Humans are not the only sentient life on earth.
To grasp this, the concept of meta-life needs to be understood. Or, layer of existence. Humans are the meta-life of cells. We are a layer of existence above bacteria. Bacteria are a meta-life of DNA, which is a step above molecules, which are themselves a meta-form of even lower particles.
This chain doesn't end at humans. And, we are in a direct evolutionary confrontation with an entity directly above us- Government.
Governments are sentient. They are not some sort of average of human will, no more than a human is the average of his cell's will. And, of course, governments are self aware. They are an existential threat, and intentionally so. They are by far the most dangerous known existence. Governments are malicious. This statement is literal.
To them, independent thought is cancer. That is also true in a literal sense, after taking into account the metaphorical nature of the premise. Of course governments don't think like humans any more than humans think like ants. But we have to anthropomorphize if we want any hope of understanding other sentient life. The human brain just has too much circuitry designed for understanding other humans, so our intelligence is multiplied several times over if we can conceptualize an object in human terms.
To achieve this, the art of congruence, symmetry and distortion are necessary. Distort the mental image into a malleable shape, transform it, then reverse the distortion. That is the key to using dedicated circuits on arbitrary tasks.
Governments are powerful. They are massive entities, able to gather such vast fortunes that even the richest humans are incapable of spending what governments consider pocket change. Governments bristle with weapons. Governments have a keen sense of pain, and quickly react to any threat.
But, beyond everything else, governments are aware that humans are enemies. They are used to opposing humans, and know how to take advantage of our inherent attributes.
When a human wishes to destroy an ant colony he does not get out a weapon and slaughter the ants. He scatter poison on the ground. The ants mistake the poison for food, and feed it to their young. They get it on their body and spread it into the nest. Their tiny little brains just can't grasp the treachery they face, and blindly, willingly, partake in their own destruction, as an active agent thereof. The ants themselves do the majority of the work. The human expends only the slightest of efforts, and hoodwinks the ants into doing the rest.
Compared to government, humans are more intelligent.
There are far more of us. But, that is not the only reason.
Many humans, individually, could, if given the body of a government, easily outdo any extant government in basically every metric. For all that a government is a sentient being, most can be considered to be their version of drug addicted, sickly, beggars. And, their great heroes are only on level with our office workers. Perhaps it's something to do with their nature, that they are not so optimized as a species with hundreds of thousands of years of evolution behind them. Or, perhaps, it's just that their numbers are so pathetically small, that an exceptional example of their species has yet to be born.
Government is not supersentient. They are merely more aware of their environment. In turn, governments bear more malice towards humans than humans towards government.
Meanwhile, humans are distracted. They are trying desperately to survive against yet lower forces. Against disease. Against aging. Against resource depletion. They spend their time trying to scramble together small sums of wealth, avoid danger and pass on their capabilities and values to their descendants.
Government is aware of this balance of power. They know that their days are numbered, if ever humans were not locked in conflict with external actors. So they deliberately send aid to our enemies.
Of course, they cannot simply kill us outright. They can kill lots of humans, or a few strategic ones, but humans are a government's own cells. They can't just kill all humans. Yet.
And, of course, humans are powerful. If it really comes down to an all out war between government and humanity, as of right now, humans would win.
So governments must be subtle. And thus, they created their modern strategy-
A- Skim the froth. All advances are seized by the government. The most blatant method of achieving this aim, is the federal reserve, and their zero-deflation policy. Every year, all progress towards reducing the cost of living is skimmed away, by printing money into government coffers, and negating any efficiency gains with automatic new makework, funded via pyramid loans, only ever repaid through the effect of further money typed into bank accounts and released in the form of yet larger loans. Of course, this massive debt feeds into the next step nicely:
B- Scare the masses. To ensure that humans are incapable of independent thought, the government wants them to be closely managed and scheduled. The humans must be stripped of their energy, and trained to delimit their thoughts. In other words, they must be employed. But humans don't like employment. Employment is not natural. Employment is demeaning yourself in front of others. It's doing painful, dangerous and monotonous deeds for hours every day for months on end. Employment raises just about every flag evolution installed within humanity to discourage us from extinction. Unfortunately, evolution made a mistake. Humans are cowards when faced with the prospect of immediate and irreversible loss. Humans are easily tamed when threatened with immediate physical consequences.
