Progress and decline are hot buzzwords these days. It certainly doesn’t help that our culture lacks unified visions of either. One man’s step forward is another man’s step back, and this national tailspin will no doubt hit the ground, eventually. So long as the right and left wing are trying to fly in opposite directions, that seems certain. In-between the spin and the crash, dwells all of us bracing for impact.
I am right leaning, and so I certainly will point to the left’s progress and ask “to what end?” knowing that I will not get an answer - or at least if I get an answer it is certain to be outdated by the next election. I was once told by a professor - one who knew how to hid his power level - that “the goal of all philosophy is to kill its teacher”. He would then put both his fingers in a gun shape and line them up on each of his ears, and invite the student he was making fun of to put his finger into a third at his forehead. “You’re my third positionist to test the thesis”. Amusement aside, it was his way of delivering unto us a healthy suspicion of the intellectual class. He would explain, philosophy deals in such abstract and vague invented words, that the only way to progress the field is to regularly kill the field. He would tell me this is the root of all progressives: Not to advance humanity, but rather to continually make the next generation different. Time is a flat circle, as some have noted.
I have seen this phrase repeated in various alterations. A little-known blogger I read, @SuspendedReason, describes it as such:
This is the idea popular among rationalists that the goal of philosophy should be to kill itself: that philosophy just is the study of the vague and unverifiable, and that its purpose is dealing with this vagueness in order to demystify the subject domain. As a philosophical idea slowly formalizes itself into something truly testable, it has become no longer philosophy, no longer inexact.
He goes on with this banger:
Some disciplines, ashamed by their identity as inexact sciences, embarrassed by living on the wrong side of the tracks, have tried to get ahead of themselves. Tempted by the prestige, authority, and grant money of science, they have tried to skip over stamp-collecting and case study, description and taxonomy, straight to statistics, hypothesis, and lab coat. These disciplines thus become cargocults of scientism, bordering on fraudulence. They resemble the state and sophistication of pre-modern medicine—all while profiting off the real predictive power and insight of the hard sciences through their nominal and institutional association. Hence the simultaneous replication and generalizability crises in psychology.
You can read more from his “Notes on the Inexact Sciences” HERE
My suspicion is that this illusory progress is really the last vestiges of a primitive cyclical sacrificial system. The old thing is ceremonially humiliated to make way for the new thing, which in turn grows old and is ritually humiliated for the next new thing - which is often just the old thing resurrected. In ancient times, such ceremonies would mark the turning of an era to avoid bloodshed. Today, in an era of hyper-individualism, it’s likely contributing to an inevitable bleeding.
As I’ve mentioned a number of times on this Substack, I’ve been reading - and rereading - Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past. One of the themes in this trilogy is this same critique of progress. The Chinese reader, sitting upon thousands of years of consistent cultural development, looks at the irregular and erratic shifts in western culture in the past century or so not as progress, but as problem. Mind you, this isn’t a problem to overcome or solve, but rather as a problem that can at times get in the way, other times be an asset. China has her warring states periods, after all - times when formality and manner are cast aside to re-test what works and what doesn’t. Such erratic behavior can actually be a source of new ideas, but they need to be on a reliable basis of truth to move humanity forward. They can’t just kill their own foundation and build a new one over and over again. These ceremonial humiliations of the ruling region of China to mark the rise of a new region’s prominence are a lens in evaluating the West’s own less organized and informal approaches. For the Chinese, viewing the World Wars - or current instabilities - as the west’s equivalence to a “warring states” period can help them time their own ascendancy.
Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past begins with a bit of a curious mystery: a spring of suicides in the hard sciences. Scientists across the world are offing themselves and leaving behind cryptic letters that “physics is a lie” and “reality isn’t real”. The main protagonist of book one is a scientist brought on board by the CCP to inform them of what’s going on to cause this. Eventually, he too begins to experience events driving him closer to the same fate. Skipping over the details, this protagonist eventually discovers the Earth has been invaded - but the aliens won’t arrive for centuries to come due to their ships being slow. In an attempt to stall human development until they arrive, the aliens have sent “Sophons”, or intelligent protons that have a computer printed onto their surface at the quark scale. They were entangled with twin sophons back on their homeworld, allowing faster-than-light communication. And as they are just a proton, they can be accelerated to the speed of light to get to Earth very quickly compared to the invasion fleet. The sophon mission is simple: confuse and play tricks on scientists so that humanity cannot progress scientifically during the invasion fleet’s transition across the stars, in the hopes of maintaining the alien’s technological advantage. Without the sophons, the aliens are convinced humanity would advance beyond the technological capabilities of the invasion fleet, and the invasion would fail. The sophons are the cause of irregular and erratic physics from particle accelerators. They are the cause of all the strange behavior of western elite, and their downright mental breakdown. Sophons feed in stupid concepts into data and telecommunications, listening in on human ideas and boosting the worst ones while shadowing the best to lead humanity astray. After all, if you were an alien civilization, why wouldn’t you try to neuter a world’s most intelligent before you invade?
It’s a very clever plot device that attempts to construct a materialist explanation of western degeneracy. From the Chinese perspective, the complete batshit breakdown of the west’s intellectual class cannot be easily explained in materialist terms. It seems like some kind of contagion is spreading, destroying their minds - and yet there is no unifying drug, toxin, or anything at all that would explain this in materialist terms. Were there some super power other than the United States, it would seem like foreign interference to slow down Western technological supremacy. But China isn’t causing it, and neither is Russia, so who? The only rational materialist explanation is that it is quite literally an alien force. Of course, if you are a Christian you already have a name for this alien force: demonic influence. Satan has noted our Christian society was getting too strong and influential and has thus focused his entire assault on the minds of our cultural and intellectual leadership. We Christians need no aliens to explain these course of events - we were told it would happen.
There is a very frightening realization once you realize what the sophons are capable of in the trilogy, namely that there are actually two kinds of progress: real progress, and actualized progress. Real progress is the work done in creating new information and discovering new aspects of the cosmos. Actualized progress is the equally difficult task of converting that knowledge into practical applications in our everyday lives. The sophons can stop real progress, but they can only delay actualized progress. Once a thing is known about to the human mind, the sophons cannot directly remove or corrupt that information. That knowledge can be built upon. So, from the moment the sophons arrived, only real progress stopped. Actualized progress - the production of new consumer goods, technology, and other such things - continued. Indeed, it continues so richly that most of humanity is completely unaware that real progress has ceased. By the time the protagonist discovers the existence of the sophons, they had already been on Earth for many many years. The stalled advancement in physics and other fields was simply assumed to be the difficulty of advancing the field, not an active force preventing it. This realization is very disjointing because how would you notice actual stagnation, or even decline? We like to imagine it as Rome burning to the ground, but rarely is it that. Sometimes it’s just a mob walking into Moscow and demanding the end of the Soviet Union. Nothing materially changes, but an entirely new Geopolitical reality is the result.
There’s the challenge: the difference between real and actualized progress is rather easy to point out looking backwards, but nearly impossible to project forwards. For example, the knowledge that nuclear power could exist was discovered all the way back in 1898 by Pierre and Marie Curie. Turning the knowledge into practical application took another 44 years to the first atomic reactor generating electricity. That real progress is still creating actualized progress to this day, as we continue to think up and build ever more efficient forms of nuclear power. You would never guess real progress is stalling - if not stalled - such as the barrier getting fusion to work, because the actualization of progress wrought from that 1898 discovery is still ongoing.
Real progress is discovering a resource, actual progress is turning that resource into an asset. The time differences can be insanely long. If Humanity made no new technological discoveries (real progress) ever again, we might still be inventing new consumer goods and manufacturing techniques (actualized progress) for the next thousand years. Consider, as another example, the advent of steel some 3,200 years ago. The invention of reinforced concrete in the mid 20th century is actualized progress still occurring from that discovery. One can conceptualize the gap here as a kind of measurement of “lost potential”. Had reinforced concrete been invented by the Greeks, today’s reinforced concrete technologies and advancements would be thousands of years ahead. And yet, we cannot assume such ancients were ignorant. Many times, they were simply against progress. Yes, the Greeks and Romans could have built skyscrapers in their day. All the technology existed to do it: Steel, Concrete, even primitive elevators. But they chose not to. And we can tell they chose not to because we have their laws that criminalized building tall buildings. Circling back to the opening statement, to the Roman mind a skyscraper was not progress. It was decline.
