Out of Balance

Is it true, that we're all deranged?

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Cultural critic, Artist, Composer

  • Mumford’s Myth of the Machine

    It’s not just AI

    It’s fruitful to go back to such figures as Lewis Mumford, who wrote on the history of technology and whose book The Myth of the Machine informs current conceptions of the psychosocial dynamics of contemporary technology. Over fifty years ago he warned against a convergence of science, economics, and technics buttressed by political power which militates against life-enhancing values, those which begin in the place which is least repressible: the Empire of the Self. “But for those of us, who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty ancient hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out.” –Mumford, Pentagon of Power , Epilogue: Advancement of Life, p. 435.

    Yes, I am talking about self reliance. Just like last time. My thoughts become more insistent upon being heard as it becomes clear just what is at stake. To review, I am speaking of that realm in which the self begins to atrophy; it leaves us as our ability and desire to escape the state of tutelage leaves us, which comes about when one no longer is able, or even wishes, to think for oneself.

    This dovetails into Herbert Marcuse’s theory of technological rationality, which posits that philosophical Rationalism transmogrifies into a “technological rationality” which, once the technology becomes ubiquitous, changes what is considered rational within that society. It has a moral dimension. For example, is it moral to put off answering an email for more than a single business day? From this perspective, being “connected” takes on the flavor of a moral imperative. It’s treated as irrational and immoral to fail to respond to an email or text for more than some small amount of time, like a second. What do you owe the Combine, as I like to call it? “Combine” defined as I did above in connection to Mumford’s concept of the Myth of the Machine: a state of affairs characterized by a convergence of science, economics and technics undergirded by the political. “The true meaning of the technological Age can only be realized when it becomes apparent which kind of politics can master the new technology.” –Carl Schmitt

    Beyond Mumford in the quest for personal autonomy there is the figure of Ralph Waldo Emerson. There is a definite mystical tinge to his writings on the Empire of the Self contained in his 1841 essay Self-Reliance. “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company in which the members agree for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue most in request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.” Sucking at the teat of Mammon always and everywhere exists as logically prior to the technological imperative. Can you walk away from it all? It’s a tall order.

  • AI and the New Dark Ages

    Joseph de Weck’s case against AI

    There is some hope still, isn’t there? As long as there are people out there like Joseph de Weck who wrote a piece for The Guardian dated Dec. 26. “This summer, I found myself battling through traffic in the sweltering streets of Marseille. At a crossing, my friend in the passenger seat told me to turn right toward a spot known for its fish soup. But the navigation app Waze instructed us to go straight. Tired, and with the Renault feeling like a sauna on wheels, I followed Waze’s advice. Moments later, we were stuck at a construction site. A trivial moment maybe. But one that captures perhaps the defining question of our era, in which technology touches nearly every aspect of our lives: who do we trust more–other human beings and our own instincts, or the machine?”

    de Weck then goes on to introduce us to Immanuel Kant and his famous essay, “What is Enlightenment?” And its clear and unequivocal answer: Enlightenment is the escape from tutelage.” As Kant puts it, enlightenment is “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity or “nonage”. And further defines immaturity or nonage as “the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.” And so this moment the culture had arrived at, 1784, represents an epochal moment. For the first time, it was possible, utilizing the advances in philosophy and the sciences in general, to escape from tutelage for a sizeable contingent of the educated classes. The ancien regime had suffered a fundamental collapse with the end of the old French aristocracy and there was no going back. No longer would the Great Chain of Being buttress the sickening prerogatives of primogeniture and all the other atavisms of the soul. We thought we had it made. Now the new battle-cry, “Sapere aude!” (“Have courage to use your own understanding!”) would resound through the streets of the capitals of the world. But darkness has its way of seeping into those areas we thought were lit permanently.

    It is ultimately a question of Authority with a capital A. I define Authority as that force which does not admit of interrogation. de Weck: “Artificial intelligence threatens to become our new “Other”–a silent authority that guides our thoughts and actions. We are in danger of ceding the hard-won courage to think for ourselves–and this time, not to gods or kings, but to code.” He then talks about some statistics that should curl the hair on the back of everyone’s necks. This year, only three years after the launching of Chat GPT, “82% of respondents had used AI in the previous 6 months.” In large numbers, People are turning to the machine for advice.