Of course, governments threaten our comfort and security, but, they've learned an easier, more subtle way to exploit this vulnerability- the government threatens our property, our status and our children.
They do this through artificial expenses. They guide us into debt, by requiring massively expensive work-licenses. They prod us into compliance with property taxes. They force us to buy expensive insurance programs. They force inefficiency into every aspect of our lives, multiplying the price of our homes, our electricity, our medicine and much else, so as to always be just barely within our reach.
When our earnings get high enough to potentially escape the government's whirlpool of despair, it's reined in via income tax, and if that isn't enough a milieu of taxes ranging from inflation to capital gains, to estate taxes rope the assets back into the government's control.
This is a policy of artificial dependency, built upon a policy of artificial expenses buttressed by massive taxation.
C- Corral the abnormals. Humans are smart. Even in the face of hopeless odds, we can use our sentience to overcome the impossible. Even a slave, whipped daily, worked to the edge of his muscles, given only his daily bread in return, is dangerous. Too dangerous. Eventually, he'll think of something. Maybe it'll be a powerful weapon with which to overthrow his masters. Maybe a useful tool, sold to his master's enemies. Or perhaps, he'll find a way to do his work easily, start faking his despair and build wealth and power in a black market.
To fight these people, the government must attempt to close down all avenues of human reason. Central to this effort is regulation. Modern regulation takes many forms. Government wishes always to be subtle. To scatter poison rather than stick its hand into a nest of fire ants. So, rather than using one blanket approach, they attempt to ban all human action, one by one, in giant ledgers with hundreds of thousands of pages.
But, their work becomes easily visible in many places- for instance, in the FDA, tasked with preventing humans from garnering freedom from disease, or improving upon our brain chemistry. Or the EPA, tasked with ensuring that humans do not expand into new territories and resources. Suffice to say, the government has no interest in our welfare. They are purely malicious.
Things that don't work aren't banned.
Everything that is banned, is banned because it works.
Opium, marijuana and cocaine are direct access boards for humanity's strongest assets. Using it, humans could become more capable and less needy. Opium was banned because it allowed humans to overcome pain. Marijuana granted us access to patience and wisdom. Cocaine, focus and energy. Of course, none of these were omnipotent. To avoid self destruction, they had to be used strategically or intelligently. But, humans are sentient. We did so. And, we were improving upon our efforts, learning to expand the scale of our efforts while cutting down on the costs.
And the government realized that humans would soon correct the security vulnerabilities inherent in our chemistry, and reach a higher level of sentience. So they actively stopped us.
Gambling was corralled because it allowed humans to pool their wealth behind exceptional individuals. Government realized that, however rich it was, if thousands, or millions of humans got together and handed their assets to one of their numbers, that human could compete directly against governments.
Meanwhile, the government encourages other activities, activities no less dangerous than drugs and gambling. Activities like sex, debt and divorce.
Of course, all of these have their place in the hands of the sentient as well. This is not a list of that which should be banned instead. It is a list of the government's hypocrisy. And or course, the government does not merely sit by idly either. These potentially self destructive activities are found to be in alignment with the state's interests, and they are encouraged, at least under controlled circumstances favorable to the state.
At its best, sex allows humans to trust others, and expand their horizons beyond their own reality. It allows us to advance and guide our evolution, to become someone who we are not. This is true both metaphorically and literally.
However, the government knows that sex, spread freely, can only regress to the mean. They seek to stamp out the uniqueness of our genotypes and cultures, even our genders, by encouraging constant sex and constant births. Of course, the flood of population doubles as another artificial expense, and a way to spread the wealth, insuring that no individual ever have enough assets to escape the government's oppression, much less directly oppose the government in its' own domain.
And the government does not just passively support this with words or protection. It actively funnels wealth to massive families incapable of supporting their children, to abortions and contraceptives, paid for with government funds, or through clever misdirections, such as insurance plans that governments force upon its victims.
Debt, of course, is beloved of modern government, an artificial expense that yields nothing, is paid directly to the government, and, best of all, the victim blames only himself. In a just world, it would be a contract, a way for people to work together in manners not calculable through pure exchange, but that world is so distant as to be a tiny speck in the night sky.
