Posted by Individualism is founded on the principle that the individual human constitutes a higher value than the collective. The most plausible argument for this principle is that all collectives consist of individuals.
Collectivists maintain that the collective constitutes a superior value and a greater good. Indeed, the individual cannot exist if not as part of some collective. The family, the clan, the village, the nation. Inversely, one could argue that collectives cannot exist without individuals.
Collectivists promise us the perfect society with all of mankind as the governed collective and they brush off the argument that they are destroying millions of individuals and make more millions miserable in their effort to establish the perfect collective.
As the (cynical) collectivist proverb goes: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs”. All the destroyed individual human existences and lives are a low price in the eyes of the collectivist for achieving the perfect society.
All attempts to achieve this collective paradise on earth that have so far been undertaken ended up with a ruling privileged minority (the “nomenklatura”) wielding authoritarian power over a rightless, impoverished, and unhappy majority. How can a collective be in good shape if most of the individuals of which it consists are disenfranchised and miserable?
Never mind. Today’s neo-communists have warmed up the old and cold myth that the bliss of the collective justifies the misery and suffering of even a majority of individuals. Individualistic troglodytes must be reeducated and corrected (AOC’s re-programming camps). They need to be taught and to internalize that individualism is just another word for greed, supremacy, egotism, selfishness. They need to be converted from inner-directed persons to other-directed persons. They need to understand that they must not follow their inner compass, their faith-based values, or their personal ambitions or goals or to maximize their unique talents and natural physical, intellectual or artistic capabilities.
Instead, they must learn how to sense what the group, the collective, wants and condones, to comply with its behavioral norms and to internalize its expectations. They need to be taught that all competition is inherently bad. Wanting to excel, to exceed the average, to win, is inherently anti-social, because it generates inequality and inequity, winners and losers.
Students must not aspire excellent grades but try to be average or even substandard. The more inept and non-performing you are, the more you will be accepted by the substandard standards of the collective, which must inevitably attempt to level out all differences between individuals, since individuality stands square in the way of collectivism.
Don’t make an extra effort. If you can’t make the bar, the collective will lower it for you. This is what is going on in our schools and colleges today. Excellence is in the way of equality and must hence be eradicated through a brain-washing system, called education, which aims at equalization at all costs, even at the cost of turning our children into whining neurotics or inept nincompoops. Science is racist. Math is discriminating. History is racist. Chemistry and biology, in fact all learning and teaching, must be emotionalized. To hell with rational thinking, logic, and fact-based empiricism.
A collectivist totalitarian society and global dictatorship need obedient subjects, not renitent individualists.
Enter AI.
AI, or what we average citizens know and use as AI, is currently merely a meta search engine that can search other search engines and data bases faster than a human can and that is, with proper direction, capable of compiling remarkable results from already existing human-produced content that sometimes exceed what humans can accomplish. But it is not yet intelligence in the sense that it can independently define and solve problems and develop new and creative ideas or concepts.
As James Seehafer, a painter and multi-media artist, who coined the art term “massurrealism” put it:
“There is a spiritual dimension to real art. It must possess that human force, some psychic binding agent that coheres the whole and gives it meaning. … AI-generated imagery … is not grounded in the human psyche and cannot connect with its viewers on a spiritual level … it cannot grasp the desires and aspirations of the human soul – because it has yet to suffer or feel joy.”
(Trebuchet Magazine, London, July 9, 2023)
I would add that art is the sensualization of human feeling and thought. AI may be able to create true art when it becomes capable of feelings like fear or bliss. But if it can do that, it will itself have morphed into a truly human condition and will become subject to the same emotional and sensorial limitations to which we are subject.
However, there is one thing that AI will positively prevent: learning and the acquisition of knowledge and skills by humans through study and exercise. “Ne nos inducas in temptationem” says the Catholic Pater Noster – do not lead us into temptation! If students can produce perfect term papers using AI, they will do it. If students can solve mathematical or literary tasks using AI, they will do it.
AI will become the universal digital gofer, sort of a mega-leprechaun or bottle genie that can do those worrisome chores that many humans prefer to avoid like studying hard, learning things by heart, mental arithmetic, acquiring intellectual skills and present knowledge through repetition and memorization that are the mental prerequisites to successful complex human action like open heart or brain surgery.
In the city of Cologne in Germany, people have a fairy tale about the busy “Heinzelmen”. Here is how the story begins: (my translation)
Once upon a time in Cologne, How comfortable was it with the Heinzelmen! For if you were lazy, you just lay down On your couch and took your ease Then at night, ere you knew it, came the little men and swarmed out. They clattered and rattled, And plucked and picked, And jumped and trotted, And cleaned and scoured, And ere a lazy bum awoke, All his daily work was already done!
AI will likely become the global digital Heinzelman. Coming generations won’t have to learn how to write a good essay or term paper, how to do math, or how to analyze complicated problems, because AI will do it all for them. AI will also become the ultimate tool of the elites in their attempt to dumb down the people.
Can you fathom the possible results? Think about it. Our schools, colleges, universities will crank out millions of dumbbutts, nincompoops, and simpletons (they already started) who can babble smart about social justice, equity of outcome, racism, and gender transition, but know nothing about dental repair, appendectomy, electricity, or road construction.
According to the National Center of Statistics, in 2022, approx. two thirds (about 74%) of American 4th and 8th graders were already not proficient in reading, writing, and mathematics. (To achieve this miserable result, we spent approx. $15,000 tax money per student (elementary. middle and high), the fifth highest amount in international comparison.)
AI, if used correctly, could be a useful tool to assist in human learning, but if it is used to replace human learning it will become the demise of our civilization. Ineptitude, ignorance, arrogant entitlement, and group think will rule. Once all individualism has been successfully eradicated we will all end up shining the shoes of the new Chinese master race, and we deserve no better fate because we will have no one to blame for it but ourselves.