Profiting from Death and Extinction.

As is the case with many animal species which are social, the vast majority of human beings from birth to adulthood, are part of a community of significant others. This formative family experience within hierarchical mass societies, particularly when it is a close one, helps to create a contradictory physical and emotional social essence within human beings. Initially, the vast majority of children experience almost unconditional love yet, their existence within hierarchical mass societies, soon becomes conditional upon fitting into a prescribed and restrictive division of labour in general. In the entire history of its existence, the hierarchical mass society system has been designed to obtain the surplus-labour (historically often the tithe or tenth) from each subordinate citizen. Under the capitalist mode of production, this surplus-labour from workers takes the form of surplus-value or profit, extracted whilst they too are often employed in repetitive, stressful, hazardous conditions during damaging and dangerous activities. In other words, the capitalists profit and wealth is gained at the cost of occupational illnesses, injuries and sheer exhaustion that their workers experience during long and frequent shifts throughout their working lives.

Consequently, throughout history, the elites as a class do not value working class citizens as amazing human products of evolution, they only value them, as a necessary ‘means’ of production and surplus value creation – and then only when needed. [Doubters check out Aristotle in chapter 5 of his book on ‘Politics’] These living ‘means’, like the none-living ‘means of production’ are either owned or controlled wholely (as with slaves) or partly controlled (as peasants or wage/salary slaves) and ‘let go’ (made redundant) when they no longer produce services or profits. In a similar way, the raw materials capitalists purchase for the workers to use to manufacture commodities (which contain the surplus-value/profits) are also not valued as intrinsic parts of life on earth. These raw material resources are extracted from nature without any concern for the microorganisms, plants, animals and insects whose life cycles of Nourishment, Metabolism, Growth, Reproduction, Ageing and Death (N-M-G-R + A-D) are dependent upon these parts of nature (on land or in sea) that are destroyed, damaged or polluted by extraction or destruction. Capitalists profits, therefore arise from the consequent Deaths and Extinctions of organisms which supply our oxygen, make soil fertile and numerous other key species which keep the base of the Nourishment, Metabolism, Growth, Reproduction, Ageing and Death (N-M-G-R + A-D) cycle of life on earth functioning.

So within the capitalist sphere of hierarchical mass society operations, each generation of the working classes, experiences being undervalued, exploited and ‘let go’ during the cycles of boom, bust and slump. But as representatives of an intelligent, emotional species, human beings also suffer something arguably far worse. Due to the low pay and long working hours within hierarchical mass societies, the unconditional love of the majority of working fathers and mothers for their offspring is short lived. The overwhelming majority of children, by circumstances or legal requirements are removed from their natural supportive family environment, to which they have socially adapted, and sent to be professionally ‘schooled’ (socialised/groomed/disciplined) by total strangers. In modern hierarchical mass societies, the alienating trauma of this transition to re-adapt themselves to a life without unconditional love and regard, can be intense. From as young as four or five years to sixteen years and beyond, pupils (as trainee workers) are taught to accept day long and year long control by a teaching authority in exchange for occupationally based and biased knowledge. Consequently each new generation of working class children not only suffer a loss of unconditional love and security at a tender age, but are given chains of responsibility, discipline and variable crumbs of social regard, by overstretched teachers. Furthermore the form of social regard which they then recieve is conditional upon continuous targeted assessments and regular success in passing elite determined examination hurdles.

As we know from direct and indirect experience, all that trauma and school-induced competition/stress is merely a prelude to becoming the next generation of those employed to labour at producing a service or a surplus-value in the form of profits or taxes for an elite that live a completely different life, in completely different locations and in completely different homes. Although it is taken for granted, the lack of intrinsic value for working class human beings – within all hierarchical mass societies – is also vividly illustrated and demonstrated by the treatment working people suffer when they are unable to find unemployment. Hence if an individual is not employed by an elite member of hierarchical mass society in some way and are not creating profits, services or taxes for them, these unfortunate victims cease to have any form of value to the elite or their system of production. If this is doubted, by the reader, just consider the status of the long-term unemployed victims of the patterns of boom and bust of capitalist economic cycles and labour replacement technologies, who are then often blamed for being dependent upon state benefits or charity.