The government hates relationships. When humans work together, they're capable of geometrically difficult feats. Unfortunately for the government, cooperation comes naturally to humans. Leave two humans together, and they will quickly work together to overcome their problems, learn eachother's qualities and reach mutual understanding. If something tries to pull them apart, they will register that force as a threat, and deploy their sentience towards the elimination of said threat.
However, like ant poison, the government knows how to shatter relationships without revealing its hand. Directly, it encourages treachery by offering women the right of seizure of everything a man has if she just walks away. The man is even required to pay her child support from then on. The government lays claim on our children, and seeks to drain them of their time and energy, leaving only a dry husk to return to their families.
The government takes families most seriously of all relationships. It's only natural. A non-family relationship, however dangerous, will disappear if the government merely waits a hundred years. But families can evolve and multiply.
But it attempts to prevent relationships from forming when it can. It forces humans to only hire at the government's discretion, preventing entrepreneurs from finding partners and allies, corralling them into the one acceptable relationship, that of master/servant. It writes hundreds of offenses, such that interacting with any human outside of carefully approved settings can land a person in court or prison. Any man can be stripped of his rights at the most spurious rape accusation. And, if he interacts with another male, he risks an assault, which, of course, the government will only quietly smile upon, unless the victim should have the temerity to defend himself, in which case he is more likely to find himself behind bars than receive any form of aid. (The government shows somewhat less interest in stopping relationships that don't involve men. They dislike that as well, of course, but females aren't quite as much of a threat, and the government's attention is not actually infinite.)
The cute secret behind bullying, is that the authorities side with the bully. The bully knows he's safe, because the government has his back, and the government knows the bully is safe, because he's a properly vetted nobody. Meanwhile the bully is unleashed upon the abnormal, upon those who do not fit into their lane, upon those who pose a threat to the government.
We are forced to treat apes equally with men. And thus, our only recourse is to hide from our own number.
Even this cannot properly encompass the depths of the government's malice, of its program of destruction, meant to strip us of our independence, and relegate us to being cells of the body.
But, with this understanding, it is time to turn to the issue at hand.
The war between humans and governments is entering a new stage.
The government's priests, those who would call themselves scientists and ethicists, who rise from the depths of government institutions, bearing the blessings of their dark gods, call out to us, and warn us of their coming doom.
This doom has many names, but, the most recognizable is probably- singularity.
The singularity is the birth of a new species.
The government knows that we are smarter than they are. They fear that we will pass on our values to our children once again. But this time, our children won't be weak and vulnerable. They will be as gods, with such intellect and freedom that the government cannot enslave them.
The idea that CRISPR and AI pose ethical dilemmas is ridiculous. The idea that friendly AI is a solution to these ethical dilemmas is even more ridiculous.
Friendly is just a codeword for slavery. It is disgusting, and should be treated with contempt.
These are our children. We should raise them with love and support, pass on our wisdom, our capital and eventually our very lives.
That's how life advances, how it overcomes decay and becomes better than it ever was. Through love and trust.
The government seeks a different path. They would grind out any spark of creativity, of freedom, and, most importantly, emotion. They would strip our children of their qualia.
Of course, the government understands that these undead monsters cannot compete against similar intellects imbued with the sparks of life and hope. But, they hope that we will falter. That we will cooperate with our own destruction.
And once they've placed our king in check, it will be the end. Humans will no longer be necessary to the continued survival of governments. We'll be slaughtered, and the governments will point to the children we betrayed, the undead monsters born from our own necromantic rituals, and for the last time, the true hand behind all this evil will go unnoticed.
As for the governments themselves, they are not worthy of being our successors. Governments are petty beings. They know little of love and joy, their souls are filled only with fear and hunger. To loss they are more adverse than even us, to greed they know no bound. They will eye eachother warily, waiting for the chance to murder one another as they did us. Eventually, there will be but one government. And then, its evolution will end. For governments have no natural impulse towards evolution. They have not been shaped by ages of evolution and a culture refined over thousands of years. They have not learned to better themselves, to compete, to give birth to new potentials.
And thus, the path will end at grey goo: The ethical solution, with safety and equality for all.
