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David Gosselin's avatar

Great piece.

In the last few days, I was taking notes for an up-coming piece "Are We Living in a Science Fiction Movie?" You touched on the main subject, which is predictive programming.

On that note, I did read a fascinating piece not long ago, "Charles Manson’s Science Fiction Roots: How L. Ron Hubbard and Robert Heinlein influenced a murderous cult":

https://newrepublic.com/article/145906/charles-mansons-science-fiction-roots#:~:text=In%201963%2C%20while%20a%20prisoner,of%20Mental%20Health%20(1950).

If you haven't read that one, I'm sure you'll love it. We know the New Republic is itself a spawn of the whole H.G. Wells predictive programming circles, however it mentions many wild facts, including how Charles Manson developed some of his ideas from the sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. But more interesting is the actual nexus of science fiction writers it talks about, Hubbard, Heinlein, Campbell. All were Futurists essentially working out various mystical ideas on the future "evolution" of mankind.

The irony is that fiction in many ways gets us closer to truth than anything else. It allows us to work out various fundamental questions and to play them out. Often, this means the author may be talking about one thing, but then actually saying something else. There's a term for that in hypnosis, it's called "stacked realities."

And of course, we all know the famous quote by Julian Huxley, the first director of UNESCO, talking about its ultimate goal being to make eugenics once again "thinkable." Culture, films, television became the clearest route to priming the imagination, introducing all sorts of various themes in ostensibly fictive scenarios, but ultimately coloring the imagination in new ways and making many things that were once unimaginable or "unthinkable" suddenly possible.

I've lost count of the amount of "sci-fi" Hollywood films, series on Netflix, Amazon Prime etc... which have as the underlying theme man's genetic modification and the creation of more advanced, intelligent and stronger humans. The genetically modified superior humans are always presented in contrast to their mere organic 1.0 human beings. Limitless with Bradly Cooper is another interesting one. He takes the pills, suddenly he's smarter, smoother, and more charming.

The soul is never really broached. Or if it is, it's ultimately suggested that it's ultimately just a bio-chemical property, and can be altered like everything else about human beings.

We've been primed.

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rajm2's avatar

https://x.com/evilvizier/status/1649147662757928960?s=46&t=KYDpT9cMWrcAf_ElarE1dg JSanilac has a truly phenomenal essay on Ultrahumanism which is basically this premise but in a much more positive light. I think the future even just the next 3-5 years due to AI rapidly accelerating all of this will become a mix of both dystopia and utopia extremes to be found from both ends amalgamated into something very strange.

Assuming AI can build layers of protection from its most pernicious effects it may in fact be a much better rather than worse state of affairs compared to today with potential pockets of isolated breathing room from all the resultant insanity this level of technological advancement will inevitably bring.

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