Are We Transitioning to Doom or Doomed to Transition? (EXCERPT)

I wish it were true. 61. Yeah, 61. Yeah, I know I don't look a day older than 16, but it's 61. And so it's a bit later.

Anyhow, no, that's not what I said. Give me about 20 minutes and I will try to sort everything out.

You can edit the segments that you feel are redundant or whatever.

What I'm saying is that we're in a period of transition.

Now periods of transition comprise the bulk of human history. We were always transitioning somewhere. We were transitioning from the Roman Empire to the barbarians. We were transitioning from polytheism to monotheism.

Humanity, mankind, is always transitioning.

But this is the first period in human history recorded and not recorded prehistory. It's the first period where we are having multiple transitions and each one of these transitions is tectonic, is like enormous, is fundamental, is essential. And we are having all of them simultaneously.

And what's even more unprecedented is that we have no elites left or at least trusted elites, no institutions.

You know, in the past people went through transitions and transition is always disorienting and dislocating and terrifying and, you know, it's surrealistic. Transitions are like a horror movie or like a nightmare.

But people went through transitions, pandemics, wars, clashes, collapse of empires, you name it. They went through transitions.

But they had a fallback. They could always go back to the clan, to the tribe, to the village, to the family, to the church, to the feudal lord, to the professional guild. They had communities, they had institutions which were tried and true for centuries and sometimes millennia.

And so, yeah, you as an individual, you went through trials and tribulations and vicissitudes. The world was falling around your ears and everything was horrible, but you always had where to go. You always could revert to something which kept you grounded and centered, something that cushioned, comforted and buffered the changes, something that reduced your anxiety.

So we are having all these transitions.

Yeah, multiple. I think about four or five, four or five domains of transition, maybe six. And I can break them down.

So we start with the political arena, politics, political organization.

So until very recently, like what, 250 years ago, which is nothing, it's a blink of an eye in human history. Until 250 years ago, we had monarchies. We had kings and queens. We had, everything was hierarchical. Everything was arranged. The rulers ruled by divine favor. They adhered to a code of conduct, which was codified over sometimes millennia. So we had monarchies and monarchies had lasted thousands of years. I mean, dynasties lasted hundreds of years, but monarchy as an institution, lasted thousands of years.

And then because of various demographic pressures, we'll come to it a bit later, monarchies became empires.

Now, whenever a monarchy becomes an empire, it's unstable. It becomes unstable. It's destabilized because empires comprise a multiplicity of cultures and societies and geographies and demographies and empires, therefore, are very unstable structures. And they fluctuate the volatile.

And so their inner tensions in empires, and so what happened is most monarchies became empires starting in the 15th centuries, 16th century became empires.

And then there was inner instability and they fell apart. They crumbled.

And so the monarchies were laid bare and then monarchies fell. Many monarchs were beheaded or shot, guillotined or executed, the Romanos, Louis XVI, etc.

So the monarchies fell apart and there was nothing there. There was a void. There was not a single model because monarchy was a universal model. You had monarchies everywhere. You had monarchies in China. You had monarchies in Austria. You had monarchs, I mean, you name it, you had monarchies, Russia. Everywhere there was monarchy. It was the universal organizing principle of human affairs, politically speaking.

But when monarchies fell apart and disappeared, vanished, were eradicated, we didn't have a universalist model to replace them with.

So we started to experiment. We started to experiment and there were multiple experimental political systems. There was communism and socialism and fascism and liberal democracy and you name it, and aristocracy. There were all kinds of contested alternatives to monarchy.

And to this very day and age, to this very day and age and age, we're still undecided. Sometimes democracy is on the ascendance. Sometimes autocracy is on the ascendance. Sometimes occlocracy mob rule is on the ascendance. We're still not decided. We haven't settled on a single model and we are unlikely to settle on a single model.

Although if I had to bet, I would bet on autocracy, authoritarian models of organization, if I had to bet, because they reduce uncertainty and they ameliorate or mitigate anxiety.

But that's a therapist's point of view.

Now you asked. Yeah, so it's a key question. Why did monarchies destabilize themselves? Why did they become empires?

And the answer is population pressure. There were too many people. There were surpluses of people. There were demographic surpluses. What could you do with these people?

You couldn't deploy them. You couldn't feed them.

