There is something sick about the first person who said “Humans just don’t follow orders very well. I wish I had a creature that would follow my orders perfectly. How do I train such a creature?”

In time, another person realized no such creature exists.

Many share this want. Some seek to help empower the individual. All too often, in this want, is the dismissal of a human’s individuality.

Great effort has gone into denying the human his individuality. Correspondingly, great effort has gone into making him, as much as possible, into a well-behaved and predictable input and output mechanism:

Behavioral psychology, management, marketing, education are but a few of the fields that put so much effort into this. “How to make man behave less like man, more like animal,” has been the focus of that work. Outsmarting the Sociop... Stout Ph.D., Martha Best Price: $19.36 Buy New $17.12 (as of 04:06 UTC - Details)

It is dehumanizing in the truest sense of that word.

But it doesn’t stop there. It goes a step further, for a beast is a biological entity with its own unpredictabilities.

Adherents create a perfect idea: a computer with ultimate intelligence and great power which never questions commands.

That becomes the new ideal to which man is compared, to which man is pushed to be like.

How can man be a predictable and interchangeable commodity?

How can the natural affinity for man to question authority be minimized and then neutralized?

There are those who seek to use computers to empower the individual. They are few in number.

The output of many in the tech world is not coincidental. It is an expression of their values. That output includes their politics. It is rooted in bad philosophy that refuses to recognize reality for what it is and refuses to recognize individuals as such. This is true of so many, from a social-justicey-kool-aid-haired intern at Google up to Bill Gates. This thinking crosses disciplines and reaches far beyond tech, to all corners of professional life. Introducing Logic: A G... Shatil, Sharron Best Price: $4.34 Buy New $3.25 (as of 04:06 UTC - Details)

Based on bad philosophy and, at times, bad people, of mentally deficient sociopathy, a common attitude is how can computers be used to help man serve others like predictable automatons. How can man be seen more like computer? How can man be made more like computer?

This is the inherent sociopathy in mainstream tech.

It is also the work of individuals in many fields, who could never fathom the dictum “The law exists for man, and not man for the law.”  For they go through their professions making strange estimations, meant to indicate perfect markets or perfect competition, in the case of economists, but those estimations do not reflect reality.

Correspondingly, their work becomes to bring reality, closer to their model – a fool’s errand – rather than bring their model closer to reality.

Or in the case of climate scientists who assume away all the variables of reality in their models and then seek to make reality more closely match their results rather than bring greater reality to their models.

Another example is the informatic, making the algorithm that describes human needs and wants in a simple piece of math. But it doesn’t. The algorithm was wrong from the very beginning. Then the presumption is that the human user is wrong. Could ten thousand PhDs working on a project possibly be more wrong than Joe Sixpack?  “User error” it is then called, alongside many other dismissive and distracting terms for failure, when in fact what was wrong was the idea that assuming away variables brings you closer to reality.

There is so little reality at the heart of that thinking. The Singularity Is Nea... Kurzweil, Ray Best Price: $2.30 Buy New $12.71 (as of 04:06 UTC - Details)

Man is man.
Beast is beast.
Machine is machine.

Great effort will continue to be put forward into confusing those three ideas, distinct and true. Great pain will be caused by those refusing to acknowledge the distinct reality dividing these three groupings.

Their disregard for reality will not change reality. Reality will care not for the opinion of such men. Reality takes no poll before exacting its rules. Reality forms no plebiscite to determine the feelings of those its rules affect.

And consequently, it is reality that will continue being reality, regardless of the degree to which the sociopath ignores reality.

The true variable is in how much pain will be created by this attempt to idealize away reality, to assume away truth, to claim reality has no application on reality.

And that variable is determined by how much faith man puts in the sociopath, how much power man places in the hands of those who deny reality.

This is directly proportional to the amount of pain that can be caused by such ideas.

Relegate them to the attic, where the nutty, dysfunctional uncle has long belonged, and where wiser generations placed him, or in the basement as an occasional diversion on a boring day.

That’s where wiser generations placed these eccentrics who had such poor understanding of humanity and reality, and had such poor social graces, that they were seen as mere dismissed eccentrics, so public in their sociopathy that no one could take them seriously. The Coming of Neo-Feud... Kotkin, Joel Best Price: $30.51 Buy New $19.54 (as of 04:06 UTC - Details)

But that is not every eccentric, for more than that was placed into determining one’s value.

Today, being eccentric is practically an asset in itself. Our society, appreciative of the advances of some eccentrics, appreciative of the oddball, and awash with cheap money and easy credit, cares little for the philosophical discernment needed to root out the sociopath.

The sociopath and eccentric are not the same. But they sure can look alike if you know no better and believe that no one would ever put a sociopath on the cover of a magazine or hand him wads of cash. To the contrary, in this era, those are more likely to be marks of the sociopath than not.

The venture capitalist knows: throw a million dollars at one hundred eccentrics and one will make you into a billionaire.

No longer relegated to the attic, the sociopath may even sound good occasionally, especially in sound bites, or in softball interviews. A broken watch is right twice a day, but seldom is the toxic philosophy of the sociopath even right that often.

The roots of these beliefs are bad, as bad as it comes. How very distracting this era of easy money, world reserve status, and quantitative easing to infinity can be on what really matters.

Suddenly frivolity matters.

And reality is nothing.

Insightful data is irrelevant, wisdom more irrelevant. Technocracy: The Hard ... Wood, Patrick M. Best Price: $33.00 Buy New $24.59 (as of 03:55 UTC - Details)

Narrative and image and force rule the day.

It becomes immoral to do anything but bow to the greatest sociopathy and to pretend you have no memory and no ability to reason.

How did so many Americans get here?

They stopped asking hard questions.

And it didn’t start yesterday.

But the remnant remains. Continuing to ask hard questions. Continuing to be intellectually rigorous. Continuing to be exacting.

Because no matter what an academic movement says about what reality is, reality doesn’t care.

Logic is our greatest tool for separating us from the beast, our greatest tool in separating us from the machines.

In all recorded history, there has never been a lack of the anti-logical. There has never been a lack of sophistry. It may forever be with us and that should not for a moment faze you. Reality has a way of snapping back into proper form that which thinks itself immune from reality.

It is our job to know the truth as best as possible and to organize our resources as best we can in accordance with that truth.

That is our work. No more. No less.

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