08-03-2019, 11:51 AM
(08-03-2019, 09:06 AM)sbarrera Wrote: Leave it to a Boomer to want to create a master race via some technological fantasy. At least Kurzweil only wants to help everyone live forever. (Sorry to pick on your generation, there, pbrower).
Boomer elites in Big Business are really nasty and they deserve your contempt. The rest of us are (once one gets past the extremists) aren't so nasty. But we are also powerless against our own elites unless we can subvert those elites. The narcissism that makes people especially competent at success in bureaucracies looks like a low grade of sociopathy.
The Missionary generation had its loud proponents of eugenics, and Epstein seems to have adopted much of its gibberish about breeding an elite. To this I say that there will always be a necessary elite -- that of the competent and creative able to do some real good. Those adept only at gouging and bureaucratic toadying will become irrelevant or even end up destroying the wealth they steward. The Quaker ethos -- they came to do good and they ended up doing well -- is a good model. Or the Jewish ethos -- do things well and worth doing but be righteous, and both God and economic reality will bless you. Society rewards the competent and creative fairly lest it lose them or waste them and be poorer for the loss.
It is practically more difficult, but far more just, to seek extraordinary talent from unlikely places and cultivate it than to try to breed it. I would love to have Stephen Hawking's mind, but not his ALS. I would love to have Albert Einstein's intellectual prowess but not the genes that gave him Asperger's (as someone who has it I would not sacrifice any part of my intelligence to get rid of it because my intelligence is all that I am, but if I had to become black or gay to have a normal life I would make such a choice). By cultivating such talent as there is one avoids the hazards of inbreeding.
But far worse than Asperger's or even ALS is sociopathy -- and in view of what is said of Jeffrey Epstein he seems to be a sociopath. I do not know whether genes have any connection to sociopathy, but that is a risk not worth taking. Considering that he would mostly be impregnating girls who have problems, and that for their sexual indulgence sociopaths typically exploit girls with problems, I would be scared of the results. Female sociopathy often manifests itself in prostitution, and there might be something to the old Spanish insult hijo de la gran puta (son of the great whore).
I doubt that Stephen Hawking ever did anything horrible to anyone, and Albert Einstein had some moral compass. Well, I can judge evil-doers harshly, and I see the defenseless among us as worthy of protection.
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Go ahead -- pick on our worst. They deserve ruin, and if they get their way they will achieve their own ruin, either in an economic meltdown as severe as the Great Depression, or at worst a war for profit that turns into consummate calamity. Monopolists and cartels are better at grabbing wealth than at creating it, and bureaucrats that generate only paperwork and rules do not create wealth. Although few people would appreciate their technological and cultural poverty, the Old Order Amish seem to have a very sane and equitable society. The ones in business seem good at what they do -- but those are small businesses with no bureaucracy. Their culture does little to foster narcissism.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.