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Why Weak Societies Choose Tyranny The pinnacle of tyranny would be a system that allows politicians, elites, and bureaucrats to control a population without force or coercion because the people love their servitude. Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, an eerily relatable dystopian novel, with this idea at the forefront. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, there is no overt oppression. The state does not have to stamp on human faces with its jackboots or erect an inescapable surveillance state. Rather, the people of Brave New World happily chain themselves with meaningless pleasure and distractions. The authorities do not rule through terror and rage, the central elements of 1984, but instead give the people everything they ever wanted. A pharmaceutical called Soma becomes the opiate of the masses. Mustapha Mond, the World Controller, likens it to Christianity without tears. While religion requires years of moral training, Soma allows citizens to achieve peace simply by swallowing tablets. It is the perfect escape from reality, a holiday from the facts. Lenina, the female counterpart to the protagonist Bernard, cannot comprehend why he refuses Soma, preferring discomfort to something that can remove it. When Bernard states, “I’d rather be myself, myself and nasty, not somebody else, however jolly,” Lenina sees this as a sort of pathology and repeatedly encourages him to take the wonder drug. Bernard explains, “I want to know what passion is.” He understands that there is more to life than merely being content, craving genuine experience, including suffering and intensity, rather than being emotionally regulated by the World State. Lenina’s bewilderment stems from her conditioning to regard unhappiness as a technical problem, encapsulated in the society’s common saying that “a gram is better than a damn.” The people of Brave New World are not captives but satisfied customers. Children are produced by the scientific state, relieving people of the responsibility of parenthood. This grants them the ability to engage in promiscuity, where everyone belongs to everyone else, while filling their free time with cheap entertainment and endless sporting events—what would be referred to as slop today. As Neil Postman observed, Orwell saw totalitarianism through the lens of fear, while Huxley saw it through pleasure. There was no need to ban a book in Brave New Worldbecause there was no one who wanted to read one. An abundance of low-quality information rendered censorship unnecessary because no one could hear the truth through all the noise. Huxley threw shade at civil libertarians who passionately opposed tyranny because they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions. Humanity in its rawest form is portrayed by John the Savage, an outsider free from the World State’s conditioning. Upon coming face-to-face with this spiritually neutered society, he completely rejects it: “I don’t want comfort, I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.” Huxley’s dystopia is not imposed on an unwilling population but instead requested by a hollow one. Which leads us to the question: How do people become so weak that they get on their knees and beg for totalitarianism? Good times make bad times possible. Once a certain level of luxury and safety is achieved, people start to resemble the hobbits from the Shire. They are so far removed from evil that they forget it even exists and become defenseless in the face of it. Andrew Lobaczewski, who studied the psychology of totalitarianism from inside Poland’s communist takeover, wrote: “During good times, people progressively lose sight of the need for profound reflection. They lose the capacity to differentiate human nature, and emotion begins to dominate intellect. Once a critical mass starts operating on the pleasure principle, any excess mental effort seems like pointless labor.” Lobaczewski warned that it is not as simple as some people losing the ability to think rationally. It is worse, because those people then shame anyone capable of doing so. A clever, liberal, and merry individual is a good sport. A more far-sighted person predicting dire results becomes a wet blanket, a killjoy. The ability to have uncomfortable conversations without emotion taking over is, in Lobaczewski’s view, an indicator of whether a society’s future will be good or bad. It is easier to think about pleasant things. This leads people to eliminate any data or facts that cause them discomfort. That becomes a habit and eventually a custom accepted by society at large. Once the general populace accepts that inconvenient truths should be left unsaid, it becomes incapable of reaching correct conclusions. After all, how could you ever describe a picture that you refuse to look at? “Catastrophe waits in the wings of the communities that lose the capacity for psychological reason and moral criticism,” Lobaczewski wrote. “It is on the other side of this weakening of thought that the processes of the generation of evil are intensified at every social scale until they give rise to bad times.” It is precisely man’s dreams of happiness that can lead to chaos and suffering. This hedonistic view of happiness contains the seeds of misery, feeding the eternal cycle whereby good times give birth to bad times. Friedrich Nietzsche viewed socialism as demanding comfort for the greatest number of people possible. To question whether it is good for the masses to live in comfort has become a form of heresy. This reveals the spiritual atrophy that so many suffer from. Considering only the weak believe comfort to be a virtue, it is what Carl Jung would describe as the infantile dream state of mass dependency: the desire to gently slip back into the kingdom of childhood, into the paradise of parental care. Except this lack of friction has consequences. The perfect state destroys the soil in which great intellect grows. Genius, struggle, passion, strength, and wisdom are required to build a safe and abundant society. Yet once a certain level of comfort is achieved, it can destroy the very virtues required to obtain it. Nietzsche observed that it is the warmest heart that aims to alleviate suffering and hardship but fails to realize that it thereby wills the destruction of its own foundation. Comfort breeds mediocrity, which is then called good. Small people want one thing above all: that no one hurt them. We have taken this pathology to such a degree that we now obsess over hurt feelings and call this virtue. Pleasure, in its proper place, is a byproduct of meaningful goals, not a goal in itself. Aristotle saw that pleasure and comfort distort perception and proper judgment. While they do not cause us to misjudge something like geometry or mathematics, they can destroy our ability to decide what is worth pursuing and, therefore, what to do. Consider The Odyssey. Homer depicts Odysseus’ men on the island of the Lotus-Eaters, where they taste the fruit and lose all desire to go home. Much like Huxley’s Brave New World, they are not imprisoned. Rather, they simply stop wanting anything more. Odysseus has to drag his men back to the ships while they weep to stay. This is what comfort can do to men. It empties them of purpose. We intuitively understand this but fail to apply it to our own lives. We must make the same choice as Odysseus when he refuses Calypso’s offer of endless comfort and immortality. He knows she is more beautiful than his wife Penelope waiting at home. He knows that he and Penelope will grow old and die, a fate he could avoid by staying with Calypso. No one who reads these stories wishes he had stayed. We want him to choose the hard way home because if he took the offer, he would stop being admirable. Yet staying is exactly what our modern society asks of us. We are told that the island is the good life. But what happens to the man who caves to this temptation? In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche imagines a risk-averse society taken to its logical endpoint. The elimination of all struggle produces a man so diminished that he fails to possess even self-contempt or higher aspiration. Safety and sameness become the highest goals, creating “no shepherd in one herd.” Anyone who seeks to be anything more than normal becomes an aberration to be dealt with. Or, as Nietzsche puts it, they have “made the wolf a dog in man himself, man’s best domestic animal.”