Furthermore, consider the working class old-age pensioner worn out by a lifetime of work then provided with a pittance of a pension at retirement and left abandoned to their own reduced abilities to cope with social neglect and emotional indifference. No job = no status = just pity! Likewise ponder the status of immigrants and other asylum seekers driven by circumstances – beyond their control – to leave their places of birth to seek a place of safety or sustenance. In this case, no job = no status, and in this case = little or no pity! Consider also the anxiety of those currently employed as workers who see in immigrants and asylum seekers, only cheap replacements for their own deteriorating status as producers of value and surplus-value and also see immigrants to the advanced capitalist countries as rivals for a share of the shrinking welfare and housing services within hierarchical mass societies. Under capitalist dominated hierarchical mass society systems a reverse form of normal collective logic is applied. Adding extra people to a national workforce should mean that there is either a lower duration of work needed by everyone in order to ensure the same economic output; or the same duration of work implemented by greater numbers would ensure a greater national output.

In a rational system, in addition to normal essential life supporting economic activity, this additional workforce, would allow all the crumbling school and hospital buildings, all the decaying bridges, reservoirs, sewers, sea defences and depleted forests, etc., to be restored or remedied. But capitalist logic is not normal logic, because capital only wants to pay as little as possible to working people and employ them only to do those things that can be sold to make a profit or yield interest. Schools, hospitals, bridges, reservoirs, sewers, sea defences and tree planting are not saleable mass produced and consumed commodities, they are merely parts of a social infrastructure. In this way, hierarchical mass societies reverse normal/natural human logic and working people no longer work primarily for the benefit of each other in order to live, but they live primarily in order to work for the benefit of the elite. But to return to a focus on the loss of intrinsic value – as human beings – by workers in hierarchical mass societies, it is essential to recognise this loss as a contradictory form of physical and emotional alienation caused by the hierarchical profit-based social form. This dual alienation, from community and love often surfaces as anger and resentment against other human beings who have been turned by the hierarchical system into rivals rather than social companions and burden sharers.

“All you need is Love; Love is all you need”.

Well not really, John! Nourishment (N) of (N-M-G -R + A – B) plays a foundational part of all life on earth, but indeed, the loss of love in hierarchical mass societies really has resulted in an almost obsessive pursuit of regaining it in some form or other. Therefore, it is important to consider and understand the emotional and psychological problems of living within hierarchical mass societies. In such societies with extensive divisions of labour, as soon as childhood is passed, large numbers of adolescent and teenagers become emotionally disturbed, intellectually constrained and even considerably physically and emotionally altered by the restricted and unnaturally controlled environments they live in; the type of social regulation they endure; and the repetitive occupations they begin to fulfil. As adolescents and adults the desire to find an alternative source to parental unconditional love and acceptance – simply for being a human being – in hierarchical mass societies can become a desperate, life-long, unfulfiled search for millions upon millions of citizens. The proliferation of songs, novels, plays and films based upon the need and search for success (and failure) to find love indicates the extent of its much lamented universal loss from childhood to adulthood within hierarchical mass societies.

In some cases the failure to find this source of companionship, love, belonging and acceptance results in counter-productive attempts to buy or force a semblance of love and respect from another human being. The question of whether hate is a fundamental characteristic of humanity (ie as per the ideas of monotheism and Freud etc.) or a contingent reaction against the loss (or removal) of love (ie. as per Suttie) has yet to be satisfactorily answered. However, practical experience suggests that childhood cooperative working and being together during play and childhood companionship invariably preceeds the onset of fighting and hurting each other between pre-adolescent male and female companions. Since hatred occurs no where else in nature, I suggest it is not natural; it therefore has to be socially learned and actuated. So too with gender prejudice and low status discrimination. From the onset of hierarchical mass societies, most females have been alienated from their natural social role as equal companions in obtaining the (N) in the life processes of (N-M-G-R + A-D) and have primarily become the unnatural socialised objects of male sexual desire and the bearers of ‘their’ children. This role reduction for the female half of our species has been perpetuated every generation since hierarchical mass societies began. Yet the natural essence of companionship and love cannot be entirely suffocated by socialization.

