The Age of Constant Change

Roger Berkowitz
That AI is an engine that affirms our lying world does not mean the world is static; on the contrary, the world that AI above all reflects back to us is the world created by academics, journalists, writers, artists and those content producers—those members of the cultural elite that N.S. Lyons calls “Virtuals.” Virtuals make their living, Lyons writes,  “by manipulating, categorizing, and interpreting symbolic information and narrative. “Manipulate” is an important verb here, and not merely in the sense of deviousness. Such an individual’s job is to take existing information and change it into new forms, present it in new ways, or use it to tell new stories. This is what I am attempting to do as a writer in shaping this article, for example.” In this way, Virtuals bring about a world that is in constant change, a world of “fast culture” and unending progress. 

Hannah Arendt understands that essential to the human condition is both change and stability. Humans need a world, something durable that we share and are at home in. Arendt worried that the increasing pace of generational change would unsettle that world and lead to an ever-growing sense of homelessness and rootlessness. And the metaphysical loneliness that results leads to a craving for stabilizing lies and fictions, ideological movements or even social theories that give the world a patina of coherence and meaning. What virtuals offer is a steady stream of such theories that order our complicated and often incoherent reality. What Lyons doesn’t say, but Babette Babich might, is that the world of the virtuals is tailor made for the rise of AI. For there is no one better than an AI to constantly make sense of the world determined by narratives and fictions. Lyons has established themselves as one of the virtuals who questions this virtual world. They write: 

Surely, it is no coincidence that the sense, felt by so many today, that we seem to be living in an era of constant revolution and shattering upheaval parallels the rise of a Change-Industrial Complex.
It hasn’t always been like this. In a way, the current state of permanent revolution also represents a recent civilizational imbalance produced by the triumph of one distinct type of human personality over another.

Some five centuries ago, Niccolò Machiavelli identified two psychological profiles of people who generally became leaders: the cunning but weak Fox, who was “defenseless against wolves”; and the strong and brave Lion, who could scare off wolves but was “defenseless against traps.” Machiavelli thought that a true statesman must embody both. In the twentieth century, one of Machiavelli’s distant students, the Italian political theorist Vilfredo Pareto, would expand on his metaphor to describe the characteristics of two larger classes of people. Foxes are defined by their “instinct for combination” and experiment, and are “in general . . . adventurous souls, hungry for novelty in the economic as well as in the social field, and not at all alarmed at change, expecting as they do to take advantage of it.” Foxes are unsuited to, and uncomfortable with, the employment of physical force; they prefer intellectual and rhetorical combat, seeking to overcome obstacles through clever persuasion or manipulation of people and narratives. By contrast, Lions possess an instinct for the preservation of existing forms and virtues, along with communal unity and “group persistence.” Valuing security and stability, they prefer caution and conservatism, “hoping little and fearing much from any change, for they know from bitter experience that they will be called upon to foot the bill for it.” Society’s natural warrior class, they prefer the honesty of open conflict to scheming and, while typically slow to anger, tend to favor the direct application of force to solve problems.
Our contemporary elite class is quite transparently dominated by Foxes—the same personality type that tends to become Virtuals. Pareto would have predicted this, having noted a historical cycle in which safe and stable civilizations (usually founded by the firm hand of Lions) come to avoid—and, indeed, abhor—virtues and methods other than the indirect and diplomatic. This soon favors the byzantine organizing, scheming, manipulating, and propagandizing of Foxes. With the inarticulate Lions eventually fully marginalized and excluded from governance by the Foxes, the instability of such societies then increases relentlessly, generating direct challenges that the Foxes, inept at using force, may lash out at but are unable to resolve.

If Americans today suffer under a sort of escalating “anarcho-tyranny”—in which uncontrolled immigration, crime, substance abuse, and other social pathologies proliferate alongside a state that seems to grow constantly larger and more determined to exert its dominance through control over, and manipulation of, information, ideas, and narratives—the undiluted rule of Foxes may be partly to blame.

It is also in this context that the ruling knowledge class’s enthusiasm for postmodern ideology should be understood. “Woke” and other variants of postmodernism identify language and narrative as the central domain of human struggle and control of it as the essence of power. Indeed, with his subjectivist rejection of any objective truth, the postmodernist sees narrative as reality. And if narrative—or abstract theory—is “truth,” then it is observable material reality that must be false, amenable to change by sheer will.

This, we might note, is the ideal ideological worldview to tempt Foxes and Change Merchants. It is fundamentally dematerializing, relocating power from the physical world to their preferred realm of pure abstraction and narrative—i.e., it promises complete power to manipulate reality with the mind. This infinite subjectivism provides the opportunity to induce unlimited, frictionless change, at any scale, at any time; even those material limits once considered absolute, such as biology, can be cast aside with a word. The world becomes completely fluid, with reality structured by interpretation, necessitating the management and control of a priestly expert class. How convenient! With postmodernism, every true nerd’s secret fantasy (transmutation from nerd into wizard) suddenly appears within reach.