Caught Between the System Swarm and the Group Think Horde
“There are no conservatives in Cambridge, Massachusetts” – Steven B., PhD, Harvard, Brandeis, phone conversation
Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, PhD, MIT, is a distinguished research biological-engineer and developer of artificial intelligence systems based in the high-tech and bio-tech corridors of Cambridge, Massachusetts who ran for president in the 2024 election. Dr. Shiva also sponsors the political awareness and self-health Truth-Freedom-Heath Movement. Below I evaluate the radical Shiva political awareness movement from a conservative perspective rather than lower myself to a rant of why I was compelled to disaffiliate from his movement.
“…the prime political imperative of our present situation – the refusal to identify with any horde” – Sociologist Peter Berger, Movements and Revolution, 1970.
Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai organized his Truth-Freedom-Health movement to serve as a support base for his run for the presidency in 2024 and to generate a working-class self-health movement to respond to the AI challenge to labor. Thus far his movement is mostly educational, focused on learning a biological systems approach to human health (not disease) and how systems engineering can explain the workings of everything from how the human bio-cell works to how the world political economy works. Shiva views social systems as working either like a thermostat (programmed closed system) or like a personal computer (open system requiring inputs).
His powerful “Shatter the Swarm” video explains how about 10,000 elites in the Knowledge Class oppress the Working Class by telepathically “swarming” like a flock of Starling birds for power, profit and control that keeps the Working Class divided, unorganized, unaware and unhealthy. He explains how politicians portrayed as anti-establishment are really “Not-So-Obvious Establishment” actors (among them Trump, Hillary, Biden, RFK, etc.). Shiva firmly believes in the utopian occupational ideology of Artificial Intelligence: all trades, occupations, professions and gig work can be automated (regardless that automation is almost invariably not cost efficient). However, as explained greater below, systems engineering cannot adequately explain the unintended consequences, blowbacks and the ironies of history.
The two rules for automating industry are that an efficient operation will magnify any manufacturing efficiencies but conversely will also magnify any inefficiencies. However, this ignores that making the process efficient will be prohibitively costly in a competitive market economy. But cost is unlikely to be as much a factor in a public-private venture socialist economy where government subsidizes private-public enterprises such as Tesla and Starlink, the same way as is done in China. Consider the analogy of greater efficiency of a jet engine that can transport 250 passengers but its immensely greater cost compared to a gasoline combustion engine that can transport 4 people. But buying a jet engine for a car would not be economic.
Shiva also uses system engineering to explain caste and social class systems. But the social class system is enforced not only externally but also by internal controls. For example, a working-class conservative such as, say, longshoreman Eric Hoffer (The True Believer: Thoughts on Mass Movements), who may want to join a pro-labor movement nonetheless will be made to understand in unmistakable terms that he “would be happier elsewhere;” to wit precisely my experience as to why I was made to disaffiliate from the Shiva movement. Thus, Shiva fails to focus his own “systems science” on the ‘group think’ of his own political movement, regardless that he promotes thinking for oneself.
Shiva ran in the primary election in 2018 as a Republican for US Senator in Massachusetts and as an independent for U.S. president on the 2024 ballot in 15 states and a write-in candidate in other states. He is inclined to the radical Leftist embrace of demonstrations and lawsuits that I believe would be precisely where the oligarch class wants to corral the working-class opposition. Ipso facto, what did the Canadian Trucker Movement accomplish or the Yellow Vest Movement in France? Nothing. Shiva’s own free speech lawsuit was successful but then the case was sealed. History is replete with irony and paradox and subterfuge.
Shiva himself admits he is sympathetic with Marxist Communism as far as the need to create community but not its authoritarianism. Nonetheless, it is interesting to see who Shiva identified himself with on the cover of his 2016 book “The System and Revolution” which is nearly identical to the book covers and titles of V.I. Lenin’s 1917 “State and Revolution” and Karl Marx’s 1848 “On Revolution”.
Most people don’t know that Marx was never against Capitalism nor genuine religion and was a poet, mathematician, stock market speculator, gun toter who spent most of his inheritance buying rifles for Belgian peasants, tried to emulate a bourgeoisie family for his daughters better chances for marriage and advocated the end of Judaism. Marx was fired by bankers and industrialists for defending freedom of speech as a newspaper editor. He was an idealistic utopian who believed that only materialism drove history but never addressed the unintended consequences of revolutionary change. He contended he could predict the future of a classless society, but he could not foresee how advocacy for revolution in his “Communist Manifesto” would set up his book to be hijacked by oligarchs for political purposes. It must be understood the “Manifesto” was paid propaganda by British oligarchs that the Manifesto criticizes as oppressors. Nonetheless, Marx’s book morphed into a sort of sacred scripture that legitimatized mass murder mainly of 1.7 million of the working class in the Russian Revolution plus 7 million Ukrainian farmers in the Holodomor under the banner of creating a worker’s paradise. Irony.
