Hacker News Reader

Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

The leadership of nations requires you to put pressure on the thoughts and minds of your people, left to their own devices those minds will simply be shaped by someone else.

The morality in it comes from your motivation and methods. Secretly giving piles of money to the weirdos you successfully identify as being the leaders of artistic movements to amplify those movements can't be all that bad.

The question of the day is if you were the CIA trying to do the same thing today, who and what would you fund?

View on HN

I would fund things which make people less susceptible to manipulation and more equipped to think for themselves.

Because I believe in democracy not as a political tool but as a fundamental right. I don’t wish to use democracy to gain more power.

But maybe that’s why I’ll never be in that position, to make that choice.

> I would fund things which make people less susceptible to manipulation and more equipped to think for themselves.

This also would be manipulative. If you think society can provide you freedom, you are looking in the wrong places.

How would that be manipulative?

If you alter people's natural behaviour so that they are less manipulative, do you think this is the same as having not taken that action? It is a (further) unnatural intervention. It would be like giving someone an emetic because they ate too much.

The anti-manipulation training or the emetic could be beneficial, I agree.

The 'proper' answer would be to address the manipulator, to prevent their interventions, so that they can live their lives naturally, if they are not harming anyone.

I think we can work together and provide ourselves freedom/collective agency/ some amount of say in the order of things

So where should one look?

It seems tome that society is very much what does provide freedom, just not all freedoms.

One should look to oneself, and act according to what you believe to be right. Internalising an externally provided morality is not it.

So you don't learn from other people's experience?

I wouldn’t because the CIA is explicitly barred by Congress (Title 50 U.S.C. § 3093) from conducting influence operations intended to affect American public opinion since the Intelligence Authorization Act of 1991.

Hence why USAID was (allegedly) co-opted to perform the same role.

The right-wing areas of the internet, even now, say the decline of whatever progressive or left-wing phenomenon they’re talking about is because they ran out of money after USAID was defunded.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com