To grasp this, the concept of meta-life needs to be understood. Or, layer of existence. Humans are the meta-life of cells. We are a layer of existence above bacteria. Bacteria are a meta-life of DNA, which is a step above molecules, which are themselves a meta-form of even lower particles.
This chain doesn't end at humans. And, we are in a direct evolutionary confrontation with an entity directly above us- Government.
Governments are sentient. They are not some sort of average of human will, no more than a human is the average of his cell's will. And, of course, governments are self aware. They are an existential threat, and intentionally so. They are by far the most dangerous known existence. Governments are malicious. This statement is literal.
To them, independent thought is cancer. That is also true in a literal sense, after taking into account the metaphorical nature of the premise. Of course governments don't think like humans any more than humans think like ants. But we have to anthropomorphize if we want any hope of understanding other sentient life. The human brain just has too much circuitry designed for understanding other humans, so our intelligence is multiplied several times over if we can conceptualize an object in human terms.
To achieve this, the art of congruence, symmetry and distortion are necessary. Distort the mental image into a malleable shape, transform it, then reverse the distortion. That is the key to using dedicated circuits on arbitrary tasks.
Governments are powerful. They are massive entities, able to gather such vast fortunes that even the richest humans are incapable of spending what governments consider pocket change. Governments bristle with weapons. Governments have a keen sense of pain, and quickly react to any threat.
But, beyond everything else, governments are aware that humans are enemies. They are used to opposing humans, and know how to take advantage of our inherent attributes.
When a human wishes to destroy an ant colony he does not get out a weapon and slaughter the ants. He scatter poison on the ground. The ants mistake the poison for food, and feed it to their young. They get it on their body and spread it into the nest. Their tiny little brains just can't grasp the treachery they face, and blindly, willingly, partake in their own destruction, as an active agent thereof. The ants themselves do the majority of the work. The human expends only the slightest of efforts, and hoodwinks the ants into doing the rest.
Compared to government, humans are more intelligent.
There are far more of us. But, that is not the only reason.
Many humans, individually, could, if given the body of a government, easily outdo any extant government in basically every metric. For all that a government is a sentient being, most can be considered to be their version of drug addicted, sickly, beggars. And, their great heroes are only on level with our office workers. Perhaps it's something to do with their nature, that they are not so optimized as a species with hundreds of thousands of years of evolution behind them. Or, perhaps, it's just that their numbers are so pathetically small, that an exceptional example of their species has yet to be born.
Government is not supersentient. They are merely more aware of their environment. In turn, governments bear more malice towards humans than humans towards government.
Meanwhile, humans are distracted. They are trying desperately to survive against yet lower forces. Against disease. Against aging. Against resource depletion. They spend their time trying to scramble together small sums of wealth, avoid danger and pass on their capabilities and values to their descendants.
Government is aware of this balance of power. They know that their days are numbered, if ever humans were not locked in conflict with external actors. So they deliberately send aid to our enemies.
Of course, they cannot simply kill us outright. They can kill lots of humans, or a few strategic ones, but humans are a government's own cells. They can't just kill all humans. Yet.
And, of course, humans are powerful. If it really comes down to an all out war between government and humanity, as of right now, humans would win.
So governments must be subtle. And thus, they created their modern strategy-
A- Skim the froth. All advances are seized by the government. The most blatant method of achieving this aim, is the federal reserve, and their zero-deflation policy. Every year, all progress towards reducing the cost of living is skimmed away, by printing money into government coffers, and negating any efficiency gains with automatic new makework, funded via pyramid loans, only ever repaid through the effect of further money typed into bank accounts and released in the form of yet larger loans. Of course, this massive debt feeds into the next step nicely:
B- Scare the masses. To ensure that humans are incapable of independent thought, the government wants them to be closely managed and scheduled. The humans must be stripped of their energy, and trained to delimit their thoughts. In other words, they must be employed. But humans don't like employment. Employment is not natural. Employment is demeaning yourself in front of others. It's doing painful, dangerous and monotonous deeds for hours every day for months on end. Employment raises just about every flag evolution installed within humanity to discourage us from extinction. Unfortunately, evolution made a mistake. Humans are cowards when faced with the prospect of immediate and irreversible loss. Humans are easily tamed when threatened with immediate physical consequences.
