This Moment in Time
about what is job #1, #2, #3
First, some background…
Three years ago I wrote a long essay About the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. As best I could, I tried to understand the situation by absorbing a lot of content from a wide variety of sources, as I often do. One of those was Hanzi Freinacht who wrote 10 Key Insights Into Russia-Ukraine.
My comment on Hanzi’s article was,
There is great irony in what Hanzi Freinacht advocates. At this moment in time our priority is to save western civilization by defeating Putin in Ukraine no matter how long it takes. But the moment the war is won we must again realize that western civilization is not worth saving. It is extremely fragile and unsustainable. We must build a radically better civilization with a totally different operating system.
In my essay I also referenced an article by N.S. Lyons, The World Order Reset. I do not remember how I stumbled upon Lyons, but I found reading him was time well spent. Recently in my article Free Speech, I had a lot to say about a recent article by Lyons that got a lot of attention.
This morning I was scrolling through my Substack Notes feed which included a post by Matthew David Segall:
Thanks for this, Iain. I share basically all of your concerns about how things went haywire. Trump is a symptom of a very broken system. The problem I have with Lyons is not that you or anyone should read and share his insightful diagnoses of current political events. I've read and shared them, too! My problem is that he appears to be insufficiently attentive to the fact that Silicon Valley technofeudalist broligarchs are currently running the Executive Branch of the US Government. I can promise you they have no interest in the sort of conservative values you eloquently championed above. Their vision of the future could not be more LH-dominant. Elon Musk told Joe Rogan the other day that empathy is Western civilization's biggest weakness. It's "a bug," he said. The transhumanists running Trump's White House may not be "woke," but their vision is nonetheless a kind of transhuman hyper-progressivism.
Segall was commenting on an article by Iain McGilchrist, Laughter in heaven. McGilchrist is highly respected by many of us in the SPACE, and for good reasons. I read the article and it makes many good points.
BUT…
In my opinion, Iain McGilchrist misses this moment in time and I appreciate Segall speaking up, as he has done on other occasions. McGilchrist focuses on the Trump Team attacking the Administrative State which is no doubt necessary. McGilchrist is not a Trump supporter by any means, but in this article he does seem to be inappropriately soft on Trump.
At this moment in time, we can observe what people prioritize and, imo, there is something far more important than reducing a burdensome bureaucracy. The priority is, imo, getting the Trump Administration out of power as quickly as possible lest democracy be lost in the USA.
And I will make a comment similar to what I said three years ago.
At this moment in time our priority should be to get Trump+ out of power by any means possible. But the moment that happens, we need to realize that western civilization as manifested in the USA today is not worth saving. We must build a radically better civilization with a totally different operating system.
From my perspective, there are, at this moment in time, three priorities:
defeating Putin in Ukraine;
getting Trump+ out of power; and,
pausing AI.
And none of these objectives look achievable at this moment in time.
But these are objectives to which I personally can contribute very little. My personal priority is to personally thrive as best I can and to contribute in whatever small way to building a radically better civilization.