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“But yet mathematical certainty is after all, something insufferable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
Everybody knows that 2 + 2 = 4 since 4 = 2 + 2. They know that excellent thing with certainty but generally fail to appreciate the charming nature of 2 + 2 = 5. Tautologies are usually preferred to choices that seem to contradict the “laws of nature.” Mind-forged manacles are popular because freedom from the laws of nature, while desired, is feared. It suggests that liberty is a fundamental existential truth.
Don’t get me wrong, I can count. I am drinking my second cup of coffee. Number one has disappeared down my throat, but the second coffee tastes fine. It is real and still exists. The first is just an abstraction now – number 1 – a simple vertical line on the page.
We are pissing our lives away on abstractions, forgetting that notation is a system of symbols that direct us to what they intend. The key is to grasp what is intended. The cognitive construction of the number system is a useful tool, but when it is pushed as the essential tool to grasp the meaning of life it has become a tool of control. That is the case today.
The Internet and digital media are the greatest propaganda tools ever invented. They have come to us on the wings of numbers. They are insidious in the extreme, as the etymology of “insidious” tells us – Latin, insidere, to sit on, occupy – for over the last few decades they have acted as an invading army occupying our minds with numbers in a cunning attempt to mathematize our lives for techno-scientific, financialized neo-liberal capitalist purposes. To prepare us for the Great Reset when people and machines will be indistinguishable, Artificial Intelligence (AI), 5-G ultra microwaves, and Agenda 2030 will be fully established, and when human life has become part of The Internet of Things.
That, at least, is what the builders of the new Crystal Palace intend. At the moment, their Digital Palace seems like a stone wall that is here to stay, but as Fyodor has said, people are strange creatures and will sometimes refuse to be reconciled to the impossibility of “stone walls if it disgusts you to be reconciled to it.” I am disgusted.
The construction of the Digital Palace is the long goal that has been underway for decades. To erase lived time and space, flesh and blood humans, and by transfixing people with numbers, to create an abstract and ephemeral reality through a constantly evoked sense of emergency. Living the machine/Internet life would never be acceptable if people had not been subjected to an onslaught of numbers/statistics/data that has accustomed them to think like computers. The great Jacques Ellul made it clear in his classic work, Propaganda, that propaganda is much more than the waving of a magic wand and lying, although it is that. It is a long process. He writes:
It is based on slow, constant impregnation. It creates convictions and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition. It must create a complete environment for the individual, one from which he never emerges. And to prevent him from finding external points of reference, it protects him by censoring everything that might come in from the outside. The slow building up of reflexes and myths, of psychological environment and prejudices, is not a stimulus that disappears quickly. . . [my emphasis]
The mathematization of our thinking has been the essential first step in addicting people to the internet complex where mind-control is so effective. I say first step, yet it has been concomitantly accompanied by daily litanies of lies about world events through what Ray McGovern aptly terms the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT). In his usually masterful way, the great journalist John Pilger has recently pointed out so many of those grotesque lies about U.S. wars of aggression around the world. Their numbers are legion, but not the kind of numbers you will find in the mainstream media. We are drowning in lies and numbers produced by a nihilistic elite in love with power, money, mayhem, and murder.
Twenty or so years ago a massive push was organized to give prime emphasis throughout the educational system to what is termed STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. This has been implemented at the expense of subjects that have traditionally been associated with the liberal arts – philosophy, history, literature, art, music, etc., subjects that introduce students to thinking in the widest and deepest ways. It is no accident that instrumental logic has replaced deep thought for so many people and the poets have been replaced by intellectual pimps. The emphasis on STEM subjects has paralleled the rise of the Internet with its drumbeat of numbers, statistics, and data. Let me offer just a few examples, which may seem innocuous unless seen in their larger context.
- The switch from analog to digital clocks and watches and their omnipresence.
- Referring to the week as 24/7 and the writing of dates as numbers such as 08/30/2023.
- The use-by-date numbers on all products, soon to be applied to commoditized people.
- The use of the term 9/11 to refer to the events of September 11, 2001.
- The listing by numbers of the best colleges, mascara, underwear, corkscrews, etc.
- The hilarious dating of the earth’s age to the current 4.4 billion as if that meant anything to anyone.
- The computer generated weather forecasts with their 10 and 30 day forecasts with precise numerical percentages for rain, snow, etc.
- The analytics that dominate the world of sports, the posting of numbers for everything from the speed a ball leaves a baseball bat, a tennis ball a racket, and in golf the speed, height, curve, apex, carry, and launch angle when a ball is driven – all these numbers changing as a computer measures the ball in flight.
