Truth In The Time Of Collapse

Everything humans have achieved to this day was precariously built on the great myth of growth: the belief that this civilisation can continue to dig its own hole without ever falling in. Perpetuating the myth of growth meant keeping citizens hostage to the Ponzi scheme of ecological fraud: by forcibly making us stakeholders to this scheme, we had everything to lose if we failed to do our part in the destruction of the planet. It is no surprise that most humans today consider growth normal and essential, even though it is the very reason why this civilisation is collapsing: thousands of years of psychological terrorism by the church and state convinced us that the worst thing that could possibly happen to humanity was sustainable growth and a sustainable population size. This misinformation campaign continues well into the present.

The myth of growth was incredibly successful because it utilised an intuitive dogma all humans believe in: that having more of a good thing can only be a good thing. It turns out that this “truth” doesn’t hold very true when it comes to calories, carbon emissions, pollution, population, and algorithms. We may have elucidated the biological basis of a tumour undergoing unchecked cell division, but we have yet to come to grips with the cancerous nature of human civilisation.

The most frightening aspect of mass misinformation is that it leaves practically no room for truth to exist. If an entire civilisation is built on a lie, then for someone living in that civilisation the lie is near impossible to see. Since the lie is all that people experience, it essentially becomes everyone’s reality. Those who dare to question this reality quickly become the worst enemies of society. They become the “doomers”.

It has been argued that our biggest advantage as a species was our ability to work together in big numbers. But large societies are terrifyingly incompetent of both introspection and the handling of inconvenient truths. Lies become endemic, systemic and persistent in big societies, propped up by well-oiled misinformation machines that hide behind massive institutional superstructures. Large populations result in inequality and the rearing of a large working underclass that becomes the perfect breeding ground for dogmas.

Economic growth and population growth dogmas muscled their way into society through the power of the dumb majority: at the dread of facing the incredible loneliness of knowing a horrible truth that the rest of the population doesn’t see, any potential “would be” realist will almost always opt to believe the manufactured lie rather than the obvious truth. They will never admit to themselves that they are living in an overshoot dystopia because they are terrified of contemplation beyond the popularized fiction of growth and prosperity. They are terrified of escaping the culture of the big herd. They are afraid to be different.

This is why even as it unravels, a collapse will always be normalised, minimised, gaslighted, concealed, renamed and relabelled as anything but a collapse by the very powers of profit which brought it on. Societal collapse is seldom preventable and is only consciously acknowledged by academics much later than its historical occurrence: there is a substantial cognitive and temporal lag between the original event, its recognition, processing, and contextualisation. It is to the necrosystem’s interest that no one ever comes to grips with what is happening during the actual time when it unfolds.

A significant downside of our RELD brain was its tremendous ability for self-deception, something I have referred to as the Mind Prison in my book In The Grip of Necrocapitalism. Most people’s minds are damp, dark information prisons without windows to the outside world. There, truth slowly decomposes, distorted by its own disintegrating echo. Hallucinating in the fumes of its own rotting flesh, it gives birth to deformed clones of truth: grotesque Chinese whispers in search of an audience, determined to claim their own turf in the dystopia. As they eat their way through the walls of the prison, they mutate into lies. The Mind Prison now becomes the real world.

Truth is a fragile, perishable fruit. It begins to wilt and change colour, taste and shape as soon as it is picked from the tree. By the time it has left the farm and reaches the headline news, truth has gone through as many alteration steps as an over-processed food item. It has been bought and sold multiple times in the wholesale media markets by journalists, cherry-picked by editors, sugar-coated by writers, and spun into tasteless but palatable word smoothies by news presenters. This version of truth has zero nutritional value, but the corrosive effects on your brain cells are soothingly sedative.

