Are We Advancing or Regressing?

Modern Ignorance and Ancient Wisdom: Part I

The reason I was moved to write The Omega Glory: 2022 Redux was mostly subconscious at the time. Many grasped that it represented the loss of free society or free speech, and that was the most obvious interpretation given the age of censorship in which we’ve rapidly come to find we’re living, as it dramatically accelerated in 2021.

Two very important pieces on the issue of free speech and a free society have recently been penned by Glenn Greenwald and Naomi Wolf. Don’t miss them.

From Greenwald: The Pressure Campaign on Spotify to Remove Joe Rogan Reveals the Religion of Liberals: Censorship

From Wolf: Thinking Like a Tyrant

However, when I wrote it, I was feeling the fear of loss of something more literal: a modern parallel to the same type of loss of knowledge and civilization that the Yangs in the The Omega Glory episode of Star Trek suffered — a world where people revert to a grunting savage existence, where they lose not just the ability to read, but language itself, which goes extinct.

Don’t mind me. I’m just a raving lunatic indulging in conspiratoid madness.

From May 2020: 

“Asked about how long it might take before mankind goes mute, Musk said it could happen in five to 10 years in a “best-case scenario” if the technology continues to develop at its currently rapid pace. Of course, even in the entrepreneur's brave new world, he said some might still choose to speak for “sentimental reasons,” even when “mouth noises” are but a primitive vestige of the past.”

…

I’ll tackle what I think of Musk at some other juncture in time, but let’s get back to the old school type of modern ignorance: the potential for knowledge in books to disappear via more traditional means:

… when I hear from many friends who delight in their ability to dispose of all their print books -- and many of them are literally throwing their books in the garbage -- I imagine the most-pessimistic scenario: post-apocalyptic, end of the world stuff, and descent into a new Dark Ages.

Maybe it's the aftermath of a global nuclear armageddon, or maybe it's just slow decay into world-wide despotism and economic decline.  But suppose before it happens most of the print industry ceases to be cause of e-books.  Maybe in the post-Armageddon period most of the print libraries are burned to the ground, or burned for heating.  Everybody has their e-books, of course.  But there's no way to power the damned things.  Industrial civilization  is in smoking ruins.  No power plants, no chargers. 

But it gets worse:  the microchips and hard-drives that all the knowledge of humanity is stored on  -- those electronic devices die of their own accord after awhile.  Atoms move around randomly over time, cosmic rays break down crystal structures, heat de-magnetizes disk platters.  Most of it won't work after 20 years, but after 50 years?  Not much will remain. 

So your world has ended, most libraries are gone, everyone got rid of their print books -- and e-books go permanently dead.  Education goes completely in the toilet in the short term, without books.  And in the long-term -- the utter lack of books will greatly facilitate the decline into a _Very_ _Dark_ _Age_. 

That was written ten years ago by my late husband.

I don’t think even he could have envisioned the pace of digital book-burning and memory-holing in the last decade and especially the last two years. It’s been breathtaking.

Big Tech has collectively attempted to banish probably millions of pieces of content from social media for the crime of wrongthink. 

Forget about Joe Rogan for a moment. I’m thinking of the thoughts of highly credentialed people like Martin Kulldorff of Harvard who suffered a Twitter ban last year and a LinkedIn ban next. Then there are the attempts to delete the statements of Nobel Prize winners like Luc Montagnier and many more, most of them highly credentialed scientists and medical professionals. 

Despite — or perhaps because of — my long-time beliefs that most of what we see in the media is highly manipulated, I thought in 2020 that emerging conversations about totalitarianism were hyperbolic.

I was wrong. The pace of destruction in the past year has appalled and terrified — but also strengthened — me.

I believe nothing is off the table now. 

Of course, we are reminded by many well-meaning but naïve individuals that Facebook, YouTube, Google, Twitter and others are private companies, with the implication that giant corporations could never be used as a central point of control to do anything really crazy like lock us out of our food supply or activate kill switches in our vehicles for the sake of the common good or the planet.

Democracy Dies in Darkness. 

The next thing to be deleted (as we’re seeing in Canada) is your bank account. If they don’t like what you’re saying and doing, they’re going to turn you OFF.

Thank heavens that in these past two years, our self-appointed corporate overlords and politicians haven’t pushed for a virtual world of entertainment, education, shopping, working, socializing, traveling, and communicating in which there would be no need for the base human experience anymore. 

We can also rest safe in the assurance that the same people would never embark on a grand global project to control the course of human evolution and alter the very nature of human identity. 

We’re building a safe world for the next generations:

Never forget what was promised. We were promised flying cars, but all we got were fake forests.