OF THE
TIMES
I recently started hearing about the work of the Russian polymath Vladimir Vernadsky. The guy was a brilliant scientist - he was the founder and first president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, so not exactly a fringe thinker in his time. Vernadsky took Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's concept of the noosphere and grounded it in his own deep appreciation of biological, geological, and chemical processes - which was a profound understanding indeed as he pretty much invented the field of biogeochemistry. His views seem to have gone far beyond the Gaia hypothesis, probably ultimately inspired by his writing, that was popularized well beyond his death, which merely posits that the biosphere achieves a high-level homeostatic equilibrium.What the heck is life for?
Full disclosure: I haven't actually read Vernadsky, so everything that follows is just me riffing on what I've gathered from a few podcasts and blogs. I first heard of the man's work from that brilliant lunatic Clif High (see for instance here), the conspirasphere's bald old mountain wizard; while I take everything Clif says with an extra helping of salt, he's consistently one of the Internet's most interesting people. Matthew Ehret's study group has also been getting into Vernadsky recently.
...the willingness of the individuals to blindly sacrifice their personal interests in favor of the collective, radical intolerance of dissident voices, a paranoid informant mentality that allows government to penetrate the very heart of private life, the curious susceptibility to absurd pseudo-scientific indoctrination and propaganda, the blind following of a narrow logic that transcends all ethical boundaries (making totalitarianism incompatible with religion), the loss of all diversity and creativity (making totalitarianism the enemy of art and culture), and intrinsic self-destructiveness (which ensures that totalitarian systems invariable annihilate themselves in the end). (PT, p. 91)And among the signs of a "new kind of (technocratic) totalitarianism" on the rise today, he refers to the snooping powers of the world security services and move towards a surveillance society, the loss of privacy, rise in snitching, censorship of alternative voices, QR code mania, etc. Unlike the old totalitarianism with its "ring leaders" like Lenin and Hitler, we have rule by "dull bureaucrats and technocrats" (PT, p. 91). He observes that the process has evolved over time — from the age of autocracies when masses were effectively put down by rulers, to the larger-scale and longer-lasting masses of the French Revolution, still more so with the Bolsheviks, and finally, with Covid, "we have, for the first time in history, reached a point where the entire world population is in the grip of a mass formation over a prolonged period of time" (PT, p. 93).
Comment: An unpopular view in these times.to be sure, but the conclusions dovetail nicely with those of another astute observer of the homosexual population (among other things), Josh Slocum.
MindMatters: Kicking the Cluster B-hive with Joshua Slocum: Queen B's, Homosexuality & Dealing with Narcissists