The Wayward Axolotl

Recently an ancapitard was commenting on my blog. I had thought that ancapism (anarcho-capitalism) died out back in 2015, replaced by the alt-right and other ideologies, but apparently a few ancapitards still lurk in dark corners of the interweb, blabbering about universally preferable behavior and argumentation ethics and other nonsense that I thought only existed as throwback memes. (No, I'm not appealing to novelty. I'm just pointing out that ideologies have life-cycles and ancapism is a dying ideology.) I've already refuted anarcho-capitalism completely ( here ), so there's no point revisiting that. But I thought it would be interesting to compare ancapism to other ideological movements, in terms of memetics and psychology. So, that's what I'm going to do. In advance, I should say that not all ancapitards are as bad as the caricature I'm going to present. However, the caricature is generally true. For some, it doesn't go far enough. Okay, let...

“Immanentizing the eschaton” means to bring about the state of heaven on earth: to transcend the ordinary state of the world and bring about a divine, final state. The eschaton is a religious version of “the end of history”. Political and religious movements often aspire to bring history to an ultimate fulfillment in some kind of utopia that transcends the ordinary conditions of life. Humanism, the successor religion to Christianity in the West, has its own version of the eschaton. Humanism transfers divinity from God to humanity. The omniscience of God is transferred to humanity as faith in reason and science. The omnipotence of God is transferred to humanity as faith in technology and progress. The benevolence and moral authority of God is transferred to humanity as faith in human compassion, empathy and altruism. The eschaton of humanism is the full actualization of the human potential for knowledge, power and goodness. Because they situate divinity in human nature, human...

This is a critical analysis of the ideas in The Revolutionary Phenotype by J.F. Gariepy. All quotes are from his book. Before I get into the details, here is the TLDR version: the book is a tangled mess of errors and nonsense. The book is based on the concept of a “phenotypic revolution”. This idea comes from a theory (not JF’s) that DNA-based life evolved from RNA-based life. This is speculative but plausible, and I think it’s probably true. JF views the evolution of DNA-based life from RNA-based life as a “phenotypic revolution”: an event in which part of the phenotype (DNA) became the genotype, and the former genotype (RNA) became part of the phenotype. He then extrapolates from this view to a dire warning: that using technology to edit genes will lead to another phenotypic revolution, in which certain technologies that are currently part of the human extended phenotype will become the genotype, and human beings will become part of the phenotype of machines. JF describes the out...

Why do we die? One reason is entropy. Our bodies accumulate damage over time. The damage is not just to physical structures, but also to the genetic information stored in our cells. Over time, we gradually lose ourselves. Youth is beautiful because it better reflects the ideal form of the body. As we get older, our bodies and cells degrade away from their ideal forms. Even though our bodies and cells have many mechanisms to resist entropy and maintain their forms, entropy slowly increases. Eventually, this leads to death. The other reason is evolution. Most of the damage to our cells is purely destructive and simply makes them less functional. Occasionally, however, a cell is damaged in a way that makes it reproduce freely within the body. You could say that it reverts back to being a single-celled organism. Instead of carrying out its function within the body, it reproduces freely, generating many descendants by mitosis. These cells act like selfish reproducers at the cell lev...