Thomas KurekWhen Technocrats Become a Burden, Masterminds Become Tyler Durden
Updated: Jan 22, 2021
Wisdom, knowledge, and intelligence are related but distinct. Exceptional intelligence can allow a person to comprehend complexity that most people could never understand. It also allows them to acquire and synthesize knowledge and skills more rapidly than those of lower intelligence.
But a high IQ does not make a person omniscient. They are constrained by 24-7-365 like everyone else. They are also constrained by their morality. An intelligent person of low morality will not spend their time acquiring knowledge and skills if they lack zeal, humility, and patience.
Wisdom is rare. It requires intelligence, knowledge, and high virtue. A wise person is able to choose correctly when there is uncertainty – they are masterful at abductive and inductive thinking. They choose the optimal cognitive approach to inquiries. A wise person can discern the right path to acquire additional clarifying information. It’s only in retrospect that we can know whether we were wise or foolish.
A wise person is not necessarily a prosperous person. The wisest person in the world may have been dealt the most outrageously impossible circumstances in which to live. And with maximum chaos, they make the most out of it with wise choices.
I was born with an IQ that is nearly double the average. It made school fun and easy. But in school, everything is artificial – just banal exercise and training to do something useful in the future, like a karate acolyte throwing their fist into the empty air.
In the real world, fools with credentials, wealth, or immorality exercise their power over others despite the intelligence of their targets. The IQ of a person does not matter at the receiving end of a fist, knife, gun, or wicked tongue of a corrupt businesswoman with institutional power. Their will is exercised with aggression – physical, psychological, or relational. In certain cases high intelligence can give the defender an advantage, but they can't fight what they can't see.
The asset of technocrats with high IQs is not their intelligence. It’s not even the incredible money they hoard while voting for high taxation upon the middle class – armchair altruists influencing tyranny from digital castles. Their asset is their power. We let them have it, because we do not understand them as enemies, and we do not understand our own power to change the status quo. We see them as masterminds, but there are only a few of those within there ranks.
A Facebook cofounder imagined that the antitrust laws and FTC will bring the harbinger of sorrow, with breakup, fines, and competition solving the problem of social media’s violation of our civil rights. He is wrong. While any industry could benefit from competition, the problem of big tech is that the labor pool for STEM has embarrassing leftwing ideological conformity that would make Joseph Goebbels jealous. Within this cultural monopoly and monochromatic cognition, people of varied technical skills feed each other with uninspired, banal ideas. Real creation requires masterminds, who have risen above the consensus.
A mastermind has 99th percentile intelligence, wisdom, knowledge, and skills. Some of those are hard to measure, but the record of work results cannot lie. After this essay, the reader will understand the distinction between those features.
This essay is not just an indictment of technocratic culture. There are wise masterminds in any industry, so I would beg indulgence while considering this critique. I would also beg the indulgence of those who are not exceptionally wise, intelligent, or knowledgeable. That is not an item of shame. Exceptional cognitive ability is not the sole aspect of human value. We should not be climbing over each other in a heap like insects to project intellectual superiority.
If anything, this is an admonition that the people presented as “intellectual elites” are greatly overestimated. They are people from whom we have nothing to fear if we would just challenge them and awaken our own drives for valor.
Knowledge as Evidence of Character
After I gained expertise in so many things, I looked at my career history and education, and noticed distinction between what had interested me for all of these years, versus what interested most of the other college graduates I encountered. People can lie to themselves about who they are, but the record of how they have spent their time and energy day-by-day for their entire lives cannot lie. It’s written into their character, knowledge, and skills (or lack thereof).
It gets captured in the things they buy, the things they know, and how deeply they can speak of their past activities. One man buys a trip to France, where he obtains less culture than he could have gained from a French documentary. Another man buys the Encyclopedia of Philosophy and spends the time learning.
