Mont Order February 2015 Conference

Mont Order February 2015 Conference - Transcript

MONT ORDER FEBRUARY 2015 CONFERENCE – TRANSCRIPTFebruary 14, 2015, 14:25-16:30 GMT 09:25-11:30 EST

Inheritance, Equilibrium, Order

Participating brothers

Dirk Bruere: Transhumanist activist representing the Zero State, anautonomous transnational state.

Harry J. Bentham: Host. Blogger and op-ed writer at Beliefnet, Press TV,and other media entities.

Mike Dodd: Editor of the futurist Wave Chronicle publication.

HARRY: Welcome to the Mont Order conference – February conference.We’re a small association at the moment. We have nine participants,including me, and I hope that we can develop this club to have overa hundred people in the future. They’ll be bloggers, websites,movements, and so on and so forth, opinion makers and whatever. Andanyone – anyone in the club – can add anyone else, which is a goodpoint to reiterate, as it’s not a hierarchy, it’s just a circle ofpeople. Anyone can lead it, as it were, as it’s not got anystructure.

Originally, we were going to have – originally everyone [in the MontOrder] was going to be coming to this conference, or most people. Iknew a few couldn’t attend, but at the moment we’ve only got thethree of us. That’s me, Harry Bentham, I’m a blogger at Beliefnetand a columnist on a number of websites, and Dirk Bruere, who ishere to represent the Zero State activist group, and Mike, whorepresents the Wave Chronicle, who – I’ve been collaborating withhim with my own blog.

And so, the people who didn’t show up to the conference – not toname and shame, but they were just too busy to come to this today –were 0glemedia, which is a technology website; Harry Danilevics, whois a host for Wake Up America, which is an alternative media projectin the US; Mitsuki, who is a Japanese blogger I collaborated withand was one of the first people to join this club; and Wei, who is a

http://wakeupamerica.com/

http://clubof.info/

http://wavechronicle.com/

http://zerostate.net/

http://lordre.net/


blogger based in Cambodia – a dissident blogger based in Cambodia –he can’t show up, possibly because of the different time zone; andJens, JM Porup, who is a novelist – a satirical novelist based inUruguay.

So, you can find out more, you can see our full list of participantsat Beliefnet using a link that I am going to put below this video.And so, what is the Mont Order? I’ll give a brief introduction.We’re an association of writers and groups who consider ourselves tobe catalysts for change.

We seem to have lost Mike. Where’s he gone? It doesn’t matter, I’llcontinue with this.

DIRK: Well, he knows this anyway, so –

HARRY: Don’t know if we can get him back. Okay, well, he probablygot bored and left.

Right. Okay, right, so we’re interested in transhumanism, which is,for those who don’t know, the idea of fundamentally changinghumankind using mostly future technologies but also currenttechnologies. We consider the Internet to be part of that change,because that’s probably the most significant technology that’stransformed people’s lives in recent history. And so, we alsoencourage political change in tandem with that kind of changebecause it’s all connected, it’s all social change.

So, originally we had about ninety minutes for this, but due to thecomplications in setting it up, it’s going to be slightly less timethan that, probably more like just over an hour. And so, I hope thatwe can cover everything in that short timeslot. Mostly, it’ll be measking questions, being the host of the group. And so, yes, I mightrun through some controversial questions and put them forward, whichshould stimulate a bit of discussion.

DIRK: Go for it, then.

HARRY: I’m wondering if we’ve got – I’m wondering if we’re going toget Mike back or if – he’s probably having connection difficultiesor something.

DIRK: Could be, and they’ve got loads of snow over there,apparently, so –

HARRY: Yes.

http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/lordre/mont-order-club.html/


DIRK: That might have been interfering with communications.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: One of us has had some bandwidth problems as well.

HARRY: Yes, yes. While he’s gone, we might as well speak on hisbehalf, along with everybody else that hasn’t showed up.

DIRK: Yes, well, he and I have known each other for – how long now?Getting on for twenty years on the net. We’ve never met, but we’vesort of been in the same groups and done stuff together.

HARRY: Yes, yes, and that’s one of the benefits of the Internet,isn’t it?

DIRK: Yes.

HARRY: That you can form those kinds of collaborative relationshipswith people all over the world, and so on. So, right, well,politically, what I feel we should be doing as a group – as a club,the Mont Order – is, I think, and I think that we all have this incommon as a feature – is that we see the current political systemsthat we have now – which are all organized along the lines ofnation-states – that we see those as being a bit archaic and that weshould be trying to develop alternative communities and things likethat. That’s one form of change through technology. And you see alot of effects of that now, like revolutions around the world, andso on, like the Arab Spring and the effects of groups likeWikiLeaks, which work through technology, and whistleblowers andphenomena like that. The Internet is already giving rise toalternative communities like that, and we can even talk aboutourselves as an example of that. Just the existence of this club atall is an example of that.

So, having written for dissident publications, I feel that we don’tlive in free societies in Britain and America, not in fully freesocieties, and that gives us a lot to talk about. So, that’s onesubject that we can cover in this discussion.

DIRK: It depends exactly what you mean by a free society. I mean,traditionally, in an unfree society you get caught talking on theInternet and the secret police kick the door in and you disappear.

HARRY: Yes, yes.


DIRK: I mean, that doesn’t happen now.

HARRY: True.

DIRK: Our kind of unfree societies are unfree in two kinds of ways.One is the sort of, political correctness where you get arrestedfor, you know, hate speech, because somebody doesn’t like whatyou’re saying, or –

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: Or, in Britain, for those of you who don’t know, trolling onFacebook pages and tweeting is becoming – has become a criminaloffense, you know – offending somebody is now a criminal offense. Soyou have a kind of soft tyranny where, if somebody’s offended,potentially they could take you to court or the police could arrestyou. It depends, you know, whether police are feeling busy on aparticular day or whether they take the complaint seriously.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: That does tend to, sort of, damp down discussions, especiallymore heated discussions, which is, you know, it has its good and itsbad points but it’s certainly not free speech.

The other much more insidious form of lack of free speech – well,it’s not even lack of free speech – it’s the fact that nobody knowswhat’s happening. You know, there’s so much free speech, so manyclaims that you just can’t sort out the truth. I mean, a perfectexample is, between me and you.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: Now, the only thing I know about the Mont Order is what’s onthe Internet and what you’ve told me.

HARRY: True, yes.

DIRK: There’s actually no way I can check the truth of that. Youknow, so maybe it’s exactly as you say it is, or the arm of anotherorganization with its own hidden agenda.

HARRY: Yes.


DIRK: And, you know, it’s probably not true in your case, but I knowthere are instances where it is true, certainly within Zero State.

If people don’t know what Zero State is, the short version is thatit is an autonomous transnational community, which was originallybased around trasnshumanism but has expanded its remit into politicsbecause we were interested in – we actually wanted to do things asopposed to just click ‘like’ on Facebook, like all the sort of crap,slacktivists. On Mike Dodd’s site, Wave Chronicle, there’s anarticle I wrote called The State of Zero State – 2014. And, peoplewho don’t know about the Zero State should go and see that. Now, thething is, we can state all kinds of interesting facts that makethings look either sinister or harmless, but you can tell the truthin such a way – by leaving out context, by not telling all the truth– you can make it seem anything you like. I don’t want to actuallygo into specific examples, because that might sound a bit weird.But, if you go to The State of Zero State – 2014, you’ll see some ofthe things.

For example, one of our sort of projects was to try and – or, thiswas run by the German, sort of the German people at Zero State – wasto approach small nations in the Pacific area, with maybe twentythousand people in there, in their nation, and try and get thosegovernments interested in a bitcoin economy. This was before bitcoinsuddenly hit the headlines. And, for various reasons, that failed,but one of the possible ramifications of that was that when one ofour American members, when he came to Britain, got stopped atHeathrow Airport, questioned for five or six hours about bitcoin,turned around and was deported. At that point, everybody [at ZeroState] started getting really paranoid because suddenly, you know,the tick the ‘like’ button slacktivism had turned horribly real intheir minds. Now they were looking at potential no-fly lists, youknow –

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: Black marks by the NSA against their job applications, allkinds of stuff like that can happen. Because, suddenly, people weredoing real things in the real world. Now, my view is thatgovernments don’t really mind what happens on Facebook and Twitterand so forth, because –

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: Yes, most of the people who do that, they let off steam onFacebook, it’s like writing to your MP or writing to the newspapers.

http://wavechronicle.com/wave/?p=1911


As long as you don’t actually go out and do anything, you can dowhat you like, more or less. It’s only when you act in the realworld that you suddenly come hard up against the state.

HARRY: Yes, I know, I watched something recently – I saw somethingrecently on a YouTube video that struck a chord with me, which wasclaiming that the surveillance that we have reduces freedom. Because- even though we go on about how the Arab Spring and things likethat were an example of people standing up to their government, andso on – if the state can see everything that’s going on, over theInternet – it can thwart people’s attempts to organize through theInternet anyway. Because it can see everything, so the states thathave that surveillance advantage aren’t as vulnerable to peoplemobilizing through the Internet as a country like, say Qaddafi’sLibya was. Because he didn’t control Facebook or Twitter, whereasthe American government, you could argue, does control Facebook orTwitter because those websites are based in the US, and if anythingthe US can switch them off if it wants to.

DIRK: Yes, I mean –

HARRY: And those websites don’t want to break the law, either. Like,Google in particular, doesn’t want to break the law, if it’sAmerican law. Like, I think, Julian Assange asked Google to disclosethe, all the FISA Court requests that had come in to Google, fromthe US government, and they wouldn’t do it, they said, because it’sillegal.

DIRK: Yes, because the court order comes with an order saying you’renot allowed to tell people about this court order.

HARRY: Yes, and so, Google will write a book like The New Digital Age,which they wrote, claiming that the digital age frees people andmakes them able to protest the government, and things like that, butwhen it comes –. They don’t mind facilitating a revolution inAfrica, Google wouldn’t mind facilitating a revolution in Africa atall, they’re not going to turn themselves off because some dictatorin Africa told them to, but if the US government told them to turnoff, then they would. Or they would do anything the US governmentsaid, because for some reason, the US government, they consider itto be more binding in what it says on them. And in a way, they’reright because their company is based in the US, so they are bound byUS law, aren’t they?

DIRK: Yes, there’s also the problem in that, well, take one of thebiggest transhumanist groups on Facebook, Singularity Network. Last


time I saw it, it had about fifteen thousand members. So, how manytranshumanists do you think are actually active, out there, doingstuff in the world?

HARRY: Probably not many.

DIRK: I would say there’s less than a hundred, maybe less thanthirty.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: Out of fifteen thousand on Facebook. Now, assume, that’s sortof, my experience because I’m interested in transhumanism. If I wasinterested in the kind of Facebook politics, I assume, that thereare other groups on Facebook that are – oriented to have that kindof membership as well –

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: The government has rounded up, effectively, tens of thousandsof people on Facebook, and now they think that doing something isticking ‘like’ on some horrible little aphorism with a picture thatgoes with it.

HARRY: Yes, yes, I see.

DIRK: You know, you’ve taken ten thousand people, and you’ve defusedthe anger of ten thousand people.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: And the remaining handful, you can deal with very easily.

HARRY: Yes, yes, I mean, I think that in the case of the ArabSpring, one of the main reasons that that was successful in manycases was because of, Islam – the way that Islam is organized, Islamis a community-organizing tradition. It’s capable of putting abillion people in one place – in Mecca.

DIRK: Yes.

HARRY: So, if it can bring out a billion people into one place, thenit must be capable of putting millions of people on the streets ifthey want to. If imams and religious leaders want to put millions ofpeople on the street to protest, they can probably do it.


