The Blackbird DAO: The secret society the world needs

ishmael@newsletter.paragraph.com (Ishmael) — Mon, 09 May 2022 11:11:46 GMT

edition://0xcAaD85c31B8Ebb89a9cfa09C7F1537de60318DAc?editionId=0

TL;DR

We are starting a long-overdue clandestine organization that will work to remove dangerous dictators, control the world’s existential risks and promote justice and compassion. We are the solution to the frightening reality that nobody is in charge. We wish to end the Age of Cowardice. Our sacred text are the 95 Theses. We believe in the Seven Truths.

The 95 theses of the Blackbird Cult

“No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.” - Albert Einstein.

One: the blackbird appears and reveals the conspiracy

Call me Ishmael.
Over the past three weeks I lost four good friends to the war in Ukraine: two Ukrainian, one Russian, and one German.
I had to call the father of the German friend to give him the news. I had to learn how to arrange the repatriation of a person's remains.
I drove twice to Krakow and back picking up refugees. I heard stories I'll never unhear. The relatives of those people, with whom I dropped them off, wore black.
I sat this morning in my small garden to write but could only produce a single line from a book I read a long time ago, an ungrammatical one at that. It went, "I am not complete in the mind." I wrote the sentence down hundreds of times, page after page, in my notebook.
Just then, a blackbird appeared and landed at the far end of a wooden table at which I was sitting. Its feathers were all black, its beak bright orange. The blackbird spoke to me.
I can't turn back time, the blackbird said. But I can show you a future in which a tyrant is removed from power before he causes the deaths of thousands. I can show you a world in which decent people are in control.
I can show you how to build that world, Ishmael.
I looked around - there were no people in sight. This is how you become insane, I thought. I dropped my head and went back to writing, the same single sentence, even faster than before. But the bird continued.
First, you must understand, she said (for it was a female blackbird), that there is a global conspiracy out there.
The conspiracy is this: there is no shadow government running the world. All those claims that you’ve been hearing over the years, about the invisible hand controlling your life, about a secret society of the uber-powerful mastermining your destiny - they are a lie.
Everyone has been part of this conspiracy, Ishmael. QAnon, and social justice warriors, and anti-vaxxers, and post-structuralists, and Scandinavian plane-shaming teenagers, and anonymous hackers, and war-hungry media, and the Trilateral Commission, and flat Earthers, and the Occupy movement - they all led you to believe that there was a big plan of some kind out there, their own or someone else’s. But there isn't.
What exists instead, what has always existed, are motley groups of self-interested, more or less normal people trying to find something to do with their time, something they'd find worth doing. In good faith and in bad, they’ve been fumbling their way through the ages, sometimes being remarkably selfless, sometimes screwing each other over for money and power.
A lot of progress has resulted from this behavior. And many disasters.
Saying this, the blackbird hopped a bit closer.
She continued: The problem is that today we can no longer afford disasters, Ishmael. A small incident in one place, or a single lunatic's paranoia, can end life everywhere. Think nuclear war, a pandemic, the climate catastrophe.
That is the hair-raising realization about the fact that nobody is in charge, the blackbird said.
And those who are trying the hardest to be in charge are the worst people in the world, she said. They are the handful of sociopaths in an ocean of good people.

