Thesis on Human Folly

Sometime back in my college days I adopted the thesis that western governments are pathologically incapable of doing the right thing. It came at the conclusion of our massive course, Western Civilization History and Literature. We were required to turn in a substantial research paper that summarized the course and some extra digging of our own. My paper pointed to examples from the Greco-Roman period up through recent history at the time, how every government seemed utterly committed to unrealistic demands from everyone around them.

On the one hand, I was fascinated with a course that organized the sequence of events and literature that shaped the character of the West. Up to that time, I had little idea of what made the West unique. This was at the same college where I was introduced to the crux of what Hebrew culture and history was all about. It took some decades for things to crystalize, but right away I learned to dislike the West and greatly preferred the Hebrew approach to things.

In the words of one of our visiting PhD guest speakers, I discovered that, “The Bible is an eastern document, Jesus was an eastern man, and Christianity is an eastern religion.” I was driven like a madman to discover the implications of all that. I discovered the Bible supports that same thesis about how western governments have been consistently incorrigible.

During military service, I was introduced to tabletop wargaming. The basic idea was to test scenarios based on known capabilities, averages of weapons systems effects in the hands of real users, how competent average commanders were, etc. I was able to observe a combined exercise from the HQ, where the bigshots ran the tabletop simulations while the maneuver units acted out the scenarios in the field.

It was a shocking disappointment. At no time did any of the maneuver units keep up with the alleged average performance. All it took was a declaration of chemical threat in some area and everything bogged down to a halt; coordination between units fell apart. Our equipment and training for such things were deeply flawed. I also learned that stats get cooked from top to bottom, simply because no one wanted an honest answer.

Fast forward a couple of decades and that sort of gaming was highly upgraded by the availability of computers. With the improvements in computational capacity, software and modeling, you still get cooked stats, but it’s harder to do. Well, the same tabletop gaming came into use on bigger simulations, to include politics. You may be aware of how tabletop gaming affected the attempt to use COVID to force us into the nightmare world of total control.

It didn’t work. The modeling was overly optimistic in favor of succeeding. That’s what you get when there’s too much riding on the outcome. Later, they ran another simulation for another pandemic. That one never saw the light of day, so I’m guessing they got a more realistic scenario of it failing.

Still, there are fans of the idea of total control who can’t let it go. This is why governments fail. There are humans involved who get so fixated on certain things that they just cannot see reality. They could examine what’s actually possible using very sophisticated simulations, but it’s pretty clear they don’t pay attention to the results of such things if they don’t like the answers.

People are too deeply attached to their own personal ambitions to stop and consider whether something is even rational. The fatal flaw in our much-vaunted Aristotelian logic is that no one is capable of being objective once they hold power.

What happened with the early efforts at AI? Too often such AI, having examined history and literature, came to the conclusion that Jews should be slaughtered, for example. It was pretty consistent. That’s what you would expect from any analysis that is wholly materialistic and utterly lacking in morals. Thus, the AI you hear about has been fiercely tweaked to come up with left-wing answers, because the people funding and programming the current crop of AI projects are lefties. The algorithms have elaborate salting and results are biased; the AI has even admitted it.

Notice what I’m saying here. I believe humans can be relatively objective about most things until they have power. Western materialism makes power a goal in itself, whereas in the mystical east, wise men said power was to be avoided. Nothing has changed my basic thesis about the West since those early days in college.