So the first thing, these surpluses tended to concentrate in cities. So this process of urbanization, people moved from agriculture to urbanization. So there was a farmer. He had 10 children and only one of these children could inherit the farm. And the other nine had to move away. They would move away where?

There was no land anymore. All the land was taken. And so they had to move and concentrate in habitats, which later came to be known as cities, essentially virtual environments. It's a virtual reality.

The first attempt, the first experiment with virtual reality was urbanization. So the first impact, the first effect of population pressure was the emergence of cities.

And then that wasn't enough. Cities became untenable. They became unsustainable. They started to crumble around the edges. They became a lure to invading armies which besieged them. So cities became a trap.

And so colonialism, imperialism, mercantilism were the next solution. We're going to export our population to other territories which are essentially empty or perceived as empty because the people who are living there are the white man's burden.

So this excess of population gave direct rise to all these major trends of the, let's say, 13th century to 20th century, including colonialism, imperialism and so on.

And of course, industrialization. Because there were so many people. You just had to, must produce the production line. And long before that, the smokestack factories in the industrial heartland of England.

So industrialization was also a direct outcome of numerous mouths waiting to be fed, clothed and potential consumers.

So now we have industrialization.

People were living in cities far away from the land. They were not producing anything. They were just consuming. And then they were, when they started to produce in factories for themselves. So their production was derivative or secondary. They received agricultural inputs and they converted them into finished products, into industrial goods, which they then themselves had consumed.

So there was a decoupling of production from consumption in throughout the middle ages and well into the Renaissance and so on. The craftsman knew his clients. It was a close-knit community. If I created something with my hands, a ceramic shoe, a shoe for a horse, whatever it was, I was a blacksmith. I made pots and pans and swords. I knew my clients.

There was a direct linkage between clients and craftsmen, clients and farmer, consumer and producer.

What industrialization and organization did, and much later colonialism and imperialism did, they decoupled the producer from the consumer. And this resulted in anonymous ad hoc communities, teams, unions, labor unions, and not the least, the nuclear family. The nuclear family is an ad hoc community. It's men and a woman coming together to produce offspring. Then once this is done, majority of them actually walk away. They divorce. That's how most marriages end. 51% of first-time marriages, well over 80% of third-time and 75% of second-time marriages.

Marriage is an ad hoc arrangement, ad hoc community. And it became the gig economy. Everything became a gig. People self-assembled in what began more and more to resemble networks.

And of course, this gave rise to technologies which have facilitated and empowered this.

So this is the political and economic aspect.

I'm not sure I understand.

Yeah, there's all wisdom. Scholars have been linking family models and even models of love and definitely sexual screens to economic pressures.

So for example, today you see women want to have a career. So they don't have relationships. So they end up having casual sex. Casual sex is a direct derivative of economic pressures. And it's always been the case. It works by you. It's always been the case. The monogamous family, that's an artifact. It's an artifact of the hierarchical agricultural state. The agricultural state demanded single-family labor units. And you needed to be sure of paternity. The agricultural state produced agricultural surpluses. Some of these surpluses went to the city, all of them actually.

So there was a need to manage agricultural surplus. And the best way to manage agricultural surplus is to pass it on to the new generation by way of inheritance.

But you want to be sure that the kid is yours. The children are yours.

So that's where monogamy comes in. It's a mechanism to regulate equitable distribution of surpluses, also known as wealth, across generation, intergenerationally. It's a conveyor belt, the monogamous family. It creates wealth, and then it hands it over to the next generation.

So paternity is crucial. Paternity is crucial.

Hence, monogamy and the sanctions that are attendant upon the violation of monogamy, in some cases, by pain of death.

Now, in gender studies, you keep having this trope of patriarchy. Like there were these brutish, faddish men throughout history who had enslaved and suppressed and subjugated women throughout the ages.

That's a very misleading model of what had actually been the case. It's a counterfactual model. Yes, of course, patriarchy existed. Still does. But so did matriarchy. It wasn't a distinction between patriarchs and matriarchs. It wasn't a question of power distribution or power matrix or power symmetry.

The patriarchy was confined to the public domain. Men dominated the public domain, but women dominated the private domain. And this was codified. It was codified in religious texts, including sacred texts. The woman's domain, the woman's kingdom was the home. Domesticity was a form of matriarchy. And the man's domain was everything public affairs of the world.

So there was a division of labor and a division of power and a boundary between the powers. And the powers were all the time in constant flux and in constant negotiation and in constant consensus building and compromising.