Even among those who are officially trained to systematically kill others of their own species, there still occasionally develop bonds of openly declared ‘love’ for their ‘band of brothers’. It is an affection and altruistic form of love among soldiers which arises from a lengthy shared common, inter-dependent task and is only destroyed within humanity in general by the divisions of class and competition for sources of occupational labour and wellbeing. Money can’t buy you love, (as the song goes) but within hierarchical mass societies dominated by the capitalist mode of production, money can buy highly profitable surrogates and substitutes produced for just this purpose. Physical and emotional distractions from the tragic realities of hierarchical mass society existence have become mass production enterprises for big-business. However, a lonely, loveless life, surrounded by inanimate artifacts of amazing complexity, variety and functionality, can still often be a fate worse than death, for those so situated. Hence the frequency of suicide among those with double or treble of everything – except what they really need. In contrast, to the deforming emotional characteristics running through. all hierarchical mass societies, there are at the physical level, also alterations to the morphological form of human beings. These can be the result of occupational illnesses and injuries along with air quality degradations in work place activities along with the the hierarchical regulation of time and energy expended during a life-time of long working shifts.

These social and occupational conditions can lead to premature ageing, illnesses, incapacity, deformities and even premature death among the most exploited workers. Many intellectual and emotional emotional effects derive from the demands associated with the alloted occupational tasks, such as stress, boredom, monotony and fear of punishment for not completing designated tasks. In addition the inherent competition and alienation within such hierarchical mass societies also promote loneliness, conformity and fear. Even among the successfully socialised (and outwardly groomed) therefore the range of negatively experienced emotional responses are extensive, varied and continuous as are the remedial cognitive, physical, chemical (drugs) and psychological (therapies) attempts to ameliorate the effects of such negative experiences. In regard to social conformity, it should be noted that the control based aspect of the mass media (radio, television, film, magazines etc.) in highlighting and rewarding conforming behaviour on the one hand and condemning challenges to the system on the other, has proliferated in extent and volume, during the 20th century. In many countries, the pulpit has ceased to be the dispenser of approval and disapproval for elite sponsored ways of coping with living in this historically determined and unnatural way.

In the west, bourgeois humanities official post Apocalypse saviour, designated as Jesus, weilding a sword of retribution and offering keys to heaven, was mostly abandoned in the 20th century and replaced with the post-war industrial distribution of ignition keys for personal automotive, petrol-headed, polluting transport. The ‘freedom of the road’ after enduring the 40 weekly hours or more of cramped wage-slavery at the office or factory, became the promised land of escape from monotony and drudgery – until!. Until eventually road rage, congestion and exhaust pollution intensified hierarchical mass society tensions and problems. The knights of the road turned into tailgating, overtaking, accident-prone risk takers. The city street and road, became the 24/7 (inhospitable) locations for administering a compulsory dose of toxic chemical gas to the delicate lungs of infant, adult and old alike.

Then also in the name of secular progress, following and worshiping a charismatic ‘holy man’ was replaced by following and worshiping a charismatic ‘celebrity’ and the ability to groom favours (sexual and non-sexual) from faithful ‘followers’ was shared between religious and entertainment elites. The next hyped up promise of ‘progress’ was of ‘free’ unlimited ‘clean’ (sic) Nuclear Power; then it was Star Trek type space travel tourism, automation, computers and the 3D printing of anything not making it to the mass production shopping malls. The construction of these 20th century Cathedrals of Commerce made access to ‘cheap stuff’ available 24/7 to unthinking commodity worshippers and entitlement fetishists with no concern for the living sources of these products.

