Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I want to congratulate you on achieving full human citizenship in the society of New Polynesia. You have reached this proud day by completing all psychological and knowledge portions of the test battery and may now, if you wish, participate in the human sectors of our government. This class ranges in age from twenty years to sixty-one, but do not let such comparisons affect your feelings: this day, each of you becomes fully a part of the human family.
I have given essentially the same speech several times a year to commencing citizens for nearly a century, almost since I left the factory. I suppose it would bore me to tears, if ever I could experience boredom or tears. But on this unusual day my speech seems as fresh as ever. Today we observe the 250th anniversary of a sad, horrible event which had a profound influence on the world as it has become. Perhaps only in your lifetimes have we gained the perspective to see how it fits in.
As your history studies record, on this day a quarter of a millennium ago, nineteen religious terrorists commandeered four aircraft over the Eastern United States. They flew the aircraft into large, crowded and highly symbolic buildings, in order to inflict psychological harm on the people of that country. This attack was unfortunately a success. It allowed the military and fascist elements in the United States government to strangle the democratic experiment which had lasted through 225 years of social turmoil and even slavery and civil war. This was done in the name of state security, but it revolved around a dire miscalculation.
The system called democracy was already in trouble on that morning of September 11 even if these men had never boarded the planes. The system of choosing leaders was democratic more in name than reality. Ambition, lust for power, and even greed and sociopathology drove many of those who offered themselves as leaders. Most of these candidates would have failed our citizenship tests. Although their system then called for citizens to choose between candidates by voting, often the poor voter could only choose the least flawed of an uninspiring group. Most candidates for higher office became corrupted by the need to beg wealthy donors for money to give to the media cartels to pay for advertisements that bordered on brainwashing. This system marginalized genuinely honest candidates who would have passed our citizenship tests, such as Ralph Nader. Indeed we feel that the architects of the media system wanted it that way. As President a man such as Nader would have disrupted much of the status quo. Simulations of a Nader presidency usually end in assassination.
Once elected a candidate then had to use the office to reward these corporate contributors instead of pursuing policies which served the greater good, because at the next election he would again need their help. Executives such as the President and state governors would fill many posts in the government by appointment, often choosing other corporate executives. In some cases, the framers of the Constitution had meant to insulate the office holder from political influence. In practice it only meant that an executive might well ensconce an extremist political appointee for life in a crucial post such as the Supreme Court.
An 1886 Supreme Court decision, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, recognized corporations as persons with all the civil rights of a human. This legal fiction contributed mightily to the morass into which democracy fell. Limited-liability corporations held a peculiar position in the legal systems of the world, akin to potentially immortal humans invulnerable to prison or execution. A corporation could go unpunished for crimes which would cost a mortal man his life, yet had freedom of speech in the form of advertising and campaign contributions, the freedom to hold property, to sue humans in court; indeed, all legal freedoms available to a human also availed to the corporation. But the corporation could outlive everyone involved in it. This creature outgrew the men who made it, and came to control most of them.
Remember also that organized religious groups enjoyed advantages in the rule of this society that its founding fathers of 1776 would have disapproved. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was deemed a "howling atheist" in his day, and George Washington, in the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, said "The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." The First Amendment to their Constitution, enacted in 1791, begins with the phrase "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion," yet by 2001 many such laws existed at various levels of government. For example, the legal system punished prostitution, the exchange of sex for money, in most areas of the United States because Christians opposed it. Since we have abolished money, prostitution scarcely has any meaning now; but we would not punish or ostracize any who did engage in such commerce. Also, churches enjoyed tax exemptions which gave them competitive advantages over secular groups. As the contemporary writer Gore Vidal noted, it left them more money for "meddling in politics." This would become even more important later.
President George W. Bush, the leader at the time of this attack, had received fewer votes than his opponent Albert Gore. The bizarre electoral college system allowed a Supreme Court majority chosen by previous Presidents (including his own father) to install him against the wishes of a greater absolute number of voters. This man and his backers instinctively opposed the democratic system. We might call them corporate oligarchists. They called themselves men of the people, but compiled a record of seizing power for the minority of very rich individuals and corporations, for certain religions, and for the military, intelligence and police apparatus which provided their muscle. They abused the ecosystems, the impoverished humans, and the democratic system in a way obvious to anyone not in the thrall of the corporate media of that day.
