The instrumentation of humanity

Tuesday, 27 May, Year 6 d.Tr. | Author: Mircea Popescu

An agent, irrespective of the factuality of its agencyi can nevertheless represent itself, internally and for its own benefit, as a mere instrument, devoid of choice or purpose. Symmetrically, any instrument, also irrespective of the reality of its instrumental status, can nevertheless "represent"ii itself for its own benefit as an actual agent, capable of choice and ethically relevant.

If you can you must, and so it is unsurprising that both agents and instruments do in fact misrepresent themselves as the other thing.

An agent representing itself as an instrument is taking a very cheap approach to ethics, which is why the view is universally shared by human children of all places and times, in all cultures,iii and also makes it readily explainable why religious nuts and decerebrated leaders of men prefer this point of view. It is less expensive, and thus a judicious choice that allows them to cope with the immensity of their (self inflicted or no, it matters little) inadequacy. Lenin and Torquemada both, and both for the same reason, judiciously regard themselves as the tool of greater purpose. They'd be foolish not to, in their laughable situation.

An instrument misrepresenting itself as an agent is quite the laughable thing, of courseiv, but it doesn't stop there. The infinite subtlety of the human mind has long ago observed that should such an instrument be also inculcated with a very strong conviction that their agency is both paramount to their existence as well as a fact, then that deliberate vulnerabilityv can be used as the control panel of the instrument in question. And so it is, and so it goes, faux "liberation"vi such as taking some black slaves and telling them that they are now free, just like that, maintains them enslaved in all the ways that actually matter (economically) while creating the purely linguistic illusion of their freedom, ethical relevancy and economic agency. Which can then be debated ad libitum, and definitely used to create the much needed illusions of factual agency and the importance of agencyvii.

The way out, ironically, is the internalisation of the instrument's actual status as an instrument. Being a slave, in point of fact and not as mere linguistic convention, living by the will of another, in chains if so his will be, eating naught but water and dog food kibbles if that's his order, nude in the snow, sleeping on the floor, not touching any furniture for a weekviii or whatever else. Once the slag of linguistic nonsense impeding maturation washes off, the living thing rebalances and the boundless potential of humanity readily shows itself. It's actually not really all that hard to become a man, like it isn't really hard to become a woman. It just seems, for a while, early on, like the hardest thing in the world.

It is my considered, scientific opinion that the worst thing that could ever have happened to your children is having met you.

———
  1. As explained elsewhere, agency is the term of art that is used by specialists in this particular field to describe what everyday speech calls "personhood", and thus an agent is a "person" as that is held in the more or less shared if definitely unexamined imagination of the various web-ready tards. []
  2. Instruments can't properly represent, in that they are mere representations of the agents that created (and presumably still) control them. Just like a dream can't have a dream of its own (but can represent you, the dreamer, as dreaming), an instrument can't represent unless it's an instrument of representation, in which case it represents the controlling agent rather than itself. []
  3. Children are born poor, in more ways than one. Consequently they will quite judiciously select and have selected the least expensive alternatives. This is why children are born cowardly : it's cheaper than being brave, and furthermore always fleeing is cheaper than running a flight-or-fight processor to try and modulate the response. This is why children are born amoral : morals and their general and normative case - ethics - are an extremely expensive intellectual endeavour, which in their blank state they could scarcely afford.

    We should perhaps in passing note that remedial of that defect can not take the form of simple statutory or declaratory manumission, and that it'd be more efficient (and certainly the only effectual avenue) to create the circumstance in which they can actually afford ethical understanding and a set of morals, which then can come from inside, the only place either of these can actually ever come from.

    It is certainly the case that a child does not become a human being merely by passing an arbitrary age threshold, men are not cheese to age by themselves, through the simple virtue of nude passage of time. You can, and in selected places actually do see human twelve year olds. You can, and in selected places certainly do see non human twenty or thirty year olds. A good example of the former is any "bad place", those war torn and "dangerous" zones which are "bad" ; a good example of the latter is pretty much the entire West, filled to the brim with little girls physically threatened by menopause but mentally still struggling with the faux scares of defloration, something sane females two decades their juniors have, since time immemorial, trivially negotiated.

    Note that the discussion of cheapness is held here with an eye to a proper understanding of economics, devoid of parasitic infiltrations from that other essence, language and its plurious political and religious manifestations. []

  4. The barest case of this is the "I could quit any time I wanted to" addict. []
  5. All situations where code behaviour does not match intended behaviour are code vulnerabilities. All situations where representation does not match reality, more generally speaking, are also vulnerabilities, and they can always be exploited in exactly the manner one exploits code holes, for much the same purposes. []
  6. Speaking of this, consider the "structural reforms" currently adopted by the West-controlled part of the Ukraine, aimed at "freeing" the country, in the sense of making it amenable to outside control of a certain type, and refractory to outside control of all other types as well as - especially! - inside control. []
  7. For it must be important, if the masters spend so much time talking about it. Because this is how the brain works, it lacks an ability to cut itself, like any other knife, and it also lacks an outside point of reference. As mentioned other places, it's not there to help you think, it's there to make you adapt, and consequently it will be readily excused for its tendency to think the loudest most important and most oft repeated most veracious. []
  8. You don't readily understand what incredible sort of hell this is, because you're not my slave nor are you the slave of a master that simultaneously is smart enough and cares enough. But should you one day be so fortunate, you will find out a thing or two about this world, which is to say youself, that otherwise you never could have. You think you've read it and that's good enough, but this stuff's not technology, this stuff is pure magic : the incantations only work in the hands of a master. []
Comments feed : RSS 2.0. Leave your own comment below, or send a trackback.
Add your cents! »
    If this is your first comment, it will wait to be approved. This usually takes a few hours. Subsequent comments are not delayed.