DIRK: Yes, the irony of the Arab Spring –

HARRY: It’s like –

DIRK: The irony of the Arab Spring was that it was replacing one setof dictatorships with another, which may or may not have been worse.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: The classic case is Syria.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: And, the Americans also have this weird, this counter-terrorist policy, whereby – you’ve probably seen it over the lastfew years – like “number three al Qaeda in Iraq has been killed inour drone strikes”, you know, “number two in Syria has been killed”.And what they’ve been doing over the years is just breeding more andmore efficient terrorists, efficient and ruthless terrorists –

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: Because all those really clever guys are moving into thosepositions. You know, if you tended to leave the leadership intactand just wiped out the, sort of, rank and file, it works a lotbetter because the people who sort of, start off, start offreasonably moderate. You start killing the moderates, then you endup with, sort of a mad dog organization like Islamic State.

HARRY: Yes, that’s true. Like, apparently, even al Qaeda itselfappears moderate by comparison with the Islamic State now.

DIRK: Well, Islamic State is al Qaeda, it’s just another branch ofit.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: And, of course, there’s all these accusations that variousgovernments fuel Islamic State and al Qaeda, which is true.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: And there’s claims that, for example, the Americans deal withal Qaeda and Islamic State, and back them and so forth. But, again,this is a kind of night and fog thing – that, you don’t really knowwhat’s happening. Even the American government probably doesn’t


know, because there is no such thing as a monolithic Americangovernment. You have autonomous departments, you have the CIA; youhave the NSA; you have the Department of Defense; you have the StateDepartment. They’ve all got their own agendas. They all – a lot ofthem are in competition with each other. They’ll run operations theywon’t tell each other.

HARRY: Yes, yes, I’ve heard that before, yes.

DIRK: So, you have some of the CIA dealing with Islamic State or AlQaeda, then you have the DOD trying to bomb the shit out of them,and the two won’t talk to each other, necessarily. And you getaccusations that the Americans are supporting these people. Well,why are they bombing them, then? You know.

HARRY: Yes, yes.

DIRK: You know, everything looks very contradictory. And, of course,our good friends in Saudi Arabia. Obviously, they seem to be theones behind most of this, but we can’t bomb the shit out of thembecause they have the oil.

HARRY: Yes, that’s true.

DIRK: It’s all just a mess. And then, the other problem with – I wasgoing to say democracy – with free speech on the net especially, isthat people are more interested in interesting things than they arein the truth. If you can tell an interesting story – that will go alot further than your sort of, banal truth will. So, conspiracytheories, you know, they run wild.


DIRK: And, even if you look at – well, I’m not going to pick out anyconspiracy theory, but generally, conspiracy theories are based onan interpretation of facts. Generally, not all the facts, and quiteoften facts taken out of context. But, I was involved, and have beeninvolved, and am involved in various branches of occultism. And, oneof the things you find is that, no matter how ludicrous the belief,if you look for evidence, you will find it. If you’re convinced thatAdolf Hitler escaped to the Moon in a flying saucer at the end ofthe Second World War, and you start looking for evidence, you willfind it, you will suddenly live in a world that’s run by Moon Nazis.

HARRY: Yes.


DIRK: It’s a very, sort of, bizarre psychological place to be.People who are heavily into conspiracy theories live in a – aneffectively different world from ordinary people –

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: They think it’s the real one, but it’s no more real than anyother sort of obsessive.

HARRY: Yes, that’s true, yes. If people focus excessively on onenarrative then they just end up seeing everything as part of that.

DIRK: Yes, people don’t like to live in the world where shithappens.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: It is better that somebody’s controlling something, becausethere’s always a sort of chance that you’ll be able to overthrowthem, and everything will be alright with the world then. But in theworld where, you know, shit happens, you can’t fix it. It’s just,bad stuff happens.

HARRY: Yes, I’d say I’m more content to live in the world of shithappens, to be honest. I find that to be more interesting.

DIRK: Well, except, of course, conspiracies do exist but they’re notthese sort of conspiracy theories where the New World Orderorchestrates every sparrow-fart in history.

HARRY: Yes, yes. I guess one thing about the war on terror thatpeople don’t – one of the conspiracy claims in the war on terror isthat idea that America supported bin Laden. But there’s not actuallyany – any evidence that America supported bin Laden. There’sevidence that America supported Mujahidin fighters in Afghanistan,but not specifically bin Laden. And bin Laden had been making anti-American statements for a long time, all the way back to the 1970s,probably.

DIRK: Well, bin Laden’s big thing was the fact of having Americantroops stationed in Saudi Arabia –

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: And bin Laden wanted to destroy the house of Saud, you know,he thought they were corrupt, which – I think he’s probably got a


good sort of point there. But, you know, did we deal with him?Probably, yes. But, did he need the money? You know, he comes of avery rich family.

HARRY: Yes, I don’t see the point of funding – of why anyone wouldhave funded bin Laden because bin Laden was in Afghanistan to fundpeople.

DIRK: Yes.

HARRY: It doesn’t make any sense that people would have funded him.

DIRK: Yes.

HARRY: He himself was a financier of terrorism. That’s the wholecomplaint against him, is that he financed terrorists.

DIRK: Anyway, Mike’s back.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: Hey, Mike, I can’t hear you still, so you need to tweaksomething.

HARRY: I think it might be something to do with his connection,because that would explain both why his microphone wasn’t comingthrough and why –

MIKE: Can you guys hear me now?

DIRK: That’s it, got you.

HARRY: Yes, we can hear you now, yes.

MIKE: Alright, so I’m back. My computer, kind of, winked out alittle bit, but I was hearing some of your conversation going on.Did you guys, obviously you guys already did the introductions,right?

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: You have an introduction there, so you can say who you are andwhat –

MIKE: Alright, I’m Mike Dodd, I’m with the – I run the WaveChronicle. What I like to do with that particular website is go




through, put up some technology posts, educational posts which we doevery Saturday. It fits with transhumanism and activism. The idea isthat we can use technology, along with some philosophy, to make abetter world. That’s our overall goal.

We’ve been associated with Zero State for a little bit. We’ve hadsome issues with Zero State from time to time, but that’s been onboth of our organizations. We do have our own authors that do submitarticles from time to time, and we’re always looking for morearticles as we go forward.

So, a lot of the posts I put up look like this, nothing but YouTubevideos, which – I do that for a particular reason. The reason why Ido that is, I think it is important for people to see certain keyfigures, and see what their faces look like. Like, I put up one ofthe articles on Ayn Rand, which you see – I’d never even heard ofthis person before a year ago. It makes it around to thetranshumanist folks, this Ayn Rand – some of the books that shewrote years ago on this, what I would call a rampant form ofcapitalism. That’s the only way I can really look at it. And I foundthis whole video from the Donahue Show, which is probably thirty orforty years old, where you actually get to see her particular face,her reactions and her own words. Which I think is, kind of,important, that you look over some of these people. That’s why Ilike to use YouTube videos, or any video I throw up there. So youcan see the person themselves, see exactly what they do. It’s easyto read words and take a different set of meanings from somethingwritten down, but it’s a lot different when you’re looking atsomeone as they speak. You can actually see face inflections and allof that, so some of the folks who like this, the Any Rand mentalityof, rampant capitalism will solve all of our ills – while I’m inMassachusetts right now, we’ve have like, seven feet of snow andwe’ve got another foot of snow coming, but somehow capitalism wouldmagically fix that – not a government with snow ploughs and ice-melters. So, I mean it’s that particular mentality I like to lookat. So, when you see those YouTube videos, they’re not randomly putup there. I look over every single video that goes up there. Sadly,I watch every single one of them. Some are better than others, andyou don’t even see the ones that I didn’t put up there either.That’s pretty much a quick overview of the Wave Chronicle.

We’ll eventually do some more stuff as we go forward. We work withZero State, we work with The Rational Argumentator, a bunch of othergroups. Also with the Mont Order, which has been a pleasure workingwith.

http://www.rationalargumentator.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phil_Donahue_Show


HARRY: Yes.

MIKE: So, we’re a growing group of people. I love grabbing otherarticles that other folks within the organization have written andget them up on the Wave Chronicle website. So, I like how this –this unison of effort between that organization and everyone elsewithin it. It seems to be a really good group of people that havedone some really good work.

HARRY: Yes, yes, and international in focus as well.

DIRK: The one thing I’ve noticed with videos, especially with GoogleHangouts, you know, if you look at my picture, I look apparentlytowards my left, don’t I? Occasionally. But I’m looking at thebottom of the screen where I see the little pictures. Now, whenyou’re talking to people, you should actually be facing the camera.And the worst thing is, I’ve done this before, I was looking at itand I was thinking I shouldn’t have done that, is – what you do is,you look in the camera and then you’re sort of looking down likethat and then looking back, and it makes you look really shifty andsort of untrustworthy.

HARRY: Yes, yes, I suppose, but –

DIRK: So, the body language that you use, if you want to look down.What you don’t go is sort of – that probably doesn’t carry overinto, sort of, Asian cultures or Indian, or African. I’m not sureabout those, but certainly in the West, that kind of body languagewhere you don’t want to make eye contact with somebody, that justlooks untrustworthy. And politicians, you know, you see them on TV –they don’t just appear on TV. They go through hours of coaching,they have videos taken of them. They’re are asked questions onvideo, then the video is analyzed and they do it again, and do itright. It’s not a kind of natural skill that comes, it’s one that’svery specifically taught, and that’s one of the things that all ofus that interact or want to interact with the public, especiallyover video, should realize – that you just need to practice, and youneed to notice these little things as well. You know, watch your ownvideos.

HARRY: Yes, yes.

DIRK: You know, have a shave, which I haven’t done.


HARRY: Yes, for me, in the past I’ve usually had my camera close tome, but today I thought I would have it further away. I don’t knowwhy I did that.

DIRK: It’s probably a good idea. I mean, I’m sitting right in frontof a twenty-seven inch screen, and I’m about sort of, I don’t know,fifty centimeters away from it, that’s about a foot and a half inimperial. So, when I look down towards the screen, I have to turn myhead to look, sort of, and then back, and the camera’s directly infront of me. If I was sitting further back, that wouldn’t matter.

HARRY: Yes, it’s like, where I am now, if I look at different partsof the screen, you don’t really notice it because I’m that far awayfrom the camera anyway, that it’s not really that much of an issue.

DIRK: One of the things we’re going to have to do with theTranshumanist Party [UK], when we seriously get going, we should beregistering in the next couple of weeks in the UK, is actually runlittle courses on how to speak. You know, speak to video – speak toTV cameras, and not look shifty – must look trustworthy and, youknow, look the electorate in the eye, sort of, whatever. And,another thing I noticed is I put in a lot of hesitation, like peopledo. You know, this is how you can tell some reality TV programs thatare supposed to be real but aren’t, because the actors are far toofluent, and they’re sort of, not sort of doing what I’m doing –stopping and thinking about what they’re going to say, and crap likethat. They’re far too fluent, you know. Whenever you see somebodyvery fluent, you know they’re reading a script or they’ve runthrough a script in their head, or this is something they’vepracticed. And, you know, we need to do that because people are –alright, I’m going to be honest here, half the population is belowaverage intelligence, most people are stupid. You know, they don’tlisten to what is being said, they don’t vote on policies, they voteon, “oh, doesn’t he look shifty, I think I’ll vote for the otherparty.

HARRY: Yes, they’re not going to watch this video either.

DIRK: No, or, they probably will if I become famous, or you becomefamous, or maybe Mike goes and shoots somebody famous, I don’t know.

MIKE: You know, the thing is, like when I was doing some trainingfor my day job, look at yourself on camera. See how you actuallylook going out there. I mean, that helps a lot, too. You just tapeyourself, give a speech, do – you know, run through some kind of


slideshow or what have you. And you’ll get to see how you look, howyou sound, and that will help.

