Christopher A. Bennetts

Did you know ? Human Capital Edition 2009

This is one of the “Did you know?” video clips you can see on youtube.    When I watch these I get goose bumps.   The exponential growth in technology is mind blowing.   I am not even sure how I feel about this let alone answer the question the pose at the end what does it all mean?

I recently watched the movie The Fountain Head based on a novel of the same name by Ayn Rand.  This is not a new movie having been released in 1949.  I have previously read her epic novel Atlas Shrugged so I had a good idea what to expect.

The movie is about a brilliant young architect that wants to build a new style of building but is frustrated by conservative tastes that demand recycling of existing styles which are based on classic and even ancient designs.  The architect is not prepared to compromise and at one point when he has no commissions and no more money to pay the rent for his practice starts doing manual labor in a quarry after rejecting an offer of a loan from an old friend.

Finally he gets a break with a commission to design a new apartment block but as this nears completion he comes under fire from his peers who the story suggests feel threatened by the independence and innovation of this new building.  After the building is completed he finds himself black listed from all major projects but starts to get small commissions such as designing a Service Station.  He slowly builds up from there to the point where he does get significant commissions and is starting to gain acceptance.

There is a major housing project for the poor that is up for grabs to any architect that can solve some design problems.  That is any architect except him.  He does get to design it secretly with an old friend of his taking the credit. He does not want any remuneration for doing so with his only stipulation is that NOTHING gets changed.

In his absence things do get changed and when he returns he is enraged and dynamites the construction as it nears completion.  He does not flee the scene, standing there with the detonator in his hand.  He is arrested and it goes to trial where it comes out that he was the secret designer of the building.

The court case is where Ayn Rand launches into her philosophy she will later call objectivism.   After his address to the jury they return the verdict of not guilty which I thought wrong. He was after all very guilty of the act of dynamiting the building and it is the jury’s task to determine this and this alone.  The Judge then passes sentence with the option of taking into account any mitigating circumstances. Knowing how uncompromising and self virtuous objectivists are I see the outcome of not guilty as somewhat contradictory.

In all fairness I have not read the book and it’s worth noting that Ayn Rand herself was not happy with the movie version.  I found the movie to be over simplistic in its depiction of humanity as a mass of unproductive non-contributing parasites benefiting from the intellectual endeavors of a few.

The movie is fiercely anti-communist produced during the time of McCarthysim and the fear of Reds under the bed.  The parallel in the movie is with communism where distribution of wealth is not based on merit but on perceived needs.  Thus the accomplishments of the individual become subordinate to the needs of the masses.  In ‘The Fountain Head’, Ayn champions the right of the individual against the collective.

The argument of Rand is that an individual has full ownership of their intellectual creations and has no moral obligation to share it with the rest of society. There is a fundamental flaw to this argument in that the individual is already drawing his knowledge from a collective of all those that came before him.  He stands on the shoulder of giants giving him a view that he could not gain in a thousand life times if he truly was the independent creator Rand suggests he is.

For Ayn Rand the world seems to be made up of only an intellectual nobility and parasites with communist ideas wanting to benefit from the endeavors of the nobility without making any contribution.   She takes this idea one step further in ‘Atlas Shrugged’ where this “intellectual nobility” decide to go on strike, withdrawing their services from society thus, “stopping the motor of the world” and leaving the masses to fend for themselves while they go off to a secret mountain location to build a new utopian free economy.

I am reminded of an excerpt from the ‘Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy’ by Douglas Adams which describes a planet that one day decided that telephone cleaners were such parasites on society, making no real contribution, the planet banished them but, a few short years later, the entire population of the planet was wiped out by a disease spread via dirty phone sets.

Douglas uses humor to make the point that subjective appraisal of the value of the contribution of others is dangerous and this is the very thing that so called objectivists would do to those they consider their intellectual inferior.

After reading ‘Atlas Shrugged’ I did visit an Objectivist discussion forum and I found them to be as fanatical and judgmental as any religious zealot attempting to apply the principles of Objectivism to every aspect of life. Taking objectivism to its ultimate conclusion would result in a class system with masses ‘rightfully’ in servitude to this self appointed “intellectual nobility”.

Communism ultimately failed because it was built on false principles and total misunderstanding of human nature.  Any Rand’s Objectivist utopia would be similarly doomed to failure for the same reasons.  The reality is the “intellectual nobility” do not need a champion like Ayn Rand to defend them.   They are still very much in control and always have been.

The movie is worth watching if it happens to come on TV but it’s not one I would recommend hunting down.   I have no doubt the book is much better but if you want to read Ayn Rand I would suggest starting with Atlas Shrugged.   This has been such an influential novel in shaping the opinion of the right wing in America that without reading it you cannot fully understand American 20^th century history.

Brave New World – The Book

Brave New World by Aldus Huxley was part of my high school curriculum so I was forced to read it in my youth.   It is more than 30 years since I read Brave New World and such was the impression upon me that I remember it surprisingly well till this day.  I also remember it being one of the hardest books to get into as I struggled with the first chapter or so trying to follow multiple conversations of the different characters being introduced into the story.

Once into the book I was fascinated by the dystopia Huxley described where on the surface all the world problems had been solved and finally everyone was happy.  The scariest thing about this dystopia was that it seemed to work and there was no opposition to it nor could one develop.

A world where everyone belonged to everyone and nobody belonged to anybody. This was achieved by removing the function of procreation from individuals and assigning it to the state.  Babies are no longer born but genetically engineered and decanted from test tubes.

The practice of eugenics and cloning is used to create a caste system with members naturally predisposed to their role in society and re-enforced further by conditioning including constant subliminal instructions from birth to be happy with their role.

