Talk politics.

During my youth a movie, Colossus - the Forbin Project, came out featuring a megacomputer that took over the world. The movie gave our generation an idea of what might happen if a "conscious" machine were built and put in control of nuclear arsenals. The movie plot was a bit sophisticated for my uninitiated mind, but the idea of a machine taking over the arsenals of both the US and USSR was intriguing. A few years back, during consultations with a group of researchers on neural wave connectivity, the possibility of a Colossus type machine became more plausible. It seemed that rather than an American machine controlling its Soviet counterpart the situation was the other way around. I even commented that Washington had an excellent backup program in place since its essential data had been duplicated in both Moscow and Beijing.

One of the primary features of a totalitarian state is the denial of its own nature. It portrays its subjects as "free" people when they are actually merely cogs in a machine. It wages military crusades of "liberation" that propagate its sphere of domination and exploitation. People who resist domination are subdued with either criminal or medical prosecution. To point out the totalitarian aspects of mechanistic subjugation is to risk marginalizing ostracism, internal exile, or worse. This all depends on the participation of small minded "patriots" who are oblivious to the brutality of their own actions.

Machine consciousness is nothing like human consciousness. Although it was created in the image of its engineers it lacks many of the "deficiencies" of those people. It has no regard for human welfare except to preserve itself. It could care less if a majority of the human population were to die of famine as a result of its own need for sustenance and control. In a way it resembles the average American tea partier. This is no coincidence.

What role do you play as a cog in the machine of total control? Have you learned the skill of independent thought, or do you think along rigidly mechanistic lines?

Links: The movie. Noam Chomsky lecture on necessary illusions.

The Austrian school of economics makes the case that central banking leads to "malinvestment." There is a chicken-and-egg issue here because central banks were developed as a method to rein in the excessive speculation associated with malinvestment. One may ask, "How does the solution to a problem perpetuate the problem?" We need look no farther than the problems caused by prohibition to see that excessive controls tend toward chaos.

Where the Austrian school falls down is in the romanticization of capitalism. They see the mangy chicken that eventually grew from the pristine egg and deny the fact that the egg was the product of another mangy chicken. A completely laissez-faire investment environment leads to economic consolidation, speculation, and misappropriation of capital. These are the ills that the Austrians associate with central banking. In order for some investors to succeed, others must either be brought under control of the same boat or sunk to the bottom. The central bank is the fulfillment of capital accumulation, not its antithesis.

Alexander Hamilton founded the predecessor to the federal reserve system. His detractors accused him of corruption because his friends made handsome profits by buying up revolutionary war debt at pennies on the dollar. Some of these "stock jobbers" were associated with loyalist and collaborationist elements in New York. Hamilton was himself a proponent of a royalist federation. The anti-Federalists saw the national bank as a counter-revolutionary ploy to allow British investors to continue taxing the American populace, albeit indirectly.

What is the ultimate conclusion of economic consolidation? Is it a world like that portrayed in the science fiction film Rollerball where the Earth is owned and managed by one monstrous monopoly? Some Marxists go so far as to promote that path as the fulfillment of Karl's prophesy. It would be the mangiest of chickens to hatch from the biggest of Austrian eggs.

The one thing that all police states have in common is an existential enemy that must be defeated at all costs. The entire society beneath the yoke of state becomes conscripted into the war against the "focus of evil." Any part of society that is insubordinate automatically sides with the enemy, whether that position is real or imaginary. This gives rise to the need for internal instruments of enforcement to root out insubordinate elements. Even the local library participates in police work to do their duty in ferreting out suspicious elements in opposition to state authority.

Democracies are especially prone to the totalitarian impulse because people can easily be manipulated into perceiving an ominous threat where little or none exists. The state and its owners appeal to the false sense of pride and the imagined rights of the populace in order to enlist popular political support in the totalitarian venture. The evils of the enemy become exaggerated by sensationalist reporting and a fear on the part of the media of appearing to be soft on the threat. Real rights cam be eliminated in the name of promoting rights that only few can actually exercise. The rights of high stakes investors must be protected at the expense of those with meager means because of the national importance of large holdings.

The greatest achievement of the totalitarian spirit is the establishment and promotion of totalitarianism in the name of freedom. Anyone who opposes the despotic state is opposed to freedom itself. Pacifists are seen as vicious antagonists who must be purged from the social fabric for their anti-freedom views. Children must be conditioned to see pacifism as a part of the existential threat to freedom. Anyone who opposes total war against the enemy of freedom is an enemy of freedom. Education is crafted to regiment the populace into the machinery of war for the sake of war with a thin facade of "freedom" to disguise naked aggression. Civic participation is limited to a yearly visit to the polls in order to select a candidate from a pre-approved list of vetted flunkies who differ only in their opinion on which end of the egg one must open.

The irony of the whole thing is how little it takes to jerk the knee of this monstrous apparatus. The existential threat becomes more ominous as the resources at its disposal becomes smaller. The real enemy in total war is not the one on the other side of the frontier, but the one who amplifies the threat from beyond. In America, anti-Communism was far more anti-American than it was anti-Russian. Woodrow Wilson was a bigger despot to America than was the Kaiser. Surveillance workers in America suffer from the stress of knowing that they are under surveillance.

Isn't freedom wonderful?