HARRY: Yes, I think, with me, I’m not that good at giving speeches.You know, like, if people – if I just have the floor and everythingis silent, I’ll run out of things to say. But, if it’s more of aformat like this, where people are throwing things at me, orsomething, then I’m more easily bated into saying things, and I’mmuch – much easier to choose what I’m going to talk about. Like,just before, you were talking about libertarianism. Well, that’s awhole subject that we could talk about for an hour, probably, if wehad the time, but we’ve not –

DIRK: Oh, I used to be quite favorable towards libertarianism, butI’ve changed my mind over the years.

HARRY: Yes. Well, definitely, the Ayn Rand libertarianism is, Ithink, is completely and utterly crazy. I mean, it’s like – the bestcriticism of that, that I’ve heard, is that, if she really is whatshe says she is, if she’s an objectivist and she thinks that youshould only do things that are to your own benefit, then why is sheteaching anybody this? Why is she writing a book about it? Becausethe whole function of writing a book is to share knowledge. If sheknows something, if she’s onto something that benefits her,shouldn’t she keep it to herself? If she really believes in herphilosophy of only helping yourself?

DIRK: Well, it depends, it depends what skills you have. You know,if you’re a super genius entrepreneur, then you don’t need to tellpeople your secrets, but if you’ve only got a couple of good ideas,you’re good at writing and not much else, then, you know, write abook.

HARRY: Yes, I suppose, yes.

DIRK: You know, people do what they – or try and do what they’rebest at.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: Unfortunately, what a lot of people are best at doesn’t paymoney, which is another problem with our society.

HARRY: A lot of the things that are done in society, like education,I mean, it’s aimed at – I mean, a child is helpless, a child isn’tgoing to give you anything. But people, for some reason, help


children, and help them learn. It’s not for their own benefit thatthey do that, it’s for the benefit of that child, isn’t it, really?

DIRK: Yes, I mean, most people are actually altruistic –

HARRY: Yes, the idea of teaching a child isn’t consistent withobjectivism, as Ayn Rand put it forward.

DIRK: Well, again, me being cynical, Any Rand’s ideology isperfectly suited to psychopaths, to justify their own existence andactions.

HARRY: Yes.

MIKE: I mean, on this thing with education, as we’re dumbing down,especially in America we’re dumbing down the society, the issue isthat we’re teaching these kids now, at least in America, to pass atest. That’s what we do.

HARRY: Yes.

MIKE: So, we have everyone on one standardized section, goingthrough all twelve years – twelve years of regular education and offto college. But there’s no, you know, further concept of – everyonegoes in to be a teacher, a lawyer, what have you, but there reallyis no concept to go in and put out people who are dancers, you know,the artistic people. These programs are getting cut, you’re nothaving people who mechanics, electricians. The skill trades in thiscountry are falling apart. I mean, it sounds great when you have,you know, America is filled with nothing but CSRs, but you have somestates, especially down south – they honestly do not have enoughskilled people. You know, they don’t have enough plumbers in some ofthe southern states, in the United States. Because they have thoseproblems, they don’t have the skilled jobs. We don’t have facilitiesanymore. One of the jobs that I had, back in the day, I worked at avery large dairy plant. It takes five or ten years to make a dairymechanic, you know, they don’t just pull those off an assembly line.And that’s, kind of, the problem as you look at, as we go forwardlooking to build, you know, whether it’s transhumanism, futurism,any of these other items, you lack the skilled people to do a lot ofthis work. I mean, it sounds great when you have someone talkingabout, you know, Google has this robot that works in some factorythat is seventy degrees, it only has dust, there’s no contaminantsand it just rumbles and bumbles and stumbles through these vastfootball stadium sized areas. But it doesn’t account for the realityof a lot of production plants, in this country. And, you know, it’s

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_School_Reform


– we need to switch education from where it is now, to somethingwhere we get people where they really belong. If they really aredancers, artistic people, we need to push them into that area, theydon’t need to become lawyers because that doesn’t make any sense.

DIRK: Well, the irony is that the forthcoming advantages inartificial intelligence – there’s one, well, we’ve probably allheard this, that in the next fifteen years, something like fortypercent of the existing jobs will be automated. I mean, for example,driving jobs. You know, the writing’s on the wall for all drivingjobs, taxis, trucks. The writing’s also on the wall for lawyers andcall center workers, with machines like Watson. One of the thingsthat surprised me recently, I tried the Google translation app, thelatest version, where you just talk into your phone, it translatesit into whatever language you like, and the voice recognition isquite good on that. And good voice recognition is a very difficultthing. The thing is that jobs that are not going to be automated are– it’s plumbers, it’s what used to be called the semi-skilled or theworking class-skilled, blue collar jobs. I mean, anybody can putboxes on a truck, anybody can – I was going to say anybody can be alawyer, but – machines can do lawyers’ jobs, I mean, the – one ofthe things Watson is looking at, on the Jeopardy! Program, thecontest, that’s – first of all, he read tens of thousands of medicalpapers – he can diagnose diseases better than doctors. And what he’sbeing set on now is law, you know, he can look for – one of the mostinteresting areas of the law – lucrative – is finding areas wherelaws conflict, where one law says you can do one thing and anothersays you can’t. Because in those grey areas, you can set precedents.And this is especially valuable in, you know, for example, thecorporate tax world. You know, looking for loopholes. And Watsonwould just wipe out all those lawyers overnight. Except for the verytop lawyers, who will actually be using Watson, to get rid of allthe, you know, the junior ones.

But, what Watson can’t do, and what is a long way away, is having arobot dexterous enough to crawl under your kitchen sink and fix theplumbing there. That is a seriously difficult job, it is monstrouslydifficult from an AI point of view. Everything else is trivialcompared to that.

HARRY: I guess that you have some people like, I mean I don’t knowif Jacque Fresco has particularly, I don’t know if he has theknowledge of plumbing to get around that, but his idea of futurismtends to revolve around designing entire cities from scratch,doesn’t it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeopardy!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)


DIRK: Well, that’s not going to happen.

HARRY: I don’t know if you’ve seen his circular city designs, and,sort of, putting cities on the ocean and things like that.

MIKE: Well, about a lot of that though, it sounds great, AI takingover a certain amount of jobs. And that all sounds fantastic. But,to add a realistic item to this, machinery breaks down. In dairy,you have ninety-something percent humidity, it’s an extreme – youknow, the environments are extreme because of the water in – youknow, the particulates that are around, making flavored milk. Andyou have chocolate milk, you think that’s nothing, but, in vastquantities, as you’re making silos’ worth of chocolate milk, you nowhave thousands of pounds of powder throughout the plant. So now, youhave all these particulates. It’s not – everything sounds fantasticwhen it’s in one of these environmentally controlled buildings, butin the real world, a lot of these machines break down. You’re goingto need people with skills to fix those.

HARRY: Yes.

MIKE: And that’s just not – we’re not making those people right now.Those people aren’t being taught to do that. And that’s where youhave this problem that it’s great to create, and all this equipment,but you don’t have people with the mechanical skills, and no-onerealizes that. Okay, even if you said now that we actually had theeducational centers to train these skilled folks, you still takeyears to learn to be a mechanic in that particular field. I mean,anyone can be a part-changer. You change this part, maybe it’llwork. You change another part, hopefully now it’ll work. It’s adifference between a part-changer and a mechanic. A mechanic willlook at the situation and say, “this is the part that needs to bechanged”, or something, what have you. The part-changer’s just goingto change all kinds of parts until, eventually, it’ll work. Themechanic will actually figure out why it didn’t work, and fix it.That’s where we’re off. That is where there’s a disconnect.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: Yes, I agree with that. I mean, I think that artificialintelligence is going to hit where it’s not expected. You know,people might expect it to take the, sort of, skilled jobs. But thedefinition of – they’d certainly expect it to take unskilled jobs.But it will also take up what we thought of as very skilled jobs.Doctors, lawyers, for example.


HARRY: Yes, or it may be that the artificial intelligence gets allthe top jobs. It may be that the artificial intelligence can be thePresident, or the top general, or something like that.

DIRK: Yes.

HARRY: But the regular soldier still has to be a human because,apparently, they haven’t got – they can’t have robots crawlingthrough trenches and stuff like that, because they might break downor something.

DIRK: Well, the kind of artificial intelligence that we’re talkingabout is not what we’d call artificial general intelligence, whichis something as good as a human or probably a lot better. We’retalking about a kind of limited artificial intelligence, artificialintelligence in limited areas that can be applied to well-definedfields. I mean, when artificial general intelligence arrives, if itarrives – and that could be anytime between now and never – youknow, the world would change overnight. And we’ll be lucky tosurvive it, I think.

HARRY: Yes, I’ve often thought, I suppose you could say, what anightmare it would be if we reached a point where machines werebetter at – like, for example, if a machine could be a bettermarksman than a human. You know, like, if it could take in all thedata and it could snipe someone in a way that no human couldpossibly do – if we reached a stage like that, then I supposesomething like that could defeat humans in a war or some situation.

DIRK: Well, I think that’s overly optimistic. The idea of shootingit out with terminators is an optimistic fantasy.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: We’re talking about the kind of differences in intelligenceand capability. It wouldn’t be us versus them. For them, it would bea minor and temporary problem in pest control.

HARRY: Yes, I think there are already weapons developments going onnow where, I think, they are trying to make sniper rifles so thatyou don’t really need any skill to use them. You know, like, they’retrying to make it so that it’s all just technology that does all theaiming for you and you don’t need to do anything. You can just pointthe gun at someone and the automated aiming system will kick in andshoot the person for you, or something like that.


DIRK: I mean, there are experimental systems, robotic systems –

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: I mean, the strange thing is, you’ve seen these in computergames from the nineties, because I’ve seen them in computer gamesfrom the nineties. So, it’s difficult to work out which came first,the idea as a reality or the idea as a game. And what you have is,you have a weapons position, not much more complex than amachinegun, and all it does is it just scans everything in front ofit, looks for any changes, and if it sees any changes, it shootsthem. It doesn’t miss.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: You don’t have anything coming within its field of vision thatit doesn’t shoot, unless you can blow that up first.

HARRY: And I guess it opens up that sort of question, that sort ofinternational law sort of question, as to whose responsibility itwould be. You know, like, if someone can pin the blame. Like, if abunch of civilians get killed and you can just pin the blame on amalfunction or something like that, then you could say that you’renot culpable for it and that it was just an error.

DIRK: Yes, there was a weapon system that was, I don’t think it hasbeen actually implemented, and basically, it was banned with thekind of, landmine ban. And what it was is, intelligent landmines.You don’t bury them, you just drop them into enemy territory andthey just wander off looking for targets. You know, they wait, startwalking or whatever, and when they see a big metal object that lookslike a car or an armored personnel carrier or tank, they jump up,use their force fragment explosion to just put a hole through it.And you just drop thousands of these things over a potentialbattlefield, and they either wait or they start wandering aroundlooking for things to kill.

HARRY: Yes, I guess that’s an important point because, it’s kind oflike – there have always been systems that were automated to somedegree that were responsible for killing people. Like, whether itwas an electric fence or a mine, or something like that. There’snobody actually doing it, there’s no one actually committing thatact. It’s just engineers or sappers or people who have set thisstuff up, and then it is killing people later. So I suppose it wouldbe similar to that –


DIRK: Yes, the difference is that you don’t have to step on it ortouch it, you just have to be in visual range of it.

HARRY: Yes, yes.

MIKE: The thing about advanced programming is that it is, you know,when I look at AI, I look at AI as that it is going to operateoutside of its programming. You know, that’s what I’m looking atwhen I see, when someone mentions AI. The proof I’m looking for is,okay, it was given a particular task to do, but it when outside ofthat program.

HARRY: Yes, yes.

MIKE: That’s where I see AI. Now, on something you’re talking aboutlike, a landmine that moseys its way to wherever it’s going to go,that’s to me, not AI. That’s just a variation of programming withif/then statements until it finds what it’s looking for.

HARRY: Yes, it belongs in, I suppose it’s in the same category assomething that’s been set up in advance by engineers, which thengoes about and does its own thing.

MIKE: Exactly.

