(Over) Reliance
Chapter Eight
THE MATH:
If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.
+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.
+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.
+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.
+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes.
+ Cognitive dissonance has led to errors in our reasoning.
+ We must defend ourselves against those we thought were defending us.
+ Until we disable the corrupt revolving door we have an active breach in our defense.
+
There have been many societal changes since the time when we ran the snake oil salesman out of town after his product sickened the community. As the marketplace grew beyond what private citizens could keep watch over, we had to assign certain members of the village to keep a lookout for swindlers. We entrusted them to let us know about anything fishy we should be aware of. We created middle men between us and any commercial threat.
Because we were no longer in the lookout position, we did not notice when those in it got overtaken and captured. And once the lookouts were in place, many began to stop looking out for themselves.
This new arm of the commonwealth was a reasonable and necessary insertion because, as the “father of Liberalism” John Locke put it: “in an ideal, anarchic state of nature, various problems arise that would make life more insecure than under the protection of a minimal state.” But, when we handed over this responsibility to the middle men, it seems much of the citizenry, over time, have relinquished certain duties still essential to protect ourselves and the children.
We entrusted the entirety of our physical and environmental health to susceptible mortal humans and did not insulate them well enough from the corrupting tendencies of the tricksters they were tasked to oversee. Once they fell under the influence of the swindlers, they stopped letting us know about anything fishy, and the majority of the people stopped asking. Since all the analyses of fishiness happened behind closed doors, we remained unaware of the corruption which existed there, and we did not have a clear view of the dangers being scrutinized or what was at stake. So, in terms of what was allowed into society, the lookout position became the decision-maker position. And once that authority was in place, we began to stop deciding things for ourselves.
Once a product was in the market, we could not see by looking at it which potential risks had been investigated and what those arguments were. All the pertinent information we would need to make our own decisions was absorbed into the end result—it had made it into the marketplace.
The difference, now that the middle men had decision-making authority, was that when someone got sick from the snake oil, they had to go back through the middle men for validation, because now no one outside of that position could run the salesman out of town. And the middle men who vouched for the salesman, staked their reputation on him, and most importantly got rewarded financially from him, were less and less willing to validate this claim of injury and less and less likely to want the salesman to stop selling.
The public trust in government has been decreasing alongside the same timeline that the Bad Companies have been utilizing and honing their Playbook to deceive the people. When the National Election Study began asking about trust in government in 1958, about three-quarters of Americans trusted the federal government to “do the right thing almost always or most of the time”. In recent years, this number has dropped below 20%.1
Trust in government hit its all time low at a shocking 16% in 2023, following the years we were most advised (and often compelled) to trust the experts. As we understand by now (we better!), these deeply conflicted trends will result in a ton of debilitating dissonance.
I’ve included a clip of Dr. Rangan Chatterjee on the Jay Shetty Podcast discussing the subject of reliance. He submits (at around the 20:40 minute mark) that we’ve been posing to ourselves the wrong question of: “which expert should I trust” instead of “why do I no longer trust myself”? As he explains in the first chapter of his new book2, we’ve outsourced our inner expertise to the external experts. And then, like any underused muscle, the trust in self begins to atrophy.
There are many of us who might not be able to find our way through much of the geography surrounding us or even call members of our own family if our phones lost service. I think I have two phone numbers memorized. (I just tested myself — it’s only one). The number of teenagers who have even received their drivers license has dropped around 20 percentage points in the last two decades. Less than half of them can drive so if their phones crash they’re really out of luck to get anywhere.
The problem with depending so entirely on the external devices is that we are helpless to control any aspect of those. If my cell service stops, there is nothing I can do to prevent that, there’s nothing I can do to turn it back on. I’m just stuck. If I was relying on my own memory or navigational skills, like I did for the first half of my life, I would still be able to make the important call from somewhere and plot the directions to the next town and drive myself to it.
The idea is to take advantage of the new innovations and tools that make our life easier or improved, but not let those completely replace the skills we still need to possess and hone. If the “why do I no longer trust myself” question of our generation morphs into an “I never learned how to trust myself” resignation for the Gen Z’s and onward, we are passing on a terrible torch to them and can only predict a continuous de-evolution.
We are fortunate to have so much access to new sources of expertise and so many new modernization technologies to do for us what we used to do for ourselves.
An animal in the wild does not ignore all the external aspects of its environment, it takes them all in. But it relies on its own instincts to evaluate those and decide its next move. The animal is hyper aware of itself and so hyper reliant on itself. There is no other entity in its world that it can outsource this analysis and insight to. The animal survives by its own vigilance alone.