So it's not true that there was only matriarchy. The public domain was patriarchal. The private domain was matriarchal.

But what had happened is, and what is happening today, matriarchy is on the ascendance. Women are taking over. So now they have the private domain and they're taking over the public domain as well.

You can watch other videos on me. I dwelt on this.

Women's earning power, the most critical professions, the number of college graduates, men are taking over. Men are becoming obsolete by the day, obsolete and inferior. There's a major cataclysmic, tectonic power shift in modern society.

And so now matriarchy is taking over the public domain. And I think men would begin to be more and more and more confined to the private domain, house husbands, if you wish.

So I think there's a shift, a reversal where men used to be public and women used to be private.

I think in the future men would be private and women would be public. And this is happening because most of the classical, traditional family functions had been outsourced. Healthcare, education, even sex, it's all been outsourced and it's been outsourced well over 200 years ago. Medical and technological innovation allowed women to be free and liberated finally.

So now women didn't have much to do within the family because everything was outsourced. Everything was contracted out to all kinds of providers. And they could have sex with anyone they wish without bearing any consequences because of contraception and so on. And they lived much longer and were rejuvenated for much longer.

And there were technological innovation that allowed them to interface and interact and network. And so women became so-called emancipated or empowered. It upended the power matrix between men and women. It reduced procreation.

There are far fewer children today than ever, including, for example, in China, where one half of people under age 26 pledged to never get married and never have children. So all industrialized countries, Russia, China, United States, United Kingdom, Germany, with exception of the United States because of immigration, but all industrialized countries are under the replacement rate. There are too few children to replace the previous generations and far too few children to support pension schemes. And this is because women refuse to have children. End of story. This is a major shift in the power matrix when women are taking over and they make the decisions about their bodies, about what they want and don't want to do and how they want and don't want to function in relationships.

So this eliminated, this transition had eliminated obsolete gender roles. There are no gender roles anymore.

The dead. What we have today is unique gender. Everything had been masculinized.

Both men and women described themselves in 95% masculine terms. This is called the stalled revolution.

What we have today are men with vaginas, if you don't mind the anatomy and men with penises. We don't have anymore any meaningful distinctions between men and women as far as gender roles, sexual scripts, functioning and so on. Everything is homogenized. Men behave exactly like women. Women behave exactly like men. They are all men.

I cannot emphasize enough the profundity of this amazing development. For 10,000 years from the time of the hunter and gatherers, for 10,000 years, during the agricultural revolution five, 6,000 years ago, urbanization, empire building, monarchies, for 10,000 years, women had been confined to the public realm, to the private realm, to the private domain and men took over the public domain.

But they made a hash of it. Men made a hash of it. They almost destroyed the planet. Men proved themselves to be both stupid and dysfunctional and women had enough.

Starting in World War I, about 100 years ago, women gave up on men and started to take over, aggressively take over the management of human affairs. And as they did so, they became more and more masculinized. There were no men left as far as women were concerned. They couldn't trust men. There is distrust between men and women. There is even contempt.

And men and women are angry at each other and no longer rely on each other. Men are not taking this lying down. They're not taking this transition lying down. They're losing their power big time and exceedingly fast.

Unbelievably fast, actually. This is one of the fastest transitions in human history, maybe with the exception of the fall of the Roman Empire and the aftermath of the Black Death when labor became a very important component of the economy.

But such transitions happen once in a millennium.

So men are not taking this lying down. They're fighting back. And they're fighting back within relationships. And they're fighting back in sex. And they're fighting back by denying and depriving women of children, of family, of commitment, of investment, of respect. They are abusing women, castigating, chastising them, the double standard, and so on.

Men going their own way. Men are fighting back, but unproductively, maybe. It's not going to work. It's not going to work. And the only thing they're going to accomplish is that they will be excluded from the new woman order, not new world order, new women order. Men are going to be excluded if they continue to behave so stupidly and try to defy history and turn it back. There is no turning back.

Yeah, I'm passionate about it. I'm passionate about it because I think this is a far bigger threat, this war between the genders.

War? No, I disagree. No, I disagree with you.

It is a period of transition, but it has led to a war, open war between men and women.

Absolutely, war to the death. Symbolic death or maybe literal death in some societies like Afghanistan and Iran. There's a war going on. And I don't know who's going to... I know that women are going to win, but I don't know what the cost is going to be, what the price is going to be, but it's a war.