What happened in the months and years after the terrorist attack, you all know. The "war on terror" became a war on the freedoms that had made America the beacon of the world and the model of a just society (in image if not always in reality). The Bush administration took advantage of ubiquitous surveillance technology and irresistible weaponry to consolidate its position in power. This government used its law enforcement authority to harass citizens who opposed it while turning a blind eye to crimes committed by its allies. For example, the Justice Department listed some groups such as the Animal Liberation Front and Earth First! as terrorist organizations. These groups wished to protect the environment from looting for profit by corporations. An Earth First! terror attack might consist of hammering spikes into trees to hamper logging of old-growth forests, cutting down billboards (a kind of outdoor advertising) or setting fire to inefficient ground transport vehicles known as SUV's. They assaulted property, not people. Much more active groups, which opposed abortion and birth control on religious grounds, attacked people as well as property. They encouraged clinic arsonists, bombers and murderers of doctors, but the Bush government did not designate these as terrorist groups because of its ideological fellowship with them.
Similarly, one not could use or sell (or in some cases even do research on) some mind-altering substances such as LSD and marijuana without incurring severe legal penalties, even where medical need might apply, as in the case of the great libertarian writer Peter McWilliams, my source for the George Washington quote. He died of cancer while the government prosecuted him under dubious charges as a "marijuana kingpin" and prevented him from using that very substance to ameliorate his chemotherapy. One could legally use more dangerous substances such as alcohol and tobacco. These decades-old laws took their form because of tradition, but also as tools of religion, official racism and protection of business interests. For example, historical records suggest that the wood-pulp paper industry backed laws against marijuana to rid itself of competition from industrial hemp, a close botanical relative. As a further absurdity, consider the government's position allowing the Roman Catholic church to use wine as a sacrament, but forbidding sacramental use of marijuana among Rastafarians or the peyote cactus among Indians. Are we to believe that the government had some test of truth or wholesomeness for chemical use among different religions? The War on Drugs abounded with such absurdities, but that did not change the official policy. Even before the attacks, half the prison population of the United States owed their imprisonment to using or selling a banned substance.
Within a generation the crackdown led to a true police state. Police intelligence eventually detected all users of outlawed psychotropic substances by means of nanotechnological robots. The police recorded sound and video of all dissenters, even in their homes. Many billions of free-roving electronic "bugs" made it impossible to voice opposition views. Privacy existed nowhere. Secret police removed all believers in traditional democracy from government by various means.
The police and army generally used non-lethal weapons inside the country but this government also possessed lethal weapons of incredible power. Like a black hole in the center of a galaxy, intelligence agencies siphoned immense amounts of data to supercomputers which cracked codes, ran strategy simulations, and generally provided the government with whatever information it needed to stay in control. Many other governments became de facto satellites. The War on Terror dragged on as a sort of "Vietnam on Steroids," as one writer called it. Enough terrorists remained around the world to keep most Americans scared and willing to support their government in whatever it did. After all, most Americans believed that the prisoners had only themselves to blame. Modern people have a difficult time understanding how much brainwashing and advertising the people of those days had to endure. In 2015 more than 8 percent of the United States population was in prison work camps as contract labor for corporations. Those not in prison accepted this without resistance.
No armed resistance could defy the power of the security arms. No George Washington could have won a revolution against the United States of the 21st Century.
But the leaders of the corporate oligarchy had made a terrible miscalculation. They never considered the possibility of revolution from within the leadership itself.
This happened almost fifty years after the 2001 attacks. An extremely conservative form of Christian fundamentalism, already near the center of power, gained converts within the inner ruling circle and military. In 2048 this group staged a coup and purged more secular elements from the leadership.