The outside information and knowledge available to us can be vital intel. We use it to support our decision-making, but we have to evaluate it. Not all offers are good or necessary or verified just because they have made it to market. Yet more and more in today’s high-tech world we are breezing past the evaluation obligation.
All new man-made offerings come with the hope and claim that they will improve our lives or solve a problem. In the many instances we have discussed relating to Bad Companies, the most pervasive “improvements” or “solutions” have resulted in the highest death counts for Americans. If there has been any wisdom gleaned from these fatal situations, society still doesn’t have many examples to show where it has been using that to adjust its behavior.
Most of us today are currently feeling amazed and unnerved by the adoption and fast-tracking of the AI chatbots. For this chapter on reliance, I was tempted just to write: “self-determination vs chat-GPT = amirite?” and leave it at that. It’s not difficult for anyone to predict how an over-reliance on AI can lead to a decrease in human engagement, creativity, and emotional intelligence. At this very early stage, the data are already out on the resulting decline in critical thinking skills with increased AI dependence.3
The rise of artificially intelligent companionship is a whole other unprecedented phenomenon. The real fear that our children would never again feel the need to read a book or write their own essays is now quickly being replaced by the fear that they might also never find a better, more dependable “friend” than the one they’ve “personalized” out of this new technology. A survey published this year found that one in five students report that they or someone they know has had a romantic relationship with AI.
You can probably by now guess the familiar period of pre-regulation we are currently in with these new chatbot companions: “Comprehensive regulations for AI companion chatbots are emerging at the state and federal levels…Given the speed of AI development, legal and ethical frameworks are still in flux, but several key principles have been established or are under consideration…”
And the latest and most unsettling advances on this subject is that ChatGPT will soon allow pornography for its users! I will direct you to this BBC article which cites some of the obvious points: “critics say OpenAI’s decision to allow erotica on the platform shows the need for more regulation at the federal and state levels.” And, “No company has ever had the kind of adoption that OpenAI saw with ChatGPT…They needed to continue to push along that exponential growth curve, achieving market domination as much as they can.” Porn oughta do it!
Beyond these omniscient simulated-human conversationalists (and God knows what else they are simulating), we are right now living through an explosion in the wearable sensor market. In some aspects, these go even further beyond what artificial intelligence can know of our desires and curiosities, to what it can know of our actual biology.
Let’s briefly focus on this specific new market as a practice example to illustrate how a weakened self-reliance might engage with any new product or technology or proposed agenda.
First thing to remember is that, as of now, we are choosing to buy these devices, or not. It’s not like Wearables are a powerful force of nature we are unable to resist, they’re just a new thing hitting the market. And like a lot of new things, they could be harmless, and they obviously could have some benefits or they wouldn’t be a new thing at all. But the starting position should not be: Ok I’ll opt in and then see what happens. The starting position should be the question of whether or not we’re going to opt in. And that requires some requisite evaluation, in order to answer the question, prior to the action of opting in.
In the evaluation process we gather information on our side, the defensive questioning side. Part of that process is imagining what all the Bad Companies of the world might also get out of our consenting to the product, on their offensive assault side, knowing what we know about Them.
Individuals having access to their own biometrics is interesting and surely useful in a number of ways. But before we get too excited about any flashy new object or trend, we are obligated to take out our handy risk-benefit calculator. (By calculator I mean analyses—in case you are immediately searching Amazon for a bluetooth risk-benefit calculator to strap on on top of your fit bit!). This is the process where we compare the possible benefits and risks associated with a particular action, decision, or intervention to determine whether the potential good outweighs the potential harm. This evaluation part should prompt us to extend our thinking beyond the desire created by the flash, to ask ourselves: what else is happening? What else could happen? This inquiry and assessment comes before we decide our next move, not after we have strapped it onto our body.
Even without extensive research, our own natural instincts and inborn logic could predict, if we gave ourselves the chance to think through it, what some of the “unintended” consequences, i.e. risks, i.e. harms, from these new wearable products might be:
Modification and perversions of behavior— Individuals may become addicted to monitoring their health data, potentially leading to anxiety or obsessive behaviors. When we ask our device how we slept instead of feeling that ourself, when we check our phone to see if we're stressed instead of noticing our breath, etc, we are outsourcing our valuable embodied consciousness to algorithmic interpretation. Once we are reliant on our watch to tell us about our physicality, we might never trust our own gut again.