Thinking in terms of these gaps between real progress and actualize progress can help conceptualize how quickly, or slowly, something is progressing. Coupled with laws and culture we can also measure how much something is being resisted - AKA, viewed as decline rather than progress. In contrast to concrete, compare the mere decades between the discovery of logic circuits and the advent of modern computing. Should we consider this progress? What if future generations will view the gazing of screens for such prolonged times as a form of mental illness or addiction? To them, we might be suffering an immense decline in human potential, and every year we do not destroy our screens will be viewed to them as a year lost for their progress.
In Liu Cixin’s stories, the sophons have blinded humanity from discovering new science, but not from developing and actualizing existing science. A big theme is coming to terms that there will be no new discoveries - what we have is what we’ll always have. Humanity has to break from its wanderlust of progress, and instead focus entirely on what it can actually do with the information it has available rather than wasting efforts on trying to find new things that they are simply barred from accessing. This becomes known as the “Sophon Lock”, and it’s something that downright drives humanity mad from time to time. Initially, the aliens use the sophons to communicate their plans to some people, in addition to the scientists they are targeting. But eventually they refuse to speak at all. That the sophons can listen in on them but refuse to talk leads many to scream their frustrations into the void, knowing some alien light years away will hear it and simply not care.
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There’s a lot to think about here as well: How do you confront an enemy that knows all your plans? How relatable to the dissident condition of living in a surveillance state. In the stories, the UN struggles to work out a solution, and there befalls man very deep paranoia and fear that any original and clever plans humanity can think up will be instantly known by the aliens and they, in turn, will have centuries to work out a counterplan on the way to Earth. In the stories, this eventually leads to the advent of “Wallfacers”. Individuals granted resources to think up strategies in the depths of their minds, but barred from speaking them until the doomsday battle to come. A strange blindfold strategy to face the stellar panopticon. Have you considered how you could be a Wallfacer against your own rather alien regime here on Earth?
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I mentioned in previous posts the story also explores the technology of hibernation. One of the motivations of its invention was for humanity’s most brilliant. Realizing they have no future as long as the sophon lock endures, many opt to enter hibernation in the hopes of a future where humanity either overcomes the sophon lock, or resists the invasion. It is preferable to constant mental harassment from the sophons alongside a dead career from sophon intervention. In one section, a scientist awakens 200 years in the future to find a world with flying cars, robots, and smart cities with seemingly perpetual energy. He is initially confident that humanity had found a way around the sophon lock. But, it is quickly explained to him that the sophon lock is still active. All the wonders he sees were possible in his age too and there has been no real progress. The flying cars use the same magnetic levitation in his day. The seemingly perpetual energy devices use ordinary germanium radio-crystals instead of batteries. The power is still generated from coal and solar far away, transmitted to the city. The robots are not intelligent. They’re just plastic and servos. Even though everything looks futuristic and sci-fi, nothing truly new has been invented. Humanity has simply gone further in actualized progress while real progress remains locked off by the sophons.
Think about that for a moment and consider our own civilization. Again, many of these elements are stand-ins for Chinese curiosity on western stagnation and decline, with the sophon lock standing in for our own loss of ascendancy. Have you become convinced we are progressing as a species? What makes you think that? The phone in your pocket is said to be more advanced than the computer that went to the moon, but why aren’t you on the moon with that phone?
Consider the iPhone. Has there been any real progress on the technology since it first entered the market in 2007? Or is it merely small, actualized progress of existing knowledge that’s been around for decades? Being as I am older than many of my readers, I can tell you that all iPhones are just PDA technology that can be traced back to the 1980s and 1990s. Some even had internet access.