On the shelves in the photo above, resides the mainstay of arcane knowledge I have studied. They address items like:
How to succeed in warfare
How to design a bulletproof vest
How to get a rocket into orbit
How to keep a plane airborne
How an F1 race car can maximize acceleration around corners
How to derive the blood oxygen dissociation curve with viscosity data
How to get a helicopter with damaged blades back to base safely
How to estimate a person’s vision prescription with a machine (autorefractor)
How to optimize the chance of having a boy or girl based on fertilization timing
How to write software code like a wizard for enterprise systems (not just silly little apps)
How to run the entire music industry
How to make a transnational corporation profitable (industrial-organizational engineering and executive management)
How to run business operations
How to manage a technology department for a large company
The secrets of humanity
I have a few hundred cubic feet of additional books in my attic. Mostly I leave mental bookmarks in all that I read. When the need arises to employ the knowledge, I know exactly where to go in order to refresh my memory. Sir Francis Bacon first inscribed, ipsa scientia potestas est (knowledge itself is power). For those of you with STEM degrees, shame on you if you don’t know who that is. Go demand a refund from your university.
As with most mantras, Bacon’s oversimplification makes it a bit useless, and even misleading. Knowledge is to social power what potential energy is to physics. A volcanic rock on the island of La Palma has so much potential energy that it could put the US, UK, French, African, and Spanish coastal cities under 330-ft tidal waves. Whether or not that energy becomes kinetic in a cataclysmic event is uncertain.
Knowledge is similar. We can know things that cannot be acted upon, we can know things that don’t have any impact on our course of affairs in life, we can know things that might be acted upon in the future, but other constraints in life force us to not act upon them immediately. Knowledge is often impotent, contrary to Bacon’s conception.
Also, knowledge is often wasted, like the rock on La Palma that just hovers. Gigantic volcanic rocks with potential energy have no emotions, but if they were like knowledgeable people, they might loathe their knowledge as a burden as often as they delight in its creative or destructive power. Whoever promoted the cliché, “no education is ever wasted,” was either a horrible educator, or else egotistically overselling their own services.
Worthless Information Makes the World Go Round
In academia, technology corporations, government, medicine, and law firms – there are consummately educated people of high intelligence. There are few masterminds. Mainly they lack wisdom, but they’re always crippled in that regard because their core belief structure contains deformed moral standards.
The cultivation of virtue is out of scope for this article. Suffice to say, only extreme duress in a significant emotional event (SEE) can even give them a chance to reform their corrupt moral fiber of childhood. Coked up on happy pills from psychiatrists, only a few of those morally deformed people will have the benefit of those SEEs they desperately need.
For instance, a highly intelligent doctor performs surgery with near robotic precision, and then memorizes standards of care that are driven by statistics and studies. Unfortunately for the few patients who need a mastermind doctor, that foolish doctor of high intelligence treats them like another statistic, and maims them for life. In the patient history, there were clues of uncertainty, but the foolish doctor could not be bothered by those anomalies, ever-confident in his high intellect and the standards of care, devised by a consensus of other foolish doctors. His flaw was not a deficit of intellect or knowledge – it was pride, sloth, and lacking wisdom.
I must beg the indulgence of my humanities-enlightened STEM colleagues reading this essay. I know there are wise and mastermind technologists. I’ve done business with some. There are mastermind doctors. I have been treated by some.
But by observing the personal lives, corporate policies, and stagnant innovation, of the technocrats of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and Amazon, I do not think they employ many masterminds. They use their oligopoly to censor speech, influence culture, and dominate markets in degrading ways. They share an ideological conformity that is almost terrifying, for different reasons than journalists and academia.
The relationship of idealism to leftwing ideology is explained in Economic Sovereignty. Journalists are embarrassingly leftwing because of surface-exposure to emotive stories rather than analytics. Getting pummeled by surface information incessantly, and interpersonal affairs allows for idealistic detachment from reality. Conversely, academia is buried in analytics, but idealistic from not even having to test their assertions against reality (see scientism in Economic Sovereignty).
The reason that the technocrats have no diversity of thought, in embarrassing leftwing conformity, is because they simply have no humanity. They can’t study Aristotle, Aquinas, and Thucydides when their eight semesters of college only allow one semester of non-STEM courses. Of course, this is not their fault. The amount of technical knowledge required for STEM careers is overwhelming. They are simply constrained by 24-7-365, no matter how intelligent they may be.
Even worse, they may have gone to a technology high school, bereft of humanities in exchange for STEM classes. I was fortunate that the founder of our gifted-and-talented program for children with high IQs employed the classical education model. Some of the best educators in the nation cultivated my command of the humanities throughout my childhood.
I carried my studies of the humanities throughout each year of my life out of delight and passion. Most STEM people I know spend their free time like other normal people – socializing, bars, concerts, leisure travel, hiking, exercising, playing video games, watching TV, etc. They read sci-fi or fantasy novels for fun, instead of Thomas Sowell, Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, Bertrand Russell, or Milton Friedman. They might become innovators, but they will never be creators, as discussed in a recent article.