HARRY: From a legal standpoint, I guess it’s the same isn’t it, asany legal standpoint would be, what else? What other system has donesomething similar to this before? That would be an example of it.

DIRK: There was something else, I’d like to get back to something wewere talking about earlier, about the fog of disinformation on theInternet. And what I’m interested in is just adding to that fog. Oneof the things that I think any movement or organization, especiallyon the political end – well, I’m not sure what you would call ZeroState, well apart from the alternative title, international ortransnational state – all these things need their own mythology.

HARRY: Yes. A subculture, you mean. Or, you could call it asubculture.

DIRK: Well, stories are what really happened, and why they reallyexist, and what they’re really up to. So, most of what happens – andI’ve seen it with Zero State, I’ve seen it with the TranshumanistParty – most of what happens and the reason things exist havenothing to do with what is eventually presented to the public.


HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: And, sometimes, the way things come into existence is reallybizarre.

HARRY: Yes. About that subject of the Internet, and disinformation,and all that, which is the one that we’re on – I mentioned earlierthat the Arab Spring, I think a lot of it is to do with the way thatIslam is organized as a religion, through mosques and so on, and theway that they have pilgrimages and things like that, which they doanyway, which gives them certain capabilities in the way oforganizing. I think that one of the reasons we can’t see somethinglike the Arab Spring in a Western country is that we don’t have thatsort of religious or social structure. In the West, we’re relativelyatomized and people just tend to live their own sort of bubble.

DIRK: Well, we did have structures like that, probably into the1960s –

HARRY: Yes, with labor, trade unions were similar to that becausethey could put thousands of people in the streets.

DIRK: Yes, but, the more communication you have that’s virtual, andvirtual gathering places, the less face-to-face you get, and withoutface-to-face contact and personal contact, you don’t get thecommitment.

HARRY: Yes, that’s true. I mean, I don’t know if you –

DIRK: I mean, I think the Arab Spring was only possible becausetheir communication facilities were so poor.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: You know, if they’d all gathered in Facebook and complainedabout their government, and then ticked the ‘like’ box, therewouldn’t have been an Arab Spring.

HARRY: Yes, that’s true, yes, and –

MIKE: There is some of that, though, around, in the United States.It’s not going to be like an Arab Spring, because they’re differentsocieties. The United States, we had the Occupy Movement.

HARRY: Yes.


MIKE: That’s how that is going to work in the United States. Andthere was voting to go along with that. We got some politicians out,we voted in some more dumb politicians, it’s a vicious circle. Butyou have – it’s going to be different in Western societies becausewe have a weight of both. If there’s somebody you don’t like,they’re going to be voted out. What a lot of people, maybe outsideof America, don’t understand is how close a lot of these electionshave been. I’ve seen elections in my state where the person won bytwenty, forty, sixty, eighty, or a hundred votes. You’re talking,out of communities with hundreds of thousands of people, when youhave voting elections that can be that close. We’re having the samething [as the Arab Spring], it’s just in a different manner thanit’s happening elsewhere in the world. Their society’s different [inthe Middle East], so they take a different set of actions, althoughthe US probably paid a lot of them, for the Arab Spring. Put thatalong there with it, but that’s how you go with the differencebetween societies.

HARRY: Yes, it’s like, in a way, dictatorships have set themselvesup for this kind of opposition, because – of the sort of thing thatyou saw in the Arab Spring – because they’re so repressive thatpeople often resort to violence just out of outrage anyway.

DIRK: Yes, they’re just stupid and crude, basically.

HARRY: Yes. And we don’t have that here, because the governmentdoesn’t resort to brute force, or at least it doesn’t do so whenit’s at an unwise time. I mean, it does sometimes resort to bruteforce in the case of, I suppose, Julian Assange is a case of that –

DIRK: Well, it’s hardly, I mean, in a lot of other countries they’dhave just dragged him out and shot him in the street.

HARRY: I guess so, yes, but he did have to take refuge in anembassy, didn’t he?

DIRK: Oh yes, he’s bottled up and it doesn’t matter [to thegovernment] what the cost is.

HARRY: I mean, I think that one of the reasons he’s alright there,is because Britain – Britain has always been very – one of thethings about it that’s good, for all the bad things about Britain,is that Britain tends to adhere to international law. Except in thecase of the Iraq War, that was –


DIRK: Well, I’d be a bit more cynical, I’d say that in Britian,nothing quite works effectively. And that includes the police andthe security services, and the repression. Britain has never had thekind of repression we’ve seen in continental Europe, for example.It’s never been, sort of, quite a dictatorship. It’s always been akind of half-hearted dictatorship –

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: Even when it was supposed to be one officially, like underCromwell.

HARRY: Yes, I mean, in one way –

DIRK: It’s been repressive, but not repressive in the sense of, youknow, let’s massacre a million people.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: Not since the Middle Ages.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: A point I was going to make, a response to Mike. When you havea two party system, and the balance is very, very closely, they’revery, very closely balanced. Then, any organized third party canhave a disproportionate influence. They can’t replace those parties,but they can become the deciding factor in a lot of areas. I thinkthis is where you see the Tea Party –

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: Particularly having a disproportionate influence, and thereligious right. I don’t know, would you agree with that, Mike?

MIKE: You’re seeing lately – on an overall basis you are correct –lately in my state of Massachusetts, we now have a third party, oneof the things that worked out in this last bit of election, that wewere able to get a third party voted in, in my particular state. But–

DIRK: Which one?

MIKE: The point about – I’ll have to look that up. Because they’reon my list of people that we’re looking to try to help out. But we


do have a third party. It’s Independent, something, I’ll have tolook it up.

DIRK: Okay.

MIKE: I’ll send you that. But, we now have a valid third party.They’ll be on all the ballots now. So, that’s like a valid thirdparty in my particular state. The Tea Party people hijacked theRepublican Party – which, they’re [the Tea Party] actually, if youlook at the history of them, they really are democrats. No-one wantsto hear that, because it doesn’t work to their particular grooming.But they’re basically southern Democrats. Because they havedemocratic values, they’re not fiscal conservatives, which is whatthe Republican Party is supposed to be. But they were able to hijackthat party, and now you have this religious right fringe movementthat has taken over one of the two political parties. That has made,in those states that have the Tea Party and that control, are makingthings a mess which is why we can’t do anything with this nationright now. We’ve had roughly, at this point we’re going to belooking at sixteen years of not much getting done. It is pretty muchbecause of that, you know, between two Presidents.

DIRK: Well, in that case you’ve got sixteen years of other peopledoing stuff.

MIKE: Well, they haven’t done anything. That’s the first part of itall. It’s like sixteen years of an economy being built, an economybeing destroyed, an economy being rebuilt again, and then no realreforms and no real action taken since then, because we’re not happyone way or the other with whoever the President is.

DIRK: Well, yes, but then, on the other hand, all the very richpeople have been making more money, so it’s obviously working forthem.

MIKE: Yes, the very top one percent.

DIRK: Yes, yes, this is why politicians don’t change things, becausethey’re on top, they’re generally wealthy. If they’re not wealthywhen they start out as politicians, they’re wealthy when they end aspoliticians, and the system works one hundred percent for them.Otherwise they wouldn’t be running things. You know, why change it?

HARRY: Yes. It seems like, one thing that I think has beendiscredited in recent years is – you know how we were talking aboutdictatorships before and how we’re supposed to be different from


dictatorships, is that in many ways, the allegations about who is adictatorship and who is not has kind of gotten out of hand now.Like, Putin, for example, used to be considered a democrat and nowhe’s considered a dictator.

DIRK: Well, that’s because the Russian people have voted the wrongway.

HARRY: Yes, but just because the US government disagrees with whatPutin did. It’s kind of like, as soon as anyone does anything thatthe American government doesn’t like, they just get stamped on theforehead that they’re either a dictator or a terrorist. You know, itdoesn’t matter if they got voted into power, or whatever, or if theyhad a referendum or something like that. The American governmentjust puts this stamp on their forehead.

DIRK: Well yes, politics and the establishment have this kind ofwhole set of stupid assumptions and – they’re not assumptions,they’re statements – like, you know, take UKIP. That must be anextreme right-wing party because extreme right-wing means you’reanti-immigration. If you’re anti-immigration, you’re extreme right-wing. It doesn’t matter what your other policies are. It’s like theold British National Party, which were called, considered to beextreme right but, apart from their immigration policy, they wereextreme left.

HARRY: I suppose, yes, it’s like –

DIRK: And the worst one was, I remember back to when there was acoup against Gorbachev in the Soviet Union – and you probably won’tremember this as you were fairly young –

HARRY: I would have been about one –

DIRK: The papers over here were saying – right, the people leadingthe coup were hardline communists – and it was described in themedia as a “right-wing coup”.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: It was hardline communists trying to stop the Soviet Unionturning capitalist.

HARRY: Yes, yes, and it’s like that, the neoconservatives today,like John McCain, the other day, was at the Munich SecurityConference and was preaching about a liberal world order. But that’s


going to confuse a lot of people in the US, because they don’tconsider him a liberal there, do they?

DIRK: Well, liberal means different things on different sides of theAtlantic.

HARRY: Yes, like in Europe it means something different. Because, inEurope, when we say liberal, we mean classic liberal, don’t we?

DIRK: It’s more like US libertarian.

HARRY: In political theory, a classical liberal is someone whoargues for less government, yes, it’s someone who argues that agovernment is best when it’s as little as you can make it.

DIRK: Yes.

HARRY: It interferes in public life as much as possible, that’sclassic liberalism. Whereas in America, they think liberal meansheavy government intervention, don’t they? The word itself meansfreedom, so it doesn’t really mean, it doesn’t indicate highergovernment intervention. But, that’s just the way it’s used inAmerican politics, isn’t it, it’s just come to be used that way?

MIKE: On an overall basis, a lot of the politics in America,especially when you talk about the basic population, it’s they don’tunderstand the political terms. You know, they look at, they don’tunderstand Europe and European political terms. It’s not anythingthey’re going to be able to understand.

HARRY: Yes.

MIKE: Alright, so it’s something that’s well beyond them. Theindependent party of Massachusetts is the United Independent Party.

DIRK: That seems fairly descriptive.

MIKE: Yes, exactly. Now, you know, Americans don’t grasp thisconcept of what is liberal, conservative. When they look at – whenthey look at conservative, it’s more of a religious view, at thispoint.

HARRY: Yes.

MIKE: And so that’s how you have to take a look at it. So, when youhave these, I’ve been hearing of these Republicans going to Europe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Independent_Party


and making fools out of themselves. And, because – they don’t knowit either. They’re not any better than the regular population.

HARRY: Yes.

MIKE: So, I’m not shocked that they’re going over there and makingfools of themselves.

HARRY: Yes, and McCain, I sometimes wonder if McCain understandsanything. He talks about having a liberal world order, and all that.He seems to be more concerned with foreign policy than with domesticpolicy a lot of the time, doesn’t he, McCain? He’s so concerned withwhat goes on in the Middle East. Like, I think, he was also saying –he was also denouncing the overthrow of the Yemeni government aswell, and calling that Iranian aggression, even though Iran hasn’t –no-one has pinned any responsibility on Iran for what went on inYemen. But for all intents and purposes, it just looks like the pro-US government got removed. And they think Iran must be behind itbecause, I suppose, it serves Iran’s interests to kick America outof a country –

DIRK: Well, it’s not just Internet nuts that like conspiracytheories. You know, governments are rife with conspiracy theories.If you’re in the government, especially in the intelligenceservices, nothing happens by accident, you know. Somebody’s alwaysresponsible for it.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: They’re the worst of all.

MIKE: I mean, what you have to look at is – I use this comment allthe time – it’s the warmonger elite. They need and want a perpetualwar. They have been consistent in wanting this perpetual war, prettymuch on an economy basis, the military-industrial complex. That’show I look at a lot of these warmongers, especially McCain and someof the others. Where they have to have, you know, it’s – they needthat mentality to move everything forward, and that’s part of –.They’re the dying breed, so hopefully with these elections comingup, that will work itself out. But there’s no guarantee of that,especially in this day and age.

