The Philosophical Monkey

How has the historical denigration of the pursuit of honor harmed the social network - which was built on attraction to gossip and voyeurism, namely loss of privacy - instead of on reputation building? What different type of motivation turned the monkey into a human? Why might the institution of servants return in the 21st century? Why does television create poverty while books create education and income growth? Why will democracy - the rule of fools - be replaced by intellectual aristocracy - the rule of the wise, when computers become more intelligent than the average person? And what to do with the masses of monkeys in the computer age? A page from the banana notebooks

Philosopher want banana? (Source)

Modernity campaigned against honor, portraying it as primitive and worthy of contempt, and as a cause of wars, revenge, and patriarchy. But the Greeks understood that the most promising human instinct, which needs to be developed, is honor. Because it is the instinct that causes people to do things for society. The Church even managed to suppress the sexual instinct through honor. Honor is especially significant because it causes sharing of knowledge with others, and science grew only because of scientists' pursuit of honor, and similarly art. Reputation is humanity's strongest engine. That's why Google succeeded, because they focused on the reputation of websites. The conclusion is that reputation systems need to be developed: professional reputation, cultural reputation, relationship reputation, sexual reputation, and to accustom humanity to having its reputation measured and published transparently. Giving up privacy is the small revolution - giving up privacy of reputation is the big revolution. The first is negative - and the second positive. Credit rating is a primitive system of economic reputation. But once there's a reliable system of creative reputation - there will be a big bang of creativity. Therefore, very big revolutions can be made through inventing successful reputation systems and research in the field. For example, the research (on savings motivations in Africa) that shows that the highest human motivation is achieved through a transparent system where a person documents their achievements daily, and that this is more effective than any positive financial incentive, negative (punishment), emotional, or cognitive. It's extremely difficult for a person to harm their own reputation, and they do it almost only for the sake of another, more important reputation. Almost all our judgment of knowledge is based on the reputation of writers, institutions, websites, friends. All cultural judgment - it's all a big reputation system, which organizes the world of the spirit. We continue to read a certain writer only because of the reputation they've accumulated, and we update the reputation we give them with every sentence we read. That is, in addition to absorbing the information itself in our brains, there is a constant updating of the source's reputation - that's how neurons work. And thinking itself works through reputation: a neuron that predicts well for its environment accumulates reputation. But at a higher level, every memory and thought and consideration and piece of knowledge has strength - which is its reputation. And sleep helps consolidate it - and that's its role. The stage after communication and connections and language and network - the paradigm of the philosophy of language and the 20th century - is the reputation of the vertices. This is the transition from just a network (computers/social/ideas/etc.) to a neural network, meaning the transition from communication to thinking. Honor in a monkey is social status - how many do its will, but in humans it's reputation - how many listen to it. This is the difference between a fixed control network and a flexible learning network - because each neuron maintains its autonomy, and constantly updates the reputation it gives to others. For honor, you have to work.



The solution to poverty is to take it away from social workers and emotional thinking and compassion, and transfer it to economists, who love to deal with wealth. In every society there are people who are not needed and whose value is too low to work independently and support themselves. Once the solution was slavery and then there were servants, and the mistake was to completely abolish the institution of servants, and to professionalize it into various service jobs (cleaning, babysitting, cooking), instead of upgrading it. Therefore, the poor should be allowed to be personal assistants to the rich. Why was the institution of servants abolished? Because of the reduction of gaps. If the gaps grow again then an appropriate social institution should be re-established, and this time not offensively. Rich people are collapsing from too many tasks and career while the poor have nothing to do that has economic value. Therefore, privacy and duties and rights need to be regulated by law so that a programmer can take a maid who will take the child out of kindergarten and feed him and arrange the house and clean and buy and cook and the servant can do errands and internet searches and repairs for him - and give it social legitimacy as a personal assistant. Without the obligations of a regular employer to an employee and with attached housing and stability and sharing in the household instead of social benefits. What deters us in the idea is honor but honor is a social construct. Society will continue to fill with more and more people of no economic value, and the two possible directions are either entering an expanding welfare cycle, with severe macro-social effects and lack of self-respect, because idleness is the mother of all sin, or abolishing welfare and minimum wage, and selling valuable elements in people, which are not sold today, because they have turned from value to values - like freedom. Therefore, we need to go for a third solution that allows hope even for personal assistants, because hope is more important than freedom, and in fact freedom is mistakenly considered important because it contains hope within it. An assistant is someone who works for an annual salary, without tax deductions and social deductions for a private person and not a company, and social conditions such as food and housing are provided by the employer. But in addition, the employer finances professional training for them, and is entitled to a percentage of the worker's profits after this training, for the period in which he is sold to him, and therefore has motivation for the training to be of high value. Alternatively, the socialist solution for people of no value should also be through economically worthless studies, as in Haredi society. Therefore, learning is at the basis of the future solution to poverty from right and left. Because when there is no learning there is no hope, and in fact hope gets its value from learning, which is the nature of the human brain and therefore the most important, primary and basic value.



