Daedalus: The Ghastly Mission Against Human Living and Intelligent Death of Us Instead

Daedalus signifies not only the power of invention but a dark complex which offends human dignity involving scientific perversion and distortion in humans and scientists.

Greek Myth Rising, Humanity Sinking Under a Death-Cult

William Stead was full of trepidation embarking on the Titanic. The powerful dynamos in its labyrinthine engineering would keep the lights on until it went down. He would have reflected on the hubris of the name associated with ancient Greece. His spiritual sense anticipated a disaster he had foreseen much earlier when he wrote about a liner sinking. But he also anticipated a curious complex of our contemporary world in his thinking about Daedalus. He had used the story years before to help begin to explain how he had bought a 13 year old girl in London. The recurrent relevance of the ancient story and revelatory potential remains today.

Accidents happen. But the risk of accidents increases when we engage in risky activity. The enterprise of techno-science involves great risk. But it is more. There is a death culture and death cult associated with the New World Order. There is death to religion, the nation state and the family. That is their policy. We can talk about unintended consequences but many are not accurately so described. We are too willing to find a mistake when a deliberate policy was being pursued. The death-cult translates medical hygienism into a plethora of policies from abortion to euthanasia. They inevitably expand until the alleged choice becomes compulsion as AI will take over the functions that life formerly controlled. It depends on transmuting scientific know-how into devastating weapons and de-stabilising policies dependent thereon. The dealt-cult is presented in a campaign of population control and posthumanism. It always seems to invert and pervert religious symbolism, particularly about the Virgin Mary. Of course it is a coincidence that Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) has such an acronym. The new God was identified with the dynamo over a century ago to replace the Virgin as dominant.

We have come to a fragmented worldview which fails to appreciate the consistency of certain themes from old times. When scientists and scientific philosophers state as if scientific fact that no God exists and hence you are not special, nor other humans (apart from intelligent scientists) and that you cannot comprehend the world, have no inherent dignity, do not reflect God and a pure accident whose future and descendants should be manged by their ilk, don’t let it go so easily. If you do, your species may follow. When you hear of terrible things and human depravity that techno-science seems removed from, bear in mind that ancient wisdom plants them in the thick of it in numerous ways. Indeed much depravity comes not from the non-existence of God but the non-existence of acceptance of objective value and moral responsibility as real.

While I read lurid reports of what the nuns in Ireland have supposedly done decades ago, without much reference to reliable reports and no nuance, I hear very little of the contemporary and remarkable disappearance of children from state control and responsibility according to reliable reports . The sense of horror about the past is curiously absent in relation to the contemporary context. Likewise the joy with mass immigration conceals a frightening opportunity for the dark forces of trafficking that many journalists studiously ignore as they concentrate on condemning people not celebrating the inevitable cultural enrichment. The red tape of the administrative state that played a big role in the Irish Famine, mass deaths and emigration contributed to the English ghettoes. In both historic and contemporary cases the failure of the state civil service to children has been ignored and those institutions have managed to avoid appropriate moral censure. Yet state capacity for concealment and strange association with nefarious practices was made clear in the UK in the Jimmy Savile saga. The Church has taken the brunt and this furthers the power of scientific hegemony juxtaposed clearly against supposed evil superstition. Stead would wonder how far we had come. But he would also know that this modern manifestation of psychic truth is an old theme. Just like the theme of abandonment of babies from Romulus, Remus and Moses to the Foundling Hospital in London, there is nothing new under the sun. He would know that the super-modern ship we have got on had a dark destination and the ancients warned us about the steersmen. We are embarking on the care of a cybernetic Charon convinced of inevitable success of an ostensibly cleaner futuristic vision, even if we do not see the crimson sea below us. Great heroes of this new world, new age like Christopher Hitchens shared the view of his (since reformed) brother Peter initially that they and their comrades were prepared to sail through a sea of blood to get to their promised land. A promised island might also have worked for other cosmopolitan atheistic materialist luvvies. The national administrative state are dummies and dolls for transnational corporate power and we are being played.

The Inventively Transgressive Spirit of Daedalus

Daedalus is a master of technique that is inherently transgressive.