HARRY: Yes, yes, well isn’t – the Republicans got control of theSenate, recently, wasn’t it? In that –

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_complex


MIKE: On an election that, basically, people voted – that’s how thatended up working out.

HARRY: Yes, that just because people were fed up with Obama, theyended up voting all these pyromaniacs into office.

MIKE: You know, on that end – it’s one of these things that, whenyou take a look at that, it – they just didn’t go out and vote. TheDemocrats didn’t go out and vote. A lot of the candidates, if youlook at the particular races, none of them ran on supporting Obama.They all ran, every single Democrat that lost, against Obama.

HARRY: Yes.

MIKE: So, there are a number of good things that have happened. It’snot all bad under Obama. And, if you run in the opposite direction,and you’re a Democrat in those areas, and you liked Obama, why wouldyou vote for someone that is doing this –

HARRY: Yes.

MIKE: And that’s where everything went awry.

HARRY: Yes.

MIKE: Now you have Republicans in both the Senate and the House ofRepresentatives, and now you’re going to – now you’ll see for thenext, probably, two years, nothing but vetoes coming down the line.

HARRY: Yes, yes, on that matter, Mike, who do you think the nextPresident will be after Obama?

MIKE: Personally, I hope it is Warren, but she hasn’t declared torun yet.

HARRY: Yes.

MIKE: So, on top of that, I don’t know. I mean, Hillary may run. Butwhen I view here, she’s no better than McCain.

HARRY: Yes, yes, a lot of people have pointed that out, yes.

MIKE: If you go in that direction, you’re going to continue thiscurrent process of all the slaughtering that’s going on in Syria,all the slaughtering that’s going on in Ukraine, that’s going tocontinue under those particular people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Warren


HARRY: Yes. You know, I think that what started in Syria with – Iactually think that Syria has passed its best-before-date for aregime-change, you know, for them to overthrow the Syriangovernment. Because, I mean, earlier on in the conflict – I mean, ifyou remember back in, like, 2011, it seemed as if, like, Assad mightbe overthrown the way that Qaddafi was, maybe in eight months orsomething like that, which I think was about how long it took tooverthrow Qaddafi. And maybe NATO could have done a bit of bombing,or something like that, in the process, but – and people would havecomplained against that, but it would have been all over so quicklythat nobody could really stop it. But I think that it’s reached apoint now where, even if they did bomb the Syrian government now, iteither wouldn’t have much of an impact, or it would just have thewrong impact and mean that the Islamic State took over moreterritory. Or, it would – either way, it would just look as if theyhadn’t helped by doing that. You know, like, they hadn’t managed toput the people in power that they wanted, even if they do bomb, theSyrian government – if they did.

DIRK: Well, here’s a bit of insider Zero State information from whatwe euphemistically call friends of friends – that is, all the peoplethat we’re not officially aligned with – on the ground that they’rea bit dodgy really. By that, I mean anything from beingideologically incompatible to us to being mass murderers, basically.What’s going to happen with Syria is that various governments in theWest, especially aspects of the US government, are looking to keepAssad in place and, up to the point where he wins – and then he’sgoing to be replaced. By one of his family members who is beinggroomed for that position in London right now.

HARRY: Possibly, yes.

DIRK: And that comes from somebody who’s involved with that process.

HARRY: Yes. I know that there was a point, I think, before the waron Syria – before the war in Syria, which is more of a war on Syria,really, I suppose you could say – but there was a point where, Ithink George W. Bush tried to get Bashar Assad on his side, and Ithink that Hafez al-Assad, who was Bashar al-Assad’s father, was tosome extent pro-American. I mean, the CIA used to hand him terrorsuspects for him to torture, because they didn’t want to do itthemselves. But I think that indicates that the Americans, at somepoint, wanted Assad to be on their side, and must have given him achoice between being on Iran’s side – or being on their side, andsomehow Assad chose Iran. And that was the point when the Americans


decided that he had to go. And ever since then, they’ve just beenlooking for an excuse, and this uprising –

DIRK: Maybe, but it’s also this case of different aspects of theAmerican government having different agendas.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: That’s definitely true, I mean, what the West is doing, orwhat America is doing is trying to look for any excuse to back Assadagainst IS.

HARRY: Yes, probably, now, but –

DIRK: Because IS has got out of hand.

HARRY: But, it’s like I often say, once people have gone down onparticular route, and they have been intransigent about it foryears, saying something, making statements, they often continue tomake those statements, no matter how irrational or pointless itbecomes later. Because they’re too embarrassed to backtrack on whatthey said before. Like, John Kerry can’t say – can’t suddenly turnaround and say, “We now think Assad is a legitimate representativeof the Syrian people”, because he’s been saying that he isn’t, foryears. It would just look inconsistent. Hillary Clinton, inparticular, seemed to really like the idea of supporting uprisingsagainst dictators. That seemed to be her method of getting Americato take over countries, as it were, was through that.

DIRK: So, you just end up replacing a moderately secular, pro-Western dictator with somebody who really just hates us.

HARRY: Yes, and I’ve noticed that there’s always this line in themedia about democracy, or spreading democracy, but for some reasonthere isn’t a spread of democracy. There is not an increase ingovernments that are democratic.

DIRK: Then, there’s the little questions that are never asked, like,Islamic State is still selling oil from Iraq. And the Iraqioilfields. Who are they selling it to? Who’s buying it? You know, ifyou’re – they’re making what, a billion – two billion a year fromthe oil sales. You know, that’s not a trivial amount of money. Youdon’t hand that over in, sort of, a wad of cash at the border. Youknow, that’s going through the banking system – that’s going through– all these national intelligence agencies know who’s buying thatoil, where it’s going to. You know, why don’t we just stop buying


it? That would seem simple, but where are these questions beingasked in the media?

MIKE: But that was never the goal of – when they went into Iraq. Imean, that’s a whole issue with this. When you look at the giantmess that has been created. You’re doing – Syria, no-one knows howthat’s going to go. They might be trying to groom someone from theguy’s [Assad’s] family, which sounds great, but there’s no guaranteehow that’s going to roll. It’s the same thing when they thought theywould win in Libya. Libya sounded fantastic. They wanted to get ridof Qaddafi, everyone had a coke and smile –

HARRY: Yes.

MIKE: They’re going to have to go back into Libya, because –

HARRY: Well, if you look at it now, if you look at it now, it’s adictatorship. It’s still a dictatorship. That’s what I meant when Isaid –

MIKE: Actually, it’s worse, it’s almost like Somalia at this point.It’s more of a – anarchist –

HARRY: Yes.

MIKE: You know, this wrecked, anarchist, Muslim –

HARRY: Yes, but isn’t the capital city actually controlled by ageneral, who was actually one of Qaddafi’s generals? And I thinkthat he tried to liquidate the parliament, and the West issupporting him? The West is supporting a general who liquidated theparliament – after spending years talking about spreading democracy,now they decided they don’t care about democracy, they’re just goingto support a dictator instead.

MIKE: Right, it’s an oddball thing, where you just don’t know any ofthese, now. Because, everything has become a mess. You don’t knowhow any of this is going to fall out. Because they all had gameplans. They had a game plan for Libya, when they took out Qaddafi,and how they thought it would go. That failed. They may have a gameplan for Syria. But there’s no guarantee that’ll –

HARRY: Yes, I think that one thing you can guarantee is that, nomatter what happens in Syria, it isn’t going to be a democracy.Whether Assad goes or Assad stays, it isn’t going to be a democracy.


Because if he stays, he’s going to keep it as a dictatorship, andsay that he needs it that way to clamp down on terrorists –

DIRK: There’s also other little factors as well. For example, sortof, messing up the predictions. From what I’ve been told, there’sseveral hundred million dollars been set aside for “reconstruction”in Syria, whatever that means. And there’s a lot of people vying toget their hands on that money to do the “reconstruction”. So,they’re putting in their little bit of – consultancy, shall we say –

MIKE: Well, that goes back to the IMF [International Monetary Fund].I mean, I’m sure there is a ton of money waiting for Syria, justlike there’s a ton of money waiting for Ukraine. But the moment theIMF gets in there, all the money that went to Ukraine – that wasn’tfree money, that’s IMF money. These are all loans. Even the moneythey got from the United States. Those are all loans that thosepeople in Ukraine – they haven’t figured it out yet. You know, theyKiev rebels [Ukrainian central government] haven’t figured out thatthey have to pay that money back.

DIRK: Well, no, they don’t. Because, what’s happened is that moneyprobably went straight to Switzerland. So, somebody’s going to haveto pay it back, but it won’t be the people who are running theUkraine.

MIKE: Oh, it’ll be the Ukrainian people, though.

DIRK: Yes.

MIKE: That’s my whole point. It’s that, you know, that money’s notfree. And it all sounds great. It’s the same thing for Syria,there’ll be money sitting there, and I’m sure that money will flowback to the one percent. But the people, in and of themselves –like, a feel bad for the Syrian people. It’s bad enough that they’veprobably killed off half their population, or at least a goodpercentage of it. The same thing with Ukraine, the same thing wherethey’re starting to kill off their part of the population. All thatmoney that’s flowing that way, that’s not free money. The people,whoever’s left over is going to be paying that money back. And thatis that part of – like, talk to any African nation who’s taken IMFloans.

HARRY: Yes.

MIKE: You have to pay that money back. It’s kind of like – it’s adeath knell for these nations.


HARRY: Yes, it puzzles me how you get these countries, like thepeople in Ukraine. Some people in Ukraine who think that, they seemto think the West is this club you can join, and that you get rich,or something, by joining it. But most of the world’s poorestcountries are aligned with the US, and took loans from them and soforth. In Africa, and all these places. Places like Sierra Leone,and whatever, they’re a complete mess. Like, the most impoverished,backward countries in the world are allies of the US, and countriesally to the US thinking they’re going to get rich. I mean, somecountries allied to the US and got rich, like Japan after World WarTwo, or South Korea, that’s a definite success story – but most ofthese countries aren’t success stories, they’re in deep poverty.

MIKE: I agree.

HARRY: And Ukraine, who knows? Ukraine could be in even more povertyafter this war, than it was in the first place. And it wanted tojoin the EU because it thought that it was going to suddenly havebetter living standards, or something like that, although somepeople think that the real reason they joined the EU was justbecause they all want to migrate out of the country. Or somethinglike that.

DIRK: Well, if I was Ukrainian, I would be looking forward to theday that I could just get out.

HARRY: Yes, the – what they really want is a visa so that they canprobably come to the UK, or something like that.

DIRK: Yes, I mean, it’s unpopular in some circles, but, you know,the Eastern European immigration into Britain, I think, has beengood overall.

HARRY: Yes, I don’t –

DIRK: You know, we’re not talking about importing people who hate usand won’t integrate –

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: You, know, in one generation, you won’t be able to tell themfrom the indigenous population.


HARRY: Yes, I’ve never had any problems with Eastern Europeans, ifanything, they’re more productive than a lot of British people, Isuppose.

DIRK: You know, you do get some friction in London, particularlywith some of the older ethnic minorities. Because they see theEastern Europeans coming in, not at the bottom, but sort of, halfwayup the social scale, they’re sort of, jumping in over their place inthe pecking order, as it were.

HARRY: Yes, well, one of the ironic things I’ve noticed aboutimmigration, and about people who oppose it, is that it’s often theimmigrants themselves that oppose immigration, because – whathappens is – they came to Britain, probably because there’s a highergross national income, so they’d earn more money that way, but themore immigrants – the way that they perceive it, once they actuallyare in Britain and have British citizenship, they see the otherimmigrants as being a threat to them because they think that they’regoing to push down the wages, so you get –

DIRK: Well, especially –

HARRY: Like, you get people on Question Time or whatever, and theperson who always says something nationalistic, like “Britain should– protect its interests” – or something like that, it’s always theblack person, or someone Asian that says that, it’s never – for somereason, the white folks in the audience are always in favor ofimmigration –

DIRK: Well that’s because they’re all middle class Guardian readerswho would never dare say anything like that.

