Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Remote control, of course

DEPRIVED OF THE VAMPIRIC ENERGY WHICH THEY SUCK FROM THEIR CONSTITUENTS, AUTHORITY FIGURES ARE SEEN FOR WHAT THEY ARE...DEAD, EMPTY MASKS MANIPULATED BY COMPUTERS. AND WHAT IS BEHIND THE COMPUTERS? REMOTE CONTROL OF COURSE -- WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I find myself to be a person who thinks with feeling. That is, feeling and thought are for me inextricable. I value feeling, but I suppose I tend to believe the idea put about by some that this makes my thinking weaker. For a moment I would like to reassert the value of feeling. I forget who I'm quoting now, and this won't be verbatim, but I was once struck by a quote that runs something like this: "When a man tells you that you mustn't be sentimental, that's usually because he's about to do something cruel, and when he says that you have to be practical, it usually means that he's going to benefit from his cruelty."

I only intend to make this a short post, as a kind of memo, since I imagine I will add to this theme later (and I've certainly touched on it before). I've been reading about Ray Kurzweil, advocate of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and so on. My constant feeling response to Kurzweil's words in speeches he makes and articles he writes, is one of being poisoned, like being in the presence of evil. I can certainly article this feeling in a rational way, but that's not what I'm going to do here (probably later). I simply want to make a note of this for the moment. So, having exposed myself to a reasonable dose of Kurzweil radiation this evening, I was feeling very sick with the world and with myself. I decided to settle down to some of my 'things to do' and catch up with some reading. I finished a novel and then got round to a book called The Great Turning by David Korten, which I was given recently. There's a quite thorough and interesting, been-there-done-that type review of the book here.

I noticed a few things. First of all, the book is very well written. It is a model of lucid prose, reminding me of my recent ranting about how many people think that being intellectual means having to write so that no one understands. Of course, this is a moronic tendency. That Korten's prose was concise and unjarring, that he was, in short, a good writer, immediately put me in sympathy with what he was saying. Secondly, I noticed that my mood was lifting. Where as Kurzweil seemed to be closing the future, this seemed to be opening the future.

Now, I've only really just begun Korten's book, and it is, apparently, meant to be the focus of a political movement, and, in the words of someone I know, "I'm not much of a joiner". I'm very much suspicious of movements and groups. Nonetheless, I was interested in this contrast between my feelings towards Kurzweil and my feelings towards Korten. I imagine I will write more on this subject when I have read some more.

I was particularly interested by the idea of ‘walking away from the king', mentioned in Korten's book, since this is the exactly the idea that had been revolving in my mind recently, of simply walking away from the manipulative games of those who currently control humanity, of not giving them your energy to feed on. Kurzweil, for instance, would like to present his man-machine future as inevitable, and suck us into his vision. Perhaps that feeling of being poisoned was something like the drain of energy that comes from accepting someone else's version of the world as inevitable. If such a thing is possible, I'd like to be able to walk away from vampires like Kurzweil.

Labels: David Korten, Ray Kurzweil