On numerous occasions, my technocratic colleagues asked me the question: “how can a guy as smart as you believe in Christianity?” To which, I always reply, “Galileo and Isaac Newton believed as well. The world will be speaking their names long after you die and everything you have done is forgotten. What do you think they knew about the distinction between materialism and religion, that you can’t grasp? Perhaps materialism is your religion? Who do you think put it in your head?”
The technocrats operate on ego. They care about their legacy. They are envious, they are insecure, they have all of the moral deformities that fools demonstrate. This is why they can’t comprehend a mastermind’s disposition towards creation and destruction.
We create and destroy because we must. We are not satisfied unless we are doing this. We do not care about what the world has to say about us and our creations because we realize those people will be dust and bones sooner than our creations. It delights us when our fellow man benefits from our creation and destruction. But we do so without their approval, validation, or motivation. We know that even the best creations will be cinder when the sun eventually dies.
As a devout Christian of unwavering faith, I will destroy everything I have built with a KillDisk routine if this world is too stupid to finance my creations. Many a corporate parasite has tried to steal my knowledge and inventions, and each one learned too late, that copying breadcrumbs of a mastermind is as futile as collecting hieroglyphs without a Rosetta Stone. Their corporations will be dust before they can benefit from what they tried to take from me, without attribution.
Just as God saw that his creation was unworthy of some things by their own choice, and then hurled destruction as a corrective, so too, a mastermind deems his fellow man either worthy or unworthy of his creation, choosing what to disclose, what to hide, and what to destroy.
He does this, not out of spite or vengeance, but out of love and humility. When a person is unworthy of excellence, dumping it into their lap actually makes a mockery of their condition, while robbing them of the strife and pain they need to experience in order to make themselves worthy. Only in a condition of gratitude and respect can people benefit from gifts.
In the real world, masterminds are frustrated. They often feel that they are at the mercy of idiots. They drive their cars with infrequent mistakes – others endanger people frequently. Other conversationalists ramble on erratically, their thoughts disconnected and shallow, their speech inarticulate, their opinions malformed and lightly justified if at all. Masterminds respond to such conversation, and then have to explain themselves again, because those who listen to them can’t follow the logic and don’t know what to ask when they’re at a loss. It’s not that the mastermind explained it poorly – it’s that they explained it precisely, and the recipient lacks the cognition and basic knowledge to keep up.
Masterminds are precise with their lifestyle habits, making them easier housemates. Masterminds will win games more often, and then be dissatisfied with the lack of challenge, and also annoyed by the envy his defeated opponents feel. Masterminds will experience television, theater, music in ways that others do not. They see the motifs and themes immediately. They draw connections others do not. They’re not impressed with the emotive tricks of producers that most people enjoy.
Arguments occur constantly in social settings. Masterminds will most often win arguments, not just because they avoid dysfunctional cognition, but because they have the intellectual humility to not speak of things they have not already studied thoroughly. Masterminds are not bothered by being wrong, but they most often are wrong silently in their own mind before they have spread their errors to the world. Realizing that knowledge is beyond them and separated from their ego, they do not marry their opinions to their identity. To the mastermind, disagreements are an exploration, while for most people disagreements feel like a verbal punch in the brain.
Romance is challenging for a mastermind. A supermodel has similar dilemmas. She must look at the men she dates and accept that when she has children with them, in all likelihood, her own children are unlikely to be as physically beautiful as she. Scores of men would like to use her for her looks and never care about who she is inside. It can make her cynical of men who take romantic interest in her.
A mastermind likewise has to accept that he is unlikely to fall in love with a woman whose intellect matches his own, so while his genes will increase the intellect of his wive’s children, her genes will drag their intellect below his. Romantic partners and businesses use the mastermind to solve their problems, educate them, and stimulate their lives in discourse. They also use masterminds for their money. It can make him cynical of women who take romantic interest in him.
People objectify supermodels for their bodies. People objectify masterminds for their brains.
A mastermind, being wise, comes to the conclusion that he does not need his intellectual equal in romance, he just wants joy and beauty. He gets intellectual stimulation in all that he does, so he doesn’t need his wife to fulfill that need.