    But this is not a new phenomenon. We can go all the way back to 1976 to the work of Joseph Weizenbaum, whose epochal work Computer Power and Human Reason articulated the new possibilities. A few years before, he had devised the computer program ELIZA, which was modeled after the back and forth in the clinical setting of a Rogerian psychotherapist. “ELIZA was a program consisting of manly of general methods for analyzing sentences and sentence fragments, locating so-called keywords in texts, assembling sentences from fragments, and so on. It had, in other words, no built-in contextual framework or universe of discourse.This was supplied by a “script”. In a sense ELIZA was an actress who commanded a set of techniques but who had nothing of her own to say. The script, in turn, was a set of rules which permitted the actor to improvise on whatever resources it provided…ELIZA created the most remarkable illusion of having understood in the minds of the many people who conversed with it.” And even then, fifty years ago, people were treating ELIZA as a real personage, investing it with a veritable spiritual presence, a human presence.

    de Weck goes so far as to maintain that AI, given the current trends, is on the way to eliminating the perceived need for self-examination by writing. He quotes Joan Didion, who said that she writes “entirely to find out what I am thinking.” That’s a little murkily put, but I believe I understand her basic point. I personally write not to find out what I am thinking but what I believe as a considered enterprise, existing underneath the more immediate and superficial elements which pass through my mind. For example, one could pose such a question to oneself as “Do the ends justify the means?” You could ask some Authority to help you with such a difficult question, but perhaps that would lead to adopting a viewpoint that is not really your own. I would suggest that above all, don’t seek Adolph Hitler’s advice on this point.

    So de Weck, worryingly, suggests that the answer is “yes”, yes, we start to stop wishing to find out what we are thinking when AI informs too much of our writing. Apparently there are electroencephalography studies. They show, according to de Weck, that those who rely on AI in their writing “showed the lowest cognitive activity and struggled to accurately quote their work. Perhaps the most concerning was that over a couple of months, participants in the AI group became increasingly lazy, copying entire blocks of text in their essays.” Then de Weck takes us back to Kant’s “What is enlightenment?” “Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians.’ [italics mine–dw]. It is a burden to decide to think for yourself. Why not take the easy way out and just let subordination wash over you? It’s so easy…other have thought these things out far better than you could ever do. Just leave the driving to us!

    de Weck closes his essay with a question–“How can we harness AI’s promise of superhuman intelligence without eroding human reasoning, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of liberal democracy itself?” It seems to me that the answer to this question, even at this early stage in AI’s evolution, is that you can’t.

  • AI Harming Critical Thinking Skills

    Blang spot prissy bulge!

    Brain atrophy. Really a brain trophy, but these naysayers, “the nattering Nabobs of negativity”, just have a bad attitude. What’s so bad about feeling good? You get them (the smartphone elements) installed right into the cerebrum while the host is still transubstantiating. Very messy business, the Christ-body starts spilling out of the unleavened bread and before you know it you’ve got Christ’s toe halfway down your gullet. But after all, hosts always and ever sing to the highest mountain, the praises of the Lord. Keywords: Pussy, brain rot, The Word Made Flesh, but only in the beginning. “So was it just a word floating about in space, then?” “I don’t know, I wasn’t there. ” “While the Roman Inquisition was originally designed to combat the spread of Protestantism in Italy, the institution outlived its original purpose and the system of tribunals lasted until the mid-eighteenth century, when pre-Unification Italian states began to suppress the local inquisitions effectively eliminating the power of the Church to prosecute heretical crimes.” Giordano Bruno Lives!

  • Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics

    Assessment of Democratic Decline

    Released Oct. 16, 2025 by The Steady State, a group of more than 340 US former senior national security professionals. “Our membership includes former officials from the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of State, Department of Defense [sic] and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.”–from footnote 1 to the paper, p. 1.

