Bitcoin Standard.

In Saifedean’s follow up, The Fiat Standard, Keynes and Marxism are mentioned as having large areas of overlap, goals and practically identical results:

“The number and influence of third-world leaders who were educated in British and American universities from the 1930s onward is staggering…anyone familiar with the economic history of developing countries, or with the rhetoric of any development agency or ministry in a developing country, will see this influence in the distinct stench of Marxist and Keynesian notions of central planning.The entire framing of the notion of economic development is driven ultimately by a highly socialist view of how an economy works.”

“By the 1970s, the development failures piled high, and a lot of soul-searching within the misery industry would lead to more government control and more centralized economic planning. As the “dependency school” approach became more popular, government central planning became far more pervasive. The combination of global easy money, following the U.S. government’s decision to suspend gold redeemability, and governments and international bureaucracies staffed with Keynesians and Marxists proved disastrous.”

Fuller’s paper goes a long way in providing an explanation on why collectivism and Keynesianism seem to resemble each other: it’s the same thing. It is all statist, centralized technocracy under the guise of

a) high-minded collectivism for the useful idiots of the working class, and

b) high-powered intellectual macro-economic policy for the useful idiots in the universities and think tanks.

This could be why we’re demonizing capitalism, energy, self-reliance, family, spirituality and anything else that falls to the right of Stalin. This is why Big Tech unicorns are by their own admission “commie as f*ck”, and why many of the celebrity class these days are self-proclaimed “woke” socialists. Especially the super-rich ones.

The good news

There was a time, especially under lockdowns, when I looked at the direction things were going, and I thought the Fabians had achieved complete victory. World socialism was practically here, having arrived under banners with names like The Great Reset, The Fourth Industrial Revolution and Stakeholder Capitalism.

Even worse, large swaths of the public seemed to be clamouring for it.

COVID stimulus showed how the lubricant for a globalized socialism was the monetary printing press. In his day, Friedrich Hayek (the anti-Keynes) realized this as well and was similarly pessimistic.

“I don’t believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can’t take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something they can’t stop.”
— Hayek, quoted in The Bitcoin Standard, p72

Enter, Satoshi.

The epiphany I had, and I’m not alone, is that we are not entering an age of centralized, technocratic authoritarianism, we are in the process of departing from it. We’re in the end game now. The crescendo of an age which has been unfolding for over a century – the era of the welfare state.

With the arrival of the Internet, and then Bitcoin, we’re undergoing a phase shift into the decentralized era of network states and micro-sovereigns.

The near universal mismanagement of COVID, from the possibility of a lab leak in the first place to being absolutely wrong about everything after that, pulled forward about 20 years of this tension and crammed it into 18 months. Too much, too soon. We were on track to gradually transition to a decentralized society via an interim phase of technocratic authoritarianism that could have lasted for decades, before giving away to the inevitable decentralized society. But now, we’re looking instead at a disorderly phase shift into deglobalization and decentralization. It’s already happening.

We’re at a point where reality is intervening with ideology and it was the pandemic that brought us here a few decades before I would have otherwise expected it. The conventional COVID narrative has all but broken down completely. Trust in institutions and experts is plummeting, the corporate media is a joke.

We may have already blundered our way into World War 3, while incumbent politicians around the world are being swept out of office on a wave of public backlash. Then there’s the economic and physical consequences of batshit policies that threaten to overwhelm our supply chains and energy availability everywhere.

Woke capitalism is being exposed as a sham. The public increasingly sees the Party at Davos as saturated with hypocrisy and arrogance.

The numbers don’t lie. #WEF #Davos was always about advancing Neo feudalism.? pic.twitter.com/RkQkS1iySx

— 21st Century Wire ?? (@21stCenturyWire) May 22, 2022

Make no mistake, we’re talking about the end of an epoch and the demise of the legacy power structure. Not only in terms of who the incumbents are, but the very architecture and fabric of how geopolitical and economic power is configured.

The old guard will not go down without a fight, and for the moment, they have the institutions and the media, but that is already changing.

“We’re all Keynesians now” was the intellectual rallying cry of the fiat era. Laser eyes will be the defining meme of the next one.

If I had to offer advice to anybody who was looking for ways to pivot their existing affairs and navigate the coming changes I would bullet point them as follows:

• Do not be reliant on government entitlements: these will soon be delivered via CBDCs and be full-throated social credit systems
• Turn off your TV, cancel all mainstream media subscriptions: read more books, get your news through alternative / indie media channels (start with The Sovereign Individual, both Saifedean Ammous books, and George Gilder’s Life After Google)
• If you’re a business owner: start taking crypto payments and HODL them
• If you’re not a business owner: Start one. Even a kitchen table business that you can grow over time.
• And stack sats. Always be stacking sats.

Buying Bitcoin is calling bullshit on everything

— Interstellar (@InterstellarBit) May 27, 2022

We’re going through a Fourth Turning-style phase shift. It will be turbulent, violent and at times terrifying.  But it will also bring boundless opportunity. Never before have we lived in an age where nearly anybody can go from a standing start to financial independence and self-sovereignty in the shortest amount of time with the lowest barriers to entry.

This dynamic will only intensify over the coming years and in the long run, this is what will propel a quantum leap in the human endeavour.

The world is undergoing a monetary regime change. Get the Crypto Capitalist Manifesto free, when you join the Bombthrower mailing list. Follow me as @bombthrower on Gettr or if you haven’t been kicked off Twitter (yet), @StuntPope