Skepticism about Artificial Intelligence and Systems Engineering
Sociologist Peter Berger says there are three types of conservatives. Those conservatives of faith who are strongly opposed to any change and who believe the current social order is good, natural or sacred; and conservatives who desire change solely for profit making. Then there are the conservatives by lack of faith who are pessimists and skeptics by inclination and are suspicious about the promised benefits of social and technological change (the category to which I fall into). Skeptical conservatives see social institutions as the result of accidents, ideological hijacking, co-optation, blowback, irony, etc., not design. As Max Weber puts it: “It is not true that good can follow only from good and evil from evil, but that often the opposite is true”.
For example, the invention of the printing press and Protestant Christianity inadvertently brought about legitimization of usury and profit that the Catholic Church had banned for centuries.
A mechanistic systems engineering approach fails to understand the messiness of history and that ideology often has an opposite result to what was intended typically due to oligarch co-optation of any oppositional social movement, witness Marxist Communism and the covert manipulation of secret societies.
Excepting Dr. Shiva’s personal knowledge of the caste system and freedom, technocrats have little comprehension of the discovery of freedom and how it has been destroyed time and again by some notion about the certainty of technological and scientific progress. Unfortunately, for the moment conservatives are on the side of AI to facilitate needed reforms to money corruption in government and are not considering the contingencies that monopolistic surveillance capitalism could end up as totalitarianism. This is why former Secretary of the US Treasury, Paul Craig Roberts, calls AI Surveillance Capitalism: “Bringing Us the Communism of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, and Paul Pot Were Unable to Deliver.
Or let’s take Oracle computer technologies company founder Larry Ellison who has imperiously declared that the public will have to accept that AI will be soon used for surveillance of everyone’s commercial and banking activities and their entire personal life. He says everyone will have to wear cameras, like the police and those on probation do. So, criminals will just switch off their camera or not wear their camera and everyone else will have to wear cameras? And how would this be enforced except by blocking one’s access to their bank accounts? The entire population will be treated as if they are on probation! What an innovation! This is like those activist hysterics who fear that our brain will be controlled by implanting a chip in our body connected to Elon Musk’s satellites when this can be easily thwarted by covering the chip with aluminum foil. The public are not automatons and are already switching back to check writing to buy groceries and paying utility bills, using cash rather than debit cards, and buying non-trackable cell phones in response to the invasion of privacy posed by AI. Fighting back by creating an activist “movement” and lawsuits will not be much help and employ tactics of the hard Left. More important than organizing any collective resistance movement are the actions of individual citizens to: abandon credit cards and go back to using cash and checks, to stop using the self-check out lane at grocery stores, supporting the chartering of state banks, issuance of state currency based on the value of labor and collateralized by gold and silver, stopping the issuance of digital ID’s (Social Security ID registration), using a gold-backed debit card, protecting against land grabs, hardening homes against suspicious firestorms facilitated by government negligence and covert actions and not relying on insurance companies (see here). .
Skepticism about the mRNA innovation has also gained momentum. For example, according to Our World Data online, the number of COVID vaccination doses per one million population in the U.S. dropped from 10,239 doses in April 2021, to 236 doses by May 2023, and to zero by August 2024, an underreported 100 percent decline! If the shots had been administered in, say, 1950, the likely proportion of people taking the shots would likely have been something like 95%. This attrition is probably due to the influence of the Internet. There was massive blowback to COVID vaccinations, albeit undisclosed. That is why the effort to put mRNA in food which is occurring on Trump and RFK’s watch while concern about red dye 40 in children’s cereal is a diversion.
Conservatives should be skeptical about claims of the benefits of artificial intelligence. In an occupation I am familiar with, automated real estate appraisals of homes are not statistically reliable (correlation coefficient, T-Test, F-Test, coefficient of variation) because to do multiple regression analysis at least 30 to 40 comparable sales are needed. Typically, there are only 3 to 6 sales available, and the entire market is a data set of unique outliers from one another. For example, Zillow’s algorithm for pricing homes is based mainly on house size, then adjusted for time/price trend, and has failed to be proven reliable in adjudication many times. It is unreliable because there is insufficient data from which to extract the uniqueness of each property, such as building condition, obsolescence, corner location, style or luxury amenities or proximity to a next-door nuisance neighbor. Moreover, in commercial real estate the data on income, expenses and capitalization rates are kept proprietary by each owner, thwarting any automation of valuation altogether. Artificial intelligence is oversold. If automation is so profitable it would have been implemented long ago. Only government socializing the economy by public-private partnerships can make it viable.