    The paper starts out strong. You can’t accuse these officials of not knowing how to write. “It [the assessment] concludes–with moderate to high confidence–that the cumulative effect of multiple reinforcing dynamics is placing the nation on a trajectory toward competitive authoritarianism: a system in which elections, courts, and other democratic institutions persist in form but are systematically manipulated to entrench executive control.” That sentence ought to make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. I ask the reader to keep in mind that this is not written from the p[oint of view of the radical left. These are centrist government officials who accept the basic paradigms of political liberalism (to be construed in its historic, Lockean, sense). “The analysis identifies five interrelated trends driving this process. Executive overreach is being consolidated through governance by decree [italics mine–DW] and weaponization of the state, combining sweeping executive orders and expansive emergency claims with politicized control of the civil service and preferential protection of allies. Erosion of judicial independence has advanced not only through partisan appointments, but through strategic reliance on the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket”, efforts to curtail judicial remedies and intimidate the legal profession, and selective compliance with court rulings. Legislative weakness and abdication have diminished Congress’s capacity to serve as a coequal branch as delegation, obstruction, and polarization undermine effective oversight…the undermining of public trust, knowledge, and civil society through attacks on the press, academia, watchdog institutions, and dissenting voices has weakened democratic culture and civic resilience. Together, these trends indicate a restructuring of the constitutional order around personal loyalty rather than adherence to law [italics mine–dw] ...absent organized resistance by institutions, civil society, and the public, the United States is likely to continue along a path of accelerating democratic erosion, risking further consolidation of executive dominance and a loss of credibility as a model of democracy abroad.”

    The assessment presents a set of “key findings” including: 1) that democratic backsliding in the United States is accelerating; 2) that the Executive Branch is actively weaponizing state institutions to punish perceived opponents and shield allies; 3) that judicial independence is under sustained threat; 4) that legislative weakness is compounding the authoritarian trend; 5) that public trust in U.S. democratic institutions is declining; and 6) that the cumulative effect of these dynamics places the United States on a trajectory toward “competitive authoritarianism”.

    Of particular note as regards point 1, the paper cites a “paramount concern”: “The Administration has attempted to criminalize dissent through new directives. Trump’s EO designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization and National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 treat broad categories of political belief as grounds for investigation and punishment, blurring the constitutional line between criminal conduct and constitutionally protected speech.”

    Point 4, that legislative weakness is compounding the authoritarian trend, brings the problem to the doorstep of the body politic. Under the heading “Systemic electoral flaws”, The Steady State makes the claim that the US electoral system itself is “favoring political extremism and contributing to the autocratic trend. Features such as the winner-take-all system exaggerate one’s party electoral wins and dilute minority voting power, weakening competition between the major parties. These systemic distortions coupled with partisan manipulation of election rules, gerrymandering, intimidation of election officials, and weak guardrails against money and disinformation, collectively weaken electoral legitimacy while preserving the façade of democratic process.” Moreover, these systemic issues lead to “manufactured majorities”, where ruling parties manipulate electoral laws and processes to inflate their representation and weaken the power of legitimate opposition voices. Conclusion–“The U.S. electoral system increasingly tilts the playing field toward incumbents and partisan advantage. Structural biases such as winner-take-all rules and gerrymandering distort representation while restrictive voting laws, partisan control of election administration and intimidation of election officials weaken electoral integrity.”The paper goes on to document the undermining of the faith in public institutions, with such chilling conclusions as “By asserting that unfavorable outcomes are fraudulent by definition the Administration has laid the groundwork for both preemptive contestation of future results and punitive measures under the guise of ‘election security’. This not only undermines trust in election security but justifies restrictive voting measures that disproportionately affect political opponents.”

    Point 6–The assault on public knowledge and civil society

    The concluding statement of this section begins with “We judge that the Administration’s efforts to control information, suppress expertise, and constrain civil society constitute a parallel front in democratic backsliding–distinct from the delegitimization of institutions, yet reinforcing it. Rather than merely attacking existing institutions these actions seek to redefine what is knowable and who is permitted to speak with authority. Through political influence over academia, science, media, and non-governmental organizations, the Administration is eroding the independent sources of knowledge that enable democratic accountability.” I might add that this goes much further than the problem of “democratic accountability”. The very spirit of free inquiry in all areas of thought is at stake here.