Potential health risks— Wearables have multiple transmitters and receivers using Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular, operating on several different radio bands, that continuously emit radiofrequency (RF) radiation. What do we know (or not know) about the health risks of cumulative exposures in direct contact with the body for long periods of time?
Creation of big data sets, their use and misuse— In the paradigm of our era where data is more valuable than gold, after the existing algorithm models have extracted all that they can to exploit our consumer preferences, there is one holy grail of far greater value which the biotech bros of Silicon Valley are panning for—the under our skin data. Once they get their hands and their surveillance under there, what they can do with that information to make themselves more powerful and profitable is the stuff of waking nightmares.
Privacy and security issues— literally the most sensitive and personal medical information collected without adequate knowledge or control, to be potentially shared, breached and stolen, surveilled, accessed and used by government or law enforcement or bad corporations or God knows who.
And finally, we should definitely consider:
Unanticipated challenges facing regulatory bodies—because we have discussed how challenged they are! Yet they are the only ones currently responsible for regulating both the safety and security of wearable devices and associated apps which interpret all the acquired data. It was only last chapter where we scoured over the gaping holes in that system and the consequential fatalities.
These Wearables currently reside in as uncharted as a commercial territory can get, in terms of unknown risks we don’t yet fully understand. All these new technologies require the establishment of new norms and regulations which we are nowhere near creating, or even know to ask for. According the the AMA, “The regulatory landscape for wearables is complex and evolving, with different rules applying to different types of devices and their intended uses”… Sounds about right, nonsense-wise!
We should now be able to recognize that familiar corporate sweet spot. What follows the introduction of a new technology or potentially harmful product is this same extended period of our gullibility and ignorance and their lack of oversight and regulation. Wearables are just classified as interesting watches for now, so if we are relying on any part of the external system to think any of this through or study any of the unintended consequences as they spring up—we would once again be bitten by the serpent of foolishness that has us trusting and depending on untrustworthy, unreliable agencies and authorities.
It is not logical or wise to make the decision to opt in to something when we do not yet have the necessary information to answer these type of questions posed here. Once we have fulfilled our obligation of evaluation, then we can make any decision we like. We can even accept the potential of harm and decide to opt in anyway because we’ve concluded the benefits outweigh those risks. As long as we can sensibly articulate how we came to that conclusion, first and foremost to our own self.
P.S— I just did a quick round of research to come up with some answers to those type of questions on the wearables subject (super interesting and alarming btw!):
https://en.unesco.org/inclusivepolicylab/analytics/data-privacy-and-internet-things
When a new campaign is launched, we have a pretty solid history to reflect on to help us identify where the dangers might be hiding, especially coming from a Bad Company.
The forest is full of a wide variety of mushrooms. Some are edible, some are hallucinatory, some are poisonous. We don’t determine which is which by eating them all. We examine from a distance, we assess and classify using the knowledge our civilization has accumulated over the years, learning the hard way in some instances. But once we have that knowledge, we don’t have to keep learning the hard way.
We have relied on the external Them to determine which things coming into our environment are bad, but that reliance has failed us many times. We also rely on an external Them to determine what is called good in our environment, and we get burned there too.
While our reliance on artificial intelligence is in its infant stage, we have a long history of relinquishing our independent thinking to old-fashioned human collective intelligence. But to depend on the whims of a mercurial society for direction can leave you flip-flopping from politically correct signal to signal and often with egg on your face if you accidentally flopped when the real virtue was to flip.
In the heated early weeks of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, you may remember #BlackoutTuesday. It began as an initiative introduced by two black women in the music industry to post a black tile on Instagram, representing a blackout of business for a day to reflect on how white people in their industry exploit and make money off black talent. But the campaign quickly snowballed into a worldwide opportunity to display solidarity. Tuesday morning saw Instagram feeds flooded with black tiles, in a frenzy of memetic contagion.
Problems and backlash quickly arose, which would become a familiar sequence in a continuous cautionary tale about the potential downfall of relying on social media to tell you how to be virtuous. The first issue was that many people posting their black tiles were using the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter which ended up drowning out crucial information and documentation of the injustice. Those searching for resources and protest updates only found a frustrating row of black screens.
The second problem was that widespread posting of a “silent” black square without further action was immediately criticized as a performative allyship that did not translate into meaningful change. Call-outs of hypocrisy then flooded the earlier flood. (When even the Washington Redskins’ instagram displayed a black tile to represent their taking the time to think long and hard about what they might possibly do to curb the exploitation of people of color—the joke of the whole debacle had become fully apparent). By the end of the day, many of the posts had been deleted.
