Character

09:43 Sunday, 19 July 2026
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Words: 692

I watch a lot of YouTube videos. That's probably not something to be proud of.

When I was single, I could sit down and spend a couple of hours writing a blog post. That was mostly in the Groundhog Day era. Today I'm lucky if I get 45 minutes. And it bugs me because I feel like I have something important to say, but I can't make the time to say it.

Hopefully that'll change once the new house is done and I'll have the "Dave Cave."

Anyway, AI came up again at the Tinderbox meetup. The first half was a worthwhile exploration of the Attribute Browser; but the host had kind of given people in the forum a reading assignment about AI and that was about the last third of the meetup.

I wasn't planning on saying anything, but I got called on.

I don't really have a strong opinion about AI. That feels like the right position to have, because it seems like we're surrounded by people with strong opinions about AI, which suggests to me that nobody knows anything. It's impossible to have a nuanced discussion because everyone already comes to it with a set of fixed notions that they just want to argue about.

AI doesn't scare me. If AI is an existential threat to humanity or civilization, tell it to take a number. We have plenty of those confronting us already, and it isn't clear to me at all that AI is of greater magnitude than any of the others.

What scares me is climate change, extreme wealth inequality, rising authoritarianism, ignorance, and disease.

And all those threats are the products of our culture, society and economy. "We have met the enemy, and they is us," as Pogo said.

The seeds of our destruction were sown long, long ago. The fatal flaws of our civilization are not seen as flaws. Indeed, they are regarded as the pillars of our success. Capitalism, competition and individual liberty divorced from responsibility.

We delude ourselves about the things we supposedly value. You can tell what a culture values by what it teaches its young. We teach ours the minimal skills necessary to be a functioning member of the economy, chiefly as consumers.

We don't teach values. We don't teach morals. We don't teach ethics.

We impose rules, and that's not the same as teaching.

We don't teach those things because we do not value those things. We do not value them because they offer no way to compete, no opportunity to monetize, no way to achieve status or rank in the hierarchy. Indeed, ethics, morals and values all serve to impede those goals in a culture based on competition.

Our children learn from the screens they peer into every day. They learn from watching their parents.

Capitalism, competition and individual liberty divorced from responsibility do not build character. It is no surprise we have a transactional, hedonistic, meaningless culture.

It is no surprise that Donald Trump is our president, that we are confronting existential challenges from the climate consequences of our industrial society, which is driven mainly by consumerism and waste. They are the logical outcomes of a culture, society and economy that are devoid of human values.

It is probably too late to save this civilization. Perhaps it is not too late to record the lessons of its collapse, so that whatever follows can avoid them. One advantage that whatever follows will have is that it will not have the enormous quantities of fossil fuels to supply the energy that accelerated our errors and masked our mistakes.

Anyway, back to YouTube and character. I watched a video that included a conversation between Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark and David French, ostensibly about character. I have a lot of problems with David French, and I'm not certain about the nature of his character.

Next I listened to an interview with John Bolton. He's a despicable human being. No one should take so much pride in their bloody-mindedness.

Finally, and thankfully, I watched an interview with retired general Stanley McChrystal.

If you think character matters, it's worth watching the whole thing.

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