So I consider this to be a much bigger threat to the existence of the species than any pandemic and even any nuclear war. Because if men and women cease to collaborate in generating the next phase of human existence, in bringing children to the world and providing them with a stable environment, if this is dead, if men and women are going their own way, never to meet again, which the first year, the first year where men and women didn't see each other was 2016.

Majority of women didn't have a single encounter with the opposite sex. 2016, United States.

So if there is like a break and men and women are going their own way, our species is going to go their own way.

Look, we have hubris. We're very arrogant, we're very tlalarious and arrogant species. Our species has been in existence for 300,000 years. That's all. That's nothing. The dinosaurs have existed for 140 million years, occupying every ecosystem and every habitat underwater and above water on earth. They ruled the earth. And it was 140 million years. We are like 300,000 years and we think we are the masters of the universe.

Well, the universe is going to show us a thing or two. And if we don't get along between among ourselves, especially men and women, we are doomed. We are totally doomed.

No, the critical thing is the critical thing is collaboration between men and women in a new way, which would reflect the realities, technological, medical, societal, cultural and so on.

If we don't accomplish this, if we don't reach a consensus, we are doomed. This is going to be doomsday. This is going to be a million times Ukraine and a thousand times COVID, because it's not going to be a next generation, at least not a functional one.

So what good does it do?

Okay, yeah, you're right. So what good does it do?

The knowledge, first of all, it's not knowledge, it's information. Information in the wrong hands, wrong hands, unqualified hands, untrained minds. Information is meaningless, like raw material, never becomes knowledge.

The democratization of information started hundreds of years ago, I would say with Martin Luther, the vernacular Bible, the Bible that's been written in, not in Latin, the King James Bible in English, Martin Luther Bible in German.

People could finally understand the Bible without the mediation of the clergy.

There was a first step in democratizing information.

And then in the 13th century, you had universities starting in Paris, you had printing in the 16th century, and now you have the internet.

And so we democratize information, everyone has access to all the information ever amassed in human history, and so what?

It led to what? It led to populism, it led to anti-enlightenment, it led to occlocracies, it led to totalitarianism, because it's not enough to give you raw material.

You need to train yourself, prepare yourself, you need to be like a factory, you need to have an inbuilt factory for converting information to knowledge and knowledge to wisdom.

And if you don't have that, information becomes toxic, it becomes weaponized.

And you know one lesson in human history, if you have a weapon, sooner or later you're going to use it.

It's like the gun in the first scene in a theater play. By the third scene, someone is going to use the gun.

Information is a weapon far more potent and far more ominous than any nuclear weapon.

And unfortunately, it fell in the hands of the masses, the great unwashed.

Yes, I'm an elitist. I'm an elitist, absolutely. Absolutely, I think education provides you with obligations, but also with rights and superiority.

I hold most people in contempt, not because they don't know, but because they don't want to know, because they're intellectually lazy, because they have no critical thinking and wish to develop critical thinking, and because they consider themselves grandiosely superior.

Yes, I hold the majority of people in utter contempt.

This is age and age where almost everyone is contemptible.

I don't know, I think, I think cities were virtual. What's a city? It's an artificial environment. It's an artificial environment.

And now we are transitioning from first generation virtual reality, which is cities, to second generation virtual reality, cyberspace and the metaverse, and social media.

That's second generation virtual reality. We are migrating from cities to cyberspace.

It's not by accident that it's called cyberspace. It's a space.

And it would lead to atomization. There would be lonely. Loneliness would become the standard. There would be individual anonymity. Anonymity fosters aggressive instincts, negative affectivity, NV8, rage.

So we have widespread anonymity coupled with total loneliness. It's a toxic mixture. It's the recipe for mental illness.

And when you add to this self-worship, risk aversion, nothing bad should ever happen to me.

Self-sufficiency and magical thinking. It's a bad story. It's a bad picture.

It's a bad picture. I think that's where we're going.

I'm not saying this. No, I'm sorry. I'm not saying this. Maybe you should ask me what I am saying.

Thank you.

So what I'm saying is it's virtual, but it's reality.

Cities are virtual. They're artificial, but they are reality.

