Thursday: Political Dreams

The Neurological State | Fighting Current Affairs Through Philosophy | The Philosophical State | The Administrator is a Secretary, and the Teacher is Above Him | The Intelligence State | The Monopoly on the Database as a Monopoly on Violence | Turning the State into a Learning Algorithm - and the Law into Code for Humans | Countless Small Learning Cycles are Preferable to One Large Cycle | The Ultimate Goal of the State - A Cultural Golden Age

I have a dream that the state will have a dream - that the state will be a brain  (Source)

• The neurological state is a state organized around learning - the learning state. Instead of democracy and elections, which are a primitive type of learning with a huge feedback loop, it has continuous learning, based on organizing the state like a brain. And the deeper the understanding of the brain's fine details - the better state we can create - in the big picture. The Platonic parable of large and small letters - reversed. Why the brain? A natural learning mechanism, much more efficient than evolution, more robust than an artificial algorithm, and with spiritual content on a higher plane. The soul of the state is culture, and the spirit is literature - but the state is gray matter. And gray matter needs a good learning algorithm.


• Current affairs are the scourge of humanity, having evolved from a nuisance to a genuinely dangerous disease. One way to cure the disease is to kill the patient - the state or democracy. For example, create a society where the institution of the state descends from its greatness, in favor of its more vital competitor - the institution of the corporation. A second option to treat the epidemic is to stop its spread, and treat current affairs sites like porn sites, so they lose legitimacy and revenue. This is a cultural treatment that must mark current affairs as something disgraceful, which caused Nazism, for instance. In any case, no field is further from current affairs than philosophy, and it is the [Translator's note: "Sitra Achra", a Kabbalistic term meaning "the other side" or "the evil side"] for it. Therefore, it also works in reverse. That is, the state's way of fighting harmful current affairs is as old as the fight against demagoguery in Athens - through philosophy. A state that desires life, that wants to remain a democracy, must turn philosophy into its great educational project, in order to raise the level of thinking of its citizens. Philosophy should be studied in kindergarten, elementary school, high school, and university as a mandatory subject. Exactly as religion works in its educational institutions. Philosophy is the religion of the state, and without it, the public sphere will sink to self-destruction. And just as religious priests need to be well-versed in religion, so every official needs to demonstrate proficiency in a philosophy test, according to their seniority. To be an elected official, you need a degree in philosophy, and to be a minister you need a master's degree, and to be a prime minister or authority - a doctorate. This will be a combination of the Chinese imperial examination system with Plato's state, and will raise the level of elected officials wonderfully. Even the Chief of General Staff needs a doctorate in philosophy. This will be the philosophical state.


• The administrator is a secretary, who is below the person responsible for learning who is a data analyst. The exercise of power - below the learning of power. The teacher becomes the most prestigious profession in society, every organization has a teacher. Control is teaching. Work is learning. The worker is a student. The prime minister is the teacher of the state. And the ministers - principals. Every ministry is a school. The goal of the government is to learn. The teacher not only teaches - he is the chief learner. In fact, the teacher should be called: a sage [Translator's note: "Talmid Chacham" in Hebrew, literally "wise student", a term traditionally used for Torah scholars].


• The conscious in the brain - the government. The press - intelligence, these are the senses, but not just the senses, but all hidden and unconscious processing of information. What causes consciousness versus other brain activity - story versus data. In the state of the future, a huge medical database, and databases in every field. The state is a big data repository. The main state governmental power is protection and breach of privacy - this is the exercise of violence in the information age, the violence of information, and the monopoly on violence is the monopoly on access to all information. That is, it's an intelligence state. Security is solving crimes through infinite, all-encompassing information. A new dichotomous definition: The state is the things in which centralization is preferable (for example, the military and the use of force is a monopoly) - and the economy is the rest. But even as a database, the state is only the protection of privacy and the invasion of privacy - that is, what is better centralized, the gatekeeper - and not the ways of using the database. It is the database itself, the minimum needed. Only learning algorithms have access to private details and databases, not any person.


• The abstraction and revelation of all secrets of someone, or of an organization - is the harshest sanction of the state in the information age. More than prison or bankruptcy, which are outdated sanctions. Therefore, one can imagine a terror movement of exposure, which reveals all the secrets of its targets, including sexual ones (for example, a random innocent ordinary citizen who becomes a victim). Subsequently, one can also imagine a war of exposure: revealing all the secrets of the citizens of a rival state and of all commercial organizations in it. Hacking all their computers, recording their conversations, photographing their intimate moments - and publishing everything online. Exposure as punishment should deter the individual, and as a strategy against terrorism, it can deter a group that is not a state (as is common with terrorists).


• A contract needs to become code in special programming languages that lawyers will know and will be applied to the real world (for example, a computerized condition can become a condition in the real world). As these legal programming languages become more sophisticated and detailed, they can become more and more complete and powerful, until they become the language in which the state and its laws are written. The state - as software. The legal system - as procedural code, some of whose variables and functions can be human, until it becomes code that operates on humans. In other words, the idea of the computer will take over humans not from within, but from outside, from within society. In terms of efficiency and fairness and immunity from corruption, there is an advantage to a formula over the law today, and the science of law will become part of computer science - normative computer science.


• The state will be more and more measurable, with metrics that will measure the results of laws. The very fact that you need to think about what you want to measure as the success of a law - will make you think about its purpose. And today, just as scientists research happiness etc., it's possible to measure very qualitative things as well. Therefore, a law will not only be normative, but will also contain a teleological descriptive goal that will be formulated as a metric, and it will be possible to determine if it is effective and how much, and change it accordingly. The smaller the change cycles are, that is, shorter in time and scope - in feedback loops of: legislation, measurement, data analysis and formulation of a new law - the more optimal and adaptive the state will be. This, instead of the cycle today, which takes years between formulating a law until understanding that it doesn't work until new formulation, mainly because there is no metric. True, there can be disagreement about the metric, but in most things we actually do agree and know what we want to achieve and don't know how. In addition, one can imagine a metric that is a function of several variables as a political compromise. Finally, the metric is also influenced by the data, and once data is collected, we can understand what is effective to measure and what is worthy as a metric, or find points of maximum efficiency that arise by themselves from the data. In the future, today's law will seem blind, because it didn't look at its results. All this is a result of morality, especially in its Kantian version, which is as sublime as it is opaque and stupid (traits that go together).


• The purpose of the state is immortalization. Not to manage the present, but to be remembered in the future. A state is measured by the timeless literature written in it, and eternal art created in it. A state without culture is not a human - but a beast. Therefore, there needs to be a whole field in political science that empirically examines what encourages the creation of great culture, and tries to produce the conditions for it. Every other element in the state's activity is a means to this end, and the modern state is the most grotesque and enormous example of forgetting the goal and focusing on the means. The empty, formal state - is a disaster. Banality is evil itself. Lack of freedom is not bad in itself, but because it doesn't allow writing. But a state that allows writing but doesn't allow thinking - is even worse than a state that doesn't allow writing, because writing without thinking is to ensure that the future will forget you. Producing mountains of garbage is the thing that makes even gold forgotten within it. The ultimate state - a golden age.