You might be surprised to learn iPhone.org was purchased in 1999 by Apple. The gears to create the iPhone were turning for many years. Back in 1999, Apple had created “Project Purple”, an exploration into touch-screen handheld devices which likely also inspired the Ipod. Project purple would go through a highly secure development cycle between 1999 through 2005, with concept models and drawings showing a very familiar typology:
The Real progress in the iPhone was the multi-touch screen. That’s it. And the eight years between 1999 through 2007 were primarily making that real progress actualized in a financially viable way. It already existed. In fact, Steve Jobs had acquired some rights to the technology in 1985, and the technology had existed since the 1970s. CERN developed an early prototype of what would eventually become the iPhone’s display all the way back in 1972:
Similar devices, albeit non-mobile ones, have been around since the 1950s and 1960s
Thus, it can be said that the iPhone has been a potential technology since as early as the 1980s, possibly the 1970s, and certainly since the early 1990s. It’s just that no one put the effort into putting that original CERN multi-touch screen onto a pocket-sized computer from the time. All the real progress was finished by around 1980, the actualized progress took another 25 years. In a sense, the Ipad started 25 years late, and as many have noticed it’s no longer an innovative product. Year after year, there appears to be little to no boost in either speeds or capabilities.
But stagnation in real progress can also degenerate into outright decline. For instance, It’s not that we don’t want to go to the moon again, we actually can’t. In his 1996 book Mining the Sky, Professor John Lewis made a rather depressing discovery while trying to find the original meeting minutes and designs of the Saturn V rocket: NASA had destroyed the records - possibly by accident. Moreover, the original casting molds for the F1 Saturn V engines were destroyed as well. Copies of technical sheets exist, of course, but lack the detail of the original meeting minutes and record plans. In 2013, a team at NASA had to perform archeological research on their record-copy F1 engines laying around in storage. That’s right, they were seeking to re-discover and re-test the engines to recreate the lost information. America had to do archeology on its own technology! This was done to pick up the pace of research for the now-stalled SLS program. SpaceX did similar archeological research for their own rockets by going to the bottom of the sea and recovering remains of F1 engines from the original launches in the 1960s, albeit in a far less qualitative state due to rusting and impact. The consequences of the loss of this real progress echo to this day: The United States cannot make significant actualization progress because the foundational information is lost (This is a big reason why we have to hitch a ride with the Russians as well).
During the aforementioned SLS development, plans to build on the F1 Saturn V rocket engine archeology project ended up being scrapped, and today the SLS program relies on recycled RS-25 engines from scrapped Space Shuttles. To drive home how desperate of a situation this is, NASA was storing the old RS-25s in a facility which is in many ways a kind of strategic asset reserve for the program, should they ever need old parts. But the truly asinine thing? Their recycled use will not be reusable. Every single one of these strategic assets will be destroyed once that stage of the rocket is ejected and crashes. To quote NASA:
The major physical difference between the shuttle and SLS boosters is the addition of a fifth propellant segment to the four-segment shuttle booster, allowing NASA’s new launcher to lift more weight than the shuttle. Additionally, the SLS booster will be optimized for a single use, while the shuttle booster was designed to be reused. Though based on the shuttle booster, the SLS booster benefits from several design, process, and testing improvements for greater performance, safety, and affordability.
Recycling assets is bad enough. To be actively destroying your own strategic assets is just madness.
Read more here on the Rocket recycling program.
It’s unlikely you’ve heard or seen this Saturn V replacement because SpaceX is multiple generations ahead. It’s already had a test launch. Did you know?
I need to emphasize what happened here: Real progress stalled, and then declined. Actualized progress could not continue, and so efforts are being wasted re-building the previous real progress. The SLS is nothing more than a remake of the Saturn V rocket, but with greater efficiency and weight-carrying limits. This is supposedly the rocket we will return to the moon with. I doubt it.
Oh yea, this exercise in stupidity costs roughly $2.5 billion dollars a year. Not that it matters. We sent 7 billion to Ukraine in just a few months, by comparison. Resource misuse appears to be policy.
