Pandora's Noah's Ark Box

The Other Obscenity.

Imre Lakatos was a dedicated Stalinist. Whether you can call someone even just ‘Marxist’ when they are a completely committed hard line Stalinist is arguable, to say the least.

‘Stalinism’ is a cult-of-personality totalitarian mindset which centres principally on absolute pragmatism in the first place – in other words, that anything at all, is ‘morally justified’ so long as your side ‘wins.’ Your side is represented nominally by one theoretical ‘strong leader’ that you approve of and back and have promoted into power but actually control behind the scenes. Your job once the puppet leader has been installed, is to maintain that puppet as the thing you wanted it to be from the start and to continually groom it in the form that you have decided. ‘Stalinism’ is itself a particular version of totalitarian belief systems, but which envisions the actual style and personality of the actual person of Joseph Stalin in particular, as both a key ingredient on the human, socialistic side of things, but critically too, on the mechanistic, ‘nuts-and-bolts’ of governing and ruling side of things as well.

Stalin was a mass-murderer and there can be little doubt but that Imre Lakatos was himself also a murderer, who used the idea that ‘the ends justifies the means’ continually to procure the deaths of rivals, or of those who placed his own position and survival as an active, an activist, political agent, at risk.

After World War II ended, Lakatos was caught up in dangerous political intrigue and internal disputes in Hungary and went to Vienna and from there to England.

His usual surface occupation as a University identity became the full-time undertaking that he chose to perform while in the West and from which role he succeeded in having a totally cataclysmic effect on academia worldwide that few really appreciate for what it was and still is.

Lakatos is the actual person who manoeuvred the world of academia into this present obtaining idea that there has to be a permanent demarcation between ‘categories’ of research: art is different to science is different to medicine is different to psychology is different to mathematics, and so on.

Although it is commonly believed that the ‘demarcation’ issue was established by Descartes, this is false. Descartes never said anything like that there were even various utterly differing ‘categories’ of knowledge – what he said was that the Church should stay out of human endeavours to discover truth.

How it has even come to be that there are whatever labels now widely used, placed onto certain areas of research disciplines themselves and not others and how it was ever ‘decided’ what fits into there and not somewhere else or that any certain particular thing attached to one academic label cannot be disposed with equal validity elsewhere – is perfectly unknown.

For instance, there never was a time in the past say, of ancient Greece and also of middle ages Arabic thinking, when actual music, was not already fully understood to be the practical dynamic part of highest mathematics – yet today, this is not seriously followed, and it creates enormous problems when much literature held in Oxford’s main academic library clearly cannot comply with Lakatos’ demarcation pronouncements, but which are all followed today by ‘modern’ academia.

The effect of what Lakatos did, was to totally emasculate academic research and factual research findings from any fluidly universal up-take and application by the widest human population, but constrained all of it under a single ‘hierophant’ gate-keeper system of powerfully funded research grant hierarchies which are popularly called the modern University academic system.

The point is not that humans should investigate things they need to understand, and that they should discover facts and truths – but only that there should be, and is, a system of control over what people do at all.

A blunt truth about this is simply that from authority comes commodity.

‘Truth’ is an academic commodity (IE of money value; of commercial motivation). Today.

Now, Here Is Where The Value Of The Apocalypse Box Comes Into First View.

We are swiftly approaching a time, when great disasters will come upon the whole of human civilisation, with the consequence that vast numbers of the human population will die, or at least ‘die out.’

And this is because, since Karl Popper, the world has been taken into a ‘false science’ era -, the momentum of the previous Age of Authentic Science has allowed us to survive superficially intact up to now, but we have already been in the post-science era for some time, and we will soon witness the meaning of that; its fully-flowered negative meaning. And once that negative meaning hits close to its peak, the effects will be devastating.

Part of the problems within today’s post-science era, has to do with the psychological manipulating of people’s ideas and beliefs through techniques that, albeit they are scientific tools themselves, are nonetheless maliciously used as the means to destroy individual human agency, and to supplant that with social consensus-based systems of ‘relative truth.’

