Debt Money, Central Planning and the Atlantis Future

The idea of Atlantis--the lost civilization--shows up in several classical world works. The most famous ones are found in Plato's writing. The Greek's mythology was backwards from ours. For them, Atlantis was a lost pinnacle of civilization, and it was all downhill after that. They were looking back in history to see the ideal. The people of our world think we're the current pinnacle, but the future be an even higher pinnacle. Sci-Fi took Atlantis and moved it into the future and also made "tech" the basis for greatness.

There are lots of different versions of Atlantis in sci-fi. There's the established, but failed dystopian central planning Atlantis of a movie like Logan's Run or Demolition Man. There's the utopian version of Atlantis that's depicted in Star Trek. They imply some cataclysm happened, and from that collapsed civilization emerged the space-fairing technology of warp drives and anti-matter power plants. There's the secret Atlantis where a select few know Atlantis exists, but it can't be revealed to the public of Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis. There's the Battlestar Galactica cyclical collapse version of Atlantis where some ineffable unknowable force drives man's journey. Then there's the Bladerunner version which I think matches our current reality.

The common thread of future Atlantis mythology is that technology will one day completely free man from constraints of nature (or God). This is even reflected in our monetary system of debt, and our civilization's obsession with technology. In recent decades endless credit was offered to corporations that develop "new tech" and built new tech infrastructure, like Amazon, or Tesla.

Most of my blog posts point out inherent problems with tech--mainly that it creates at least as many problems as it solves, in short that it's really severely constrained by nature, rather than a doorway of escape from natural necessity. This is really exemplified by an attempt to switch from fossil fuel to so called "renewable" energy, and the attempt to switch to an electric transportation network. Solar and wind power infrastructure are energy intensive to produce and rely on the existing fossil fuel infrastructure and road network, for example, and produce more waste and toxic byproducts of production and require energy storage, etc...

Another problem with tech is that it makes people stupider and weaker and overall worse. Tech seems to offer ways for the worst aspects of humanity to completely manifest themselves. It empowers egotism and narcissism. The philosophical notion that we "live in a simulation" is the ultimate expression of this tendency. Life is so easy for some people that they deny the existence of an outside world. (That philosophical solipsism works until you get back problems, or a broken bone or a broken tooth, or cancer, or experience loss of a loved one.)

The "biotech" field is the side show byproduct of the ego plus technology. For some reason, some men want to be biological females, and seek to replace their endocrine system, which ties us to nature and reality on some very deep, fundamental level, with regular injections of synthetic hormones. They even want to have uterus transplants for some bizarre reason.

It's a quarrel of an ego with God, or mother Nature. Nature's organized for systemic stability within the context of a very dynamic, interconnected system that's beyond man's grasp. There's no super brain, or computer model that's going to let humans see or manage that natural whole. This project seems weirdly childish and demented.

It seems like we're at the end of the road of the modernity project and the current attempt to "build Atlantis" is in the final stages. The people who are making decisions on how to use resources are going for the "Bladerunner" future. Their idea seems to require central planning and control of individuals toward that end, so now they're obsessed with dissolving the notion of individual sovereignty via the corona-scam. They're also obsessed with making people weaker and completely dependent on the state and corporations for survival.