Physicists may have made a huge mistake when they introduced dark energy. That is what a team of mathematicians say after looking at the equations. Because they find that, actually, it’s unnecessary. If they are right, that would be the ultimate embarrassment for physicists. https://t.co/ZyhAaFDHa3 #DarkEnergy #Physics #Mathematics #Therearenospecificcountrymentionsintheprovidedtweet.Therefore #therearenocountrycodestoreturn.

What if the graph of a linear function started with ants crossing a beach? 🐜🏖️ Instead of telling children, “Vacation is over. Pay attention — today we start with formulas and graphs,” imagine following the paths of a few ants across the sand. One ant walks steadily in one direction. Another starts farther away. Their trails become lines. Their starting points and directions begin to matter. And suddenly, y=ax+b is no longer just a formula on the board — it describes a journey. Maybe mathematics works better when curiosity comes before notation. #math #LinearFunction #MathForKids #MathEducation #Graphs #Learning #Curiosity #BackToSchool #ChildPsychology #LearningMotivation #EverydayMath #DiscoveryLearning #20260820 #MrNumberwise #20260821 #0013 #MrNumberwise #English

If doctors would try to establish laws to exclude AI from curing disease, society would resist, because doctors are funded to cure disease. We don't want to have more disease for the benefit of doctors. I believe the same applies to mathematics https://t.co/uShyy5ELhq #AI #Medicine #Healthcare #Nospecificcountrycodesarementionedinthetweet.