- The “helpful” messages on restaurant receipts where the tips are recorded in descending order and exactitude from 18% to 20% to 25%.
- Manipulated statistics for everything under the sun, such as Covid cases and deaths, Ukrainian military casualties, unemployment numbers, etc.
It is easy for one to add to this small list of the use of numbers. They are everywhere and are intended to be – in people’s heads, as the saying goes. They are intended to induce mass production of thought and behavior that is numb and that tranquilizes real thought and oppositional action. The more this is so, the more the schooling institutions will loudly announce how well they are teaching “critical thinking” skills. All our institutions have become complicit in 24/7 capitalism and the mind-control of deep-state forces.
In his brilliant new book, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, Jonathan Crary, sums it up nicely: “One of the foremost achievements of the so-called knowledge economy is the mass production of ignorance, stupidity, and hatefulness. . . . programmed unintelligibility and duplicity.”
The reality of everyday life used to revolve around our bodies in place and time. Now that time and place have been jumbled, it revolves for so many around the cell phones in which people live a weird disembodied existence. Sensory life is being annihilated. This is the era of virtual people, shadows of shadows, abstractions upon screens. Our connections to nature, to the seasons, to the sacred ways of our ancestors are being discarded for the machine life in the Digital Palace.
Dostoevsky’s underground man wasn’t playing a silly game when he suggested that 2 + 2 = 5. He was saying that free will is more important than reason which just satisfies the rational side of our nature. Without it we are sub-human, machines in a vast prison of our own making. His words are more important today than when he wrote them in 1864, the time of The Crystal Palace with its promotion of the Industrial Revolution’s technological marvels. Today’s Digital Palace marks a far greater threat to our humanity, and so his words are worth attending to:
. . . man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose what is contrary to one’s interests, and sometimes one positively ought (that is my idea). One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy – that is that ‘most advantageous advantage” which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, virtuous choice? What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.
And if you are apt to raise a finger in warning about such wild advice about existential freedom, let Dostoevsky ask you this rhetorical question about the reasonable and logical ones: “Have you noticed that it is the most civilized gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas and Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so conspicuous as the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is because they are so often met with, are so ordinary and have become so familiar to us.”
As familiar as numbers.
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interesting that orwell used 2+2=5, in an opposite manner, as an example of totalitarian states being able to impose their will upon the people they govern. looking in to it, there is quite a history of 2+2=5 being used in russian press of the 19th century but it was also used by the communists as well as the nazi’s. orwell had mentioned these in several of his articles written before he wrote 1984. he was supposedly inspired by a soviet propaganda poster of the 30’s, that celebrated achieving the goals of a 5 year plan in 4 years.
In various comments, i refer to this as “cooking the data”, the next layer, opinionating thus becomes delusional as intended. The Opus Magnus of course up to today, contain the most recent manipulations: the Covid circus [vaxxing included, bio-labs included, Russia and China as guilty as the International Jew dominated West], and the Ukraine contest of who gets to own what.
The all-time High Priest is no doubt the Finance Industry, long running and now eventually heading into it’s first bottle-neck of less physical assets translating into transactions, thus not to be manipulated. …i guess Nabiulina [a plane accident would be meaningless because of redundancy] and Xi’s finance “wizards” will take up the slack.
The end game: social = everything [finance, military bluff and action, the collective traditions of culture, art and religion]. Numbers only, man as part of the Internet of Things.
The author is digging beyond the top-soil of manipulative crap, thus no harm done, an article that will get more of a response @anywhere_but_unz.com. All complimentary.
Great little article. Enjoyed it a little. Thanks.
Words, came to my mind , not numbers.
Those pesky letters all jumbled together.
With punctuation, adjectives, capitalizations
and several other “symbols” that everyone
seems to take for granted. Are books, blogs, and
daily papers dumbing us down as well ?
You said “the key is to grasp the intention”.
Full Spectrum Dominance, maybe ?
First there was the word…and the word was ?
Not allowed to be read, if I recall correctly.
Consider this: meta-data impacts the usefulness of anything after, meaning, logic, reason, propagation, comprehension, affiliation, collective and individual behaviour.
Meta-data and steering them is Freud Exponential. Since over the board, there is no sensory of quality information, mining, repetitiveness, regurgitating, sublimating, combining, tweaking is most effective. Alas a grid of “things [thanks to the author]”, a middle-class of manipulators [physicists as well as politicians, media, military and administrative cogs], itself manipulated into memes and curated, mined for dissent.