The advent of Facebook, Instagram, Tic Tok and other such personal media platforms has not only allowed the spread of entitlement consumption ideology, but also various forms of intellectual and cultural grooming (thought control) to proliferate globally. These platforms of ersatz free speech have also encouraged the consumption and regurgitation of hate speech, fake news and the self-defeating de-humanising of ourselves and other communities of our own species. Entering such peer group sub-domains, linked together by such platforms, can allow the continuous and sustained influencing/grooming (yes I suggest that consistent media influencing is another form of intellectual and cultural grooming) of gullible, vulnerable, alienated, individuals to either conform to the latest half-baked opinion, or deny and deform their own gender, or even check out of living altogether by internet suggested/assisted suicide. Condemning and judging everything but the form of hierarchical mass societies and its domination by capitalism, is now routinely considered and legitimised by capitalist determined platforms. Encouraging the most severely alienated to step along the paths of active self-harming, prejudice, terrorism, body dysmorphia, suicide, mysogeny and mass shooting, has become a ‘clicking’ internet business opportunity ‘enabling’ monetary accumulation for platform providers.

Internet relationships are limited to ideas, virtual reality, photo-shopped images and money transactions, rather than real contacts to real people and support for their struggle to resist the system which deforms the humanity of so many. Although the influencing/grooming of tastes, attitudes and consumer choices has long been an attribute of elite promoted ideology within religion, historical narrative, cultural disemination and philosophical discourse, it had by the late 20th century, mostly abandoned the pulpit, the lecture hall and the newspaper broadsheets. By then it had entered practically every home by broadcast radio and television. These two mediating electro-magnetic wave forms, combine, entertainment, education and establishment politics. Which are all forms of elite sponsored, cultural and political grooming. Nevertheless, with the introduction of cell phones and unlimited internet access the means for elite sponsored 24/7 socialisation/grooming has entered the pockets and handbags of the vast majority of those people who can afford to purchase a network provider and network receiver to control their physical and mental space.

Such technology has realised and legitimised a virtual reality aspect of the basic individualism created by hierarchical mass society divisions of labour. What is left of the available work and non-work time for real face to face contact with other real human beings is being replaced with electronic contact with virtual, often photo-shopped avatars of distant people. This intimate intercourse with an alternative virtual world now routinely takes place simultaneously alongside the real world. Whilst people sit together around a table, occupy a room or relaxing at home with friends or family, they are at the same time deeply hypnotised by the latest millionaire-making interactive software or hardware controlled by and controlling their fingers and thoughts. Being physically in the real world whilst intellectually retreating into a virtual world is a doubtless a new form escapism but it is also so much more. Being fixated on the electronic gadget held in their hands and becoming willing prey to consuming the data gathering, profit-based, influencing/grooming messages and images it is delivering 24/7, is an amazingly profitable, cynical but ultimately de-humanising form of control over human beings. Families and entire communities have been transformed into willing 24/7 consumers and consequently polluters of their own nature based sources of food, water and air quality.

Even clicking and liking without buying, transfers money into some distant charlatan platform builders or influencers account. The latest twist to this ongoing improvement of elite social control by collecting, collating and profiting from processing digitised information appears to be the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to language, images and statistics. AI is also the latest investment opportunity frothing up the oral excitement of many financial speculators and technical wizz-kid’s as public attention is neatly deflected away from the broader reality of real world climate degradation, poverty, warfare, pollution and ecological disintegration. NB. AI is also more than likely to be the next substantial financial bubble to rapidly expand and and even more rapidly burst as obscene levels of monetised wealth seeks such lucrative avenues to multiply itself further.

Artificial Intelligence!

Artificial it certainly is, but intelligence? According to it’s own elite hype this computer aided AI data crunching will allegedly improve most of the systems inadequately addressed solutions to current ills. It will not solve or prevent unemployment, poverty, loneliness, cancer, poor staffing of essential services, etc., but AI games will pass the time, AI counselling perhaps numb the emotional pain whilst AI tracking of images and activities may improve catching benefit cheats, but not rich, tax-dodging, tax-haven, wealth-hiding cheats. Undoubtedly, it will improve elite control and regulation of the diminishing resources available to those suffering from the systems unequal distribution of production. In 2023, we are being told some of us will be saved from bureaucratic mistakes by rapid electronic number crunching and pattern recognition, based on the data harvesting of every move we make or don’t make. Indeed, ‘Every move you make, every breath you take, I’ll be watching you’, can now represent more than just an obsessive stalkers menacing film voice-over, but a national anthem or even requiem for 21st century elite surveillance.