Two: the bird speaks about the vulnerability of the Earth

I dared look up, turned the page, and began to draw my visitor. Maybe, I thought, this way it would seem less obvious that I was sitting on my own and listening to what must surely have been voices in my head.
But the blackbird stood there, as real as my anger and as impossible to ignore, looking me straight in the eye. Its orange beak glistened in the sun that was fast approaching the zenith. She continued:
It would be a shame if human civilization were to end, leaving the Universe’s mysteries unexplored and future generations without a chance to marvel in them.
The world has one shot at intelligent life, and you are it. Not counting a blackbird here and there.
Here is a horrible fact, Ishmael: the potency and the availability of technology is increasing. At some point in the near future, any small group of people will, with enough tenacity, be able to attain the destructive means sufficient to end civilization - an atom bomb, a potent bioweapon, a debilitating hack.
Even today, some of these resources are available to those who know where and how to look.
The clock is ticking fast.
There are only two ways to prevent a tragedy.
The first is controlling access to advanced technology.
Even with moral questions set aside, what you humans call the Cold War showed that such an approach leads to many close calls and accidents because human control systems are always imperfect. You can’t hope to be lucky forever.
The other way, the bird said, is to reduce the proportion of potentially nefarious actors who want to see others destroyed.
This means giving more people a bigger stake in humanity's survival.
This means convincing them that the world is worth fighting for.
It means showing them that the world can be fair and just. That it will be.
A proxy measure for the perception of justice is the trust in institutions such as the government, the courts and the media.
This trust is the lowest it has ever been. I know this because we blackbirds have a statistics department.
That the world is as good as it’s ever been and that it is dangerously inadequate and unstable can unfortunately both be true at the same time.
Institutions today are mere platforms and instruments. Those controlling them don't want to change them or don't have the knowledge and the courage to do so.
This is why the job of changing the institutions belongs to you, the citizens. It has always belonged to you. Why are you doing so little to change a system so obviously ineffective, Ishmael?
Is it your ambition? You are, or hope to be, benefiting from things as they are? You don’t complain about the thieves in charge since they’re at least sticking it to the elites from the other camp? You don’t complain about the ponzi schemes since you hope to screw others who are buying in after you? You don’t talk about the corrupt bureaucracy since it might be paying your salary?
If this is how you think, then the problem with your ambition is not that it is too great but that it is too mediocre. It is an ambition inherited from other people. It hopes to profit, not create. It wants to win the rigged game, not change it. Its achievement feels inauthentic. Its failure feels lonely. The price you pay for it is the loss of dignity.
Or are you silent because your lack imagination? Is the present state of things simply "natural" and the only one possible? Does believing this make your conformity justified? Does it give sense to your actions?
If so, maybe you should consider your ancestors. Their world seemed natural and the only one possible. Slavery was natural. So was worshiping Odin. Absolute Monarchy. Solidarity. Patriarchy. Matriarchy. Spending life composing music. Cave dwelling. Using leeches to cure diseases. Going to the Moon. A two-party system. A one-party system.
In fact, said the bird looking away from me, the real reason for your inaction might be this: you are simply cowards. This includes you, Ishmael. Your cowardice makes you part of the conspiracy.

Three: the blackbird speaks of the Age of Cowardice

Your cowardice doesn't make you a bad person, Ishmael. It is a disability, one from which you will recover through the mission I'm entrusting you with. But first you must see it for what it is.
Your cowardice begins with your inability to think. When you speak, what comes out are incomplete fragments of other people’s thoughts.
Your most cherished beliefs are things you overheard in passing while busy doing something else or through casual skim-reading.
You prefer not to be by yourself and thinking or creating since that draws attention to the passage of time and your mortality. You pay those who distract you and structure your time for you with their words.
The people you listen to most are those who promise you an identity.
If your time is structured and identity reinforced then you tolerate any content, however irrelevant. Five-hour conversations between two ill-informed celebrities. Marketing tweets from people who make money by lying to you. Highbrow, well written articles about non-topics. Rants of an unconflicted narcissist.
You sabotage yourself through a steady diet of “creative nonfiction” books. Platitudes that can be expressed in a sentence, directed at the straw man, introduced with cute anecdotes that never happened, backed up by questionable research and explained through the immutable traits of the Stone Age brain. Their objective: to convince you that Steve Jobs embodied the truths described and that you should too if you want happiness. Somehow, the books fail to bring you happiness.
The people you follow, once they've established a tribe, stop changing their minds. Changing their mind wouldn’t pay their bills. So, you don't change your mind either.
But ability to understand, predict, and act requires the exact opposite - a small, fluid identity, constantly adapting one’s views, seeking information that disproves your thesis.
Truth is often incompatible with the format of the opinion piece, the notion of a “story,” or the habit of subscribing to a podcast. It lives out there in the wild, resisting pattern and interpretation, as a collection of contradictory facts. It is near-impossible to find in the age of social media algorithms and search engine optimization.
I know this because blackbirds used to be very active on social media.
You think that the more you absorb the more you know. But to understand you need to reflect and produce. You are happy to milk Gödel’s incompleteness theorems for every possible misinterpretation so as to appear learned. At the same time, you have no clue what they claim, nor can you solve a simple quadratic equation for that matter.
You are “open minded” to innocuous, candy-wrapped epiphanies that befit a “critical thinker” of this time. Education to you is comfort and entertainment.
You are fired up when pontificating on whether AI is a threat or whether humanity should colonize Mars. You talk at length about the importance of personal privacy and self-improvement. You have strong opinions on gender pronouns.
You hate-read texts about billionaires fighting legal battles to keep their workers homeless. You react first with outrage, then a bored shrug of the shoulders.
You prefer not to hear about the exploding child sexual abuse online and the fact that little is being done about it. Fixing problems, especially intractable ones, is something other people should do.
You constantly work on self discipline and consistently fail. You feel like you need discipline because you don’t have a mission which would make discipline a natural consequence or an irrelevance.
So, you do other people’s missions - you climb Everest, you run marathons. The highs are strong but short lived, and then you are back to square one.
You try to be an individual and fail, because everyone else is trying to be an individual in exactly the same ways.
Thirty years from now, the historian will see your time as one of mediocrity and transition. The age of a hundred superhero movies is the age of losers. The age of hundreds of look-alike public intellectuals is the age of sheepthink. The age in which aspiring revolutionaries worship the most powerful people is not an age worth remembering.
The only question on the historian’s mind will be, “How did they not see it coming?” The only question is what that it is.