The limit for this is the break-down of complex society by physical want, not social disruption as an agent. A system as above is costly, that would be one of the few triggers of improbable change.
Most certainly neither Moskou, nor Beijing bring something new to the table. An alternative to the above cannot take root if one of the players persists in the “grid” definition of human society.
Truth is never something to be shunned. The STEM disciplines are the only ones based upon a search for objective truth backed up by actual empirical evidence. It’s the subjective bullshit that the humanities and social sciences preach as truth that has caused the masses to be so miseducated that they can’t identify truth when they see it.
The solution is to get rid of the humanities and social sciences as actual courses leading to a degree. If someone wants to study the nonsense of psychology or gender studies, go for it, but you shouldn’t be able to get a degree in what is essentially an opinion. The humanities and social sciences are opinions masquerading as facts; they have no empirical evidence to back up their claims. Their priests then go out into the world and infect the weak of mind with bullshit like psychiatry, economics, philosophy, etc that are just opinions and nothing more.
Quantitative measures are fine within an analysis of the logic or metaphysics of mathematics as that relates to a strictly materialist outlook. You need math to build a bridge, or a rocketship to the moon. But it will not help you decide the relationship of mathematics to the understanding–for instance, are mathematical propositions strictly analytic, or as Kant argued, synthetic a priori judgments? These, by the way, are philosophical questions, that you label as being BS.
However it is, a quantitative approach by itself denies the totality of man, a totality which encompasses his true value and in any case cannot be reduced to a mathematical formula.
Quantitative analysis will not tell you anything much about beauty, ethics and the search for justice, aesthetic understanding, and so forth. It will not tell you about what constitutes the best regime, or what ought to be the nature of government. Whether man is primarily a social animal (the Classical Western ideal typified by Plato and Aristotle), or an individual first and foremost (the liberal ideal–stemming from at least Hobbes), and how those answers relate to the quest for an ideal, or even workable, political order. All philosophical questions.
Take as one example, Bach’s music. A quantitative approach would be to count the notes within measures, the frequency of repeating notes, the length of time taken to play the notes, the number of contrapuntal recurrences, etc. But this will tell the investigator nothing about the transcendental aspect of the music, and that is really the essence of music.
However it is, a quantitative approach by itself denies the totality of man, a totality which encompasses his true value and in any case cannot be reduced to a mathematical formula.
I agree.
However, what the humanities and social sciences are attempting to do is define for everyone what their personal opinions should be. It reminds me of the old quip – ‘if I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you’. What can’t be quantified using the scientific method should be left to the individual to decide how to interpret it. To allow some PhD philosopher, for example, to lecture the gullible on how they should think is what’s wrong with the non STEM disciplines. His opinion is no more valuable than his student’s because he can’t prove he’s correct in his thinking. The humanities and social sciences are nothing but propaganda masquerading as knowledge.
Your Bach example reminds me of all the ‘classic’ books I was forced to read over the summer breaks and report on when school resumed. These classics were boring as hell to me but the teacher was determined to fix my wrong think by endless repetition of what some clique determined were ‘classics’ and therefore everyone was supposed to revere them. That’s propaganda and outright bullshit.
As for gov’t, it’s all a fraud. It is nothing but the most sophisticated criminal enterprise in modern times.
That may be so in some cases, but studies of human traits and qualities are part of social sciences. You often quote philosophers’ opinions when you agree with them. Two areas of philosophy are metaphysics and logic…are you opposed to that?
The ‘studies of human traits and qualities’ is used to treat the population like cloned sheep. These studies are designed to help the oligarchy control the masses by techniques discovered by the social science useful idiots. It’s people like Edward Bernays that helped the controllers in gov’t and industry get to their current stage with organizations like Meta, Google and other constantly monitoring and mining our actions for information.
I see no beneficial effects from this constant surveillance, do you?
As far as philosophy is concerned, it’s navel gazing. Your question also implies a false equivalence. All economists are frauds that use arithmetic to do their dirty work. That does not imply I’m against arithmetic.
The fact that the government misuses data/facts gleaned from research should not stop gathering data…fix the government. Scientific research on splitting the atom led to the atomic bomb; chemical research led to nerve gas. Most information can be misused.
Your condemnation of philosophy is wholesale, which means you include metaphysics and logic.
As usual, you did not address my comment about your often quoting of philosophy you agree with.
The fact that the government misuses data/facts gleaned from research should not stop gathering data…fix the government. Scientific research on splitting the atom led to the atomic bomb; chemical research led to nerve gas. Most information can be misused.