As Morgoth pointed out in a recent telegram post, stupid things like this are fraught throughout our era of decline. We used to have a jet plane that could get us from New York to London in 2.5 hours. The Concord was an amazing actualization of real progress in avionics. But the will and desire to recreate this craft is dead. So, today, we are forced to take 7-hour flights on older jet models. It’s not that we don’t want to get there faster, it’s that we simply lack the ability to do it anymore. I wonder if, like NASA, the British even have the real progress left in their records anymore. Maybe in 30 years someone will try to resurrect that too and start the development of actualized progress once again. I doubt it too.
As we move forward into this age of decline that the insane call progressive, I encourage you to look around and think about what you’re being sold. Is it real progress? Is it stagnation? Is it actualized progress from old discoveries? Or is it decline? When Math is called racist because it’s too hard for some, is that progress? An extreme example, of course it’s not. But when you’re told nuclear power is unsafe so we have to use solar and wind, is that progress? I don’t think so. When such liars are forced to burn coal so they can power their house to post their bullshit online, one ought to see that the truth points to itself. An angle somewhere is giggling, I’m sure.
But you’ve likely heard this all before. Your electric car runs on the local coal-based grid. Your computers are made by slave labor that looks at the factory machines like mythical beasts. You’re living under a regime operating as a Roddenberry cargo-cult. You don’t have to read Liu Cixin’s stories to learn about sophons - you’re already being harassed by them if you’re in any form intelligent and capable of holding back the decline. But you can’t hibernate - you can’t jump a 200 year gap into the future when humanity maxes out on actualized progress while it’s stalling in real progress. You’re stuck here, at the end of all things modern. Born to do, forced to vote.
Take comfort in knowing, you’re not the first, and very likely not the last. In 416 AD, Rutilius Namatianus - a Gallo-Roman official struggling with remaining in devastated Rome or returning to his native Gaul - felt the same tension we all do. I wish to comfort you with his poem in contemplating whether to further support the failing global regime of Rome, or put efforts into rebuilding his neglected homeland:
But 'tis my fortune that is plucked back from the well-loved land; the fields of Gaul summon home their native. Disfigured they are by wars immeasurably long, yet the less their charm, the more they earn pity. 'Tis a lighter crime to neglect our countrymen when at their ease: our common losses call for each man's loyalty. Our presence and our tears are what we owe to the ancestral home: service which grief has prompted ofttimes helps. 'Tis sin further to overlook the tedious tale of disasters which the delay of halting aid has multiplied: now is the time after cruel fires on ravaged farms to rebuild, if it be but shepherd's huts. Nay, if only the very springs could utter words, if only our very trees could speak, they well might spur my laggard pace with just complaints and give sails to my yearning wishes. Now that the dear city slackens her embrace, my homeland wins, and I can scarce feel patient with a journey deferred so late.
If his poem hits your soul, you can read his journal here
His journal encourages me that men of good will and charity will survive this, and build the foundation stones of something better. Unlike the characters in Liu Cixin’s stories, Rutilius couldn’t hibernate until the days of Charlemagne - and neither can you hibernate until the days of whoever will formalize a better regime to come. You’re stuck here in the ashes. You might be able to be a Wallfacer and plan up ideas for a future doomsday, but you don’t know if any of your plans will actually work - and besides, one slip of the tongue and the whole internet will be able to see. But you must start rebuilding, even if all you can manage is a shepherd’s hut. A hut, after all, is certainly progress from ashes. Even something as simple as a self-sufficient landed family is considerable progress from the consumerist urban troglodyte. But, it doesn’t hurt to pray that you might just manage to build a Cathedral too.
What do we build, rebuild, discard when we ignore the decline and press forward. I have explained to my children (late teens) that they must ignore the 'plastic' things of modernity and focus on the useful, but how to progress past that? Perhaps just focusing on the foundation of something new is all we can do right now. AND YES, sophons are demonic...I get frustrated that not enough people see that.