    So much for the Assessment as such. It convincingly identifies and describes this tendency for “democratic backsliding”, as defined through a process of comparison between the basic structures and procedures of the American experiment as they existed before 2016 and afterward. What escapes examination, however, is the issue of all the structural problems that existed before, all the way back to the inception of the Republic. My paper, included in this blog, called “Give Up the Struggle” examines this facet of the problem. These are the problems inherent within political liberalism itself, the much-vaunted “Rule of Law” and the problem of executive authority in general. As I demonstrated, The US was created with the proviso of a strong presidency, modeled on the prerogatives of the British Crown. And in many ways it went downhill from there. For example, what was Jefferson thinking when he promulgated the Insurrection Act? He had to stop Aaron Burr from bringing down the government, but the law has stayed on the books all that time. And of course the intensification of executive power that commenced with the Patriot Act of 2001 removed many of the bulwarks protecting the American body politic from erosion of the Bill of Rights. We cannot help but recall Hobbes’ chilling words on the problem: “Power, not truth, makes the Law.” Who has the power? How has its concentration evolved over these two centuries?

    Everything points to the need of a fundamental restructuring. One could, for example, look to the work of Gaston Bachelard, who, in his seminal book The Formation of the Scientific Mind (1938) examines the psychology of utilitarianism, which of course functions as the guiding metaphilosophy of liberalism, exposing it as something which ultimately undercuts the quest for true knowledge. From such a standpoint, L’esprit Scientifique is in dire need of undergoing a thoroughgoing psychoanalytic treatment. This of course opens up fundamental questions of patriarchy and the nature of authoritarianism in general, necessitating a shift from the examination of social dynamics to individual ones. One must, following the psychoanalyst Otto Gross, commence with the examination of the power structures within the individual with emphasis on expunging these authoritarian structures which infiltrate into the depths of every man’s being.

  • The End of an Era

    I would delimit the bounds of this era with the appearance of Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680) and its subsequent refutation by John Locke in the Two Treatises of Civil Government, and its end by the present moment. “The purpose of Locke was to justify the English Revolution of 1688. The Two Treatises of Government, which were published in 1690, not only confute the doctrine of absolute monarchy founded on divine right but also envisage a political system in conformity with the innovations of the Convention Parliament.” (“Introduction”, John Locke, Two Treatises of Civil Government, by William S. Carpenter (1924), page v. The problem with Locke’s refutation is that it does not go far enough. Yes, one could have built into the US Constitution better safeguards against concentrations of power. But the concept of allegiance, which I discussed on my paper “Give Up the Struggle”, is always there to undercut any coherent notions of individual autonomy. No, the problem is there at the foundation of any possible concept of political liberalism, which can be defined thus: Coercion is justified if it promotes liberty. This is liberalism without the Sunday dressing. Note that the first word in this wholly adequate definition is “coercion.” Coercion lies at the heart of liberalism and therefore kingship (Patriarcha) lies at the heart of liberalism. “Every State is a despotism, be the despot one or many, or (as one is likely to imagine about a republic) if all be lords, that is, despotize over one another. For this is the case when the law given at any time, the expressed volition of (it may be) a popular assembly, is thenceforth to be law for the individual, to which obedience is due from him or towards which he has the duty of obedience.” (Max Stirner, The Ego and its Own, Cambridge UP 1995, p. 175.) It’s time for PB Shelley to be heard from: “The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys: Power, like a desolating pestilence, pollutes whate’er it touches; and obedience, bane of all freedom, beauty, virtue, truth, makes slaves of men, and of the human frame, a mechanized automaton.” (from Queen Mab)

  • Sotomayor thinks Americans may not know the difference between presidents and kings

    Regarding an article which appeared in the Guardian, 17 Sept 25

    Maybe because there isn’t one. I ask the read to refer to my recent set of articles on political liberalism. On pages 2 and 3 I reference the legal opinion concerning this matter. The original discussion is contained Robert G. Dixon, Jr., Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel. Titled “Re: Amenability of the President, Vice President and other Civil Officers to Federal Criminal Prosecution while in Office”, dated, Sept 24, 1973, containing the following: “…the textual silence regarding the existence of a presidential immunity from criminal proceedings may merely reflect the fact that it ‘may have been too well accepted to need constitutional mention (by analogy to the English Crown), and that the innovative provision was the specified process of impeachment extending even to the President.” We now know that it is far too easy to circumvent this provision. With no reliable mechanism of removal from office for any possible offense, there exists a de facto kingship for such an officeholder. Sotomayor is looking at the American legal system through rose-colored glasses.