Sexual promiscuity is promoted and even taught to young children.  Forming long term relationships is frowned upon and considered unhealthy.  Emotions are kept under control with voluntary doses of ‘Soma’, a drug to modulate feelings.    There is even a new religion with Henry Ford as the figurehead admired as the father of modern mass production.

Brave New World – The Movie

I recently became aware that a 1998 movie had been made and was very curious to see it.  I finally got a copy and have just finished watching it.  I found it generally disappointing as it failed to present the same believable model of the dystopia I had read in the book.

Visually the movie was disappointing and unconvincing.  The movie is meant to be set far in the future after the death of Ford and devastating World Wars that resulted in the setting up of a world government, but the technology shown was at best contemporary and in many cases already dated.

The clothing was also very dated with a mix of contemporary and retro 60s.  In one scene the World Controller had on a bright orange suit with huge chunky orange beads and would have looked in place on a set for Austin Powers.

The movie only superficially covered the caste system and neglected the cloning aspect among the lower castes.   At one point in the movie a Delta tea lady is asked if she is happy to be a Delta and she confirms she is using a programmed response from her conditioning.   To my mind she looked far too normal and unconvincing compared to the glassy eyed moronic Delta I’d expected to see.

There were changes to the characters and story line also that I think detracted from the believability.

In the book Bernard is socially inept but desperately wants to fit in.  He is physically shorter than other Alpha plus caste members and there are rumours that alcohol was accidentally administered to his test tube, this being a method employed to stunt the growth of Epsilons.

The rivalry between Bernard and his boss culminating in a plot to kill Bernard using a reconditioned Delta are additions not found in the book.  While this made the characters far more human by our standards they are inconsistent with the socially conditioned members of Brave New World where such personal rivalry and aggression would be alien concepts.

In my opinion there is too much missing from the movie and it fails to deliver the believable vision of a dystopia that Huxley wanted to warn us about.  I suggest skipping the movie which is very forgettable and reading the book.

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I came across this brilliant use of technology and thought it was a great example of creative thinking.  I am a bit of a technology buff and very interested in how new technology impacts on society so this is of particular interest to me.

Here is the description:

‘SixthSense’ is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.

Watch this video first – it should amaze you

If you enjoyed that then you can learn a more about how it works in the second video which is a presentation to TED

Pranav Mistry is the brilliant mind behind this new ‘Sixth Sense’. Many people watching it might be thinking that he and MIT Media labs have developed totally new technology. This is not really the case.

It is really just a new human interface connecting up existing technologies. They do not show the little “box” that runs it all but anyone that has a new iPhone will recognise many of the applications. I do not mean to take away from the brilliance of the concept. I admire this guy’s mind.

I don’t think I could ever go back to a mobile phone with a keypad now!

Review of the fouth DVD – The Temple in Man in the Magical Egypt series by Egyptologist John Anthony West.

In the fourth episode John West takes a new and amazing look at the Luxor temple reveals it as an ancient interactive temple of teaching about the metaphysical anatomy of man.

This revelation comes from R. A. Schwaller de Lubics mathematician, philosopher and modern-day alchemist who spent 17 years at Luxor studying and unlocking the biometric secrets encoded in stone.

In the previous episode Decent we were presented with what appeared to be random stone markers and it required acceptance of the mapping and calculations of the association of these by Thomas G. Brophy. This is not the case with The Temple in Man.

This episode more than any of the others brought home to me that there is a lot more to Ancient Egypt than contemporary views of Egyptology suggest.

I watched the eight videos in the series over a two week period but I am now reviewing them from memory a few weeks later.

Review of the third DVD – Descent in the Magical Egypt series by Egyptologist John Anthony West.

In the third episode John West explores what would have appeared to be a random placement of stones for centuries which is now recognised as an accurate map of our Milky Way galaxy along with 23 of its neighbours, also depicting accurate distance to significant stars in the constellation of Orion.

Such ancient knowledge of our universe suggests the “Older Kingdom Still” was either far more sophisticated than previously believed or supports the theory of Alien visitors. Astrophysicist and archeo-astronomer Thomas G. Brophy presents his theory.

I watched the eight videos in the series over a two week period but I am now reviewing them from memory a few weeks later.

Review of the second DVD – Old Kingdom and Older Kingdom Still in the Magical Egypt series by Egyptologist John Anthony West.

In the second episode John West continues explore the idea that the Old Kingdom is predated by an even older Kingdom by examining architectural anomalies such as the mysterious Oserion which appears to already have been an ancient ruin when it was “uncovered” by Seti I during the construction of the Temple of Abydos in first Dynasty.

The aging of the Sphinx is another anomaly with a stella in the Cairo museum describing reparations performed by the father of the traditionally credited builder.  The connection with Astronomy is also explored with the Sphinx being the sign of Leo putting the possible age at 10,000 to 12,000 thousand years ago or even in the previous precession or age of Leo some 34,000 to 36,000 years ago.

I watched the eight videos in the series over a two week period but I am now reviewing them from memory a few weeks later.

Review of the first DVD – The Invisible Science in the Magical Egypt series by Egyptologist John Anthony West.

In the first episode John West revisits the unexplainable accomplishments of Ancient Egypt suggesting that there may have been an even more Ancient civilization that came before it. The accepted mainstream dating of Ancient Egypt has a sophisticated civilization suddenly appearing out of nowhere with no preceding foundations upon which it was built. What is even more surprising is that John shows that in many ways the old Kingdoms were more sophisticated that later dynasties and rather than evolving Egyptian civilization was in decline. The model is the exact opposite to what any anthropologist would expect to see.

There is also a discussion of the fiboacci number serious present in organic geometry and its presence in the stages of construction of the temple of Karnak – also known as the “House of Life”.

I watched the eight videos in the series over a two week period but I am now reviewing them from memory a few weeks later.