No one wants to end up on the wrong side of history. Not even in the short history of a single day, where the impulse to parrot others to avoid any accusation of complacency toward the current issue led many to act impulsively before really thinking things through. Which then only led to a different and worse accusation of shallow conduct.
Rash urgency doesn’t automatically amount to advocacy and goodness; pausing to evaluate doesn’t automatically amount to discouragement and disregard. Outside of actual emergencies when there is not a moment to spare, it is usually wisest to spare the moments to think deeply.
Landing on the wrong side of longterm geopolitical events bears far more serious condemnation (theoretically, ideally) when bad decisions can lead to the most terrible humanitarian crises.
In all instances, from commercial products to social or political alliances, we can be led to make bad personal choices when we outsource the major responsibilities of looking out for ourselves, evaluating the claims we are offered, and resisting what we know by our natural instincts to be dangerous or in our hearts to be wrong. It’s not only AI use which creates an "accountability gap" that can lead to harm, exploitation, and a societal erosion of individual moral agency. There is a great deal in our own behavior, our pattern of passivity, that has led to more of an “accountability ocean” which separates us from the reason and ethics we must rely on to make better decisions.
The Public Relations campaigners have mastered the manipulation of our consumer preferences and the engineering of our consent. There is very little evidence to show where we have overcome this. Due to the ceaseless, unobstructed execution of their Playbook and the efficacy of all that trickery, we may not perceive or be ready to admit to all the elements that weakened our resistance and have made us more susceptible to the tricks and more reliant on the tricksters. There is ample evidence to show that the consequences of this gap in our perception and accountability are getting more and more desperate.
So now, we would need to glean the wisdom from that part. Beyond the acceptance that industry or government historically deceives, gaslights, and harms us for the sake of their power and profit, we must accept the fact that, despite our awareness of this, we have not noticeably pulled back any of our reliance upon these entities or agencies.
This period of reliance we still reside in concerning the Bad products we’ve discussed leaves us tolerantly waiting in the fog for the science or an established authority to announce the official warnings that might activate our opposition.
We see the numbers of chronic diseases in our children spike catastrophically and we wait for officialdom to declare an emergency.
We can personally attest to the increased prevalence of neurodevelopmental disorders (from ADHD to Autism) in the younger generations and we wait for leadership to thoroughly investigate this while it’s still taboo to even consider the potential environmental causes.
We witness these young humans in the prime of their life enter the “continuum of care”, supported by pharmaceuticals and little else, and we wait for some miracle to save them.
We rush to get the new app, the new technology, the new bio hack, for fear of falling behind, and hand over the rights to our privacy and our sovereign bodies in order to compete in that race—a race someone else decided we must win even though it runs in the opposite direction from authentic wellness or our own ethics.
We have all been bystanders to a technical and provable genocide in Gaza and we still wait for the agreed-upon official confirmation by a body with legal authority, while still only 20 of our U.S. congresspersons have allowed themselves to say the word out loud.
Those muscles of our self-reliance have been weakened and our inner expertise has been muted. That is no accident. It is due to all the ways the opposition’s strategy has worked to maneuver us from active participants to passive consumers. Once disconnected from our reason and from our intuitive deference to a higher law, we can remain like a ship without a sail until we reconnect with it again. But repeated exercise of the muscles used to recognize and resist what is out of alignment, so we can then return to relying on a more solid and sustainable morality, can restore our strength and integrity.
When it comes to harmful products and unjust wars, what we’ve learned the hard way is that we are too reliant on those who have been captured by the enemy. They now protect the interest of the corporation or war machine over that of the people, so there is not a lot of benefit in the reliance, and even greater risk as the set up impairs our ability to protect ourselves or others.
We don’t have to keep learning the hard way.
Today’s most consequential example of the lack of a functioning defense we have against The Pattern is the crisis in Gaza. We’ve watched on the sidelines with our jaws dropped in horror and eyes full of tears, waiting for the representatives we rely on to find the compassion and sanity to vote against the most blatant and visible villain of our era. It has never been more imperative to examine the very raw period of the past two years through the lens of the Pattern & Playbook—where we’ve again been forced to tolerantly wait in the fog for an established authority to announce the official warnings to activate any opposition.
In the next chapter we can take a calm and clear look back at this latest and most tragic campaign with the recognition, wisdom, and accountability necessary to compel the shifts that can only come from changes we make on our side of the Pattern.
+ Our over-reliance on external systems undermines our ability to protect ourselves or others. =
We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….
This article comes at the perfect time. Absolutely spot on. Your insights into systemic deception are realy important right now.