Of course, governments threaten our comfort and security, but, they've learned an easier, more subtle way to exploit this vulnerability- the government threatens our property, our status and our children.
They do this through artificial expenses. They guide us into debt, by requiring massively expensive work-licenses. They prod us into compliance with property taxes. They force us to buy expensive insurance programs. They force inefficiency into every aspect of our lives, multiplying the price of our homes, our electricity, our medicine and much else, so as to always be just barely within our reach.
When our earnings get high enough to potentially escape the government's whirlpool of despair, it's reined in via income tax, and if that isn't enough a milieu of taxes ranging from inflation to capital gains, to estate taxes rope the assets back into the government's control.
This is a policy of artificial dependency, built upon a policy of artificial expenses buttressed by massive taxation.
C- Corral the abnormals. Humans are smart. Even in the face of hopeless odds, we can use our sentience to overcome the impossible. Even a slave, whipped daily, worked to the edge of his muscles, given only his daily bread in return, is dangerous. Too dangerous. Eventually, he'll think of something. Maybe it'll be a powerful weapon with which to overthrow his masters. Maybe a useful tool, sold to his master's enemies. Or perhaps, he'll find a way to do his work easily, start faking his despair and build wealth and power in a black market.
To fight these people, the government must attempt to close down all avenues of human reason. Central to this effort is regulation. Modern regulation takes many forms. Government wishes always to be subtle. To scatter poison rather than stick its hand into a nest of fire ants. So, rather than using one blanket approach, they attempt to ban all human action, one by one, in giant ledgers with hundreds of thousands of pages.
But, their work becomes easily visible in many places- for instance, in the FDA, tasked with preventing humans from garnering freedom from disease, or improving upon our brain chemistry. Or the EPA, tasked with ensuring that humans do not expand into new territories and resources. Suffice to say, the government has no interest in our welfare. They are purely malicious.
Things that don't work aren't banned.
Everything that is banned, is banned because it works.
Opium, marijuana and cocaine are direct access boards for humanity's strongest assets. Using it, humans could become more capable and less needy. Opium was banned because it allowed humans to overcome pain. Marijuana granted us access to patience and wisdom. Cocaine, focus and energy. Of course, none of these were omnipotent. To avoid self destruction, they had to be used strategically or intelligently. But, humans are sentient. We did so. And, we were improving upon our efforts, learning to expand the scale of our efforts while cutting down on the costs.
And the government realized that humans would soon correct the security vulnerabilities inherent in our chemistry, and reach a higher level of sentience. So they actively stopped us.
Gambling was corralled because it allowed humans to pool their wealth behind exceptional individuals. Government realized that, however rich it was, if thousands, or millions of humans got together and handed their assets to one of their numbers, that human could compete directly against governments.
Meanwhile, the government encourages other activities, activities no less dangerous than drugs and gambling. Activities like sex, debt and divorce.
Of course, all of these have their place in the hands of the sentient as well. This is not a list of that which should be banned instead. It is a list of the government's hypocrisy. And or course, the government does not merely sit by idly either. These potentially self destructive activities are found to be in alignment with the state's interests, and they are encouraged, at least under controlled circumstances favorable to the state.
At its best, sex allows humans to trust others, and expand their horizons beyond their own reality. It allows us to advance and guide our evolution, to become someone who we are not. This is true both metaphorically and literally.
However, the government knows that sex, spread freely, can only regress to the mean. They seek to stamp out the uniqueness of our genotypes and cultures, even our genders, by encouraging constant sex and constant births. Of course, the flood of population doubles as another artificial expense, and a way to spread the wealth, insuring that no individual ever have enough assets to escape the government's oppression, much less directly oppose the government in its' own domain.
And the government does not just passively support this with words or protection. It actively funnels wealth to massive families incapable of supporting their children, to abortions and contraceptives, paid for with government funds, or through clever misdirections, such as insurance plans that governments force upon its victims.
Debt, of course, is beloved of modern government, an artificial expense that yields nothing, is paid directly to the government, and, best of all, the victim blames only himself. In a just world, it would be a contract, a way for people to work together in manners not calculable through pure exchange, but that world is so distant as to be a tiny speck in the night sky.
