LORD OF THE FLIES AS A METAPHOR FOR CIVILIZATION
THE EQUIVALENT OF IMMATURE ADOLESCENTS RUN THE WORLD
DESTROYING THE WORLD IN ORDER TO SAVE IT
FORWARD:
This is going to take more development than just one essay. It has been a concept developing in the back of my mind for a few years.
This essay is kind of a hip pocket, off the cuff essay, written based on these thoughts without much deliberation.
I hope to write more on this daunting subject in the future - hopefully with more adequate deliberation and due diligence.
Sometimes the nature of reality overwhelms the writers egotistical desire to have the transactional last word - this is such an occasion.
As would be expected - making such a huge leap as corresponding the evolution of our civilization to William Golding’s novel Lord Of the Flies - has taken some considerable time to develop.
I don’t take this at all lightly and would not even consider the idea but that the current takeover of the world by thugs dictates that we find answers and that we find them quickly.
I would have preferred a more measured approach but that is not practical and does not serve our present needs as human beings.
In the past I have compared the antics of the global cabal - the one which is convinced they own the world - as the antics of misbehaving five year olds and - while that still seems accurate - the observation that may be better seen in light of the grand immaturity of certain adolescents - is even more accurate.
THE CURRENT FAILURE OF WORLD CIVILIZATION
All of our civilizations are perhaps notable for having failed - often failing spectacularly - and to the detriment of all citizens.
The cause of this failure is the impetus for much speculation.
I am as yet unsatisfied as to the reasons put forth for these failures by generations of academics and literati.
Am I implying that all civilizations are bad and that there is no hope of humans living together in relative peace and harmony?
No - on the contrary I believe there is much reason to trust we can do far better and is the motivation for writing this.
Neither do I mean to imply that the desire for personal power and agency is wrong - but there is a certain perversion of it that is wrong.
All humans are born wishing a healthy interactive power in the world and our very survival depends on this being fulfilled.
But there is a desire for a kind of absolute power - a kind of toxic power - which poisons all that it touches.
This essay begins to discuss this toxic power.
BOYS WILL BE BOYS
There is a huge wallop of information packed into this saying.
We use it to excuse so much in our society - the backslapping chamber of commerce type organizations, the ways in which business is conducted and controlled - by the political sphere and - last but not least - the de rigueur secret societies such as Freemasonry.
The history of secret societies alone could take up several books and swamp this essay before it begins - so I depend on the reader to make this jump here for practical purposes.
As we may observe much of the behavior we often may take for granted in the world takes in more sinister implications upon further reflection.
But for the sake of taking very large jumps - let’s take on artificial intelligence for starters and pick out the Lord Of the Flies aspects of this new technology.
I link the following essay by fellow SubStacker
in lieu of engaging in an exhaustive treatmentAI offers us a kind of distillation of the rise of Big Tech over the past seventy or so years.
And moreover there is a decided personality type found among the titans of big tech which serves us well for these purposes.
In order to envision this - consider Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak back in their garage - in a mental line up with Bill Gates, Larry Ellison with Elizabeth Holmes, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk - with the AI warrior Sam Altman.
There is a distinct type of human being here - hungry for technical expertise and corporate power - from adolescence.
In some of them - particular Jobs and Wozniak - there is clearly a kind of creative genius at work.
The others simply seemed to have ridden the sails of public - and both military industrial - and consumer - demand for - digital technology.
For those of you unfamiliar with the history of these people there are excellent films or biographical data I linked to each of their names - above.
And critically important to this is that each of these individuals rode the coat tails of other powerful entities to their heights of power.
These included the military industrial complexes of many nations, and the far reaching tentacles of such secret enclave entities as Bilderberg, Club of Rome and the World Economic Forum.
Big titanic corporations involved in consumer products and also military weapons - those such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle, Tesla and Space X - did not leap so spectacularly into power without a great deal of help and enthusiasm from nefarious civic forces.
IT HAS NOW BECOME FASHIONABLE TO CRITICIZE BIG TECH
By the time mainstream media jumps on the brand wagon - as they have in nauseating leaps and bounds - we know it has suddenly become yet another topic to take our attention away from what is important.
The subject - which has been important for years - but of course not important enough for mainstream media - which it seems ignores the really big and important stories until they become trendy.
There is a new book out, “BURN BOOK: A TECH LOVE STORY”, by tech insider Kara Swisher which has made this subject into ever more digestible fodder for trendy television shows.
