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Quote by Richard Powers

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The Overstory

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Author

Richard Powers
Richard Powers

Richard Powers is an American contemporary novelist, born on June 18, 1957. His works are known for their profound philosophical thinking, rich imagination, and unique narrative style. more

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“Day 1 of January Look back only when you need to learn some lessons from your past. Do not go there if you want to make significant progress in life. It is quite common to think about the past. Sometimes the mind wanders into areas over which you no longer have control, which can impede progress. Thus, you must constantly remind yourself to look forward. Make the decision to only look back when you take suitable lessons from the past. Devotion Dear Lord, I thank you for today. I pray you help me to attain superior levels of thinking, to be forward-focused and learn good lessons from my past. Amen.”

MindPastGift Gugu Mona QuotesLessonsDevotionGift Gugu Mona BooksLearnDear GodForward FocusedSignificant Progress
Book:Daily Quotes and Devotions: Towards a Fruitful Life
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“As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed. The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld. The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. The systematic use of nicknames such as “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself. Yet through blunt repetition over Twitter, our president managed the transformation of individuals into stereotypes that people then spoke aloud. At rallies, the repeated chants of “Build that wall” and “Lock her up” did not describe anything that the president had specific plans to do, but their very grandiosity established a connection between him and his audience. The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. The president’s campaign involved the promises of cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating the national debt, and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense. These promises mutually contradict. It is as if a farmer said he were taking an egg from the henhouse, boiling it whole and serving it to his wife, and also poaching it and serving it to his children, and then returning it to the hen unbroken, and then watching as the chick hatches. Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. Klemperer’s descriptions of losing friends in Germany in 1933 over the issue of magical thinking ring eerily true today. One of his former students implored him to “abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Führer’s greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are feeling at present.” Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer that Hitler “has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.” The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims the president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your voice.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.”

TruthFascismTotalitarianismAuthoritarianism
Book:On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
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“According to many experts the majority of the people won't be needed anymore for the coming society. Almost everything will be done by artificial intelligence, including self-driving cars and trucks, which already exist anyway. Some even mentioned that AI is making universities obsolete by how fast it can produce information. However, In my view, the AI has limitations that the many can't see, because on a brain to brain comparison, the AI always wins, yet the AI can only compute with programmable data. In other words, the AI can think like a human but can't imagine or create a future. The AI is always codependent on the imagination of its user. So the limitations of the AI are in fact determined by humans. It is not bad that we have AI but that people have no idea of how to use it apart from replacing their mental faculties and being lazy. This is actually why education has always been a scam. The AI will simply remove that from the way. But knowledge will still require analysis and input of information, so the AI doesn't really replace the necessary individuals of the academic world, but merely the many useless ones that keep copying and plagiarizing old ideas to justify and validate a worth they don't truly possess. Being afraid and paranoid about these transitions doesn't make sense because evolution can't be stopped, only delayed. The problem at the moment has more to do with those who want to keep themselves in power by force and profiting from the transitions. The level of consciousness of humanity is too low for what is happening, which is why people are easily deceived. Consequently, there will be more anger, fear, and frustration, because for the mind that is fixed on itself, change is perceived as chaos. The suffering is then caused by emotional attachments, stubbornness and the paranoid fixation on using outdated systems and not knowing how to adapt properly. In essence, AI is a problem for the selfish mind - rooted in cognitive rationalizations -, but an opportunity of great value for the self-reflective mind - capable of a metacognitive analysis. And the reason why nobody seems to understand this is precisely because, until now, everyone separated the mind from the spirit, while not knowing how a spiritual ascension actually goes through the mind. And this realization, obviously, will turn all religions obsolete too. Some have already come to this conclusion, and they are the ones who are ready.”

MindSelfishRemoveParanoidStubbornnessExistFixationAlready
Author:Dan Desmarques
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