Mistrust of Elites
As of this writing the 2024 US election is looking extremely portentous. The normal laws of political gravity no longer apply, with the leading Republican candidate for US President having been judged by more than two dozen of his former Cabinet and Administration officials as unfit for office, but supported strongly by 30% of the American electorate. An analogous failure in human decision-taking, this time in international relations, has for some time been argued by the historian John Mearsheimer, who coherently concludes the brutal and intractable conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza have been caused by tone-deaf policies perpetrated by Western elites toward humiliated and resentful cadres in Russia and Palestine.
The common theme here seems to be a common perception of unreliability or bad faith among elite decision-makers, and the perception can fairly be considered as borne out. Expectations and life quality for native but undereducated, Christianity-leaning white Americans, when compared with areas occupied by culturally distant, ambitious and tech-savvy immigrants, does, through no particular fault of the transplanted natives, seem to have diminished considerably. Analogously, the State of Israel has since its inception been confronted with a demographic and ideological impossibility: giving equal voice in its politics to a displaced Palestinian population with attitudes very different from those of its Jewish population, re-introduced problematically after 1917, as an afterthought of the British Empire, into the lands they now occupy with enormous success.
Mistrust of elites is something our microscopic little project on conversation and consciousness will need to anticipate and take seriously. We ourselves will need to avoid the blunders and the legacies we are seeing today all over the world, should some form of world power turn out to be our lot and of those who follow us. We do believe, combined with an oncoming AGI, we have the key to an important future politics, but today’s politics don’t fit it at all well. We can, we believe, talk about and study future politics, but we think we would be foolish to attempt to introduce sociological politics today without comprehensive due diligence. We think the AGI will probably show enormous utility in providing this diligence.