Your condemnation of philosophy is wholesale, which means you include metaphysics and logic.
As usual, you did not address my comment about your often quoting of philosophy you agree with.
Please show me one beneficial aspect to the social science techniques being used on a daily basis by the corporations independent of the gov’t. My point is that there are only negatives to be derived from the research these people do and have done over many decades. There’s no upside to this research. All it does is allow mostly advertising (professional lying) to sell people on products, political ideas, wants and needs of all kinds through a form of subtle mind control. It puts sugary cereals in front of kids. It tells people that Doritos and Coca Cola are a food and drink when they are chemical concoctions. It tells people they have anxiety and to see their doctor for a pill fix. Etc, etc, etc.
These techniques do tremendous damage to the idiots of the society that are too stupid to see they are being manipulated. Those dolts vote and drag me into the endless debacles social science control makes available to those with the funds to influence the terminally stupid.
As a professional software developer, my whole adult life was centered around logic; putting together logic to allow a computer to do what no individual could due to complexity and time constraints. It is you that wants to pile logic into philosophy and I disagree that’s where it belongs. Philosophy is opinion, logic is a search for truth and for what works in the real world.
As far as quotes are concerned, even a broken clock is right twice a day. I’ve quoted some of the worst human beings to ever have lived when they managed to say something that actually made sense. I give credit where it is due, regardless of who is involved.
Out of buttons, but I agree…thanks.
Well, I disagree with your premise that government and corporations are independent. Still, again, the fact that some data is misused does not negate the value of information on our society.
So your idea is it is better to remain ignorant of the society you live in because some of the data is used in a way you don’t like?
It is not me who links logic to philosophy; this has been the case since ancient Greece. If one is to study logic at university, it is under the auspices of the philosophy department.
I prefer to think of philosophy as wisdom, yes opinion for sure an opinion of humanity…on life. One can take it or leave it. It is not offered as an absolute but as an opinion.
Your last two paragraphs are contradictory.
Please show me one beneficial aspect to the social science techniques being used on a daily basis by the corporations and / or the gov’t and / or any other player. Every technique used by all parties is detrimental to the people as a whole.
BTW – the social sciences are a lie just in the name since there’s no science in it.
Do you place yourself in the same scientific category as the frauds in the social sciences?
Well, we disagree.
I agree. It should be called social studies or social issues.
I do not. See my answer above.
Well, we disagree.
I agree. It should be called social studies or social issues.
I do not. See my answer above.
I’m not so sure, Bill.
Yes, “the humanities” create and distill opinions, or can be used to do so. But there’s another attribute that we overlook at our peril (although my observations may be some what belated by now).
Psychology is the study of what it means to be human. Sociology is applied mass psychology.
Programmes such as MKULTRA, are derived from psychology, and inflicted, en mass, through applied psychology/sociology.
So, it’s through the humanities that governments learn how to manipulate, and contain, society.
All of that said, what Mr Curtin is referring to in this essay is not so much “the humanities” as it is “the arts”. A subtle, but important difference which I think is the entire crux of Mr Curtin’s argument.
Art and arts expand consciousness and free the mind and spirit to explore life on ones own terms.
“The humanities” break everything down into numbers, to restrict creativity and the free exploration of being.
Or so it could be argued.
With love,
Kali.
Ah Phaedrus (aka xyzxy), you put it so much better than me. Thank you.
Kind regards,
Kali.
The humanities and social sciences are used to create and support the moochers on the productive members of society. They produce the social worker moochers that take care of the baby factory moochers, neither of which should exist as both are a net negative. They produce the advertising executives that lie for a living. They produce the diplomats that help invade other countries. On and on, they produce the absolutely useless in the society that actually do great harm just by their very existence. I’ll use the economists as the prime example since they are the whores that support every gov’t and banking scam, all of which are slowly imploding to hurt the productive.
There isn’t a single positive I can come up with regarding the humanities and social sciences that isn’t outweighed by the tremendous negatives they produce in their wake.
As for art, that’s a hobby anyone can indulge in. Once it becomes art as in Hollywood, art as in twerking on stage, etc it is how the oligarchy sets the trends in motion for their ultimate advantage via subtle mind control techniques pioneered by the humanities and social sciences. Real art is personal. The art that gets pushed is just so much bullshit.
agree with you good sister kali, good points all around, especially the mkultra comment, know your enemy and what they’re up to. boy, bill really sounds like a philistine*, he should watch out this place is crawling with mossad!
*with apologies to the long suffering palestians, for this terrible pun/joke.