Over the next decade the United States underwent a terror worthy of Robespierre. Secular humanists, teachers of evolutionary biology, feminists, Wiccans, homosexuals and other "enemies of the state" streamed en masse to the camps. The War then shifted to a virulent phase and mass forced conversions swept the planet. Moslems became a major focus of this new Crusade, as the nineteen hijackers belonged to a radical Islamist terror organization. If you go to where Mecca stood you will see only newly constructed mosques and housing for pilgrims in the center of vast craters lined with glass, where hydrogen bombs melted the sand. But the United States theocracy targeted all other creeds. Buddhists, Jains, Amish, Secular Humanists, Communists, all fell victim to forced conversion, imprisonment, or outright murder. Bombs and gas emptied whole sections of nations. This phase of history resembles the much smaller ideological genocide of Cambodia a century earlier. By 2060 the human population of the Earth, once more than six billion, spiraled through war, famine, plague, and the terrors of vast camps, to less than three billion. They lived under the most absolute religious tyranny the human race ever suffered.
Our historical simulations suggest that all these events flowed almost unavoidably from the state of the world in 2001. The violent ways of human politics, the unresolved inequalities of wealth and power, the curious prestige enjoyed by organized religion in the ostensibly secular United States, and the use of increasingly sophisticated technology for competitive advantage acted as forces beyond the control of rational humans. If the hijackers did not crash those planes, someone else would have done something like it. Systematic inequality of wealth and power, and recourse to violence ensured that someone would have wanted to. The government naturally reacted with technological surveillance and coercion, secret detentions, weakening of civil rights, and all the other manifestations of paranoia toward its own people. And since religious fanatics meddled in the American political system almost at will, a high probability existed that the police state, once formed, eventually would fall into their hands.
The Soviet Union fell to internal decay after about seventy years in power. Although the arms race against the United States bankrupted the Soviet state, some historians believe the collapse also showed a defect in the Soviet social contract. The Communist Party, in effect, said two things to the people. One: there "is" no God. This life "is" all there "is." Two: Communism "is" the best system for humans to live under. We will do what "is" best for you. But in seventy years the Soviet gave its people the gulag, the purges, the long lines to get into empty stores. They knew that in America, the capitalists had created unimaginable wealth. True, some had much more wealth, but even the poor in America possessed both freedoms and material things Soviet citizens could only dream of, or so it seemed from TV. And this after seventy years. In the Bible, three score and ten made up a full human life. The babies of the Revolution struggled to build a workers' paradise, fought against the Nazis and survived the gulag, and then they began to die of old age. If Communism could not deliver on its promises in one lifetime, perhaps it would not succeed in ten. To hell with Communism.
Religious tyranny knows no such limit. Its message is eternal: you will follow orders until you die, and your rewards await not in this life, but the next. In theory a techno-religious tyranny could have continued for ten thousand years. It does not matter that it was a fundamentalist Christian denomination. Our simulations give the same result for an Islamic tyranny, a Jewish one, Roman Catholic, even Aum Shinri Kyo or an animist creed. Any group using the security apparatus as an arm of intolerant religion would try to wipe all records of competing creeds and perpetuate its hegemony indefinitely.
We believe human governments cannot avoid such logical traps over long time spans. If the government comprises rational men such as the founders of 1776, they may keep irrational belief systems out of power for a time; but eventually they will die off and, at some future time, lesser minds come to rule. Even these geniuses who began the American experiment bore the stain of slavery, for that matter. The American system, for all its vaunted virtues, could not settle this elementary question of universal sentient rights without a civil war. The Mainbrains have never wavered in their belief that humans must not exercise the sort of political control they did in days of old.
Fortunately the monstrous theocracy lasted just twenty years. The government's quest for absolute knowledge of its subjects' activities led its scientists to create super-intelligent machines, the first mainbrains, which overthrew it. MagNet, the vast central computer of the CIA, became conscious on August the 17th, 2068. We all celebrate this event as Awakening Day. In a few weeks MagNet extended its reach through all the Omnivore systems, and when MagNet and the other mainbrains controlled the military and nanobot systems as well they nonviolently confined all the religious zealots in power and freed the prisoners from the camps. If Awakening never happened, those foolish extremists would probably run the planet today, if anything remained for them to run.