We are earnestly promised by the newly installed high priests of Artificial Intelligence, that it will shorten hospital waiting times, improve diagnosis of illnesses, spot criminals, terrorists and drug dealers, ease traffic congestion and drop bombs and explosive land mines more effectively and efficiently. In other words according to it’s new cult activists and preachers, artificial intelligence is going to save humanity from destroying itself in inefficient and unnecessary and unprofitable ways and allow it to do so with less effort. In future AI will allow us to continue to destroy ourselves by doing what has been done in the past – mass produce and consume commodities – but in future ever more quickly and efficiently. Meanwhile the planet in the name of ‘progress’ and without full-blown AI ultra-efficiency is already experiencing, burning, flooding, drought and AI drone assisted warfare.

Beneath all the techno-babble spun around Artificial Intelligence is the fact that it is no more than the latest iteration of a method of observing, collating and controlling information that in essence is as old as hierarchical mass societies themselves. From the earliest versions of hierarchical mass societies, in Persia, Babylon, Greece, Egypt and Rome, the elites had to solve the problem of how to observe and control the masses – who as the sources of all essential and non-essential production, (food, essential materials, and luxury products) – where the essential economic foundation of the system upon which the elites comfortably situated themselves. Information about the location, activities, work type and duration of the agricultural slaves and artisans along with food stores and allocations needed to be collated and organised, by overseers and beaurocracies using the early technologies of clay tablets, vellum scrolls, papyrus documents and stele monuments. Then in modernity came passports and national insurance numbers. Without these beaurocratic means of identification and control in the eyes of bourgeois statisticians humans don’t ‘officially’ exist.

Now a further technological upgrade to the collecting, processing and recording of data needed by the hierarchy is available, thus rendering many of the present lot of statistics experts and paper processing beaurocrats surplus to requirements. This is a fate also awaiting those citizens who have carved out a comfortable careers and esteemed places in the various levels of hierarchical mass societies, writing novels, childrens books, plays, songs, film scripts, advertisements and even academic essays. Using the data bases of all previous works of literature – in all fields – a computer engine programmed with AI software can scan, select, borrow, assemble, produce and publish from these billions of words long or short new varieties on a level with most of the acceptable human attempts to do the same thing, but in routinely short time scales.

Instant AI produced songs, scripts, jingles and content re-writes are becoming available to accompany the instant coffee or micro-waved TV dinner we supposedly enjoy. Reality has caught up and exceeded Orwell’s 1984 description of the logical direction of hierarchical mass societies with their constant Big Brother surveillance and culturally imposed Newspeak re-writes and Newthink requirements routinely modified by changing versions of elite-promoted political correctness. What previous speculations once suggested about how long it would take a troop of apes banging on typewriters to produce a coherent document has now been doubly rendered as a pointless esoteric debate as coherent documents can now be achieved in minutes and seconds and at very low cost, by a metal or plastic box running a previously constructed computer program. By ‘mining’ and ‘extracting’ the accumulated sediment of previous layers of intellectual and visual production something ersatzly different, but not really new, will artificially emerge.

But this reproduction of previous authors words and images, cut and pasted into new combinations is not intelligence, artificial or otherwise, it is electronic data sifting and sorting to order. By scanning previously produced visual and sound data, AI created virtual vocalists can now sing AI created songs more cheaply than paying living human songwriter’s and performers to entertain us. Consuming a live visual performance by a human being is to be replaced by consuming a computerised image of a virtual avatar performer. At one level such aggregated assembling of collective mediocrity and excellence will just illustrate that every so-called individual human skill is actually a skill socially replicated from and developed out of, all the contributions that other previous, parents, teachers, trainers and influencers have made. Privileged people making a handsome living from years of studying the thoughts and images of the esteemed dead and imposing their own opinions and prejudices on the past has a long history, now it can be done by a low paid data entering clerk with a licence to process extracts from previous authors perceptions of historical reality.