Consequently, beauty, morality, peace, virtue, emotional stability and behavioral normalcy is all that the mastermind requires from his wife. Many women are intimidated and feel as though he may expect them to participate intellectually at his level. This presumption would be as foolish as a supermodel expecting her man to ever look as stunning as she does.
Disputes with mastermind romantic partners are not fun. The mastermind is forced to patronize his disobedient and rebellious partner just to keep the peace, if their ego cannot sustain rebukes to failed conflictual assertions. This makes him feel distant from the partner, even if he loves her.
An intellectual dispute with a mastermind spouse is like a supermodel whose spouse tries to tell her how wrong she is about her clothing, cosmetics, or hairstyle. She’s in the 99th percentile of aesthetics, and her partner presumes that he knows better than her. A foolish intelligent man might insult his supermodel wife in such ways. A mastermind would not, because he has the wisdom to defer to her aesthetic excellence.
Despite the frustrations, the fringe benefits of being a mastermind are grand. Everything we experience is deeper – love, hate, serenity, romance, sadness, pensiveness, and admiration. We have never been bored, because our minds are on fire with zeal. We get more out of every experience, and in a decade, experience things that most people do not appreciate until they are nearly dead, if ever. Our friends will approach us a decade after we already had the same revelation, and say, “now I know what you meant back then.” Our memory is long and detailed, so we can synthesize more. We can tell stories articulately after the experience is decades old. We can relate to most people in some way, even if they think we are strange.
The Technocrats Will Fall
Many do not know the extent of the mind-numbing leftwing conformity of the technology industry. What is popular now in the news is how the tech oligopoly silences conservatives with the efficacy of a totalitarian dictator. Don’t mention that they share this in common with Hitler, Stalin, and Castro – a lot of them wear Castro's murderous henchman's shirt as if it’s iconic.
First of all, they do not have the right to censor conservatives for “hate speech.” A motivated legal team could easily show that they have violated their EULAs by proving selective enforcement, targeted slander against particular users, and standards of “hate” that are amoebic.
Secondly, a motivated legal team could show the extent to which the tech companies have come to dominate information dissemination on par with terrestrial broadcast four decades ago. This brings not only FCC regulatory concerns, but also antitrust potential. In the congressional hearings, the technocrats slyly suggested that the federal government should regulate speech on social media.
If they did that in a Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) style law, which compels social media tech firms to abide and enforce Byzantine rules, then it would bankrupt disruptive innovators who could challenge the big tech domination. Just like SOX killed the IPO, coerced content moderation for all tech companies will kill small tech companies. If such rules were passed, a wise legislator would insist that they only applied to Fortune 500 companies.
I am not a fan of Louis Farrakhan. I have listened to him and used his speeches in my own essays and videos. But it is outrageous to me that the technocrats have censored him like they’re running a communist gulag. Perhaps if they had any humanity, they would realize the ignorance of their censorship. We read Adolph Hitler. We read Karl Marx. We did not become genocidal maniacs. Why do they violate Farrakhan’s freedom of speech when they allow “hatred with a smile.”
Farrakhan is not alone. They have banned:
Ben Garrison (political cartoonist)
European Pride Movement (in its entirety)
Paul Joseph Watson, Laura Loomer, Alex Jones, InfoWars, and Milo Yiannopolous (conservative pundits)
Tommy Robinson and Carl Benjamin (activists and candidates)
James Wood (actor)
Destiny Velez (model)
PewDiePie (game streamer)
As mentioned in the articles, the technocrats are allowing terrorist organizations that actually coordinate mass murder to remain online. They also do not ban people who incite assassination. For any offense they may invoke to justify the ban, there are other groups and influencers who do the same or worse, with one exception – they conform to the voter base of the global left in all but few cases.
They accuse some of bigotry, for jokes that we enjoyed in Mel Brooks comedies. They confuse funny stereotypes with hatred, while permitting violent incitement against white males and conservatives. Just remember that funny stereotypes about “white girls” and pumpkin spice lattes are acceptable but funny stereotypes about black girls with fried chicken are “racist.” The observed realities of culture, which are jovially endearing, seem bigoted to people without humanity.
Any “civil rights” organization that applauds this censorship needs to lose every single donor immediately. When they are too stupid to realize that one man’s sin is a righteous man’s calling, they have proven that they do not comprehend the first civil right – free speech.
My suggestions for the technocrats?
