In the past, only certain people had access to, or claimed to have access to knowledge and fed it to the masses.
Then we learned to read and figure stuff out on our own.
Now with AI and Big Tech, we’re going back to only certain people having access to knowledge (or claiming to have access to knowledge) and feeding it to the masses.
It’s not like in the absence of priests and organised religion in the West (since at least the days of Nietzsche) people were existential intellectuals trying to understand the deeper things in life, lol. As you can see, they just become hedonistic degenerates and/or money-worshipping freaks… and now, if they seek guidance, all they have is Elon bots. 🙃😭
But, TBF, there were always at least a couple flies in the ointment of Roman Catholicism (and all offshoots, ofc; and please don’t get mad dear believers, I wish there was a less triggering way to say what I’m about to say), being a state-religion created by the Western imperialistic hegemon after they kidnapped and murdered the local anti-imperialist religious and political leader that sought reform, by co-opting his image, making him an anthropomorphic deity a la Zeus, placing him in a tripartite pantheon and then mostly going along with “faith without works is valid” Paul (John Brown is the antithesis of this, even within the fold of the church, because he actually read the Bible and understood the overall themes and lessons, and believed in God and righteousness in earnest… but not everyone is a brave, selfless and almost compulsively moral student of scripture, ofc) and “your sins are forgiven if you believe in all this anthropomorphic deity crap” nonsense. Basically, it was always cooked, and there’s nothing in the Western civilization’s toolbox to fix it.
Believe it or not, you will need to at least understand belief and not just “information about this world processed through the senses” to even consider morality in earnest, think civilizationally long-term, and shape a society that one can be proud to be part of. Only in this context can we have some “ground rules” instead of moral relativism in order to build something on stable terrain instead of quicksand. But we’ll see where the Western civilizational project leads to, especially if resources become as scarce and life is as uncomfortable as it is in the rest of the world… we all know you’ll go full Mad Max (things aren’t even bad and OF is popping!), so it’s better to start changing things in advance.