  • Give Up The Struggle Pt. III

    Days of Future Passed

    Closer to our own timeDownload

  • Give Up the Struggle Pt.II

    Give Up the Struggle pt.IIDownload

  • Naturalism, Duchamp, and Tomkins

    Going over my copy of Duchamp by Calvin Tomkins recently I came across something peculiar: A reference and attendant commentary by Tomkins to an episode in Duchamp’s life that struck me as singularly obtuse. Tomkins’ account is found on p. 306 of the hardcover edition in the context of Duchamp’s restoration of the Large Glass, which was badly damaged in transport from an exhibition: “A young artist-friend of Katherine Dreier’s named Daniel MacMorris, who had a studio near hers in the Carnegie Hall building, had asked Duchamp to sit for a portrait. Decamp did so during the two days he spent in New York, before his train left on August 2 [1936], and in the process he also obliged the younger artist by answering a number of questions about Nude Descending a Staircase. The famous Nude, Duchamp said, was not really a painting but ‘an organization of time and space through the abstract expression of motion.’ As he went on to explain, ‘A painting is necessarily a juxtaposition pf two or more colors on a surface. I purposely restricted the Nude to wood colorings so that the question of painting, per se, might not be raised.’ That much was consistent with Duchamp’s present thinking, although not, perhaps, with his intentions at the time he painted the picture in 1912. The real stopper came a little further on in the interview (which found its way into print soon afterward). ‘When the vision of the Nude flashed upon me,’ Duchamp is quoted as saying, ‘I knew it would break forever the enslaving chains of naturalism.’ Enslaving chains? Duchamp never talked that way, and the high-flown rhetoric makes us wonder how much of the interview is really in his own words. He had also told MacMorris (according to MacMorris) that he himself had become ‘only a shadowy figure behind the reality of that painting’–a plight that MacMorris tried to remedy by including a shadowy detail of the Nude in the background of his assertively naturalistic portrait of Duchamp.’”

    Duchamp “never talked that way”, Tomkins says. And yet, in another interview, that Duchamp gave to Pierre Cabanne late in life, Duchamp referred to this same interview with MacMorris. Page 30 of the English-language translation of Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp, titled Interviews with Marcel Duchamp: “Cabanne: You declared to Katherine Dreier that, when the vision of the Nude Descending a Staircase came to you, you understood that it was ‘breaking the chains of naturalism forever…’ Duchamp: Yes. That was what one said in 1945. I was explaining that, when you wanted to show an airplane in flight, you didn’t paint a still life. The movement of form in time inevitably ushered us into geometry and mathematics. ‘”

    (Even though Cabanne apparently misidentifies just who Duchamp in the later interview was talking with in the earlier interview, we can be assured that this is the same interview. We have here reasonable proof that Duchamp did say something essentially like what appeared in the MacMorris interview. And the essential idea is this: That Duchamp understood and accepted that The Nude Descending a Staircase broke the chains of Naturalism forever. Whether this was said in 1936 or 1945, or to Katherine Dreier or or Daniel MacMorris is not an important point.)

    Breaking the chains of Naturalism forever. I go into some detail here to demonstrate how important this was to Duchamp and the entire branch of Modernism which finds itself on the anti-naturalist side of the Naturalism/anti-Naturalism polemic. Duchamp apparently did talk in such “high-flown” terms when it was proper to do so. Is Tomkins unaware of the passage I cited in the Pierre Cabanne interviews? And that sentence! “With the Nude Descending a Staircase, the chains of Naturalism were broken forever.” Think on what this means. With a wave of the hand, Duchamp puts an end to an entire conceptual world, the world of Comtean Positivism, Socialist realism, Emile Zola and the entire Ruskinian dimension of art and philosophy, opening the doors wide to radical subjectivism and the Empire of the Self. The implications of this gesture still to be played out a hundred and 13 years after the appearance of the Nude.

  • Give Up the Struggle

    Give Up the Struggle Pt IDownload