HARRY: I suppose.

DIRK: You know, immigration, mass immigration, always hurts thepoorest people in society, especially when you’ve already got massunemployment.

HARRY: Yes, to me it just proves what a farce countries are. Youknow, like, where you get countries, where the most nationalisticzealots of the country aren’t even from that country. They’reactually from somewhere else, they’ve come over here to become anationalistic zealot. Like, I think an example of that is BobbyJindal, in America. He’s really nationalistic, and will preach abouthow people have to be an American in order to live in America, theyhave to have American values. He’s not even an American, he’s from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Jindal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Jindal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_Time_(TV_series)


India. He’s, like, a second generation immigrant or something likethat. It’s the second generation immigrant, for some reason, that’salways the most vitriolic nationalist, for some reason, I’venoticed.

DIRK: It’s the same with religions. The new convert is always themost zealous.

HARRY: Yes, it’s like that. That’s a good analogy for it, I think.

DIRK: I mean – we noticed that, me, and Mike, noticed that back inthe nineties with Asatru.

MIKE: Exactly.

DIRK: Yes. Oh, in case people don’t realize, me and Mike know eachother – have known each other getting on for twenty years now.Mainly through a religious group called – old religion – Asatru.It’s on the old UseNet. And we are both Asatru, that is, we followthe gods, the old gods the Germanic Northern Europe. Which isanother kind of backstory that’s interesting, that doesn’t get toldwhen it comes to the things like Zero State and the TranshumanistParty and so forth.

HARRY: Yes.

MIKE: It’s really hard to go through and tell people that, you know,that basically, between Zero State and the Wave Chronicle, that –it’s run by two Heathens.

DIRK: Well, and occultists, and sort of, strange – Transhumanismlikes to portray itself as a kind of super-rational and atheisticsort of group, but in reality, there’s a lot of very strange people,and I’m one of them, and Mike’s one of them. And there are plenty ofothers around. And you find out, quite a large percentage oftranshumanists have a background in occultism of some kind.

HARRY: Yes, yes. Well, personally, I’ve always been nonreligious. Iwas never – I’d probably still describe myself as being an atheist,really. But I don’t have any particular thing against religiousgroups and so on and I’m willing to work with them and so forth. Imean, on top of that, the Mont Order itself has a kind of image oraura of being a little bit religious, which is just – it’s notofficial. There’s not actually any doctrine or beliefs to it, oranything like that, it’s really just –

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_neopaganism


DIRK: Or so you say –

HARRY: It’s really just whatever we say. Yes, it’s really justwhatever we say, like, if we worship anything, it’s ourselves.Because we’re just, you know –

DIRK: I think you ought to, you know, bring forward the worship ofthe Basilisk. Have you ever heard of Roko’s Basilisk?

HARRY: I think I do understand it, because I have read yourpamphlet, The Praxis – I have read that.

DIRK: Oh, that doesn’t mention Roko’s Basilisk. This was somethingthat popped up in 2010 on LessWrong, or something like that.

HARRY: Oh, right.

DIRK: And, to put a long story short, it’s Pascal’s Wager. Forpeople don’t know what that is, they’ll have to go and look it up.

HARRY: It is on Wikipedia, I think I have read it there, yes.

DIRK: What it says is that in the future, there will be anartificial intelligence known as the Basilisk. And, if you don’tbring it into existence now, it’ll recreate you – resurrect you fromthe dead – and punish you. Now, this is the kind of super-intelligence that even death can’t save you from.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: Anyway, as I often say, I’m doing my bit for the Basilisk, so–

HARRY: Well, I think, it’s a bit like that thing – don’t the Raelianmovement believe that people can be resurrected by aliens, orsomething like that? And they believe that the aliens will resurrectpeople and punish people – you, know, like, if people try and getout of punishment by suicide or by blowing themselves up, orsomething like that, that they’ll get revived someday by aliens and–

DIRK: And a lot of transhumanists would also agree that, one day,that technology – or posthuman technology may exist to resurrectpeople from the dead. And I think that’s reasonably plausible, and –

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra%C3%ABlism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LessWrong

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Praxis-Dirk-Bruere-ebook/dp/B008OW138Y/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LessWrong#Roko.27s_basilisk


HARRY: Yes, well, it’s kind of like that – I’ve read K EricDrexler’s books about nanotechnology – I don’t know if you’ve read –or I’ve read at least one of them, I think –

DIRK: Yes, the first one, Engines of Creation.

MIKE: Sorry about that, guys, but I do have to take off.

HARRY: Alright.

DIRK: Okay.

MIKE: Good talking to you guys, and hope to speak again real soon.

HARRY: Thanks for coming, Mike.

DIRK: So, we’ll just talk for a little while afterwards and we’llsee you later, Mike.

MIKE: You guys take care, now.

DIRK: Yes, you too. Okay, so one of the, sort of, memes that isslowly – or, slowly becoming current – in a lot of, not onlytranshumanist circles, it’s beginning to expand a little bit morethan that – is the idea of being resurrected from the dead.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: There’s always been a background belief in reincarnation, evenin Christian countries. And I think this is just anotherreinforcement of that idea.

HARRY: Yes. Although it may not be – it may not be resurrectingpeople who’ve died prior to this technology coming into existence.It may only be that, for example, if everything was converted intowhat they call computronium, including ourselves, then those peoplecould be resurrected because all the data is there. It’s a bit likewith nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is building things from themolecular level, so if a complete blueprint of any object existed,it could completely be assembled from the molecular level. And Isuppose that could include a person, in theory.

DIRK: Well, if we live in a sufficiently large multiverse, it shouldbe possible to resurrect anybody from arbitrarily small amounts ofinformation. But that’s a more technical argument [readers shouldstudy Dirk’s pamphlet, The Praxis, for this theory in more detail]. I

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Praxis-Dirk-Bruere-ebook/dp/B008OW138Y/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computronium

http://www.amazon.com/Engines-Creation-Nanotechnology-Library-Science/dp/0385199732/


mean, the whole idea of, kind of, reincarnation and resurrectionfrom the dead, this gets another boost. Especially amongst youngerpeople, because they’ve grown up playing videogames where you getmultiple lives. You get killed, you come back – you do it again –

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: And, you know, one level, “oh it’s just a videogame”, but onanother level, it’s deeply conditioning a belief system.

HARRY: Yes. Well, apparently, the folks that travel over to fightfor the Islamic State, a lot of them used to play Call of Duty orwhatever. I don’t know if they got ideas off that.

DIRK: Yes, except it doesn’t hurt when you get shot –

HARRY: Yes, it’s a bit of a perverse situation, though, that in theWest, we complain about the Islamic State, but a lot of the peoplethere – that are going over there to behead people – are from theWest. The people are being recruited by them are from the West. It’sanother example of, like I said, how countries are becoming a farce,when countries are supposed to be able to make people loyal to them,but, for some reason, they can’t. More people want to go to Iraq tofight for the enemy than want to fight for our own armed forces, forsome reason.

DIRK: But, on the other hand – why is Islamic State our enemy? Imean, they’re basically nasty guys, but they haven’t attackedBritain.

HARRY: Yes, that’s true. The way I see it, it’s –

DIRK: You have to ask these questions. I mean, is the responsibilityof Britain and America to go around, and bombing everybody we don’tlike, because they’re nasty people? Or should we just let otherpeople in their area take care of it? I mean, this is how countriesform. If Islamic State can build a nation, then they’ll do it, andit becomes a nation. If they can’t, they can’t. This is how everyother nation in existence, came into existence.

HARRY: Yes, and, if you look back at all of them, they all killed alot of people –

DIRK: Yes –

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty


HARRY: I mean, Britain – I think that Oliver Cromwell [this is anerror, sorry – William I was the right name] killed about a third ofthe people in England so that was the formation of England as anation-state in its early times.

DIRK: Well, you look at the countries in Europe, and they all havethese little crinkly borders. And that’s where the fighting andkilling stopped, because they were exhausted –

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: So, those crinkly lines are the defensive positions. The wayyou have countries with straight lines on the map, like in Africa,that’s just a recipe for civil war, because those straight lines –they divide natural communities.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: And they include them in unnatural communities that arearbitrarily defined colonial nations.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: That process of redrawing the borders, that’s happening slowlyin Africa, in places like Somalia. But the West is stopping that.We’re stopping that process and drawing it out, and it’s causinghuge amounts of misery. We tried that in the Balkans as well. Imean, the solution to the Balkans War wasn’t to have, you know,quarter of a million dead and end up bombing the Serbs. It wouldhave just been to do an ethnic partition of Yugoslavia, and do apopulation swap, and if necessary, put up the money to buy people’shouses – be real-estate brokers. But in the end, you – we just wentthe really nasty war route. Because there’s a kind of ideology thatsays the nation-state is sacred, and the other thing that is sacredis that we can’t divide people along ethnic lines. Except, thepeople on the ground there don’t want to be part of that state, andthey want to be divided along ethnic lines.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: And the West’s response just makes it worse. It drew outsomething should have taken a year or two into a monstrous series ofwars. And we’ve done that throughout Africa.

HARRY: Yes, and I suppose at that level –

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_the_Conqueror

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War#Casualties

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War#Casualties


DIRK: And in the Middle East, look at the Middle East, that’s allstraight lines on a map.

HARRY: Yes, like Iraq, and so on. That’s always been plagued bysectarian divisions and so forth.

DIRK: Yes, because these are all artificial nations. There’s no suchthing as Iraq and there’s no such thing as Saudi Arabia or Yemen, orwhatever.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: Not in the form of, you know, the lines drawn on the map.

HARRY: Yes. And I guess that, at some level, someone could arguethat all countries are artificial. Or at least they all were whenthey were originally created, because they were all created throughconquest. Which is, kind of, it is funny how – the United Nationsprohibits conquest and so forth, but all the countries in it wereformed through conquest.

DIRK: Or malformed through conquest.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: You know, we go and conquer Africa and divide it completelyarbitrarily. Before we arrived, Africa had its own politicalstructures in place, you know, which was tribally based. I mean,Britain used to be a tribal – or series of tribal societies.

HARRY: Yes, yes. And I guess one of the theories – I think peopledescribe it as being naïve sometimes – is the idea that in civilizedareas of the world, so-called, like in the West, that eventually wewon’t have nations because it’ll all just fade into this civilsociety. You know, like, we’ll all be transnational and we won’tbother adhering to borders and things like that.

DIRK: Well, that’s the ideal behind the European Union.

HARRY: Yes, yes. I think it’s – it is okay as an idea – but there’sso many forces that are against that. You know, like – I mean, evenjust the so-called liberal world order that the US protects – isfundamentally tied to the idea of the world being broken up intonation states. It can’t really be separated from that. Without – theability to project and armed force and police –


DIRK: Well, when the nation-state finally fades away, who is itthat’s making the laws? Who is it that’s enforcing them with guns?

HARRY: Yes. It’s like –

DIRK: Is it Microsoft and Google? Or is it something calling itselfthe government? Which is just a tool of the corporate state.

HARRY: Yes. And –

DIRK: Because government, in its raw state, is just the people withthe guns.

HARRY: I think that, if – if a region’s population, whether it’slarge or small, like, if you formed a transnational super-state orif it was just a very small state, like, a region can only police –you can only police a region if you’re viewed as being legitimate bythe population there. So, any – if we mix up everybody on atransnational basis so we’re – which is a fact now because of theway that countries are integrating each other and migration as afactor, and things like that – that you could reach a point wherepolicing just doesn’t function, and where armed forces can’t besummoned because nobody wants to be in the army, because everyonethinks the army’s illegitimate, the recruitment level plummets –

DIRK: Oh, you end up with the sort of areas with nationalist andloyalist areas in Northern Ireland.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: I mean, the thing is, they were always policed. Just not bythe police, by the paramilitaries.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: There was always somebody with a gun who’d tell you what todo.