We tend to see Greek mythological figures in simple terms without paying attention to the archetypes and their shadow at times. Perhaps far removed they do not seem real. However these stories today would reflect a different dimension lost in familiarity. Similarly we regard scientists as benign and the emerging globetechgov, tech-bros billionaires, the ‘broligarchy’ or the ‘controligarchy’ as admirable for supposed unique ingenuity, even if they are figureheads at times for intelligence networks. Scientific shadow is often long and dark behind benign masks. We miss the warning especially because science has become inherently transgressive and dismissive of the divine for its own ingenuity, secrecy, sorcery and belief in a final technical solution and scientific soteriology.

Tech-transgression, tech-hubris and tech-theology as teleology are an old preoccupations. The engineer has often been like the sorcerer, the servant of power. Technique is prized in war and military contexts. The engineer can be patriotic in times of conflict in the service of the state but the practises persist beyond. Invention occurs and must occur in a context of secrecy, cryptic and the occult or hidden. Mangling military men was an art form attached to dynamos and conveyor belts that never stopped. The intelligence engaged in the alchemy of armaments, often linked to efforts to communicate with celestial beings and fascination with the stars and heavens. The intelligencers were clandestine, networked and opportunistic. The divine will is either forced into a background role or ignored in a self-deluding story of the need to explore and exploit the unfolding revelation of control through learning the sacred book of nature. An apparent consistent trend of rejection of authority, religion and restraint in favour of demonstrable power can create space for an immoral and amoral mentality that is demonic at times. But the administrative state technician can always compartmentalise their mentality and compound their conscience to justify their involvement in the instrumentality of power. How else can we explain the US embrace of Nazi scientists? Nazi to Nasa was not a great hop and one ghastly mission could become another mission-control system. They could be part of the nucleus to escape planetary devastation they know their ilk will create, just like Daedalus escaping by flight. That was part of the plan a century ago. It is nothing to do with ennobling your life in a great exploration of the heavens like contemporary atheistic scientists are suggesting as their tech-world helps nature collapse.

Science, technique and technology often involve clandestine and confidential activity, especially in intelligence contexts that invite a penumbra of non-inventors who understand the leverage and strategic importance of ingenuity. Even if the domain of investigation or technique is not transgressive or taboo, the half-light around its focus will attract dark entrepreneurs. The celebrated Mechanical Turk showed how the appearance of hi-tech can cross an uncanny valley if an apparatus of conceit is constructed. It also allows a path for a Faustian descent for a transgressive technician to operate in the shadows. The penumbra involves people giving hospitality to make you fit their moral universe like Procrustes or trapping you in nets like that made by Loki which traps himself.

Explicit use by transhumanists and posthumanists of Daedalus is related to the end of humanity as we know it. He was known primarily as a craftsman and inventor, employed by King Minos, associated with a labyrinth and making wings to escape. In the labyrinth was a Minotaur, a mixture of bull and human prefiguring contemporary hybrid obsessions. In escape humans got artificial wings like a human-bird mixture, or a cyborg. Daedalus gets paid to conceal and people get lost, make inventions that have casualties, produce monsters and was deadly envious.

I often use Prometheus as the figurehead for the Empire of Scientism and atheistic materialism because that is what many players have explicitly used. The name comes up again and again for intelligence-tech companies in reinforcement of his significance. But another constant inspiration for scientists has been Daedalus, the great artificer. He comes from mythology through certain contexts that may have had some historical parallels. The story depends on its relating and what is stressed. His ingenuity and inventiveness is consistent. But in one aspect he is an envious potential murderer. Daedalus is ambiguous though influential as the potential craftsman of power. But all such creatives are. Subsequent empires approve of ancient Greek and imperial powers. He built the labyrinth for the authority which symbolised control. But he escaped when the winds of approval shifted. Some theorists like Daedalus because he worked within the system. However I suggest this recent reading may mix the shadow of Daedalus with shadow of Prometheus. Many transhumanist and posthumanists are aware they are challenging a deeper order or logos. That they would want to assuage their own lingering doubts might help explain this finger pointing to the actual heavens and Daedalus and not any old concept of God. Daedalus is a name often used in the context of space exploration as well as computing. Norbert Weiner notes him as the artificer associated with replicating living figures.