Four: the blackbird reveals the Seven Truths

To prepare for the truth, Ishmael, you need to accept that one day you will die, the bird told me.
Between now and the day you die, you have nothing to prove to anyone.
You job is to create, to devote your ever-shrinking time to an artistic mission, purposefully and without fear. This is the only thing that will feel like you won't want to fast-forward through it.
Your artistic mission is to shape your mind and help others shape theirs, so as to overcome the Age of Cowardice.
For this, you will need to set up an organization. Call it the Blackbird Cult, that’s a good name.
The members of the Cult will need to profess their belief in the seven truths which I am about to reveal to you.
The first truth is that you have a choice, just like your ancestors did. No way of organizing a society, no economic concept, is "natural." Harmony is as possible as discord. All you ever wanted of your world can become a reality before the coming winter.
The second is that protecting the world requires plumbers, not saviors. Effective, well-organized people with common sense get the job done far better than aspiring heroes who care about the credit.
The third is that true power results in compassion. If you are not compassionate then you are not powerful enough. The age of strong people will be an age of compassion.
The fourth is that, to show that the antidote works, you must be prepared to drink the poison and then cure yourself, a hundred times over. Minds are stubborn and don't want to change.
The fifth is that your job is not to bring about a revolution but to prevent it. The demagogues and the tyrants should hand over their keys, not be hanged in town squares. When the latter happens, it's always the revolutionaries who are hanged next.
The sixth is that a randomly selected group of people would do a better job crafting policy than your elected representatives do. This practice worked for the old Athenians. That same group would do a better job controlling autocrats than their negatively-selected inner circle does.
The seventh truth is that a speaking blackbird revealed all these truths to Ishmael.

Five: the blackbird speaks of the Cult

Anyone who professes, "I believe in the seven truths," can be part of the Blackbird Cult.
Those who truly believe will be three quarters reasonable and one quarter mad. This is good, because to consider the enigma that is the Universe and not be partly mad is not to be alive.
Fully reasonable people don't change things. To want to change the world is not a reasonable thing to do. It is safer to be a coward.
To make a stand takes passion, and having suffered, and having suffered because others suffered. It is an emotional act.
It is madness that creates something out of nothing, a movement out of a leap of will, belief out of a ritual.
It is madness that can't be contained with inward-oriented mindfulness but only with outward-focused action.
My cult should be of people anonymous to each other, the blackbird told me. The moment people stop being anonymous they stop being genuine.
As you spread the word, Ishmael, remember that the narrative that wins is not the one that opposes but the one that subsumes.
Therefore, the medium through which to spread the message of the Cult is not technology but culture. The medium through which to bind the membership is ritual.
The rituals of the Blackbird Cult will be those befitting a world-manipulating secret society: attire, levels of progression, secrets to uphold. Take those seriously, Ishmael, for there is no organization without ritual.
If humanity is to stand a chance then the Blackbird Cult members must be in each room where important decisions are taken, in each inner circle where deposing a dictator is discussed.
Otherwise all is lost.
When one in five are members of the Cult, the Age of Cowardice will end.
Now go and tell the world of our encounter, the blackbird said.
More instructions will follow.
Then she flapped her wings and flew out of my garden.
I recorded her words as I remembered them, and am conveying them to you.
Join me if you believe in the Seven Truths.
More instructions will follow.