HARRY: Yes. It’s like, in the US now, the policing there seems tohave deteriorated, because it’s just viewed as being more of a race-war than a policing operation, because –

DIRK: Well, it depends exactly where you are, though.

HARRY: Yes, yes. I think that the worst-case scenario from all ofthat, those sorts of processes, is that you could end up where the


government – if it reaches the point where it doesn’t have thecapacity to police properly anymore or recruit sizable enougharmies, it’ll just stop protecting the community. It’ll start toprotect itself, kind of like what the Iraqi government did when ithad the so-called Green Zone in Baghdad, where the Iraqis couldn’tensure the safety of anyone unless they were in this area called theGreen Zone, in the capital.

DIRK: Yes, if you weaken the government enough, then the other powercenters that develop, tend to either separatism – they actually wanttheir own state, broken off – which is, in a way, like the Scots –that’s the civilized version – or the uncivilized version like EastUkraine.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: I mean, there’s an easy resolution to the East Ukraineproblem, which is, offer an internationally supervised successionreferendum to the people of East Ukraine. But of course, the Westdoesn’t want to do that because the people of East Ukraine don’twant to be part of Ukraine.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: That would just, sort of, ruin all the rhetoric.

HARRY: Yes, I find it particularly ironic that our governments talkabout democracy all the time, but for some reason, someone having areferendum – they won’t accept that. They never have referendumsthemselves, but if somebody else does one, like the Crimea, they’llsay it’s a joke, it’s not real.

DIRK: A fake referendum.

HARRY: Yes. But they didn’t bother having any, themselves.

DIRK: Oh, I know.

HARRY: We didn’t have a referendum to invite American troops intoEastern Europe, or have a referendum about whether we want Americannukes in our country, and basically making ourselves a target foranyone who wants to attack US interests. Nobody had a referendum todo any of that.

DIRK: Yes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Zone


HARRY: None of that has any democratic basis, but we just get toldto accept it anyway.

DIRK: Yes, another thing that our media doesn’t really talk muchabout is – our “democratic” allies in Ukraine, a lot of them areactually hardcore Nazis. You know, they actually, especially peoplelike the Azov Battalion, they have their swastika flags, they havetheir Nazi armbands, they’ve got the whole thing going.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: Yet they’re supposed to be our allies for democracy againstthe evil Putin, who had merely been elected, as opposed to thisother guy.

HARRY: It’s like in Syria, as well, isn’t it? They talk aboutmoderates in Syria, but if you look at them, who are they? There’sno moderates there.

DIRK: Yes.

HARRY: The plans about training moderates just seems to have goneout the window, and if you actually look at who the rebels are,they’re – if they’re not the Islamic State, they’ve got some namethat’s not far from it, like the Islamic Front or the al-NusraFront.

DIRK: Or the People’s Front of Islam, or the Islamic People’s Front.

HARRY: Yes, they’re the alternatives to ISIS.

DIRK: Well, it is, because after the fall of communism or after theSoviet Union, the only ideology that could stand against capitalismis political Islam. You know, that is, in – there are two lines ofdefense for the poor in the world against capitalism. Now, one isnationalism, which is being weakened, and the other is essentiallyIslam.

HARRY: Yes. And then again, I think it was Francis Fukuyama whotheorized the idea that the liberal democratic system that we haveis the perfect system, it’s the end-state of history. It’s what hecalled it in the 1990s.

DIRK: I think he was almost right, I think that he –

HARRY: He posited –

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Fukuyama

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Nusra_Front

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Nusra_Front

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Front_(Syria)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Battalion


DIRK: The correct answer would be that it’s the Chinese system –

HARRY: Then again, he, Francis Fukuyama, also wrote abouttranshumanism and seemed to think that was some kind of potential –

DIRK: Oh yes, the world’s most dangerous idea.

HARRY: Yes, he seemed to think that was the next thing that wascoming along after the Islamist threat was done, the transhumanistthreat would come along. I think –

DIRK: Well, yes, I think, to the existing power structures,transhumanism could be a very significant threat.

HARRY: Yes, but what I – I think it would be something unlikeanything before, because what it would be is like – at the core oftranshumanism is the idea that individual people are going to gainextraordinary powers, and I think that almost comic-book sort ofvision of what might happen is accurate, because of the fact that wealready have people like Edward Snowden, who, just with a flashdrive, managed to completely challenge existing power structures,and he was just one person –

DIRK: Yes.

HARRY: He’s an example – he’s an example of the kind of phenomenonthat would – the way that transhumanists would manifest inchallenging the power elite.

DIRK: That’s how transhumanists would manifest, but what makestranshumanism unique politically, is the fact that all existingsystems, all past systems, have been based on essentially, what canbe roughly described as human nature. And the whole point oftranshumanism is to change what it means to be human.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: So that would automatically invalidate all the powerstructures that are based on, you know, human nature. However youcare to define it.

HARRY: Yes, and scarcity, as well, is another one. Because I wouldsay that a lot of our nation-state system is oriented aroundscarcity, because it’s the idea that countries have set nationalwealth or whatever, that they need to protect. And they’re in

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World's_Most_Dangerous_Ideas


competition with others for resources, and things like that. Andthey have a so-called national interest, and so-called nationalsecurity. But I think that those features, I think that the conceptof national security and scarcity – I think that those things wouldbecome redundant in – you know, if we went in the direction thatfuturists and transhumanists think that we should go, that we didtransform society using technology. That would – the best outcomewould be that we would eliminate scarcity, but with that comes –there are people whose power depends on the existence of scarcity,so those people would naturally try to oppose people who wanted toput forward a post-scarcity idea.

DIRK: Yes, just going back to what you mentioned about the idea ofnational security –

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: The only reason people support, you know, support what’s goingon in this country with the sort of mass surveillance and thedecreasing freedoms we have is because so-called terrorists – theyblow up buses, and they blow up trains, and they kill ordinarypeople.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: Which is, from the point of view of the terrorist, isabsolutely stupid. You know –

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: If terrorists were only after politicians, and the rich onepercent, the people who actually make society what it is, then mostpeople wouldn’t support the kind of state intrusion that they wouldsupport or they do support now. Because as soon as we, the ninety-nine percent, are no longer the targets, how does the government goabout justifying all the lack of freedoms and the surveillance? Justto protect their own interests?

HARRY: Yes, that’s true, I mean, it’s one of the ways that groupslike al Qaeda and whatever are so stupid in their approach to thingsis that they seem to think that by attacking random people in thatcountry, that they’re going to get a change. But what they don’trealize is the disconnect that there is between the population andthe leaders, even in a so-called democratic state.

DIRK: Yes.


HARRY: By attacking the population, they’re just playing into thehands of politicians who want to depict as being a battle – as beingan existential threat where you have to vote for George W. Bush,otherwise you might as well be voting for the terrorists.

DIRK: Well, a lot of the terrorists are following a script that nolonger works. The traditional idea of terrorism is that you go andbomb somewhere or something. And then, the government becomes veryrepressive, it starts basically shooting the wrong people.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: Now, if terrorists let off bombs and the government onlyshoots the right people, then the population generally doesn’t havea problem

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: It’s when the government shoot the wrong people, and peoplefeel insecure and in fear of their own government, that’s when youget revolutions and that’s traditionally what the terrorists want.

HARRY: Yes, like –

DIRK: But with modern terrorism, when they attack ordinary people,they just get killed or they – the wrong people don’t get killed bythe government.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: You know, the government does not lash out indiscriminately.And I think that’s where classic terrorism tactics fail.

HARRY: Yes, I suspect – I suspect that in coming decades, theIslamists will think that they’re winning, I don’t think that theywill be defeated in coming decades. But I think that they willinterpret what happens – what’s going to happen as them winning.Because, what’ll probably happen is that our national identitieswill continue to weaken, and communities – the Muslim population isone of the most growing populations in Europe, it’s the fastestgrowing religion in Europe – I mean, I don’t have anything againstthat although a lot of people do. But one effect that’ll have isthat the Islamophobia that does exist will just end up provokingthose people and they’ll – at worst, the government will become lesspopular over time, those Muslim populations won’t participate in the


political process and they’ll become more and more alienated –mainly because of their own attitude, really. But –

DIRK: It depends, it may go that way or it may not.

HARRY: Yes. But I see all that as, I suppose, a natural processreally, because I think that the nation-state system is in crisis,and that’s going to have bad results and positive results in thelong term, as well.

DIRK: Yes, well, I mean, a lot of extremism is driven by inequalityin society. And it’s not to do with specific terrorists inthemselves being driven by poverty, which a lot of them aren’t, butit’s the perception of the inequality. And the fact that the nation-state is getting weaker doesn’t help that.

HARRY: Yes, yes. And I suppose that – one idea that I’ve put forwardin some of my writing is that the nation-state is getting weaker andthere are two, sort of, models that are emerging to that. One is theside that WikiLeaks and so on represent, and I suppose that youcould say that transhumanists and futurists are in that camp aswell, is the camp that sees that we can build some kind ofalternative to the nation-state as a way of getting through thatcrisis. Whereas, on the other side, there are some people who wouldlike to revert back to some kind of theocracy.

DIRK: Yes.

HARRY: Because they think that is the alternative to the nation-state. They see the nation-state weakening and they are correct insaying that it’s weakening – people like the Islamic State. Buttheir solution is to build a theocracy – which is basically based onterror and repression.

DIRK: Well, building anything in the Middle East is going to bebased on terror and repression, I think.

HARRY: Well, yes, but I guess, in many ways, we could say it’simmaterial to us –

DIRK: The problem is, communism/socialism failed in 1990 and nothinghas come into its place except Islam. And we need a new ideology anda new vision of the future. We are drifting into a very unequalsociety.

HARRY: Yes. I think –


DIRK: And people are very cynical.

HARRY: Yes, I mean, I think that one reason why the general publicprobably wouldn’t listen to people like me, or you, or whatever, isbecause people think that they need to have this alternative – youknow, that there needs to be this monolithic alternative system,like with communism, it was that everything should be statecontrolled and collectively owned.

DIRK: No, it’s not so much that. It’s that, both with communism andthe sort of liberal democracy, there were visions of the future thatcame with it. You know, “this is where we’re going to if we all worktogether”. Even nationalism, you know, nationalism works because –if you have a fairly monolithic society, everybody’s in it together.It’s a big extended family. And you don’t necessarily assume thatthe people running it are just cynical psychopaths who’d sell out toanybody else.

HARRY: Even if it’s an illusion, like, there’s one historian –

DIRK: Yes, there’s no big vision on offer for future, except more ofthe same or –

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: – If you take the green vision, which is like a version of,sort of, apocalyptic ecological disaster or back to the caves. Youknow, there’s nothing around that – well, what Islam offers and whatthe Islamic State should offer, if they weren’t so stupid, is, theyshould offer a complete vision of the future. You know, for theIslamic people. We’re not doing that yet. I mean, transhumanism isattempting to. But it’s a very minor thing. Even something like theGreen Party is very backward-looking. It’s the agrarian luddites whoare striking back at technological society.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: Things like the Soviet Union had a great vision, that we wereall going to expand into space and that Soviet cosmism was going tobe the religion and so forth, but it failed in practice. It wasdefeated by something that was more efficient, which is, as it turnsout, fairly undemocratic capitalism. What we have now, we wouldn’thave voted for thirty years ago.


HARRY: Yes, that thing about building a vision for the future – thething is, though, I suppose that – what constitutes a vision? It’slike – you already have futurists who are putting out their vision,like for example Jacque Fresco I mentioned before, puts out hisvision of the future – but it’s mostly just models and computersimulations, and –

DIRK: That’s because the middle process is missing, which is theacquisition of political power.

