Internet is stupid

The telephone system is very intelligent. At all times knows who is calling whom, where and when moving data or voice. The Internet is stupid, but he knows one thing: this bunch of bits needs to move from one end of the Net. Stupidity is stubborn. If a router (the device that distributes network traffic) is broken, the data packets are deviated on an alternative route and the network is working anyway. Thanks to his stupidity Internet accepts new devices and people, then spreads quickly.

If you optimize a network for one type of application, it will be the worse for others.

The value grows on its edges.

If the Internet was an intelligent network, its designers had envisaged the creation of good search engines in his structure. On the contrary, intelligent web designers have created a network rather stupid. Intentionally. The search services can be built and delivered by any of thousands of extreme nodes of the network, offering, to a wide range of users, to spark tremendous innovations.

This excerpt of the article (I cannot remember the author) on the stupidity of the internet, created by intelligent design so that it can be developed and improved by anyone, makes me to reflect about religion and God and religion. They are the inventions that have had more success in the history of humanity, because affordable to everyone (some would say in everyone). This is easily intelligible (from the perspective of the atheist) because, instead of a single intelligent design, it is a projection of individual fears. Man is born as a snail and only when he acquires consciousness of his being “soft”, he builds for himself a nice, protective shell.

Objection: but the man is so fundamentally stupid, that got to do the intelligent designers? And in fact have nothing to do. The God’s creation is an instinctive thing that can be compared to the curl at the sight of danger. What I wonder, however, is whether the stupidity of man can be a proof of a superior intelligence. The man may have been created intentionally stupid, especially “soft” (malleable would be more appropriate). On the reasons of this tenderness we could discuss. A believer sees us certainly a purpose to “spiritual journey”, to improve themselves, to reach maturity, losing the skin to access to the Nirvana, as an unbreakable core. Instead, I see in this self-construction a “domestication”, and certainly not by a metaphysical entity.

[italian version]

Jesus Christ is very Nice

Morality for physicians. — The sick man is a parasite of society. In a certain state it is indecent to live longer. To go on vegetating in cowardly dependence on physicians and machinations, after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost, that ought to prompt a profound contempt in society. The physicians, in turn, would have to be the mediators of this contempt — not prescriptions, but every day a new dose of nausea with their patients. To create a new responsibility, that of the physician, for all cases in which the highest interest of life, of ascending life, demands the most inconsiderate pushing down and aside of degenerating life — for example, for the right of procreation, for the right to be born, for the right to live.

To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death freely chosen, death at the right time, brightly and cheerfully accomplished amid children and witnesses: then a real farewell is still possible, as the one who is taking leave is still there; also a real estimate of what one has achieved and what one has wished, drawing the sum of one’s life — all in opposition to the wretched and revolting comedy that Christianity has made of the hour of death. One should never forget that Christianity has exploited the weakness of the dying for a rape of the conscience; and the manner of death itself, for value judgments about man and the past.

Here it is important to defy all the cowardices of prejudice and to establish, above all, the real, that is, the physiological, appreciation of so-called natural death — which is in the end also “unnatural,” a kind of suicide. One never perishes through anybody but oneself. But usually it is death under the most contemptible conditions, an unfree death, death not at the right time, a coward’s death. From love of life, one should desire a different death: free, conscious, without accident, without ambush.

Finally, some advice for our dear pessimists and other decadents. It is not in our hands to prevent our birth; but we can correct this mistake — for in some cases it is a mistake. When one does away with oneself, one does the most estimable thing possible: one almost earns the right to live. Society — what am I saying? — life itself derives more advantage from this than from any “life” of renunciation, anemia, and other virtues: one has liberated the others from one’s sight; one has liberated life from an objection. Pessimism, pur, vert, is proved only by the self-refutation of our dear pessimists: one must advance a step further in its logic and not only negate life with “will and representation,” as Schopenhauer did — one must first of all negate Schopenhauer. Incidentally, however contagious pessimism is, it still does not increase the sickliness of an age, of a generation as a whole: it is an expression of this sickliness. One falls victim to it as one falls victim to cholera: one has to be morbid enough in one’s whole predisposition. Pessimism itself does not create a single decadent more; I recall the statistics which show that the years in which cholera rages do not differ from other years in the total number of deaths.

From Twilight of the idols – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.

This extract is highly symbolic of the polemical writings of Nietzsche. However, I think we should make an effort and go beyond the warlike intentions of the philosopher, to achieve a calm analysis of the message contained in it, that is, in my opinion, intimately and deeply Christian.

Who, if not the Christ, does embody the concept of the Ubermensch? Christ is the one who chooses to die while having the possibility of preventing death. Christ is the one that is free from the yoke of his father-master. He died by the will of men to respect the choice of men, abandoned by his father to his fate, because with this gesture He wanted to establish the supremacy of consciousness about life and the needs of the child to be released from the possession of those who created him.

If God is our father and we his children, then God tells us, through the sacrifice of Christ, that we can and must do without him, as is evident in observing the evolution of life in all its forms. The man who relies on her father’s will is not a man. He is a child, an individual who refuses their responsibilities, that rejects the right and duty to choose for themselves what is good and evil, according to the conscience, according to his, strictly personal conscience.

[italian version]