Lies are what bind people into a manufactured reality that stymies their ability to live free and meaningful lives.

If we run with the cost trope, look at lies like a shady drug deal.

You are angry and want to buy some satisfaction. You lost your job, or can’t buy a house, the cost of living is too high. Whatever it is, you are looking for relief.

So a a shady dealer offers you a lie to give you some relief. You give them some personal freedom monthly and they sell you “immigration did this to you” and it works for awhile. But you start to realize the immigration story doesn’t hit the same way. You look for relief in new lies. So you give the dealer more freedom, and buy “its not just immigrants, its obviously trans people.” Yeah that’s it, those trans people are turning the steel factories into drag theaters, wrecking the economy. “Damn!” You think. “Its not my fault, its them!” The relief you get from the lies hooks you more.

The hook is powerful. But you’re never satisfied and you need more lies as your brain adjusts, maybe even protests. You’ve got to shut it up, and you start to conflate your issues with freedom itself. You’re happy to give more freedoms over to the dealer for relief through even grander lies.

The relief will always be temporary, but you don’t even realize that any more.

You’ll never solve the problems that plagued you and you’ll die angry and depressed. Maybe if you gave up just a little more freedom, you could have had a better life. You never awaken to reality that the people taking your freedoms are the ones ruining your life. The lies were too powerful, too addictive, and they rewired you to willingly accept your own servititude.

That’s the cost of lies.

Indeed.

“Ignore the disparity, civil war, and malice! Here is a theatre in marble too!” - Pompey, probably. “Ignore the death of a past-time, climate destruction, and war! AI will solve climate change and get humanity to the stars.” Our new overlords.

I heard this on a podcast and think it explains quite abit about the mentality of these executives. They are effective altruists with long termism, mixed in with a healthy dose of narcissism and greed of course. But the later two are not what I want to discuss.

Effective Altruists, or those subscribing to Moral Ambition have a sort of ends justify the means look at it all. You do everything you can to amass power and wealth so you can make the world a better place. When you add that in with longtermism, that all the suffering now is meaningless because it’s the countless billions of humans coming later that matter, and you gain some clarity regarding their worldviews and morality. That is, of course, without considering what they think “a better place” means. To these individuals, it’s a world shaped in their image. How they see fairness, and work, and love. And it is not a place most human beings, I wager, want to see come to fruition.

I must be clear I am not saying this is right, nor altruistic, nor condoning it. I find the entire amalgam of ideas and influences rotten. It just offers some perspective on what is driving these people.

Yes. I also like how you framed it. “Disabling of the light is sucking meta’s disinformation cock” is poetic.

Yes, good point! They don’t have much, unfortunately, in this field. So I’ll contribute.

Got to have a hobby and sadly I never took to gardening.

I was not, no. First time I’ve heard of it.