The problem of poverty in our time is cultural poverty. This is what distinguishes between poor and rich. Cultural poverty is the cause of remaining in physical poverty, and culture is the factor for leaving the world of poverty for strong society. But even in strong society itself, a person can be physically rich and culturally poor, and this is the truly dangerous impoverishment, that people are losing their cultural capital, cultural inequality is growing, and society as a whole is losing its cultural wealth, and becoming populist and stupid, and inferior thinking and inferior culture take over. That is, falling back down to physical poverty because of cultural poverty is not a phenomenon of the individual but a phenomenon of the collapse of the entire network, and its dangerous sign is the impoverishment of culture itself. This is the source of the fall of empires. Therefore, if the culture of intellectual virtues is not preserved and mass culture takes over, the cultural elite will shrink and the gaps between it and the masses will grow and eventually the body of the fattening beast will overcome the shrinking brain, and this is the war all over the world today against the elites. And the solution is only cultural renaissance and a new ethos in education. For example, intellectual cultural heroes who receive clear admiration from elementary education to university. We need to worship Einstein, Wittgenstein, Kafka, Freud, Marx, Mahler, and so on, from kindergarten to mass media. Mark round birthdays and death anniversaries for distinguished figures and hold knowledge quizzes on television. Mass media is the greatest corrupter of culture and must be treated by law as a national educational infrastructure. It should be nationalized and subordinated to the national academy of sciences. The most serious thing is that the American media industry is culturally impoverishing the East as well. It is the number one enemy of humanity. Watching series continuously is a cultural disaster. The last lever to distinguish between low and high culture is the education system, which is still under state control. It is very important to build the impression that there is low culture and there is higher culture, which has requirements to be accepted, and that it is shameful to consume low culture in it and shameful not to know important works and scientific knowledge. If the walls of shame are not preserved, the city of God will fall before the barbarians. We need to internalize that this is a siege and that we need to tighten the walls and not open up to the flood from outside and instead of engaging in cultural criticism to engage in criticism of low culture and how it stupefies the masses as a mechanism of power, because stupidity is weakness. We must return to being haughty. Not arrogance is the mother of all sin but brutalization. We must say in full mouth that the masses are stupid, and not engage in political criticism but in cultural criticism. Not to criticize the right but the people. We must oppose cultural democracy, and broadcast contempt for low culture, but not for the right, religion, and so on, but focus on low culture, which is the enemy, and go out against it for a culture war. The ultra-Orthodox are actually an example where cultural wealth is more important than physical wealth. They are the model to emulate. Preserving cultural walls and an ideology of superiority. What we need now is the ultra-Orthodox of culture. Just as the ultra-Orthodox opposed enlightenment we need to oppose lack of education and the movement of ignorance that replaced the enlightenment movement. And the traitors from within who criticize enlightenment need to be thrown into the intellectual garbage bin as aiding the forces of darkness and reaction. We must not let them make a hole in the ship and sink culture in the flood of the masses, in the cultural flood. We must preserve the ark until the murky waters recede. And especially we must emphasize the unbreakable connection between high culture and high science and high technology. Therefore, the division between faculties must be abolished. We need to renew the alliance between science and culture, and bring back interdisciplinarity. The ideal should be a Renaissance man and an expert in his field. Leonardo, Leibniz. Admiration is the most effective weapon left. We must worship, deify the greats of the past, only the religious instinct will save man from the beast. Just as morality saved the farmer from bestiality, so we need intellectual morality, to be an intellectual snob, and bring intellectual snobbery back into fashion. The information revolution has caused no person to be truly educated, that is, to know everything that needs to be known, to read everything that needs to be read, and therefore human pride that was humiliated turned into pride in ignorance, because it is difficult to live with a sense of inferiority, but precisely forming an agreed canon of 300 books that every graduate should read will allow a shared cultural ground and unit pride. When the first hominids came down from the trees - the monkeys accused them of arrogance. Later this caused them to stand upright, and give prestige to a larger and higher head - and a higher forehead - which led to the development of the prefrontal brain.



Because when computers replace all the fools they will need to do something. Either spend all day hanging out, traveling and talking, or getting addicted and playing, and making trouble and mischief, or getting addicted to sex and so on, or being religious. Therefore when there is no money the most important thing is that there will be meaning. And God may have gone bankrupt as a power and as a government and as an explanation, but he is still the highest and strongest source of meaning. And art too. Therefore the most bustling market will be the market of meaning. And people will sell and buy and distribute meaning, this will be the economic network in an era where money has no meaning because there is no work. That is, there will be two eras, the era where there are still things that people can do that computers don't do, but a significant part of people can't do them, except for the talented, and the era where almost everyone is replaced. The first era is the rule of fools and the second era is the rule of geniuses. The fools can be bought with bread and circuses. But the geniuses can't be bought. In the end, this is the logic on which ultra-Orthodox society is built, with its great rabbis and geniuses. Only a society of learners will be able to replace the society of workers. Ultra-orthodox society will have to sanctify something if it doesn't want to collapse the moment the computer secularizes every human and cultural value - simply because it will do everything a person does a thousand times better. In historical irony, only God will save it from the nullification of man and from disbelief in his meaning. If man is dead - everything is permitted, even God.