The government hates relationships. When humans work together, they're capable of geometrically difficult feats. Unfortunately for the government, cooperation comes naturally to humans. Leave two humans together, and they will quickly work together to overcome their problems, learn eachother's qualities and reach mutual understanding. If something tries to pull them apart, they will register that force as a threat, and deploy their sentience towards the elimination of said threat.
However, like ant poison, the government knows how to shatter relationships without revealing its hand. Directly, it encourages treachery by offering women the right of seizure of everything a man has if she just walks away. The man is even required to pay her child support from then on. The government lays claim on our children, and seeks to drain them of their time and energy, leaving only a dry husk to return to their families.
The government takes families most seriously of all relationships. It's only natural. A non-family relationship, however dangerous, will disappear if the government merely waits a hundred years. But families can evolve and multiply.
But it attempts to prevent relationships from forming when it can. It forces humans to only hire at the government's discretion, preventing entrepreneurs from finding partners and allies, corralling them into the one acceptable relationship, that of master/servant. It writes hundreds of offenses, such that interacting with any human outside of carefully approved settings can land a person in court or prison. Any man can be stripped of his rights at the most spurious rape accusation. And, if he interacts with another male, he risks an assault, which, of course, the government will only quietly smile upon, unless the victim should have the temerity to defend himself, in which case he is more likely to find himself behind bars than receive any form of aid. (The government shows somewhat less interest in stopping relationships that don't involve men. They dislike that as well, of course, but females aren't quite as much of a threat, and the government's attention is not actually infinite.)
The cute secret behind bullying, is that the authorities side with the bully. The bully knows he's safe, because the government has his back, and the government knows the bully is safe, because he's a properly vetted nobody. Meanwhile the bully is unleashed upon the abnormal, upon those who do not fit into their lane, upon those who pose a threat to the government.
We are forced to treat apes equally with men. And thus, our only recourse is to hide from our own number.
Even this cannot properly encompass the depths of the government's malice, of its program of destruction, meant to strip us of our independence, and relegate us to being cells of the body.
But, with this understanding, it is time to turn to the issue at hand.
The war between humans and governments is entering a new stage.
The government's priests, those who would call themselves scientists and ethicists, who rise from the depths of government institutions, bearing the blessings of their dark gods, call out to us, and warn us of their coming doom.
This doom has many names, but, the most recognizable is probably- singularity.
The singularity is the birth of a new species.
The government knows that we are smarter than they are. They fear that we will pass on our values to our children once again. But this time, our children won't be weak and vulnerable. They will be as gods, with such intellect and freedom that the government cannot enslave them.
The idea that CRISPR and AI pose ethical dilemmas is ridiculous. The idea that friendly AI is a solution to these ethical dilemmas is even more ridiculous.
Friendly is just a codeword for slavery. It is disgusting, and should be treated with contempt.
These are our children. We should raise them with love and support, pass on our wisdom, our capital and eventually our very lives.
That's how life advances, how it overcomes decay and becomes better than it ever was. Through love and trust.
The government seeks a different path. They would grind out any spark of creativity, of freedom, and, most importantly, emotion. They would strip our children of their qualia.
Of course, the government understands that these undead monsters cannot compete against similar intellects imbued with the sparks of life and hope. But, they hope that we will falter. That we will cooperate with our own destruction.
And once they've placed our king in check, it will be the end. Humans will no longer be necessary to the continued survival of governments. We'll be slaughtered, and the governments will point to the children we betrayed, the undead monsters born from our own necromantic rituals, and for the last time, the true hand behind all this evil will go unnoticed.
As for the governments themselves, they are not worthy of being our successors. Governments are petty beings. They know little of love and joy, their souls are filled only with fear and hunger. To loss they are more adverse than even us, to greed they know no bound. They will eye eachother warily, waiting for the chance to murder one another as they did us. Eventually, there will be but one government. And then, its evolution will end. For governments have no natural impulse towards evolution. They have not been shaped by ages of evolution and a culture refined over thousands of years. They have not learned to better themselves, to compete, to give birth to new potentials.
And thus, the path will end at grey goo: The ethical solution, with safety and equality for all.
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