When artists consistently make reference to a story, it generally suggests a rich source of archetypes reflecting something within our conscious and unconscious. As an artificer and creator, Daedalus encapsulates conflicts in the artistic journey. That was why great painters like Rubens, Pieter Breughel, Anthony van Dyck and Frederic Leighton painted the story. Picasso focused on the Minotaur. Many films have used the myth and key elements of the famed tale. Writers often focus on aspects of Daedalus, none more so than James Joyce. Daedalus escaped from circumstances of constraint. He facilitates Icarus carefully, warns him but still loses him. Daedalus informs his work and represented Joyce’s authorial voice. Inspired by Ovid’s version Joyce reflects the innovative disposition of Daedalus. But the creative and transgressive attitude has a cost.

He is linked with automatons and robots and some see the modern Daedalus in Musk, Steve Jobs or Leonardo da Vinci. Companies in the domain use the mythology of Daedalus and pimped-up ideas of the labyrinth as a system of knowledge and so on. Posthumanist suggestion that Daedalus may be a better model than Prometheus is because of his ability to have losses of people, be associated with power whilst appearing to rebel against it and understand movement with certain biological inventions from perversion to acceptance.

In the myth, we have the strange story of a bull and the wife of the King of Minos which leads to the Minotaur with a Frankenstein genetic-engineering precursor. But the Minotaur is a curse, a trick or punishment of the gods for an insufficient sacrifice. Robots inevitably show teleology of technology denying revelation of God-in-the-human for being-by-the-human-created instead which seems to justify an initial rejection of God or constraining power. The Minotaur could be made and contained by intelligence.

The Dark Labyrinth of Complexity and Regulation

The people who create the risk through technique then make labyrinths or the need therefor.

The idea of the labyrinth as fun and symbolising spiritual progression hides a dark side. The labyrinth represents an accurate description of a Kafkaesque system of governance incomprehensibility masquerading as rational administration. It symbolises the gross architecture today of regulatory complexity made deliberately impenetrable and inaccessible today by transnational legal firms calculated to create a global system. An actual labyrinth may represent the complex and cryptic topography of programming and algorithmic governance necessary to contain horrors the system creates while compelling the community to its wider control. Labyrinth is technique of governance and control. Follow the AI-governance saga and see the pattern or read AI-Govnerveance.

William Stead is regarded as the father of investigative journalism. He predicted mass-death due to lack of lifeboats on big steamers, that he would die by drowning and he went down with the Titanic. William Thomas Stead wrote about the shadow-side of the imperial, most scientific capital of empire in London. He wanted to demonstrate the horrific process of procurement of girls in the city through an actual purchase and he did. The connection with the Daedalian disposition was very deliberate. A celebrated essay The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon by William Thomas Stead in 1885 saw parallels.

“The fact that the Athenians should have taken so bitterly to heart the paltry maiden tribute that once in nine years they had to pay to the Minotaur seems incredible, almost inconceivable. This very night in London, and every night, year in and year out, not seven maidens only, but many times seven, selected almost as much by chance as those who in the Athenian market-place drew lots as to which should be flung into the Cretan labyrinth, will be offered up as the Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.”

We have MAIDen tributes still. Stead was pointing to the deeper meaning in the myth whereby the complex of ingenuity necessitated another context of existence wherein the by-products of our recklessness would create perversions. The great empire cast a dark shadow and the heart of darkness was at its centre.

The occult, hidden side of progress also involves a very dark side to scientism. Islands, scientific experimentation, transhumanism, robotics, abuse and so on echo in other mad scientist, magician, and rich man ideas. We see it from Shakespeare’s Prospero and John Dee, to Wells and Dr. Moreau to Ian Fleming’s Dr. No to Epstein. The brave new world came from the context of Prospero.

The Babylon reference also indicates a peculiar preoccupation which exists in the British imperial, esoteric and engineering elite which continued into the age of satellite communications and AI. Aleister Crowley has Babylon back as a goddess, Babalon, and other magicians like Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard sought to summon her. Parsons as a pioneer in rockets has some parallels with Daedalus.

There are also enclaves in the Caribbean and elsewhere securing regulatory independence to allow experiments. Interestingly one is named Próspera on the island of Roatán, Honduras. Experiments in the Caribbean also include psychedelic experimentation for a different type of internal flying in the mind labyrinths.

Explicit use by transhumanists and posthumanists of Daedalus is related to the end of humanity as we know it. Daedalus gets paid to help people get lost, makes inventions that have casualties and is envious. I do not say that all edgy experimentation involves nefarious activity but the tropes are recurrent and consistent.