HARRY: Yes. Like, if you can pioneer something, no matter how smallit is, then really do have a vision, because you’ve got somethingphysically real that you can reference.

DIRK: Yes, there are two ways of doing it. You can either bypass thegovernment or you can become the government.

HARRY: Yes, it’s like – for example, communism didn’t have itsvision until the Soviet Union got created. But the Soviet Union gotcreated through what was essentially a civil war – or, I supposeWorld War One was sort of part of it as well, because it sort ofhelped to disillusion people with the sort of current regime thatthey had – that they thought it was squandering lives and so on.

DIRK: Yes, destroyed the ruling class throughout a lot of Europe.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: But, when – you, know, even in the Sixties, everyone thoughtthey knew where we were going, you know. It was going to be theMoon, and then Mars, and we were going to expand into the SolarSystem. And there was a kind of futurist ideal there – you, know,the idea that we would be all, sort of, dressed in silver suits,eating food pills and flying to work by the year 2000. But itobviously didn’t go that way. But there is now no vision of thefuture, beyond a vague nastiness.

HARRY: Yes, or that idea that’s been put out that politicians don’ttry to create visions of the future now, they just try and scarepeople with what’s going to happen –

DIRK: Yes.

HARRY: If you don’t do what they want you to do.

DIRK: Yes, and –


HARRY: And they just focus on the negatives –

DIRK: And –

HARRY: All negative campaigning –

DIRK: And if enough people say it, often enough on TV, you know,climate change, disaster, resource depletion, disaster, disaster,disaster – it’s just totally demoralizing, you know. It not onlygives people a bad feeling, it makes people feel helpless. And ifyou can make people feel helpless, they don’t work towards anythingbetter, because they’re assuming –

HARRY: Yes, it’s like –

DIRK: Like being handed a death sentence. You know, you don’t makeplans beyond your death.

HARRY: Yes. It’s like with the Scottish Referendum, I think was anexample of that kind of fear-mongering. Because it was like – in theend, fear won over hope because the Independence Movement was abouthope of building an alternative, whereas the No Camp was just about,“no, you don’t want to do that, because these bad things mighthappen.”

DIRK: Yes, “oh right, you Scottish people, vote to stay England’sbitch because you might lose your pensions.”

HARRY: Yes, and it is like – people for some reason, when they’vecome into contact with challenges, just tend to overwhelmingly thinkthat they don’t want that challenge. Rather than that they want toovercome it. So, like, for me, the idea that probably the nation-states will become less legitimate and weaker in the future, I viewthat as a challenge – so I look at it positively and I think that,how can we – how can we get through this and build alternatives inthe future? Whereas other people would just say, “no, if you –that’s unacceptable – if that happened, the Islamists would justtake over – or if that happened, then the anarchists would takeover,” or something like that. You know, like, all these negativeimages of what might happen.

DIRK: Yes, people are always willing to point out the faults in yourplan but they don’t put forward a plan themselves.

HARRY: Yes, yes.


DIRK: You know, it’s like these fifteen thousand transhumanists onSingularity Network. And what they – only a fraction of one percentof them actually do anything.

HARRY: Yes. But if it is really happening, if the nation-statereally is in crisis and humans are going to become something morethan human – if these are facts, that these things are going tohappen – whether or not we endorse them, which is probably the case,then it doesn’t really matter that there are a bunch of peoplesaying “oh, what about this or that, it might be dangerous”.

DIRK: They’ll get steamrollered.

HARRY: It doesn’t really matter that they think that. Because in theend, the time will come when they have to support these thingsbecause there’s no alternative.

DIRK: But, it doesn’t matter whether they support them or opposethem, as long they’re ticking boxes on Facebook, because they’reirrelevant.

HARRY: Yes, yes.

DIRK: You know, the future – it’s like one of the slogans of theTranshumanist Party, you know, “the future doesn’t happen, thefuture is made by people. You’re one of those people – yet.”

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: I mean, how many people make the future? It’s very few.


DIRK: You know, it’s like – how do you win the Lottery? Well, firstyou’ve got to buy a ticket. If you don’t buy that ticket, it doesn’tmatter what the odds are. You’re just one hundred percent guaranteednot to win. Maybe, join the Transhumanist Party or something, orZero State. You, know, it’s a longshot. But you don’t get to winunless you do it. Otherwise, you know, vote for Mr. X. It doesn’tmatter if it’s Cameron or Miliband or any other sort of, unknown,politician. Vote for them and you’ll get exactly what you’ve had forthe last fifty years, except with more added chaos and confusion.

HARRY: Yes, yes.


DIRK: People know what they’re voting for. You vote for somethingdifferent or you vote for more of the same.

HARRY: Yes, yes, and I guess that if it came to it, it could be – Imean, everyone at same point, or everyone at some level betrays –might betray certain values that they actually stand for, like forexample if it did happen that there was general chaos and that theworld seemed to be going to hell – which is probably how it will beperceived – how it –. I mean, it already is being perceived, as theweakening of the nation-state often comes across that way in themedia –

DIRK: Well, if you’re trying to live on unemployment benefit, £70 aweek, the world already looks a very bad place.

HARRY: Yes, yes.

DIRK: You know, people kill themselves because they can’t live onthat.


DIRK: On the other hand, if you’ve got houses in multiple countriesand you’re worth several hundred million, stashed away in the banksin various forms, then you’ve got very little to worry about.

HARRY: Yes. I suppose the time – I suppose there may be a point if –if transhumanism does contain the right solutions and the rightapproach, then it is conceivable at some point in the future, thattranshumanists may be perceived to be dragging everyone along withthem or coercing people in some way. They may be perceived to bedoing that at some point in the future, even though they’re not now.Because at the moment, it’s portrayed as –

DIRK: Well, most people don’t know what transhumanism is. You know,if you ask somebody, chances are, you’ll get somebody to talk aboutcross-dressing.

HARRY: Yes, yes.

DIRK: And I mean, the best that we can hope for is, eventuallypeople will know what transhumanism is – and what we can say is, wesaw this coming, we know where it’s going to go. And we can take youthere reasonably safely, compared to the existing political system.

HARRY: Yes.


DIRK: And that’s the best we can say.

HARRY: I guess a lot of people’s views of – some people thatcriticize transhumanism seem to be of the view that transhumanistswant to assimilate everybody and turn them into cyborgs, orsomething like that.

DIRK: Yes, this brings us right back to what we were saying at thebeginning. The sort of disinformation and the night and fog of theInternet. You know, you look up transhumanism and type in the wordevil next to it, and you find all kinds of shit.

HARRY: Yes, my view of transhumanism is more just that transhumanismcontinues what we’ve already been doing –

DIRK: Well, perhaps, but I bet that in America, there are morepeople who know transhumanism from the “evil”, Christian point ofview than know it from our point of view.

HARRY: Probably, yes.

DIRK: I mean, I read these sites and these claims, and I think “holdon a second, I known the people doing this. I’m one of them.”

HARRY: What, alleged conspiracies.

DIRK: Yes, you know, the New World Order isn’t paying me enoughmoney, for a start.

HARRY: Yes, yes.

DIRK: But it’s – this is why we need to get our own mythology outthere. Either – to push that to ludicrous extremes, so it does seemludicrous – or to correct it. Possibly both.

HARRY: Yes, I’ve noticed – I’ve sometimes been in the position of –I suppose, put people in the inconvenient situation of them sayingthat there’s a conspiracy, and then, me having to say, well, “I’mpart of that, or that I must be part of that conspiracy.” I mean, myparents seemed to think that the Jobcentres do certain things. Thatthey’re up to no good. And yet, I did a work placement at aJobcentre, so I know everything that they do. So if there’s – ifthey’re up to no good and there’s a conspiracy that they’re doing,then I’m apparently part of it because I did pretty much all thejobs that they do.


DIRK: Yes, like, once you get into the so-called evil institutions,especially within the state, you know – it doesn’t matter whetherit’s the Army, the security services, the police – it’s just filledwith people. You know, ordinary people.

HARRY: Yes, yes.

DIRK: And, quite often, strangely cynical, coupled with strangelygullible ordinary people as well.

HARRY: Yes. Like, I don’t think that – I don’t – a conspiracy bydefinition, has to be something that can actually be restricted to acertain small group. I think that if it’s something that requiresthousands of people to be involved in it, and people from all walksof life, then it’s not possible because it just can’t function thatway.

DIRK: Yes. The Freemasonic conspiracy doesn’t apply to half amillion ordinary members in it.

HARRY: Yes, you can’t pull the wool over the eyes of the people whoare actually on the ground doing everything.

DIRK: Yes, I mean, that’s the argument against a lot of the bigconspiracies. You know, you just can’t keep it secret.

HARRY: Yes, like the Moon Conspiracy. The Moon Landing Conspiracy.

DIRK: Yes. Anyway, I’m going to have to go now.

HARRY: Yes, I think we’ve gone – we’ve gone quite far over time,haven’t we? Because we started at two, but this is what happens whenyou run into a good subject to talk about and have a back-and-forthanyway, which I think is always the best way to do things.

DIRK: Okay, what we need to do next time is, obviously, get somemore people in and get a band together. Because there are certainlythings Zero State and the Transhumanist Party would like Mont Orderto have a hand in doing.

HARRY: Yes, yes.

DIRK: We’ll talk about that in more detail.


HARRY: Yes, well, like I said, my intention for this group is to getit up to around a hundred people because you just get varyingdegrees of participation, don’t you? And just having ten people thatcan talk. I mean, you need a pool of probably a hundred people justto pull out a group of people that can actually have a discussion,anyway.

DIRK: Yes. And also, it would be nice to have this unfoldingconspiracy between us, you know – right in your face on YouTube.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: So people can actually see what we’re doing.

HARRY: Yes. Although in a way, we are a bit of a conspiracy becausea lot of what we do is not in the public domain, isn’t it?

DIRK: Well, yes. I mean, I’ll talk about specific things that I wantthe Mont Order to have a hand in, concerning Zero State and theTranshumanist parties. And just, for the record, it’ll be the recordof what was requested. How people in the Mont Order implement it isall up to you.

HARRY: Yes, great.

DIRK: But then people can go back, look at the video, and say,“look, it’s a conspiracy. There they are organizing it.” And we’llsay “obviously it’s not a conspiracy, because it’s all public”.

HARRY: Yes, well, I’m not very –

DIRK: Just some more of that crazy disinformation.

HARRY: Yes, yes.

DIRK: It’s a conspiracy because it’s public, we’ve told everybodyabout it and they can watch us doing it. And we’ve said it’s aconspiracy, so it must be one.

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: Cognitive dissonance.

HARRY: Yes, like the Bilderberg Group and all that.

DIRK: Yes.


HARRY: Because apparently, it’s a secret society even though theypublish the names of everyone that goes to it.

DIRK: Oh, what’s the other one? Bohemian Grove, old man’s piss-upthing, wasn’t it?

HARRY: Yes.

DIRK: Yes.

HARRY: Yes. I mean, all these people are celebrities. It’s not likethey could really be secret. If anything, we’re more secret justbecause fewer people know who we are.

DIRK: Yes.

HARRY: We’ve got that fog of war that people don’t know who we are.

DIRK: Well, let’s just add some more fog later on.

HARRY: Yes, alright.

DIRK: Anyway, how do I log out of this now?

HARRY: I think I can stop the broadcast, which is probably the bestway to do it.

DIRK: Okay.

HARRY: Alright, so I’ll do that. Well –

DIRK: We’ll organize something a little later, then.

HARRY: Yes, this was a productive discussion and I hope to organizeanother one in future.

DIRK: Okay.

HARRY: Right, all the best, Dirk.

DIRK: Yes, you too. Bye.

HARRY: Bye.

Mont Order February 2015 Conference

Documents

Transcript of Mont Order February 2015 Conference