[secede] -- images
Why is music dying? Why is reading universally despised? Why are mathematical proofs so hard to understand? The answer is that they are not images. Since sight is the most powerful sense, we intuitively trust and engage with images more than anything else.
Many great thinkers in Western culture recognized the danger of images. Plato was obsessed with training the mind to see past all sensory chimeras into the forms beneath. The Jewish prophets’ rejection of idols earned them both the admiration and the ire of the ancient world. Bach disdained the spectacle of opera and refused to write even one.
It is obviously impossible to avoid images altogether, so we must be constantly on our guard. In 2024, most of the pictures that we see have been specifically chosen to provoke an emotional reaction or advance a political agenda. As AI continues to mature, it will soon be possible for the ruling class to generate convincing but entirely false visuals to ensnare the public.
Covid began with images of people falling over in the streets in China. The summer of Burn Loot Murder was sparked from a particularly damning image of a cop subduing a criminal. Some of the first images from the war in Ukraine were from a video game. How much different would recent history have been if people had listened to Plato, Moses, and Bach?