Consider the Marxist concept of false consciousness applied to human health, which would assert that most people eat commercialized processed foods and undertake a Bourgeoisie lifestyle that is deleterious to their health interests. This presumes that we know what clean foods and health are in the first place. While “Big Farma” (corporate agriculture) has successfully sold the public on the virtues of a vegan diet, Dr. Bruce Ames, PhD, biochemistry, Cal Berkeley, found that plant-based foods have 10,000 times the natural pesticide toxins than industrial glyphosate (half of that from rat droppings from food storage). Most plant foods need to be fermented, pressure cooked, boiled or soaked for human consumption but don’t expect even natural alternative doctors or bio-tech engineers to tell you this. Plants are excellent for detoxification but not for food unless prepared properly. There may be no such thing as organic or clean food because any non-nutrient metabolite that hypothetically seeps through the lining of a leaky gut can cause an autoimmune reaction (William Davis, MD, Super Gut, 2023). Call me a skeptic.
Moreover, it has been known for 100 years that poop can ascend from the bowel due to a damaged ileocecal valve back into the duodenum food transfer chamber and seep into the bloodstream causing deadly metabolic sepsis blood poisoning (see page 53 of Dr. John Kellogg, MD, Autointoxication or Intestinal Toxemia, 1919; William Davis, MD, Supergut, 2023 ). Disease can be caused by self-poisoning, something that bio-engineering and modern medicine has not grasped (see Charles Bouchard, Lectures on Autointoxication in Disease: or Self-Poisoning of the Individual – 1894). All disease starts in the gut – Hippocrates. That microbiology and medicine are also based on self-serving ideologies is a very Marxist concept.
The only thing new about the technocrats of Silicon Valley and Technology Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts is they want to get rid of humans altogether and replace them with robots and algorithms. Even Dr. Shiva advises that all white collar and blue-collar jobs are going to disappear due to AI. Nonetheless, AI is uneconomic in a market-based economy and can only thrive in a socialist economy. Once institutionalized, AI may be impossible to reverse just as Communism was. We don’t want China to conquer us, but we ironically proceed to support the transition to a socialist economy under the guise of artificial intelligence so we can “win the AI war with China.” The antidote is a free market economy, local banks, the issuance of state currencies backed by real labor and collateralized with gold or silver not debt.
Trapped Between the System and the Horde
Technocrats and activists both have the same traits of humorlessness and the constant seriousness of the Bolshevik revolutionists in Russia. Sociologist Peter Berger states: “Activists by inclination, almost to a man, are contemptuous…and irredeemably humorless.” Humorless technocrats like Larry Ellison are invariably found at the top of organizations in both the system and the anti-system hordes and the anti-anti-system hordes. Beware of those who can’t tell a joke, even a sick joke given that our systems for food, medicine and even religion are covertly malevolent. There was a sort of almost religious transcendence operating even under the old Soviet Communism system by subversive joke telling (see Ben Lewis, Hammer and Tickle: The Story of Communism: A Political System Almost Laughed Out of Existence, 2009). “It’s the Law of Faust’s Devil’s Bargain: the worst the times, the better the jokes” (Ernst Royle).
The corporate oligarchs want to keep us diverted to political mobilization and protests, mostly symbolic lawsuits, and natural health veganism and crusades against supercilious red dye 40 and glyphosate, not putting pressure on state legislatures to allow the creation of local economies by state banks and currencies that would protect privacy and civil liberties. Must I repeat this sentence to underscore its importance vis-à-vis the Shiva Movement?
If you’re going to join the Shiva movement, be aware that you must be a loyal automaton and adhere to group think because that is what involvement with a quasi-religious militant movement requires for it to be successful. The same organization tactics apply for a labor union or a Communist cell (see Philip Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization, 1953; Philip Selznick, The Organizational Weapon: A Study in Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics, 1951). Group Think and Swarm behavior are two sides of the same coin. But you better be a Lefty or you will be drubbed out. The slogan that the Shiva movement is beyond Left and Right is not correct in my experience.
Caught Between the System Swarm and the Group Think Horde, Why I Disaffiliated from the Dr. Shiva Movement, Wayne Lusvardi.
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