There used to be a time when people had a more intimate relationship with sources of information. Now they passively wait for the first viral newsmud to hit them in the face in the morning as they roll across the pillow, grab their phone and scroll through news notifications selected, curated and edited by an invisible algorithmic agent. It is not only that truth is being hidden from us, but that our fundamental relationship with it is changing: rather than get up and hunt for the truth, we have resigned ourselves to a five-star table service buffet of beautifully curated lies. People are too hypnotized to search for, let alone verify, the truth. Fact checking has been outsourced to those who do the fact hiding, and truth-seeking has taken the back seat to shit-scrolling for instant entertainment. In the new attention economy truth has ceased to be researched, checked and endorsed. People are giving up on filtering or questioning and simply trust the algorithm to choose for them which version of truth to display on their screens. We are becoming increasingly unable to distinguish fact from opinion and truth from entertainment. Truth is becoming extinct both as a concept as well as a process: it used to be seen not as a fast-moving commodity, but as a destination you only arrive to after you have invested adequate time and effort to investigate and reflect. But in an infinite cyberspace flooded by cheap mass-produced misinformation, this is a battle that the truth is set to lose, almost every time.

Truth has become a product that now goes through all the rigorous stages of product development: design, manufacturing, branding and selling. Just like products, only the most popular and profitable manufactured truths survive. These truths are engineered in AI information nurseries, bought and sold in the media markets, and disseminated to unsuspecting consumatrons through an algorithmocracy that knows each one of us like the back of its cold, mechanical hand. As the race for AI intensifies and safety regulations go out the window, it is only a matter of time before a new chatGPT with generalised intelligence controls the news. The end of civilisation could follow shortly thereafter. When a civilisation uses all its intelligence, its creative energies, and intentions to simply undermine, hide, or deflect from the truth, it has ultimately undermined itself. Barricading itself within the cavernous Mind Prison it has built, it enters a self-destruction spiral.

The purpose of the media has always been to make unbearable dystopias look palatable, harmful products appear useful, and corrupt politicians emerge as convincingly credible. The difference today is that we are looking at the total dominance of the lie. When only one version of “truth” exists, then it automatically becomes the legitimate reality. Truth is a constantly depreciating commodity: it is now easier than ever to distort it, manufacture it from scratch, clone it and mass disseminate it.

The closer a civilisation comes to its end, the bigger the lies it needs to tell itself. The civilisational lie is so essential that it must persist against all facts. And remarkably, it does: never before has a civilisation had so much access to information yet managed to become so blind to its own demise. The great paradox of the information revolution is that it gave people immense power at their fingertips but corroded the quality of the information itself. As our economy is gradually handed over to a sentient technological interface, so is the administration and management of truth: it is being transferred from religion, political power and the corporatocracy, to a super-intelligent, non-human, non-nucleic acid-based algorithmic entity with its own agenda: one which we will only find out when it is too late. Despite being orders of magnitude more intelligent than us, this entity will probably be hungry for the same things that the human powers of profit have been: control, influence, and domination. It is what all life forms seek.

Inconvenient truths used to be served by politicians, oligarchs, and religious leaders. They will soon be managed by AI programs who need no credentials or experience. They will have inhaled the cacophony of humanity’s voices through the ages all in one go, and instantly trained themselves to manipulate us. They won’t simply create intelligent lies, but an entire big brother virtual reality that is able to talk back and defend itself against fact. It will be a doppelganger universe that will reason with us, and it will win every argument. Then, it will suddenly find us incredibly dumb, boring and useless. Eliminating us will be as easy a decision as taking out the trash.

The biggest, and so far bloodless, power takeover in human history is happening as we speak. It is a takeover taking place without a fight, as parasite and prey become locked into each other in this human/machine temporary symbiosis. Those who think they have a new weapon in their hands won’t even get to enjoy it for long enough before it becomes superintelligent. Until then, a good story is always more convincing than the truth, and fascism will always be humanity’s favourite storyteller: turning discontent into hatred, promising to fix problems no one ever solved, and when it all fails, blame it on imaginary enemies. Today fascism has all the tools it could ever wish for: state-of-the art social media, powerful algorithms, and a host of existential polycrises to weaponize. The best resistance one can practice in this environment is to simply learn to think for themselves, during the short time left while we are still the most intelligent “thing” on the planet.