Spain's educational divide isn't just economic — A modern polygenic score for educational attainment predicts regional mathematics performance across three independent cohorts, from primary school to PISA 2022 By @davidepiffer https://t.co/y0r6vmO6i8 #Education #Spain #PISA2022 #ES #IT

BG: Днес беше публикувана темата за Денят на математиката 2027! Темата е: Математика, изкуствен интелект и нашето бъдеще Дали дойде времето, когато учениците ще виждат изкуственият интелект като продължение на математиката? EN: The theme for Math Day 2027 was released today! The theme is: Mathematics, Artificial Intelligence and Our Future Has the time come when students will see artificial intelligence as an extension of mathematics? https://www.idm314.org/#theme

In the latest episode of The Econoclasts, Wolfgang Munchau and I talk AI - except not the usual bad-good manner. Wolfgang kicks off by sharing his astonishment at AI's recent success in proving a mathematical theorem that had hitherto defeated the brightest mathematicians - and #AI #Mathematics #Econoclasts #Thetweetdoesnotmentionanyspecificcountries.Therefore #therearenocountrycodestoreturn.

Een groep van zestien wiskundigen roept in de Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics op tot actie om de kernwaarden van de wiskunde te beschermen tegen de invloeden van grote technologiebedrijven, die mogelijk de onderzoeksagenda kunnen bepalen en de afhankelijkheid van AI-resultaten kunnen vergroten, wat risico's met zich meebrengt voor de betrouwbaarheid van wiskundige bijdragen. #AI #Wiskunde #LeidenDeclaratie

Een groep prominente wiskundigen heeft de 'Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics' geïnitieerd om de gevaren van AI in de wiskunde aan te kaarten, met name de afhankelijkheid van commerciële AI-programma's en het gebrek aan transparantie over hun werkwijzen, wat leidt tot onbetrouwbare resultaten en mogelijke ongelijkheid onder onderzoekers. #AI #Wiskunde #LeidenDeclaration

Liam Price, un giovane di 23 anni senza formazione scientifica avanzata, ha utilizzato ChatGPT per dimostrare una complessa congettura di Paul Erdős, riuscendo così dove i matematici esperti avevano fallito per sessant'anni, il tutto grazie a un approccio innovativo che ha evitato le linee di pensiero convenzionali. #Mathematics #AI #ErdosConjecture

MIT has launched MathNet, a comprehensive public database containing over 30,000 verified problems and solutions from international mathematics competitions in 17 languages, aimed at democratizing access to high-level mathematical exercises and assessing the capabilities of advanced AI models in solving complex mathematical challenges. #Mathematics #Education #AI #US #BR

A 24-year-old mathematics teacher in San Antonio, Valparaíso Region, has been arrested and charged with sexual abuse after allegedly sending a student numerous "highly obscene" videos and photos and engaging in sexual conversations with her since last year, as reported by local media. #SexualAbuse #Education #LegalSystem

MIC DROP: Rep. @WesleyHuntTX FIRES BACK at Gavin Newsom’s “I’m like you” 960 SAT remark to a room full of Black voters. “Gavin, you’re not like me. I studied my butt off to get here!” “Under no circumstances are you going to just belittle us by assuming that all Black people have a 960 SAT and we could barely read.” “I had parents who believed in education. We had a sign in our house that said, ‘Jesus + education equals success.’” “There’s a reason why I earned three master’s degrees in four years from Cornell University. My brother is a Harvard Business School graduate. My sister has her master’s degree in Applied Mathematics. She was a West Point instructor while both my brother and I were cadets, and WE WERE BLACK doing it the entire time.” “And so when you say that I can’t read and I have a 960 SAT, the insinuation that you are putting on all Black people is that we are a monolith, that this is how you view us.” “I call it the soft bigotry of low expectations.” “I think about Hillary Clinton carrying hot sauce in her purse. I think about Joe Biden saying, ‘If you don’t vote for me, then you ain’t Black.’ I think about Kathy Hochul talking about ‘Black kids don’t even know what a computer is.’ And I see these kinds of things, and I just shake my head.” “I worked my butt off to get here. Hard work, grit, determination, and I’m standing on my own two feet as a Black man that represents a white majority district that President Trump would have won by 20 points, and I won by 25 points because I’m being judged not by the color of my skin, but by the content of my character.” -