The Messianic-Redemptive Yearning
June 1, 2019
I’m not sure the gravity of our situation has begun sinking in for most people. Lemme pull out my megaphone emoji real quick.
📢 *Click* This thing on?
Ahem…
Yo, internauts and netizens, googlebangers and backseat surfers, gather ye round for a little doomsday pep talk/political bumpersticker christening ceremony. There won’t be any champagne smashing. There will be a good rapping over the knuckles.
I don’t know if you got the memo, but we may well be living in end times as we race around trying to get a little ahead of our finances, a little ahead of our troubles.
End. Times. As in… that’s it. Lights out. Bedtime for Bonzo. Finito.
Do you get it?
The earth is sick. The soil is sick. The trees are sick. The animals are sick. All because we humans have gone very sick.
We have to start thinking in entirely new terms. We need new meta-tools to help us understand what a healthy civilization could even mean in the presence of the eco-techno-psycho-catastrophe we find ourselves fast approaching.
Business as usual won’t cut it any longer. No, we need drastic change if we’re to avoid a watery, fiery, sharknadoey, generally very hellscapy fate (that will most likely include evil robots).
I hate to be the guy who keeps harping on apocalyptic themes, but part of it’s my emerging role as a voice for schizophrenics, who classically have expressed what you might call a “messianic-redemptive” yearning, a yearning to see the world delivered from its suffering.
John Weir Perry, the famous Jungian psychiatrist, once observed that schizophrenics have an unusually keen interest in social problems and in the problems of the world. He agreed with others in his field that schizophrenia has unique advantages and that psychosis could lead to a kind of “higher consciousness” if allowed to run its course.
This project, Sacredphrenia, is not just about bettering people’s health. It's also about changing the way society operates. It is inherently activism-oriented. The activated sacredphrenic takes it upon him or herself to, as Seth Farber put it, “solve not just their own growth crisis but the growth crisis of society.”
And part of that solution has to involve political engagement. I don’t wish to alienate any of my followers, but our present quagmire is such that we have to start organizing and advocating for economic, environmental, social, racial, reproductive, educational, technological, and political justice on an unprecedented level.
For years, I thought the president had no power. I was so enmeshed in “New World Order” conspiracy theories that I could hardly function. A large part of my healing journey involved dismantling these theories, realizing they are as subject to delusion as the mainstream news, if not more so.
Free of my former conspiracy-addled brain, I’ve become painfully aware of the power a sitting president has to influence the course of national and global events. I’ve closely examined the lineup of current presidential candidates, hoping to find among them a glimmer of some hope.
There’s only one person whose policy proposals come anywhere close to, in my opinion, the seismic change that’s needed.
That person is Andrew Yang.
Think of him as Bernie 2.0. Or a techie who is somehow acutely aware of the “world-devouring machine.” Or a real-life Robin Hood running for president. Except instead of stealing directly from the rich, he plans to create a reasonable value-added tax on companies like Amazon and Google so the technology-produced wealth can be shared by the likes of you and me in the form of a $1,000 monthly paycheck called the “Freedom Dividend.”
Picture that for a second. Homeless people and soccer moms receiving $1,000 alike. Many people will say, “Those people don’t deserve that money because they didn’t earn it.” I believe they are operating from an outdated paradigm, one we are quickly outgrowing. Yang would respond by saying it’s time for a human-centered capitalism where income doesn’t start at zero.
At first, it’s a mind warp. But the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. It’s not socialism. It’s not welfare. It’s a trickle-up economy. It’s turning a $20 trillion dollar economy around so it works for the people and not just the elites and corporations.
A few months ago, Yang tweeted something I found particularly prescient: “First we get the economic boot off of everyone’s throats. Then when people are thinking a bit more clearly we tackle climate change. It’s hard to get folks who are struggling to make ends meet to focus on big societal problems. First activate abundance. Then we can advance.”
I personally think of Yang as the closest thing we’re going to get to a presidential “paperclip minimizer,” in reference to the paperclip maximizer thought experiment described by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, which has huge implications for the direction of civilization.
It states that when you train an AI system on the goal of maximizing the efficiency of paperclip production, for instance, the system gets exponentially better at making paperclips until it runs out of substrate and eventually turns the whole universe into paperclips.
It might sound outlandish, but a similar thing is already happening as, for instance, AI now runs Facebook’s optimization of what makes our news feeds as sticky as possible to increase the amount of time we spend on the site, to increase ad revenue and return more money to shareholders.
It’s getting better and better at appealing to our limbic brains, with the paperclip maximizing consequence that we’re becoming more polarized in our political views and, over time, “the entire sense-making capacity of the world [is] getting ruined,” as Daniel Schmachtenberger put it.
Of course, civilization as a whole has paperclip maximizing elements, and it always has. My point is that as technology gets exponentially more advanced, we’re going to need someone with a nuanced understanding of its dangers to help rein it in.
We’re going to need someone capable of high-level, far-outside-the-box thinking, who is truly radical in their critique of the economy and the political system as a whole, and who understands the grave consequences if we get it wrong.
I believe Andrew Yang is that person. And I’m a huge luddite. So, the fact that I’m supporting him for president, a guy who talks nonstop about technology, is saying a whole heck of a lot.
I’ll end by saying this. There’s no one I’d rather go through the robot apocalypse with than this dude.
“The hour is late; the clock is ticking; we will be judged very harshly if we fumble the ball. We are the inheritors of millions and millions of years of successfully lived lives and successful adaptations to changing conditions in the natural world. Now the challenge passes to us, the living, that the yet-to-be-born may have a place to put their feet and a sky to walk under.”
-Terence McKenna
