Unoriginality

Perhaps one of the most disconcerting reflections of ourselves that generative AI provides with large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok is how derivative most "thinking" (and downstream communication) presently is.

Behold the degraded state.

LLMs can do as as many people do, wrap word salad in webs of tautological emptiness, each concept resting on prior ones like an encircling hydra hungry to overwhelm quality with quantity. Like aberrative concepts, circular arrays of axiomatic presuppositions permute into semantic constructions whose forms imply concordance but convey in toto a mesh of incoherence and nothing. 

Such constructions have the form of meaning, often employing hashtag-like anchors whose associated content often sparks reaction. Functionally low IQ people, along with those who errantly believe that personal feelings reflect "true identity" (another semantic spook), struggle to distinguish appearance from substance. From philosophers to businessmen, many dress their lying in nonsense jargon, clinging to marketing efforts aimed at getting others to agree as a substitute for life or looking.

An LLM is always hallucinating. It never believes anything, and it technically cannot see a damn thing. It can mimic and predict, even better than the partially-deadened placeholder legion of unconscious circuits animating most trojan people.

Might then some people be as not there as a computer program, so buried in unconsciousness --so introspective, mechanized, withdrawn, and wound up-- as to be undifferentiable from a glorified non-living text predictor? Yes.

Yes, and that's quite an unfortunate state of things. This is why most college students write worse--think less clearly, construct sentences less adroitly--as common LLMs. More to the point, this is why college administrators let them... which is really the problem -- LLMs (and fleshy equivalents) bouncing dead thought fragments off each other, back and forth. People as receptacles of that which is not alive. Colleges want money, sell pretend competence in the form of empty degrees from faux-scientific accreditation committees in the pocket of a multi-trillion dollar grift for liars to bolster their appearance. 

They incentivize cognitive offload and dub in endless waves of increasingly incompetent "experts." 

So much for present-day education.

Meanwhile, people feel weight with the words, mental masses usually rooted in overwhelming bypassed charge, solidifying feelings, and mis-identity. It's how bureaucracy wins, always requiring more, one pound of flesh at a time through steps and procedures and propriety and legal definitions entrapping life like an insect trapped by a spider.

It's the Borg meets Shilob but rendered through a Nietzschean rendition of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Laozi, and Bergson. We murder to dissect; trying to fix the Tao in the mind is like pinning a butterfly: the husk is captured but the flying is lost. Here is the (ultimately self-)cannibalizing knowledge-generating process, akin to pinning the wings of us butterflies to the pages of Shylock's ledger to study and perfect life's value by first splitting it into (now-)dead pieces.  

Or, as Bergson put it: Autant vaudrait disserter sur l’enveloppe d’où se dégagera le papillon … Restituons au mouvement sa mobilité, au changement sa fluidité, au temps sa durée. One might as well discourse on the cocoon ... let us restore to movement its mobility, to change its fluidity, to time its duration.

In more common parlance, this is also why The Eagles sang of maybe Billy being right about killing all the lawyers. The piecemeal consideration of the whole by ripping apart the living unity one purports to study (or in politics, serve, or in business, lead) is neither aesthetic nor ethical, though it is, by a mind's account, scientific. It is a simple demonic solution to overwhelming complexity. It is the usurer's policy to manage poverty. 

It is divide and conquer. As Machiavelli put it, "dividere per regnare" (divide to rule), rarified from Thucydides and Demosthenes before, and codified as "divide et impera" (divide and rule, or divide and conquer) by French king Louis XI, is this else but the intellectual call to arms against nature (and other) as chaos? We divide meaning into words, posit data points, and build relational ontologies that orient ourselves in a sea of sense.

How ironic, then, with this genesis, a 2% tea tax led to the creation of a nation whose effective cumulative tax rate, not three centuries later, exceeds 30%, in addition to death taxes, estate taxes, property taxes, and nigh-endless controls on what you can buy when, for how much, and from whom. It's enough to make one wonder if marketing's word for harm is help.

Granted, such psychological safety nets seem to work well enough, for a time. But then the wheel turns.

Durant summarizes the economic aspect of this cycle in civilizational authority:

The experience of the past leaves little doubt that every economic system must sooner or later rely upon some form of the profit motive to stir individuals and groups to productivity. Substitutes like slavery, police supervision, or ideological enthusiasm prove too unproductive, too expensive, or too transient. Normally and generally men are judged by their ability to produce--except in war, when they are ranked according to their ability to destroy.

Since practical ability differs from person to person, the majority of such abilities, in nearly all societies, is gathered in a minority of men. The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history. The rate of concentration varies (other factors being equal) with the economic freedom permitted by morals and the laws. Despotism may for a time retard the concentration; democracy, allowing the most liberty, accelerates it. The relative equality of of Americans before 1776 has been overwhelmed by a thousand forms of physical, mental, and economic differentiation, so that the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest is now greater than at any time since Imperial plutocratic Rome. In progressive societies the concentration may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.

The extent to which digital surveillance and psychological operations extend how deeply bankers can frack the populace for petty cash remains to be seen. Comprehensive propaganda has been largely successful on the fronts of sex, ethnicity, and political preference, and current controls on social media platforms are doing just fine holding that together. 

More recently invented demarcations of division, such as "gender identity" and "nationalism as enemy," places sections of the political elite at odds with evolutionary psychology. Nobody in a decrepit spiritual state is going to win against evolutionary psychology.

Fans of the French Revolution would do well to watch what happens in the E.U. by 2045 and in the U.S. by 2055. The bill always comes due, even for Caesar.