And exactly like David Chalmers says, the philosopher, simulations, artificial intelligence, holograms, virtual reality, multiplayer games, they're all real. They're absolutely real virtual chats. VR chats, virtual reality chats. They're all real. I'm not saying they're not real, but they're virtual.

They're not natural.

Yeah. Natural is not virtual. Virtual is not natural. They're not natural.

We're divorcing from nature, which is why we inflicted and are still inflicting so much damage on nature, because having isolated ourselves from nature, we consider ourselves immune to nature.

Like we don't need nature anymore. We just need our goggles, our joystick, our video games, and our computer, and smartphone.

We don't need nature. So we can, you know, we can shoot on it. We can do anything we want to. It's going to come and bite us back in the ass, of course.

But its reality, simulation is as real as any village, and any village is as real as any piece of land. It's all real.

We continue our evolution, not genetically, but through culture and society and technology. Of course, our evolution is ongoing. But this particular environment, the metaverse, the virtual reality of the future, is going to lead to very dangerous outcomes. And I mentioned them, atomization, individual anonymity, self-worship, self-sufficiency, etc.

You know, I prepared for this interview. I went back to a best seller. I think the best seller, if my memory doesn't fail me. It was authored by one God allegedly, and it's titled the Bible.

Now I want to read to you a segment from Genesis.

So much wisdom in that book. I am not a religious person. I regard religion as a form of mental illness, and God and angels and all this bullshit as delusional disorders. But there's wisdom in this book, and all other sacred writings.

And of course, we shouldn't discard the baby with a bath water, and with a bathtub, and with a bathroom.

So I want to read to you. It's a bit extended, if we have time. It's a bit extended. But it's so wise, and describes our predicament.

So Genesis. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying of every tree of the garden, thou mayst freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it. For in the day that thou eatest, thereof thou shalt surely die.

Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.

Notice that God had made the serpent. And he said, the serpent said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, ye shall not surely die. For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired, to make one wise, she took off the fruit thereof, and did it, and gave also unto her husband with her, and he did it. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons. And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden. And the Lord God called unto Adam and said unto him, where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself. And he said, God said, who told me that thou wast naked? Has thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee, that thou should not eat? And the man said, the woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did it. And the Lord God said unto the woman, what is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, the serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. And the Lord God said unto the serpent, because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle and above every beast of the field. Upon thy belly shall thou go, and thus shall thou eat all the days of thy life. And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed. Each shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

Unto the woman, God said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception. In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

And unto Adam, God said, because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying thou shalt not eat of it. Cursed is the ground for thy sake. In sorrow shall thou eat of it all the days of thy life.

Foron also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shalt eat the herb, the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shall thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.

For out of it was thou taken, for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

And Adam called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother all living.

Unto Adam also and unto his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins and clothes them.

And the Lord God said, behold, the man is become as one of us to no good, an evil.

Now lest he put forth his hand and take also the tree of life and eat and live forever, therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden to till the ground for whence he was taken.

So God drove out the men, and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubim, the flaming sword which turned every way to keep the way of the tree of life.

When we are faced with this sword, we are faced with this sword a centimeter away. We have that close. We're trying desperately to re-enter the garden of Eden. And there's a sword there, a flaming sword. It's going to decimate us if we don't reconceive of all the issues that I've mentioned and manage these multiple transitions and create new institutions and really, really soon, because it's been already 100 years like this.

I just found a book, I think it's titled The Challenge of our Morality, dated 1924.

Well, all these issues I mentioned, literally all of them, I was shocked.

It read like a current text.

We've done nothing in 100 years to cope with the fundamental transitions that we are faced with.

I don't know why we are so like a day ago, why we are so complacent. Why we trust that everything will turn out for the better?

It's been going from bad to worse, from bad to worse and from worst to worst.

I don't see anything becoming better.

I read Pinker's thesis and so on that the world is a much better place.

It's not a much better place.

How do we measure a much better place?

How many smartphones you have? Or for example, what's the rate of suicide and how happy people are? And what's the rate of drug use?

These are the real tests of happiness, not how much bread you eat and how strong your smartphone, powerful your smartphone is.

Yeah, we can move to narcissism. We can move to narcissism.

I've been talking about narcissism all the time if you didn't notice. These are all forms of narcissism.

I've been warning about this since 1995.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we can just let me take a break for a second because I want to cut this as an excerpt.

Exactly. Then we go back on the link.

Okay, thanks.