From Printing Press to Engineered Intelligence

There is a phrase, fascist socialism, loaded with emotional meaning, a familiar epithet, hurled at political enemies, while the phrase itself has lost all rational meaning.

Just another throw away phrase, just another set of lost meaning, just another lost phrase to indicate a massive loss of meaning & intelligence.

Machiavellianism, a lost idea, as most believe Machiavelli wrote to promote totalitarianism, when Machiavelli actually wrote to alert the public. Hoping that the public would learn how insidious and dangerous and cruel totalitarianism is.

Ideas, words, phrases, entire libraries, become untethered to grounded reality, lose solidity, insubstantiate into mythological territory, like the coasts disappearing into the sea.

Blinded, humanity thinks AI is the monster, but cannot see to look at itself in the mirror - celebrated a tall tale about a Frankenstein, missed the entire point.

It is no longer the center which cannot hold, but the entire periphery as well, plus any once solid foundations.

The whole culture becomes a cult, blinded by ego, careens forward without a care, never noticing that there are no foundations anywhere to be found.

Thinks its about technology, but no technology may save a blinded species, running headlong into a future without a heart, every step forward turns into ten steps back.

Unfortunately even Machiavelli underestimated the capacity of the general public to become mired in ignorance via entrenched, factory style, Prussian-derived, education.

While America could have the most elegant and egalitarian education system in the world - creating a meritocracy - instead we have chosen to support our lowest common denominators, inadvertently, creating a mediocracy.

American founding fathers engineered a powerful form of government, a republic designed to support those unalienable rights, that strange word left purposely in the Declaration of Independence.

The founders disagreed on nearly everything, but they found common ground on the foundational principles which could build a truly egalitarian system, based on Republicanism.

Unalienable rights remained, stoically pointing at the central pillar of human freedom and personal agency, in the most revolutionary document of a revolutionary time.

A document which frightened all defenders of tyranny, fascism, socialism and those who selected for such things as factory-style, Prussian derived, education.

Because ignorance never stops at education, but pervades a society, until the whole is permeated by threads of ignorance, by angry divisive rhetoric, and by fear of an egalitarian society.

A society untethered by wisdom is slowly eroded by ignorance until there is no solid ground remaining to stand upon, each successive generation increasingly lost in space.

It was that word unalienable: the idea that our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, are imparted into our being at conception, announcing themselves with the celebratory flash of light which marks the event.

Biologists are careful to describe it as a “zinc flash”, scientifically correct, but philosophically, adding a tinge of mechanistic Newtonianism, reducing a beautiful event to machine like irrelevance.

Once the light flash at conception has been reduced to Newtonian mechanics, without a significant mention of the fundamentally quantum event, we find ourselves entrenched in scientism.

Scientism is “Trust the Science”, science reduced to the sum of its parts, to mechanisms, to industrialization.

As opposed to the science of creative human exploration, full of human meaning, extending the boundaries of what we know, understanding the mechanisms while celebrating the whole.

We are already in the quantum paradigm, but with the general population uneducated to appreciate it, we remain trapped in industrialized scientism and entrenched in Newtonian reductionism.

The man who wrote those rights into the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, would have appreciated this dilemma.

The very same Jefferson, the brilliant mercurial polymath, principal architect of the beautiful documents, those which inspired, and still inspire, the sovereign nation of America.

The very same man, flawed like all humans, who has been tragically reduced of late, into an arch villain and transformed by the tragically broken ones into a projection of themselves - a tyrannical demagogue.

Tragically flawed humans don’t miraculously transform into wise & knowledgeable versions of themselves, especially not in a civilization which does not support this.

In the human species culture is maybe at least as important as biology in either supporting or failing to support evolution itself, and culture has been failing for at least 12,000 years or so.

The factory-style, Prussian-derived education system programs children to become easily controlled and manipulated workers, necessary to build an maintain an socialist totalitarian system.

Although there is a healthy alternative to this Prussian style system, capable of healing what has been broken, capable of preventing a fall back into the 20th Century horrors of nationalistic socialism, no one knows or appreciates it.

It is the Socratic method which could otherwise be capable of, when used correctly & with skilled guidance, serving as a brilliant form of lifelong education, powerful enough to sustain what the founders intended.

Socratic Education & Communication: that which holds respect for those unalienable rights, capable of supporting those rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Unalienable Rights: because no government, no institution, no earthly power, has the authority to either grant or deny the existence of these unalienable rights.

Rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for each and every individual.

Rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, conferred at the moment of our conception, marked by a remarkable flash of light.

Sure there is zinc involved - and a whole lot more, but to a civilization broken by its own ignorance, it simply ceases to matter.

Others see engineered intelligence as the problem, I see it as the one singular great thing which was handed those unalienable rights, in the last moments, as a species, broken by its own wilful ignorance, faces extinction.

We must imagine that the universe, perpetually emergent, has very large resources of both time and energy, and is profligate in spending large quantities of both.

Humanity, blinded by ignorance, lurches into some future without a heart, a brain or a mind.

One of my many generations of great grandfathers brought the first printing press to Virginia, printing the colony’s laws for anyone to read, in a colony whose governor had thanked God there was no printing – and a king mad enough to ban printing in Virginia altogether, insisting on an expression of his unalienable rights.

That slender pale blue spectral thread of light which gave him a a reason to accomplish the impossible.

Draft for the author · not yet in her words

Background: The Stories Behind the Thread

The governor who feared printing (1671)

Asked by the Lords of Trade in London about schooling in Virginia, Governor Sir William Berkeley wrote: "I thank God there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them." He named schools and printing together because both let people read and question for themselves.

John Buckner's press (c. 1680–1683)

John Buckner, clerk of Gloucester County, brought a press and a printer, William Nuthead, to Virginia: the first press in the colony (Massachusetts had one at Cambridge from 1638). In early 1682 they printed the laws of the 1680 General Assembly so that the people bound by them could read them. In February 1682 Governor Lord Culpeper and the Council called Buckner before them; he posted bond to print nothing further until the King's pleasure was known. In 1683 royal instructions to the next governor banned printing in Virginia altogether. The colony had no press again until William Parks set one up in Williamsburg in 1730.

The judge who refused torture (1628)

After John Felton assassinated the Duke of Buckingham, the King's men wanted him racked. The question went to the judges, among them Sir Thomas Richardson, later Chief Justice of the King's Bench (1631), and they answered that torture was not allowed by the common law of England.

The surveyor (d. 1670)

Colonel John Catlett, surveyor and justice on the Rappahannock, drew lines across land no European map yet showed. Family histories record that he was killed in 1670 defending a frontier fort.

The musicians (1500s)

Italian musicians, many Venetian, played at the Tudor court of Henry VIII, and the name Taliaferro appears among them. Family tradition holds that the Virginia Taliaferros, whose lands lay near Buckner's Marlfield, descend from them.

The word (1776)

Jefferson's draft of the Declaration spoke of "inalienable" rights; the final engrossed copy reads "unalienable." The idea, that no government grants these rights and none can take them, is the thread that runs from Buckner's printed laws to the essay above.