Francis Bacon wrote about Prometheus and Daedalus with maybe more caution than modern writers. The reason for his caution however may have been his desire to keep power close to power. The revelation of secret conspiracies through crypto-analysis had been useful to reveal Catholic plots. Secret writing helped with secret codes and unlocking the codes of nature with tables of information that helped induction and perhaps could even be done by machines in the future. His conception of an Atlantean concentration of secret scientific actors anticipates the modern techno-scientific managerialism that characterises the transnational corporate class.

Bacon reveals a keen sense of the fable of Daedalus. He explains that Daedalus was a genius of bad character. We forget the murder or attempted murder committed by Daedalus out of envy in the beginning. One thinks of Caravaggio. Bacon suggests the ancients were pointing to ingenuity and its dangers. He did public jobs and made adornments that worshipped the gods but he provided the machine which enabled Pasiphae ‘to satisfy her passion for the bull’ that led to the Minotaur that devoured the youth. This was really a result of the gods being offended already. Thus the operation of ingenuity is causally linked with damage. This seems to contradict the rosy synopsis of some more recent scientists.

Bacon suggests that the ancients were really pointing to something deeply wrong in Daedalus. Whilst many talk about Daedalus and unintended consequences, the truth is about consequences from risky action which are foreseeable even if the exact unfolding is not.

AI is intelligence that is artificial and hence clearly a product of artifice and the spirit of the great artificer that is part of the great architecture of control. Thus the ingenuity is really one of control as a replacement to a divine system based on free will where choices are not compelled by channels constructed artificially.

The work of Daedalus is always linked ultimately to governance.

Haldane: Daedalus the Death of Us

But since then the arguments for caution dwindled somewhat in the writings of scientists perhaps because they had in effect constructed systems analogous to Salomons’ House through various intelligence networks. The public-private cooperation was operationalised in power nodes beyond democratic control.

J.D.S. Haldane is the most significant user of the Daedalus story in the last century. Haldane wrote Daedalus; or, Science and the Future, which was part of a change in mind-set of the old empire itself.

Haldane was clear that we should not take traditional morals too seriously. Such thinkers rejected religion and constraints on their power. It seems that they embraced their Frankenstein,

“The scientific worker of the future will more and more resemble the lonely figure of Daedalus as he becomes conscious of his ghastly mission and proud of it.”

The ghastly mission was the engineering of biology without any moral constraints based on some implied mythological licence. He seemed to think that Daedalus escaped punishment of the gods. Therefore the scientist may escape the wrath of the gods they do not believe in, unlike Prometheus. Haldane chose Daedalus over Prometheus. That attitude continued in the scientific-New Atheist religious fundamentalism that Dawkins personified.

Haldane foresaw the need to adjust morality to power. This generally meant abandoning it to scientists. He saw science as the principal determinist in our future. That future is probably tragic from the magic of science. Morality appears to contract. Haldane repeats the imperial sense from which he speaks. Science will conquer nature and humankind. It will conquer the dark side of us.

It is evident from his other writing that we will veer towards an inevitable posthuman future adapting our physical constitution to suit the dreams of scientists. The preoccupations of Haldane are echoed in or inform Aldous Huxley, J.D. Bernal and the 1920’s British scientists and their emerging critics.

The idea that Daedalus escaped moral or divine consequences when the story is laden with the idea of consequences of invention is ironic in one way. Hanging up his tools may have been wise. But ghosts and unintended consequence might trouble his sleep. Yet his followers like Haldane have no trouble with that. They focus on opportunity rather than consequences and do talk like Prometheus though wanting to avoid the consequences. It is closing the door after the horse and bolted, leaving the lab after the virus has leaked, giving up inventions when you get your thermonuclear devices, retiring to tinker after releasing AI you say is more powerful than you realised. Rather there seems to be a pathological imperial scientism that readily embraces not just risk but recklessness and downright inescapable danger. It derives satisfaction from the power of control of dangers it unleashes and smirkingly nominates itself as sole possible saviour as potential to wreck our world increases.