Swisher who, in her trendy tell all - generates much useful information to back up this understanding that the tech bros are immature, insecure and seek power and authority to compensate for their personal deficiencies.
As I wrote about several years ago the Elizabeth Holmes saga is potentially the most revealing story of the massive degree of personal instability which underlies the whole tech sector.
https://www.youtube.com/live/mAfIb8Y92mY?si=ee1tWMknB9HOchm8
Be all this as it may - my main task here is to compare the behavior of titans of tech - and their enablers - to Lord Of the Flies.
There is enough information here to dedicate an entire library - and several graduate degree programs - to.
The boys dramatically portrayed in William Golding’s adventure story - Lord of the Flies - are the sons of powerful British families of privilege and rank.
Almost as if they had been taught from birth that rank and privilege allow rather primitive and demonic ways of commanding power.
Following the stress of a plane crash the boys - preadolescents in middle childhood - descend into a kind of Heart of Darkness not at all unrelated to the work of Joseph Conrad.
Although it is all to commonly done in polite society such behavior is not easily swept under the rug as is blithely rendered by the phrase “boys will be boys”.
Yes boys will be boys - as illustrated in Lord Of the Flies and Heart of Darkness and The Northman (or, the modern Hamlet) - as they are taught to do by their parents and through the society around them - through their culture and civilization.
There is much more to these stories and I encourage us all to read the works again, to view the films, and to look into that story which is always behind the story.
Children faithfully learn exactly what they live.
And the creative minds of humans - ceaselessly searching for meaning and frames of reference - are all too easily hackable - in the words of WEF notable Yuval Noah Harari.
We as humans have been hacked and are now under the rule of a cabal of characters straight from the ranks of Lord Of the Flies, of The Northman, or Heart of Darkness - or Hamlet.
But each of us will have to decide for ourselves in this.
No one else can tell us what to think or feel about what has happened.
But it is clear they have come to take us, and our children and any remnants of personal power and agency we may have heretofore commanded - for their own gain of absolute power - unimpeded by such niceties as constitutions or by the inconvenient existence of too many of us useless eaters on their planet.
Take this on faith - we have all been hacked - no one is coming to save us or rescue us - other than several billion of ourselves perhaps.
As Hemingway might say if he was among us - referring to the impotent belief that some other power - political or otherwise - is returning to save us:
“ISN’T IT PRETTY TO THNK SO”
We really are all in this together- and believing otherwise - is simply the quickest way to see all of us put out of our collective misery.
You see we are all too hackable and easily influenced by those who will always be present to separate us from our human vulnerabilities through various means - all of them violent and destructive to every individual - including themselves.
Friends don’t allow friends to self destruct. From
I am going to assume we are all in possession of our remaining faculties and powers to use this technological tool we have at our current disposal to begin to change the world.
Eventually - perhaps sooner than later - the powers that be will remove this tool and send the world into the chaos they prefer to operate under.
Once that happens we will be sent back to the Stone Age and dependent on our own devices - such as smoke signals and one to one communication.
This civilization is self destructing of the very seeds it has sown.
There is no saving it and seemingly little reason to do so.
There is a new world rising from the ashes of the old - but we must seize the day to allow it to grow and to seed the foundations for us and our children to survive upon.
It must be built on the full recognition of our unalienable rights as conferred by our creator and all that this means - or it too will crumble away and once again insure the downfall of each of us and all of us.
The future - like the present - is dependent on our all too human sensibilities and sensitivities - those qualities such as our creative and spiritual fire and the wonder and power of our imaginations.
We have the unalienable right to the use of these things to underwrite our unalienable rights as conferred by that elusive creator.
We have all been served and will need to make of it what we will.
From
To inquiry based, Socratic, non authoritarian education, decentralized and based on all of us accepting that none of us - not one - will ever know all there is to know.
Because we respect ourselves and other human beings and do not comply with a planet being run by immature mentally unbalanced adults who believe they - and not WE - are in charge.
No more big daddy and mommy state - being administrated by characters straight out of Lord Of the Flies.
We need to find a way to trust once again.
Note: This post also relates to the earlier post from today titled Two Year Olds and the Warlords Who Run the World.
Kakistocracy
Thank you, KW, I'm glad you found the article informative.
I feel there is great change upon us, and not the change everybody expects.
Voting won't solve these problems, despite what the immature adolescents say.