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 sa
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