One of the most powerful and decisive techniques used very widely today, was derived from the Asch Conformity Experiment, run at Swarthmore College in 1951. In this original study, test subjects were given a comparison diagram showing a straight line of a particular length, and an accompanying diagram consisting of three lines one of which was clearly the same size as that of the line in the first diagram, and with the other two lines being one slightly taller and the other slightly shorter.

Using a variety of coercive means which were designed to create the impression in the test subjects that they were either ‘fitting in with the group,’ or acting and thinking outside of what the group desired, the researchers were able to show that people’s responses to whether any two lines appeared the same length to them, was markedly affected by the application of social pressure to ‘conform to the group.’

This kind of actual scientific experiment has been used to successfully drive such media, marketing and political propaganda procedures to obtain and retain power, as the well-known ‘manufacturing of consent’ idea.

And by further undermining an inherent agency in the adult human being to individually personally determine truth and facts – especially by using legitimate tools of mathematics and logic – such as through the deliberate inculcating of false reasoning methodologies in the young minds of children at schools that use ‘new-speak/right-speak’ and ‘new-think/right-think’ programs (which are basically the same things that the Asch Conformity Experiment highlighted), it becomes more and more enabled to the propagandist, for them to manoeuvre even whole societies and political constituencies quite easily into structures of deliberate false beliefs... ...in other words in order to maliciously drive them into boxed canyons in which they may be fleeced, as it were.

Let’s say, that good hygiene practices were encouraged in the public at large, and that these on their own had the capacity to keep at bay pandemics such as Covid19, it would be hard to argue against policies directed at this. But when it becomes the case that a proposed solution is to supply vaccinations to the whole entire population, then a cost-gain analysis must be made. And it never was made before the whole panoply of every single ‘authority’ on the planet decided that mass vaccination was at once the preferred solution. And it never was made afterwards, either. Simply – it never was made. And that is because the first instinct – as well as the final instinct - of modern government and institutional authority is already towards the ‘manufacturing of consent,’ rather than the clear establishing of objective fact and the subsequent ‘decision tree’ entailed.

Homelessness in cities not designed to cater to people living in the open streets, will most certainly lead to different kinds of pandemics, with as great a potential virulence, but indeed a much more devastating lethality – for instance, if there were bubonic plague to emerge, or cholera. Yet, the presence of new multi-billion dollar skyscrapers, all mostly empty, alongside the ever rising numbers of the homeless, presents serious economic and social thinkers with the question of what the cost-benefit of capital investment skewed to ‘physical property’ is, in the modern world, and to whom those benefits will obtain.

A billionaire superannuation fund executive, will just as easily die if they contract a severe case of cholera, as might the homeless person living in the streets below the skyscraper. ...And they can just as easily contract it.

People in apparent positions of power, have not clearly thought things through.

Certainly there is a critical trap to this style of thinking:

In the US election for the Presidency of 2020, the individual in charge of the algorithmic-driven vote calculating machines in Georgia, countered the security video footage showing what appeared to have been illegal processing of suspicious ‘votes’ after midnight, as it were – with the narrative that ’even if these were problematic, nevertheless, the amounts claimed by the people alleging fraud and illegality were not really sufficient to alter the outcome...′ Here we have a clear-cut instinctive reaction that deviates markedly from a need to actually discover any objective truth about what had transpired, only instead to shift the ground to an intent to be dismissive on grounds not relating to the objective truth, but to the sheer exclusive motivation of the putative or apparent outcome only.

The centre of gravity in the thinking has become the gleeful and often lurid, benefits of artificially enforced outcome, and not at all to the outcome of truth.

In such styles of thinking, the calculus looks like this: ’If process A is either for entity D to gain, or to lose, then whether A is valid and/or legitimate is not relevant, so long as D controls A in every case.′

The ‘in every case’ part is what we can term ‘the algorithm.’ ‘Algorithm’ being what we have already seen, means to be able to ‘press one’s thumb down onto the scale to affect the outcome (in only one direction).’