Even if behind the benign mask is benevolence, the best we can hope for as revealed in the words of scientists is that they determine our evolution in the ‘Filterworld’ of a filthy world they have created with their neo-mechanophilia. Thinkers like Wells, Haldane, Bernal and Julian Huxley invented the New World conception that mutated through the Atlanticist Promethean space. Daedalus was an important part of that, and he will be the death of us as we knew ourselves while we still could know who we were. When Geoffrey Hinton and others articulate the arguments for new world governance by intelligent people he is more articulating an old policy. Scientocracy and tech-totalitarianism are the future progress brings us with a left and right double combination from the Combination or Complex of the transnational intelligentism embedded in corporations created from the compost of military adventurism claiming the mantle of old empires and nations through notional empiricism.

If you do not believe the general idea about the demise of humans and humanity because of the worship of the artificial technique of a great artificer watch how euthanasia becomes more and more a question of the optimum technique of death and timing thereof ironically as a lifestyle choice rather than one related to ideas of the divine. Stead wrote,

“The maw of the London Minotaur is insatiable, and none that go into the secret recesses of his lair return again. After some years' dolorous wandering in this palace of despair-for "hope of rest to solace there is none, nor e'en of milder pang," save the poisonous anodyne of drink-most of those ensnared to-night will perish, some of them in horrible torture. Yet, so far from this great city being convulsed with woe, London cares for none of these things, and the cultured man of the world, the heir of all the ages, the ultimate product of a long series of civilizations and religions, will shrug his shoulders in scorn at the folly of any one who ventures in public print to raise even the mildest protest against a horror a thousand times more horrible than that which, in the youth of the world, haunted like a nightmare the imagination of mankind.”

Forty years before Haldane, Stead perceived a profound connection. Haldane made that deeper disregard plain and was celebrated for it. What do you expect will happen to you on the great ship we have entered steered by cybernetics? Is the shadow not evident from today, parties, blackmail and maidens? The reports are the tip of a concealed iceberg.

Curious moral asymmetry suggests hypocrisy and tactical games. The graves where my infant brother and sister lay in Glasnevin were unmarked until a memorial much after. That was the way with still-born and others. There was nothing inevitably sinister about the burial of children and that was from the mainstream hospitals. We can play a blame game for political purposes but the nuances and complexities are lost often deliberately. The Irish land is literally covered with the unmarked graves of colonialism which remembrance we were urged to move on from. Ireland thankfully reached the highest levels in lowering infant mortality later. But during colonial times it was the Church and nuns that looked after the poor after centuries of control and persecution. Now we trust the corporations who own the countries to look after all our needs and re-order history and have no fear they are assuming that responsibility with their left wing anti-hegemonic allies. We will not have the same media feeding frenzy about any details of abortion in the last decade in Ireland or Covid, not to mention the recurrent medical scandals of a secular nature not least for women. They are profitable for lawyers at least. Both left and right are two arms of the one body and Daedalus is the designer still and morality is relative and subjective. All human life is being mechanised and there is no love of humans. No life but the machine and priestly control of which envy of existing power is partly driven. Nurse Ratched has your medicine and that Native man who talks about the Combine and you being a broken machine to be fixed is obviously crazy.

Does Joyce show that Daedalus succeeds? Joyce had Daedalus himself reject country, religion and family just like the modern scientific movement suggested the new order should do. Wells did not like Finnegans Wake. I have wondered more recently whether Joyce was prefiguring postmodernism and post-postmodernism. In his theories, based on Vico, the end-result would paradoxically be a return to God. Joyce called Theosophy a Protestant sect and knew what he was leaving. But he may have sought to identify the psychic disintegration of deconstruction into myth that the construction of culture leads to. He fled too. His child was lost in a way to mental disease. Jung thought Joyce had just contained it through art. Maybe Joyce saw the Minotaur in modernism. Maybe the Wake was a labyrinth. Joyce perhaps demonstrated that when you make monsters and try risky things when you have rejected God, home and family, you must realise that the hunted, vertiginous fall will come again. Others may then turn to the divine from the repeat. You may not get the chance.

Intelligentism and dataism, religious or not, will make us all mad as meaning implodes and information explodes. When you abandon any pretence of meaningfulness you are unlikely to create any true meaning, especially when you have circumscribed truth with your compass. That is why the result of the Empire of Scientism will be the extended phenotype of endo-symbiotic objects that include old humans in its mesh in a mish-mash of method. Rejection of a great patriarchal Dada in the sky seems related to death by data and Dada and inevitably Daedalus.