This is a story about dangerous ideas, and words’ magical power to heal and to harm. It’s about AI, Charles Manson, dubstep, Neo-Nazis, occultism, and a lot of amphetamine, but it’s mainly about Nicholas Land.
While recovering from the mild flu effects of the vaccine, I spent the day reading about perhaps the most famous advocate of radical life extension — Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel.
He’s not the richest entrepreneur in Silicon Valley (he’s worth a mere $6.5 billion) but he’s one of the more interesting ones.
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A new book came out recently called Our Moment of Choice. Produced by an organization called ‘Evolutionary Leaders’, it announced that mankind was on the brink of an extraordinary evolutionary leap, from the chrysalis of homo sapiens to a whole new species of unlimited potential.
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I feel like my worldview has changed in the last few months, partly as a result of reading Thomas Huxley.
He’s a wonderful writer — better than Aldous — and I find his worldview appealing, with its metaphysical agnosticism and emphasis on the power of science to control nature and improve our world.
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Our psyches are deeply connected to the material and symbolic worlds we weave around us. The habitat of our daily lives re-inforces our habits, for good and ill. All our stuff – our apartments, our clothes, our books, our TV, our online activity, our food, our relationships – helps make us who we are, in a powerful feedback loop.
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Roy Bahat is the head of Bloomberg Beta, a venture fund backed by Bloomberg. He also works on the future of work, and - like a lot of people in Silicon Valley - is a vocal supporter of Universal Basic Income (UBI). I met up with him in San Francisco to talk about the future of work and the importance of lifelong learning.
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While I was in San Francisco, I got the chance to meet Michael Murphy, one of the founders of the Esalen Institute. It's a cross between a spiritual retreat centre and an adult education college, perched on the cliffs of Big Sur next to some hot springs. It's been very influential on transpersonal psychology and American spirituality.
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How are you feeling? How well are you? Is your weight where you want it to be? Smoking too much? How happy are you on a scale of one to ten? Are you optimising your personal brand? How fast was your last five kilometre run? Would you like to share that via social media? Would you like a life-coach to help you overcome these challenges on a way to a better, happier, more awesome you?
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Watch out folks. There is a murky world lurking behind the scenes, a sinister cabal of policy-makers, psychologists, CEOs, advertizers and life-coaches, watching you, measuring you, nudging you, monitoring your every smile, all to try and make you happy. We must resist. This, broadly, is the message of sociologist William Davies’ book, The Happiness Industry: How Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being.
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In his magnum opus, The Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor charts western society’s unprecedented shift from a consensus belief in transcendent reality to a worldview that is much more immanent or ‘this-world’.
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