At another level the existing, and the more AI virtual substitutes for reality yet to come, are just examples of a potential new 21st century industry – plagiaristic data-mining for profit – by those owning/controlling this new means of production. This outcome is hardly surprising emerging as it does from a mode of production based on the industrialised, debasement and extraction of everything valuable that exists – human and non-human – in order to turn over a profit. Mechanical robots have already replaced thousands of industrial workers and now virtual AI robots are set to replace, artists, writers, academics, doctors, designers, lecturers and managers of companies and industries. Furthermore, profit seeking from this high tech development designated as Artificial Intelligence has already piloted the creation of avatar substitutes of dead parents constructed out of available family data files. A photographic moving image that can be animated and reproduce the words of some long gone loved or esteemed one is now available for a price. These are already being offered in some countries to adults who suffer from excessive nostalgia or separation anxiety with regard to their deceased mothers, fathers or hero’s.

Even the past literary and artistic production of the dead and the anxieties of the immature are to be exploited for a projected rate of profit calculated according to how much family or public data the programmers are able or willing to cost-effectively ‘mine’ and incorporate into the avatars data banks. If all that sounds a bit like a high-tech seance and thus creepily weird, then there is more. On the presumption that an electric supply will be always be available and affordable, the creation of a reliable, (once it is switched on) inter-active, avatar friend is now within arms reach (for a price) to compensate for the fact that in hierarchical mass societies most people are too busy or have become too indifferent to commit to the process of establishing real caring communities and friendships. It says a lot about the so-called progress of ‘civilisation’ when it’s evolutionary trajectory is to replace relationships between people with relationships to yet more sophisticated electronic commodities. Welcome to the brave new world of Artificial Intelligence, where those of us who can afford to buy the AI bundle can ‘fiddle’ with it on our own (like Nero – allegedly) while everyone and everything around us burns down, gets drowned or is bombed into rubble.

And indeed, these AI developments already have a further emerging dark side to such sad and ridiculous real-world 21st century substitutions, because the military industrial complex will eagerly employ AI to design and improve armaments, quickly and cheaply whilst sifting the data for the most cost effective and efficient ways of using them to kill the greatest numbers of our fellow human beings. This fact along with the already rising industrialised extraction, destruction, exploitation and debasement of the rest of life on earth and mining the planets deep-sea natural environments, may eventually seep into more consciences. The further alienation and radicalisation of the middle classes and white collar working classes, whose income generation from their future labour will suffer further reduction or even termination in the wake of AI induced redundancy may wake up the remaining dreamers of unlimited technological and scientific progress. The dream (or fantasy) of unlimited technological progress and wealth accumulation for the few (or many) became an international nightmare in the 20th century wars of extermination, the 21st century looks set to repeat them globally.

Further examples of capitalism eliminating more middle-class humans from essential and inessential income generating production may contribute to revolutionary responses from them to that outcome as well as to the progressive disintegration of the hierarchical mass society system. With the replacement of income and profit producing jobs and careers by computer aided automation and AI the question of ‘where are the sales and profits to come from‘ has yet to be seriously considered. In this way, AI may also contribute to the eventual puncturing and deflation of the current self-inflicted, blind arrogance of elite promoted Anthropocentric capitalism. But herein lies another potential outcome of looming danger for humanities working populations. The danger lies, in the frustrated and displaced middle-classes who by using their accumulated advantages become the spokespersons and putitive ‘leaders’ of resurrecting alternative populist forms of hierarchical mass societies – masquerading as vaguely anti-capitalist. However, replacing one form of hierarchical mass society, with another form of hierarchical mass society does not constitute a social revolution. That is a topic which will be considered in ‘Technology and Social Control Part 4’, to follow.

Roy Ratcliffe (September 2023)

The last in this series, Part 4. Replacing hierarchical control with hierarchical control, will follow.