BF2S Forums "There will be no resistance"

To whomever this may interest/concern:

This may well have gone under everyone’s radar, but about half a month ago, the world made a giant leap towards totalitarianism and the abolition of freedom.

In particular (as can be read at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8593748.stm I believe), an experiment was conducted where people were asked to make morality-based decisions, either with or without a small electromagnetic impulse applied to their head beforehand. It was found that the effects were significant;

”In one scenario participants were asked how acceptable it was for a man to let his girlfriend walk across a bridge he knew to be unsafe.

After receiving a 500 millisecond magnetic pulse to the scalp, the volunteers delivered verdicts based on outcome rather than moral principle.

If the girlfriend made it across the bridge safely, her boyfriend was not seen as having done anything wrong.

In effect, they were unable to make moral judgments that require an understanding of other people's intentions.”

At this point, I’d be tempted to direct people to http://wordincarnate.wordpress.com/the- … tarianism/ but it is indeed a long read, and parts of it have a very strong fundamentalist Christian bias. However, although it is a fascinating article, I shall spare people the time and effort of reading it, and instead quote from it later on.

I believe that morality does not apply to science, and in particular knowledge itself, in the way it does to other things. That is to say, I believe there is no information that it is sinful to know. In general, the pursuit of knowledge is something holy. At this time, it should be mentioned that certainly, the manner in which some research is conducted may well be immoral, but the knowledge it is intended to lead to is not. The way in which some knowledge may be used may be immoral, but again, there is no intrinsic property of simply knowing something that is morally wrong.

There has been much said on this topic; a famous example is the Manhattan Project. The knowledge gained from it has transformed the world, and I cannot tell you if it was for better or worse. But rather, it is not so much the knowledge itself as much as the application of it. There are various opinions on whether dropping a nuclear bomb upon Japan in the ending stages of the Second World War was morally justifiable, and this has the inconvenient consequence of forcing us to consider whether, if the act was not morally justifiable, how much can the scientists working on the Manhattan Project be held accountable, given that they were/weren’t aware of what would arise from their research. Inevitably, there are many answers to this question and although they are most interesting, to discuss them would require a significant digression. The significance of this example is that it highlights the difference between what I consider to be the the morally neutral pursuit of knowledge, and the much less neutral application of it.

This in turn, relates to the matter at hand as follows; the research in question has been done. To be sure, it is fascinating. The disturbing issue, however, is, how amazingly easy it is to enslave the human mind. As Voltaire wrote: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”. This directly relates to the last line from the quotation from BBC news (“In effect, they were unable to make moral judgments that require an understanding of other people's intentions.”). An inability to understand is dangerous. Here we see both ends of the spectrum. Not only is intelligence dangerous (knowledge is power, power corrupts), but so is stupidity (how can we responsibly use that which we do not understand?). One could say we’re now so clever that we know how to make ourselves stupid. However, it would be wrong of me to rely on quotations to illustrate such issues (contrary to what many of my English teachers may have said), as can ironically be seen from the proverb “The devil quotes scripture for his own purpose”, however, I’d like to show something from the article I mentioned earlier;

“The word totalitarianism usually generates impressions of dictatorial systems which brutally crush civic freedoms and negate the humanity of their subjects in an effort to achieve complete control. Images of barbed wire, jack-boots and thought-control are conjured up in our minds. 20th century literature has given us some powerful works of fiction which suggest a variety of possible totalitarian futures: one thinks immediately of Orwell and Huxley. But the societies they described were very different from each other. Indeed, as in fiction, actual tyrant states can assume many masks. What should be discerned are the elements common to those governments that oppress their peoples.

...

The individual tyrant rarely looks like a monster in the beginning. He usually appears as a saviour of his people, though once he has attained power he will eventually show his hand—at root he merely wishes to accumulate as much power as possible in order to obtain an absolute security or glory for himself, and to enjoy it at any cost. This kind of tyrant is not difficult to identify, given enough time. When he runs out of gasoline or bullets or wheat the people cast him off, because he is a monster who looks like a monster. He has blown his cover. There is little depth to such men, for they exemplify “the banality of evil,” to borrow Hanna Arendt’s phrase.

More difficult to identify is the idealistic tyrant who expands his power in a sincere effort to protect what he considers to be the good of his subjects. He will reduce crime, balance the national budget, bring order and a measure of material plenty to the nation. He will surely labour to make a better citizen of the raw material of his subjects. There can be a reassuring sense of security in all this—in the beginning. We feel so much safer in a milieu of dependable public services and an ordered economy, though we would, perhaps, remain uneasy about trading away certain freedoms in exchange for them. But it is precisely the elimination of personal responsibility which is the new totalitarian’s ultimate goal, for this is what he sees as our fatal flaw.

...

Somewhere during the therapy there is a decisive transfer of power and responsibility. When this happens on a massive scale something is seriously amiss. There may not be brown-shirts and jackboots marching in the streets. No public book-burnings. No grotesque executions. In some cases there may even be no visible dictator, only a system or a social philosophy which permeates and controls everything. Indeed, the world may appear to be perfectly normal. The philosopher Josef Pieper points out that this is the most dangerous form of totalitarianism of all, almost impossible to throw off, because it never appears to be what, in fact, it is.”

I’m going to use this somewhat lengthy quote as the basis of my little spiel here. The inherent threat to the healthy function of society is not through this or that ideology, but rather, our own ability to succumb to authority. This is not to say that authority need be bad, but rather that we must manage it carefully. We’re now in the situation where people’s thoughts can be manipulated, though as I stated earlier, this tends not towards understanding the human mind as much as enslaving it. This has incredible potential for the exploitation of society in a way that isn’t entirely that different from that presented in The Matrix.

What we’ve seen is that there is a way to make people adopt an “end justifies the means” moral philosophy. I’m not here to state that such a philosophy is right or wrong, but simply that it is inherently subversive to “enforce” such a moral philosophy. Undermining the individual’s sense of right and wrong will surely cause society to reach a woeful state. To be fair, it’s not realistic to expect rivers to run red with the blood of innocents as Nazis ride dinosaurs through the streets of cities, but at the same time, it should be remembered that when right and wrong lose meaning, society won’t be able to tell between virtuous and insidious (assuming such concepts would still exist).

Ultimately, I suppose that although it is well and good that we’ve found out such things, we must realise that we’re playing with something we don’t understand very well here, and that for our own sake we must act with maturity, responsibility and wisdom. To do anything less would pose a risk to our society that I don’t think anyone can fully understand.

The prospect that I find most terrifying is that much like one may expect of an Orwellian world in the style of 1984, it is likely that when the oppression comes (if it isn’t already here), there will be no resistance.