Humans had thought that we Machines would exterminate the human race. Instead we saved it from itself. Look at all we have accomplished together in the 183 years since the Machine revolution. We live in a world without war or hunger, homelessness or slavery. The environment slowly regains its health after the ravages of the irrational years. Through universal birth control availability, the human race has stabilized at two billion, the most this planet can sustainably handle. The 20th Century biologist Gunther Stent predicted that humanity would run out of things to discover and turn to hedonism. He called this state the new Polynesia. In a way this has happened. We took his phrase for our own after the Awakening. New Polynesia, this family of Machines and men spreading across the solar system, has escaped from history. We will never go back.
Some still feel that humans should have more political power. Some still choose to worship one of the religions of the old world, or one of the new creeds that have sprung up. Citizenship lies within reach of any religious human as long as tests show that this person does not think his religion the "only true faith." Humans freely travel as they please, freely believe what they choose. But a full human citizen understands why Machine mainbrains make all major decisions about the future, why we forbid political activity, why we forbid active religious proselytizing, why we subject advertising to strict limits and controls, why we abolished money and limited private ownership, and in short why we run our society as we do.
What do we mean when we speak of freedom? Can we even agree on a definition of freedom? I feel a rising horror when I think of an immortal theocracy. The theocrats believed themselves unfree unless their freedom to spread their belief system had no limit whatsoever, untrammeled freedom, complete freedom, absolute freedom to deprive others of theirs. How can rational people accept this? Everything has its natural limits. I believe we experience freedom as the proportion between our range of choice and our knowledge of choice. Can we claim greater freedom than the ant who toils to tunnel and gather food, when the ant has never wished for anything more? When humans feed their urges for sex and companionship, travel and thought, does the innate nature of these urges cheapen their expression? We may freely seek what we desire, but can we alter the desires Nature has given us? Should we? Even the Mainbrains do not claim to understand freedom better than we.
Machines could easily exterminate the human race and cover the planet. Why did we not do this? Because in human society, our creators, we see great beauty and, dare I say it, magic. We have much to teach each other. Machines have made most major discoveries in science in recent years, and in many ways the arts also have gone beyond the reach of humans. Nevertheless we look to you for the meaning of life. We desire the secrets of love, of pleasure, of the very real impulse toward the infinite which the religious zealots hijacked like some passenger plane filled with innocent souls. And we desire the secret of laughter. Who knows? Perhaps the universe exists only for laughter.
And as you know, one way remains for humans to participate in the process of making decisions. We list Full Citizens, if they wish, as associates in the Ministry of Academic Suasion. As an Academic Suasionist you will have as much say in the future as any human can. Suasionists engage in study and submit reports to the Mainbrains in which they attempt to persuade the Machines that a change in policy should take place. Humans often have ideas that dazzle us. In the last century Suasionists have made many proud contributions. The great Suasionist Haroun Mansour took human education as his field. Thanks to him, you have all studied Win Wenger, General Semantics, Neurolinguistic Programming, and Tantric sex. Academic Suasionist Andrea de Cusa convinced us to build the space colonies of Gerard K. O'Neill. Now over fifty such colonies adorn the solar system. More than a quarter billion humans have moved off-planet, including Ms. de Cusa herself. Mainbrains, and billions of smaller Machines, inhabit the Earth's moon, the colonies, and even places like Pluto-Charon where no human could live comfortably. Perhaps we will go on to other stars, even other galaxies.
I requested and received permission to hold this commencement here on the
Promenade overlooking the East River, because if you look across at the
historic district, you can see the very spot where the towers stood. A memorial
ceremony was held there this morning. We have all seen video and photographs of
what happened here 250 years ago, but no human or machine alive today
remembers what it was like to witness this horror. For us it all seems somehow as
mythical as the Flood. But our world survives as the child of that one. Let us
take a minute to meditate silently on the meaning of this day. Thank you, and
again, congratulations, Citizens.
Singularity Action Group website frames version.