image by AI; my own prompt
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how reluctant we humans are to accept truths that clash with our worldview — our beliefs about the world.
This is, of course, understandable. Our worldview is a complicated, interwoven set of judgements, feelings, and other results of sense-making that we have amassed over a lifetime. It’s the lens through which we see and evaluate everything. And it’s our bulwark, our fortress that, we think, protects us from dangers, from misinformation, and from causing harm to others. When we are forced to accept that an integral part of that worldview is false, it can be threatening, undermining not only that core belief but the many other beliefs we’ve built up that depend on that shattered belief, that only make sense if that core belief is true.
I’ve written about all the things that I’ve changed my mind about, and none of these changes came easily. My acceptance that we have no free will took 50 years, for example, and it represented an excruciating, 180º turn.
We are a gullible and easily propagandized and deceived species, I think. And much of our denial of, and unwillingness to accept, things we don’t want really want to believe, is a matter of timing in when we hear that startling truth, as much as the subject of the truth itself. If we’re not ready to accept some new and important information, it will go in one proverbial ear and out the other.
This is part of the human tragedy, I think. And it’s part of the reason we continue to ignore all the insurmountable evidence about the accelerating economic, political, and ecological collapse that is now crash-landing our brave, new, well-intentioned civilization. We can be quick to form an opinion on some new matter, but agonizingly slow to change it afterwards. We have to be ready for that, and most of us are not ready. And may never be.
So I wrote a song about this. The lyrics are entirely mine:
Not Ready for That
That loved one walked out of your life. And left you on your own.
You said you never knew that things weren’t fine.
We think we know the ones we love, and think that we are known.
But it’s all just an invented storyline.
Not ready yet to face the truth that we can never know.
It’s all stuff our obsessive brains invent.
Not ready yet to see the world full on, the only show,
No matter our intent or our consent.
We thought we’d save the world, at least if they could only hear.
Together we would never face defeat.
Another war, another species lost, another struggle
In a world advancing backwards in retreat.
Not ready yet to face that complex systems can’t be changed.
Predicaments aren’t problems to be solved.
Not ready yet to watch as all we’ve built just falls apart,
The end of everything that we’d evolved.
Not ready to face that. It’s more than we can bear.
Not ready to admit we have no clue.
Not ready to deal with all the sorrow and despair.
Not ready to accept that we believe just
what we want to believe is true.
Not ready for that.
I used to rage against the system — evil guys, the ‘Epstein Class’.
I thought in time that justice would prevail.
That we could heal the victims and the perpetrators too.
And make them whole again. How could we fail?
Not ready yet to face that rights and freedoms are just thoughts.
We all do what we do; no one’s to blame.
Not ready yet to see we’re just conditioned bots
Just acting out our roles in grief and shame.
Not ready to face that. It’s too much to endure.
Not ready to admit we tried our best.
Not ready to accept that there’s no answer and no cure.
Not ready to concede that now collapse is underway
and we’re about to face our final human test.
Not ready for that.
And once again I asked Suno AI to put my lyrics to music. My prompt was for a strong female lead singer, and piano, guitar and orchestral accompaniment, in a lamenting, soft-rock style.
Here’s the song it produced: Not Ready For That.
I think its music is stronger than my lyrics. Its vocalist is compelling and powerful, and it evokes the mood I was in when I wrote the words, perhaps better than the words themselves convey.
I know — pretty bleak. But these days I’m more interested in conveying what I feel in my writing, than what I think, and music, even produced by AI, seems to help. What do you want from a guy who counts among his favourite songs the saddest song ever written?
It doesn’t have to have a happy ending to be a really good show. And damn, this life, even in these dark times, is a really good show.
Here’s a repeat of my caveat on AI that accompanies all my posts on the subject:
1. I have a love-hate relationship with AI. When it’s used properly and carefully as a tool, as an aid to learning and creativity, I believe it can be very useful, and enormous fun. But most of its large-scale applications (like replacing jobs and facilitating wars and surveillance) are ill-conceived, immoral, incompetently designed and conceived, vastly overreaching the capabilities of AI, ecologically disastrous, socially disruptive, and extremely dangerous.
2. The staggering amount that has been invested in AI has absolutely no viable business case to justify it. It represents possibly the most astounding squandering of money based purely on imagined and improbable future developments and blind faith, in history. Those who have studied this have concluded that this massive bubble will soon burst, and those who’ve invested in it will lose their shirts. At that time, the window to use AI as a learning and creativity tool will quickly close forever. Our playing with these essentially-free tools now is not going to aggravate its abusive uses, nor will it have any impact on the timing or extent of the coming AI crash. So my view is: use it while you can; it will soon be gone.
