2026-09-23

Just started watching The Tale of Princess Kaguya.

The simple images of the bamboo-cutter out there on the hills alone combine with reflections on AI (that are such a constant prescence in my mind at present), and the practice with Elizabeth: a great complex wistful sadness came upon me. How foolish we are and have been. What a waste we make of this precious earth out of greed and anger and delusion. What a paradise we have been given, and how heedless we are of it. How can we be so mindless?

How totally obvious it is that we are racing forward on e.g AI when the only sane, sensible thing would be to go slowly, to take the time to truly sense into what the whole, into what would be wise. Not this heedless rushing. And I am part of it too. That heedless rushing is in me too. I cannot stand apart from it. Yet to acknowledge that and one's implication is not to make it all one grey mass: there are those who think are path is sensible, who are so deluded and lost and infatuated, that they cannot see the insanity of it. At best they see some risks arising from it but they do not see how the whole system is misplaced, that their high-falutin talk of the technological benefits once again evades the point, the fact that we already have enough – that we had enough (perhaps) 12 thousand years ago, and it is our craving for more, for power, for advance, for domination (frankly) that is the problem.

Some may accuse me of naivete. Even once i would have accused myself.

And it is important to say that this is not about blindness to the terrible trap we are caught in, the rational dilemma, the collective action problem. What i am pointing at is the difference between those recognizing the trap and also clearly and cleanly stating: but if i were not in this trap this is what i would want and this is what i would do (I would take the path of patience and wisdom). And those whose talk of the trap evades any clean statement of where they stand – or, perhaps, they do state where they stand and where that is is the techno-progressivists fetish with more.

These men – and they are mostly men – are fools. Great damned fools who are so intoxicated by their own aggrandizement they risk us all.

And it is so bizarre: even if you wanted AI (or even superintelligence), on any collective reflection it would be so much wiser to take a century to get there – to do it cautiously and carefully. What is the rush in any cosmic sense, and the dangers of rushing are enormous. But oh no. Someone needs their name graven upon the pedastal, their name in the history books. That's their danger and danger of any lust for immortality. It was there in Achilles that blood soaked psychopath. I remember the first time I read the Iliad, the revulsion i felt at him. A great invicible bully, obsessed with fame, ill-mannered, sex-slaving, in fits of childish resentment. Ultimately so deserving of death (though even that is harsh, when i remember the buddhist in me i remember compassion and think of the treatment he himself received). And we have our petty Achilles and Agammemnon's today. Agammemnon who would sacrifice his own daughter in the onward rush of conquest and power.

Why do we tolerate them? Why do some even worship and wish to emulate them?

The toleration comes back again, in part, to Moloch, to our difficulty to act together. But all too much is wished for or allowed, we have forgotten the sense of equity and justice that once animated us all (at least if we are to believe the neo-myths that now swirl around our hunter-gatherer past). Come let us say together: enough, we can return to goodness, justice and simplicity.

We tolerate because at some level we envy, or, perhaps at some level we have surrendered to the system, or, the promise of the system. The promise of the larger the iphone, or the colony on Mars, or even the dream that one day they'll be no hunger (but oddly the promise has never been no war – that's always need a more spiritual vision I think, though there are a few, very few, extremists who imagine enough will somehow satiate us and we'll all just lie back relaxed as if after some extra-large meal and in a world of infinite (or near-infinite) resources there would be no more rivalry because we each could have our own planet. But how little they must know of us, or at least, what has become of us now. There would always be someone wanting a larger planet, or just to have yours so that they could exercise power).

But, but, but … (or rather and). I want to end this on a note of hope not only because hope is all we have, but because i genuinely believe it – even if makes less good prose and lless good tv.

The hope is we can change, and our culture can change, and our circumstances can change (least importantly – as emphasized above). Just as we fell down the rabbit-hole of agriculture we can fall back. Abundance may help us. But more importantly, we have transformed and can again. We can become something more than we are in the fallen moments, we can reach towards the stars, and the stars not of distant suns but the stars of our own potential: our capacity for kindness and love, for compassion and love, for learning and humility. Our ability to stand before the infinities and be touched by them, to live up to the teachings of our most beloved, to take them into our hearts and make them and us whole.

We have been through a time of great darkness. Perhaps it is time we turn to the light again.