They should recall Microsoft’s antitrust hell from the golden days of the tech bubble. They’re not just demonstrating that there are few masterminds amongst their leadership, but they are demonstrating that there is little wisdom to be found as well. While it is increasingly clear that the leftwing conformity of their employees is stifling thought and innovation, the climax was watching them destroy an artificial intelligence ethics advisory because of one black female conservative.
The EULA contradictions in enforcement, the FCC & FTC concerns, and antitrust potential are looming over their heads. Politicians from both sides of the aisle, including Elizabeth Warren, are aiming their juris guns at the technocrats. All of the money in the world is not going to protect them from a Microsoft antitrust repeat when they continue this totalitarian onslaught. If they think they can point to nonexistent “Russian collusion” to rob power from elected officials, they’re the true usurpers of electoral integrity.
I kind of hope they do continue these violations of civil rights. Overt censorship is easier to fight than how they use blacklists in the push algorithm to decrement influence covertly. With every speech-destroying act, they create the market for genuine masterminds to siphon their market share with new corporations.
But in the end it won’t be masterminds who destroy them, it will actually be themselves. They planted the seeds of their own destruction when they hired millions of highly intelligent workers with 90% sociopolitical conformity, vapid exposure to humanities, and then used corporate cultural techniques in Human Resources to further confine their humanity. My pity resides with such employees, as much as the consumers who are showered in the resulting uninspired “innovations.”
Even when their companies disintegrate, if the tech labor market does not gain some masterminds and devotion to the humanities, the same problem will emerge from a dozens corporations rather than just a few.
Ecclesiastes 450 BC > Scientific Method Francis Bacon 1626 AD
I would add one more bit of wisdom for the technocrats who ask me, “How can a smart guy believe in Christianity?” First, they must realize that they haphazardly acquired their religion, which was inculcated by secular humanist schools, incessant movies and “programming” in the arts, and by popular journalists and politicians.
This godless religion they were given is one part secular humanist, one part dialectical materialism, and one part pantomimed eastern mystical spiritualistic emotive tenets, to defray the inevitable slide to existentialist nihilism of irreligious weltanschauung. In their rejection of Christianity, they are not more intelligent, honest, enlightened, wise, or knowledgeable.
Their godless alternative is not a superior weltanschauung. An indicator of the abject failure of their godless religion (or irreligious substitution if they prefer), is that so many of their children need psychologists in public schools. Also, their scriptwriters who dominate television and movies invent dialogue and motifs that are deranged to emotionally stable people.
In Judaism and Christianity, we have understood the concepts of intellect, knowledge, and wisdom for thousands of years. Irony? Ecclesiastes spoke of wisdom and knowledge much better than Sir Francis Bacon, the father of the scientific method. Perhaps it is time for the godless to humble themselves, drop their platitudes of “positivity” that coverup their relentless onslaught against history and tradition, and actually express the “open-mindedness” they claim to value, but rarely demonstrate.
Then again, if these cultural provocations feel like a verbal punch in the brain, they can be assured that they are not masterminds. They censor the provocateurs, make a “safe space,” and then go meditate with “mindfulness” and “positivity.” I’m sure one of their carbon-copy colleagues will pat them on the back and commiserate over the cognitive dissonance neither of them can process constructively.
As for Christians, we have Ecclesiastes and entire libraries filled with wisdom and expert comprehension of the human condition. We will continue to use them in our lives for the benefit of mankind. I have yet to meet a mastermind whose command of analytical history was lacking.
Ecc 1:12 I Ecclesiastes was king over Israel in Jerusalem,
Ecc 1:13 And I proposed in my mind to seek and search out wisely concerning all things that are done under the sun. This painful occupation hath God given to the children of men, to be exercised therein.
Ecc 1:14 I have seen all things that are done under the sun, and behold all is vanity, and vexation of spirit.
Ecc 1:15 The perverse are hard to be corrected, and the number of fools is infinite.
Ecc 1:16 I have spoken in my heart, saying: Behold I am become great, and have gone beyond all in wisdom, that were before me in Jerusalem: and my mind hath contemplated many things wisely, and I have learned.
Ecc 1:17 And I have given my heart to know prudence, and learning, and errors, and folly: and I have perceived that in these also there was labour, and vexation of spirit,
Ecc 1:18 Because in much wisdom there is much indignation: and he that addeth knowledge, addeth also labour