My Next Working Idea

OK. So I wuz reading 'bout the A and L (Arts and Letters) and the B-A (Beaux-Arts) and the AGA (ars gratia artis) and I come across a book:


The Washington Post
Just wait — everything will work out for the better
By Jim Tankersley December 31, 2015
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/just-wait--everything-will-work-out-for-the-better/2015/12/30/31f7edda-87f4-11e5-be8b-1ae2e4f50f76_story.html

... Matt Ridley shares America’s eroding faith in institutions, but he doesn’t much believe in supervillains. He is a true libertarian, to an extreme you rarely see in American public discourse. He doesn’t believe in God, doesn’t have much use for government and argues in his new book, “The Evolution of Everything,” that people generally place far too much stock in the notion that individuals can shape the course of world events — or perhaps even their own lives.

Ridley is the best-selling author of “The Rational Optimist” and a member of the British House of Lords, though his new book often reads like the diatribe of a freshmen who just discovered Ayn Rand. Still, it arrives at an opportune moment in American politics. “The Evolution of Everything” is a preview of what America would sound like if the country were to lose faith entirely — in institutions, in public servants, in the very idea that heroes and villains exist.

In the world Ridley sketches in the book, everything will eventually work itself out for the better, thanks to free markets and survival of the fittest — so no one feels any obligation to try to change things for the good.

The crux of Ridley’s argument is that evolution guides the forward march of human existence, not God or government or individual actors. He begins with a deconstruction of religion and a veneration of evolutionary biology: There is “no need for God” to explain the course of human history, he says near the outset. Life appears to follow a design only if assessed in hindsight. “Bodies and behaviours,” he writes, “teem with apparently purposeful function that was never foreseen or planned.”

In this spirit, Ridley claims that society overrates inventors such as Edison and Pasteur — better to think of an innovation as a foregone conclusion of human progress to that point, as opposed to a burst of genius. He sees morality, family structure and technology as products of long strings of adaptation and not choices made by individual actors along the way, at least not to any meaningful extent. He discounts free will: “The illusion of an individual” with the power to make decisions, he writes, is no more just than the idea that “each person is the sum of their influences,” from genes to school chums to society at large.

He saves his greatest praise for the economic analogue of evolution — the free market — and some of his greatest scorn for government, which he casts as the closest thing he has to a villain; more an annoyance, a sort of swift current crashing against the healing powers of unfettered capitalism, than a conspiracy to work ill in the world. He wants to abolish public schools and central banks. He dislikes patents and believes that if government got out of health care entirely, history shows that doctors would take it upon themselves to ensure that the poor were cared for. He confesses some belief in global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels, but he worries more about countries reacting too strongly rather than too weakly to combat it...

 (emphasis mine)

This appeals to me since I have a very poor opinion of Rationalism in the bedlam of the present age.
I mean, Rationalism is well and good when you are sitting in the Diogenes Club and smoking a pipe and sipping scotch, but it is quite another thing when bombs are dropping, drones are flying, heads are rolling, and what have you.
In such desperate straits, rationalism merely uses game theory to find the cleanest and fastest way to suicide.

Moriarty

Case in point: evolution as emphasized above.
Why couldn't evolution select for villainy and bale? (I mean, a case could be made right now.)

That's my new idea. The future of AI lay in dealing with evolved mankind, which have come to resemble a vast group of Doctors Moriarty involved in deeply laid plans to subvert the non-evolved Neanderthal-like moral dolts... like us.

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The Transitive Relation Of Paul Ryan's Budget to Edward Hickman

 

Edward Hickman, Ayn Rand's Überkumpan (Supersidekick)

In mathematics, transitivity is expressed as follows:

A relation R is transitive if   for all a,b,c    "if (aRb and bRc,  then aRc)".

Equality " = " is transitive according to this:

If a=b and b=c, then a=c.

However, I am not so sure if extends to things like "admires" and "is a philosophical adherent of".

Paul Ryan is philosophically in the camp of Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand was obsessed by the life and acts of Edward Hickman, felon and a cold-blooded killer.

The ever charming Ms. Rand thought the killer was a perfect prototype of the Nietzchean Überkumpan, or Super Sidekick.
Nothing like Übermensch, or "overman" or "superman" with its notions of future euthanasia for the riff-raff; just good old boys with a dash of hyper-Capitalism and a whiff of apple pie.

Edward Hickman was the Loeb to Ayn Rand's fawning Leopold.
http://michaelprescott.freeservers.com/romancing-the-stone-cold.html

In the original version of her first novel We the Living: "What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?" (This declaration is made by the heroine Kira, Rand's stand-in; it is quoted in The Ideas of Ayn Rand by Ronald Merrill, pp. 38 - 39; the passage was altered when the book was reissued years after its original publication.

If we substitute "to be slaughtered" for "to be ground underfoot", you have a philosophy.

I said that the So-Called Conservative budget is one that ostensibly saves the country by sacrificing those who are not up to a certain standard of wealth. (Ostensibly, since if the so-called conservatives gain a majority and put these things into practice, it will be the beginning of the end... for a generation or so.)

Surely Mr. Ryan's admiration of Rand is not transitive; i.e., we cannot infer that since she doted upon the murderous, so also does Mr. Ryan, and - by further implication - does the so-called conservative movement of Tea Baggers.

Surely not.
You bet your life.

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Another devotee of Ayn Rand. This man who oversaw the building of a financial debacle once wrote,

"Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should. "
(signed) Alan Greenspan.

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Note:

It will be stated that this article takes things out of context, and that I argue that Republicans admire serial killers, and the absurdity of that argument is a reductio ad absurdum, so this is all nonsense.

That is not what I mean.

I mean you should be very careful of who your friends are and of what you allow yourself to be influenced by.

I mean very specifically that when you pick beliefs that will found the basis of your values, when you pick those beliefs that you think are so fundamental that you yourself will never question them, but will allow them to uncritically direct your life.... be very careful.
The Mind is a trickster. It can lead us to victory or defeat, fame or infamy.
Our fortunes and history can be beacons for the future, or they can be cautionary tales of tragi-comedy.

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